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> Thor Shots, What are they?
Thanos007
post Nov 2 2004, 01:19 AM
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And where do they come from?

Thank you for your support!

Thanos
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Kagetenshi
post Nov 2 2004, 01:21 AM
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I believe they're essentially large rocks dropped from orbit a la The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I can't confirm that.

~J
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Sepherim
post Nov 2 2004, 01:23 AM
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AFAIK, they're more like lasers, shot from low orbit, capable of destroying the biggest buildings. Possibly, many of the sattelites out there should be capable of using them, but a Cold-war situation around them would keep people from doing it.

Still, I gather most of that by what I hear around here, so I'm not nearly sure abour it.
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Kanada Ten
post Nov 2 2004, 01:26 AM
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According to Target: Wastelands they space garbage launched from Earth orbit platforms towards the surface. They achieve high speeds and create nuclear sized blasts without the radiation. It has been mentioned (by Cary74?) that garbage was a stupid idea, but the rest is sound, IIRC
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mfb
post Nov 2 2004, 01:27 AM
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the first mention of thor shots that i'm aware of is in House of the Sun, by Nigel Findley. he describes them as large (don't remember how big, maybe bus-sized?) bars of metal orbiting earth in the opposite direction of the earth's rotation, with radio-controlled attitude rockets taped on. when the rockets recieve a certain signal, they fire, tipping the block of metal out of orbit and sending it crashing to earth. this is done with precision, so that it impacts right where the controller wishes it to impact. the energy of the impact is immense.
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Kanada Ten
post Nov 2 2004, 01:29 AM
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Taken from Some Rail Gun Issues
QUOTE
Cray74
Yeah, they do...but actual rock (or the just silly "balls of garbage" described in T:WL) is a poor choice for orbital bombardment. Plain silicate rocks smaller than a hundred meters or so in diameter just don't survive re-entry, not intact. They fracture and break-up.

Metals are a good choice. Iron's a good, cheap, common material for lunar mass drivers to sling at Earth. A large slug (10+ tons) of solid aluminum would work, if you're willing to accept some mass loss.

If you're talking proper, purpose-built orbital bombardment weapons (a real Thor), you just need to get fancy with ceramic or ablative heat shields, careful aerodynamics, etc.
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Everfast
post Nov 2 2004, 01:36 AM
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I believe they are very powerful alcoholic beverages, served in tiny glasses.

They are imported from Scandinavia.
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Crimson Jack
post Nov 2 2004, 01:40 AM
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They also appear in Scandinavian porn BTL's. ;)
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Hemlok
post Nov 2 2004, 01:49 AM
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Those troll Scandinavian women can get pretty nasty after one or two...
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Cray74
post Nov 2 2004, 01:58 AM
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QUOTE (Kanada Ten)
According to Target: Wastelands they space garbage launched from Earth orbit platforms towards the surface. They achieve high speeds and create nuclear sized blasts without the radiation. It has been mentioned (by Cary74?) that garbage was a stupid idea, but the rest is sound, IIRC

Yes, I have mentioned that. Space garbage has a poor record of hitting the ground intact, let alone in a dangerous format.

The classical "Thor Shot" is a purpose-built kinetic weapon dropped from orbit, akin to a modern tank's "long rod penetrators," but larger. The "steel telephone pole from orbit."

Thor shots have nothing to do with lasers. Lasers are a separate and fascinating form of orbital bomardment from Thor Shots.
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Fresno Bob
post Nov 2 2004, 02:46 AM
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I read something in Popular Mechanics about something like this. They said it would use Tungsten rods. But they also said it wouldn't be very effective, because what if you have to hit something on the other side of Earth?
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Eismann
post Nov 2 2004, 02:48 AM
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Hi

Hm... pressed space garbage should make the deal. Just take metal garbage like used rocket elements, press it to a block, put a small rocket with a receiver at the right end and maybe put some old ceramic plates at the other and your thor-toy is ready to go.
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mfb
post Nov 2 2004, 03:20 AM
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simple, vorhees. you just make sure you've got lots and lots of thor shots in orbit.
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Ol' Scratch
post Nov 2 2004, 03:25 AM
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QUOTE (Voorhees)
I read something in Popular Mechanics about something like this. They said it would use Tungsten rods. But they also said it wouldn't be very effective, because what if you have to hit something on the other side of Earth?

