Viewing 20 posts - 1 through 20 (of 20 total)
  • What gun for shooting down a satellite?
  • matt_outandabout
    Full Member

    😉

    bencooper
    Free Member

    If you shoot down that Black Knight thing and it really is aliens, we’d be in big trouble.

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    isn’t the more applicable question what bunker to hide in to avoid being obliterated by falling satelites ?

    Progress 59

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    hora
    Free Member

    Oi sod off! 😀

    beaker
    Full Member

    This should do it…. It worked back in the 80’s

    This should do it….

    Xylene
    Free Member

    [video]www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrxHCuHnvwg[/video]

    Many uses

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    @Quirrel – remove the s from https in your link ?

    matt_outandabout
    Full Member

    Is it nor what Reagan invented Star Wars for?

    willard
    Full Member

    Nah, Star Wars was for anti-ICBM, something that the Standard Block 2 or 3 can do now (just).

    Depends what you wanted to do to the satellite I guess. I still think a bloody great big laser would do the job. Just destroy the solar panels and heatshields and it’s effectively useless.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    Surely, if it’s in a stable orbit, shooting it full of hole isn’t going to do much as the bits will still stay up there going round and round and round and….

    gwaelod
    Free Member

    Theoretically you could take out a satellite by driving a ford focus to ASDA.

    http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/are-satellites-experiencing-the-effects-of-global-warming/.

    ninfan
    Free Member

    No gun, just a bow and arrow fired by a Tasmin Archer

    CountZero
    Full Member

    Surely, if it’s in a stable orbit, shooting it full of hole isn’t going to do much as the bits will still stay up there going round and round and round and….

    Well, that is the principle behind a general satellite destroyer, send up a warhead full of ball-bearings and a charge to blow it up in a horizontal fashion, the expanding cloud of small objects at orbital velocity with trash anything in a geosynchronous orbit, that’s more-or-less equatorial. Polar orbiters would still be affected, but not as much.
    Trouble is, that’s a sort of scorched-earth, answer, because it’s totally indiscriminate, and will turn everyone’s birds to junk eventually. Geostationary birds will be unaffected, because they sit 22,236 miles out.
    Individual targeting specific satellites from the ground either requires ground launched missiles, or tech that’s still not fully developed; high-powered lasers, which are being installed on shipping to target aircraft and missiles, but might struggle power-wise to hit an orbiter, or a rail-gun, being developed, but will need a lot of poke to start lobbing chunks of ice or other projectiles into LEO.
    Even small paint flakes travel,ing at 17,000mph can cause damage, imagine what tens of thousands of 5-10mm steel balls travelling at that speed would do.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Surely, if it’s in a stable orbit, shooting it full of hole isn’t going to do much as the bits will still stay up there going round and round and round and….

    No, becuase in order to be in a stable orbit you need a constant speed. If you blow something up then by definition the bits have a different speed to the original thing. Some will fly off into space, some might go up a bit and then come back down, some will be directed towards earth.

    Ming the Merciless
    Free Member

    the rebel giant breast and nipple gun on Hoth, that’d do the job!

    andytherocketeer
    Full Member

    No, becuase in order to be in a stable orbit you need a constant speed

    only if it’s circular

    matt_outandabout
    Full Member

    But if the rail gun is on a conveyor belt, would it take off?

    molgrips
    Free Member

    No, becuase in order to be in a stable orbit you need a constant speed

    only if it’s circular

    I should have said ‘specific’ speed to match your trajectory.. If you introduce a random extra and quite large impulse to lots of bits of satellite then chance are most of them won’t stay in orbit at all never mind in the same place.

    andytherocketeer
    Full Member

    depends what you call a “large impulse”?

    a few tonnes of satellite travelling at 7km/s being hit by a “bullet” is probably not what i’d call a large impulse. debris will continue largely in the same orbit, but will disperse, some higher, some lower, and air drag will affect everything a bit differently.

    2 satellites of a few tonnes each, both travelling at 7km/s could be a big impulse.

    in orbit, both have happened, more than once.

    how long the c**p stays there is still being monitored. we’ve had to manoevre to avoid such debris (although having to manoeuvre because of “genuine” orbiting object much more common), and had to track an extra 20,000 objects from one day to the next. because a lot of it all stays up there for a long time.

    andytherocketeer
    Full Member

    edit: the kosmos/iridium collision seems to have had about 1/4 of the bits burnup within 3 years. the rest is in slowly decaying orbits.
    other bits can potentially stay in orbit (even if not near the orbit of the original object) for centuries.

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