OMG! We should so put that in Cortex Command!


...Oh wait.


Silly jokes aside, The other issue I see with God Rods is that due to the whole
'launched from orbiting satellite - therefore moving sideways pretty fast' is this:
Yes, it'd get sucked in by gravity and fall down. Fast. But not where you want it to. Depending on the speed of the satellite etc, you could accidently pole your own city.

I would have thought dropping something from an orbital station in space moving fast enough to be in orbit would be a different story from dropping "jart"s out of a plane. Unless i'm completely missing your point and the airforce have an orbital weapons platform for testing these things.
In any case, you could probably fire the thing directly behind you at whatever speed you were going forwards with minimal impulse consequences due to the relatively tiny mass of the object in question (assuming we're still talking about tungsten crowbar flechette things), youd just be wasting quite a bit of energy accelerating it ~17000 mph (or decelerating it, whichever way you look at it), or more if you wanted to give it some extra vertical kick.
Would you be able to link us to the article Rawtoast?

He already did. Also, Exalion, guidance systems. A set (or several) of fins could be used to adjust the free-fall, and besides, you don't just start dropping the things randomly, there's obviously some calculation involved. Also...

well in that case, i expect trajectories would end up somewhat like thisbut still, it seems a little silly when missles would give a better bang for your buck, and its all really just speculation in that article, from what i can infer. regardless, im going to bed.

Not really, a rod is cheaper than a nuke, and you can cram more in a missile, so actually Thor gives you more bang for the buck, since each one is at least as effective as a modest nuke.

Though you have to get the rods up there in the first place.

Well, yes, you do, but an ICBM has to achieve a low orbit as well.
Besides, a satellite launch should be cheaper than a nuke.

Awww no fun.

Nullified gravity well motion != null mass. 2 tons of metal will (in situations where classical physics still apply) always mass 2 tons, it just might not be moving down all the time. You still have to dump sufficient thrust into it to nullify its lateral motion, which lets gravity take hold of it once more.

Guys, it's not as if they'd just look through an eye hole and say "NOW!" and lob the thing at earth. RFG would obviously be automated and I really don't think any sort of momentum will make a difference. This isn't far out stuff - NASA makes these sorts of calculations all the time. We can send a prob to the farthest reaches of the system entirely through automation. Ever play one of those orbit games? We can do that all the way to Pluto making a few pit stops along the way to cirle around other planets as well, just from one really ♥♥♥♥ well calculated shot. I think dropping an unguided object from orbit onto a target wouldn't be that big a deal.

Rawtoast I have taken air force courses on orbital mechanics

here's the thing: here's your orbiting weapon platform. now, this thing is going to be probably about the size of a schoolbus (satellites are always seen as tiny, but they're pretty ♥♥♥♥ huge). it's going to have a few (no more than a dozen, at a guess, mostly just for monetary concerns [footnote a]) of these "tungsten telephone poles" on it

now, these things are pretty ♥♥♥♥ huge. assuming 1 foot diameter, and 24 feet long, fully tungsten, that's 18,400 pounds of mass, going at 17,000 miles per hour [footnote b]. geosynchronous orbit or no, you're going to HAVE to decelerate something like that, or it's simply not going to enter the atmosphere. getting something to fly towards a planet is not at all an easy job; if your angle's too shallow, you'll literally skip off the atmosphere, and if you're too steep, you'll burn up on reentry, tungsten or no tungsten. it's a remarkably precise system. now, add to that this complication: any geosynchronous orbit is going to have to "launch" rods with lateral motion, not just vertical (planetwards), thus your target opportunities are actually significantly limited. that's solved somewhat with a traditional polar orbit pattern, but you'd still need a series of satellites to have full, always-on coverage of the entire world.

now, assuming china/russia don't respond to your blatant weaponization of space by shooting down your satellites, you're still launching something a shitload of dead weight skyward. nonnuclear or not, the energy involved in putting it in orbit is actually dramatically less than that required to do absolutely any other bombardment method.

footnote a: twenty thousand dollars per pound.
do the math.

footnote b: assume a pure cylinder, diameter one foot, 24 feet in length. tungsten has an approximate density of 19.3 grams / cubic centimer, run the conversion and stare
anything in orbit is, by definition, going to have the 17000 miles per hour of lateral motion; otherwise, it's on a ballistic trajectory. an orbit/freefall/microgravity is just the state of going so fast around the planet that you're falling "around" it and past it.

This thread died. Time to revive it.

Quantum physics. It's messed up ♥♥♥♥. Particles behave like waves when we're not watching them and like particles when we are. This is explained very quickly with these ytmnds (which also have cool music):
http://quantumiscool1.ytmnd.com/
http://quantamiscool2.ytmnd.com

Here's the wikipedia page for the experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit_experiment

Some more fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment
This experiment basically says that if you observe the particle, but then somehow afterward screw with the particle in such a manner as to make its path uncertain again, you can observe the particle but still wind up with a pattern as if it were unobserved.

I'm pretty sure this is all related to that whole Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. Also, I swear to god I saw somewhere some experiment that showed you could split a photon and then force one to take longer to reach its destination than the other. Then you could observe the end result of the quicker one and through that perfectly predict the outcome of the slower one every time. It implied some kind of weird "see the future" type deal.

Surely we can come up with some incredibly crazy possible superfuturistic technologies with these concepts.

Quantum foam as an energy source? That way we wont need our dyson spheres or fusion generators or perpetual motion machines, we can just chill with practically limitless energy being pulled from.. anything.
If only..

Quantum foam?

Quantum foam according to Wikipedia
Crazy crap having to do with the structure of the universe at extremely small scales. Another form of zero-point energy.