Even with just one, it doesn't take that long to move around the Earth from orbit. The International Space Station does it every 90 minutes or so, and it's not even trying to move into a specific position as quickly as it can.
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Sandoval Smith
post Nov 2 2004, 03:51 AM
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I suppose you can make the actual delivery method be whatever you want, but the base idea is you take something with a large mass, accelerate towards the Earth by whatever means you prefer, and then let the wonders of kinetic energy do the rest.

In theory, given that a lot of space garbage would be metallic detrius, using compacted chunks of it as the projectile isn't that bad of an idea. You don't have to worry about the costs of flying large hunks of metal up from the ground, and its generally renewable.
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Fresno Bob
post Nov 2 2004, 03:52 AM
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Truedat. Come to think of it, that article might have been in Maxim. Not really sure, though. Some magazine at the barbershop.
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Cray74
post Nov 2 2004, 10:59 AM
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QUOTE (Voorhees)
I read something in Popular Mechanics about something like this. They said it would use Tungsten rods. But they also said it wouldn't be very effective, because what if you have to hit something on the other side of Earth?

Then you either have multiple Thor platforms in orbit, or just wait until one Thor platform moves into a better position.

QUOTE
In theory, given that a lot of space garbage would be metallic detrius, using compacted chunks of it as the projectile isn't that bad of an idea. You don't have to worry about the costs of flying large hunks of metal up from the ground, and its generally renewable.


In theory, maybe. In practice, space crap is low density, often low melting point metals (aluminum). Even with ceramic frontal plates, you'd have a projectile with poor ballistic characteristics and a tendancy to decelerate rapidly.

The advantages of purpose-built Thor shots (tungsten, cheap steel with a carbon nose cap, etc.) are:

*Superior structural strength. A properly shaped Thor shot may encounter 100Gs and more when it gets into the lower atmosphere.

*Superior strength at high temperatures. Sure, some space crap has high temperature resistance, but that's either in small quantities (rhenium in radiatively cooled attitude thrusters) or something that doesn't lend itself to compacting (graphite heat shields). A ceramic nose cap isn't necessarily enough and is probably about as expensive as a purpose-built Thor shot.

*Superior ballistic shaping. You can make dense metals (iron, tungsten) into an ideal "long rod penetrator" and not worry about their strength or temperature tolerance while dropping through the atmosphere. Compacted space garbage is not going to crunch into such a narrow, long dart, not if you need to protect it from re-entry heat and avoid it buckling during re-entry decelerations.

*Superior performance. A low density wad of garbage is going to hit the ground at a low speed, thanks to its high deceleration. It's not going to be shaped to penetrate deeply to hit buried bunkers. A purpose-made, dense Thor shot is going to keep most of its velocity right up until impact, and it's going to reach very deep bunkers.
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DrJest
post Nov 2 2004, 12:16 PM
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Use of Thor shots in fiction includes the 12th and last issue of Global Frequency, a comic written by Warren Ellis. As far as I know, Cray74 is correct; the typical Thor satellite is a bundle of long metal rods with steering vanes that deliver a nuclear-scale impact detonation to the target without the commensurate radiation issues. The wave of the future, god help us all.
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Cray74
post Nov 2 2004, 01:47 PM
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QUOTE (DrJest)
Use of Thor shots in fiction includes the 12th and last issue of Global Frequency, a comic written by Warren Ellis. As far as I know, Cray74 is correct; the typical Thor satellite is a bundle of long metal rods with steering vanes that deliver a nuclear-scale impact detonation to the target without the commensurate radiation issues. The wave of the future, god help us all.

A 1ft diameter, 20ft long bar of tungsten is 8185 kilograms (call it 8 tons). Assuming it keeps full orbit velocity (7800m/s) up to impact (not likely), the energy release will be equivalent to about 60 tons of TNT. I'd expect more like 5-25 tons of TNT, depending on how much drag slowed the Thor shot. Most of the braking would be in the last 5 miles of atmosphere (targets on mountain tops: beware).

The energy release would not quite be in the same format as TNT. The Thor Shot would need to hit something massive and thick (ground, water) to generate a significant blast. Coring an aircraft carrier from deck to keel would probably only generate minor blast effects (typical conventional bomb yields) at each deck or object hit; the bigger bang would occur when the remaining Thor Shot reached the water, or something really big and solid in the carrier (the reactor or really thick plating).

Basically, buildings and large ships victimized by such a Thor shot would experience something like a super-sized APFSDS (sabot) round. To generate an explosion, the Thor shot would need to hit something massive and compact enough to scatter, like water or ground.

Note that to scale up a Thor shot has limited benefits. The impact energy scales roughly linearly with the mass. (Since mass grows more rapidly than area, a heavier Thor shot will retain more velocity deeper into the atmosphere.) If you can speed up a Thor shot, the energy does scale with the square of velocity. Double impact velocity, quadruple energy release. A Thor shot fired from the moon and coasting on a minimum-energy flight to Earth would reach the atmosphere (after a 3-day flight) at 1.414x the speed of a low orbital Thor shot, delivering roughly twice the impact energy.
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Cray74
post Nov 2 2004, 01:51 PM
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And my pet theory on why Shadowrun's Thor shots are described as bundles of garbage: it's megacorp misinformation. Megacorps want nations (and other megacorps) to think they're using improvised weapons in orbit, not real bunker-busting, carrier-sinking purpose-built Thor shots. That would be, like, the militarization of space, and bad PR.
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Sepherim
post Nov 2 2004, 02:51 PM
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And a return to a Cold-War situation in certain ways (though with a Corporate Court in the middle) due to them having weapons that can hit every point in the world, and destroy it to it's base. Not nice.

In any case, I must say I don't like the idea of Thor shots flying around in space. What keeps them from busting Damien Knight? Or the Orange Queen? Obviously, busting a dragon ain't that easy, and the repercusions of ousting Knight would be dead serious to the corp to do it, but they can do it. And it wouldn't be nice to know that Lofwyr died because a refrigerator hit his head after having been launched from low-orbit. Not cool at all. :eek:
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Kagetenshi
post Nov 2 2004, 03:20 PM
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What stopped nukes from getting launched in the Cold War? There’s no way to launch a Thor Shot without people knowing who launched it and retaliating.

~J
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Cray74
post Nov 2 2004, 03:24 PM
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QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
What stopped nukes from getting launched in the Cold War? There’s no way to launch a Thor Shot without people knowing who launched it and retaliating.

That just about sums it up.
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BitBasher
post Nov 2 2004, 04:59 PM
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Especially since, by canon, IIRC theres only two groups on earth that are capable of Thor shots... SK and Ares.
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Birdy
post Nov 2 2004, 06:55 PM
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Some nice descriptions of Thor shots (and "orbital rocks") are in:

"Footfall" (The Aliens use "orbital crowbars" on the US tanks)[1]

"Future Wars" has a short story on the tactical use of the stuff

"Cyberpunks Firestorm" has the "Crazy Harry" bombardment satellite

One of the Dale Brown Novells (The one with the Spratley Conflict) has the use of a NirtSat as an improvised Thor

And from the master himself:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/mega.html


Birdy



[1] Has anyone identified all the "Alien Specialists" (aka SciFi Authors) they gather?
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