And where do they come from?

Thank you for your support!

Thanos

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

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.

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

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.

Taken from Some Rail Gun Issues

I believe they are very powerful alcoholic beverages, served in tiny glasses.

They are imported from Scandinavia.

They also appear in Scandinavian porn BTL's.

Those troll Scandinavian women can get pretty nasty after one or two...

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?

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.

simple, vorhees. you just make sure you've got lots and lots of thor shots in orbit.

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.

Truedat. Come to think of it, that article might have been in Maxim. Not really sure, though. Some magazine at the barbershop.

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.

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.

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.

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

Especially since, by canon, IIRC theres only two groups on earth that are capable of Thor shots... SK and Ares.

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?

"Thor Shot" vs Predator

Not going to argue with that!

Thread drift.

I never did finish reading Number of the Beast. I got fed up and quit when the dimension hoppers ended up in Oz (I wish I meant Australia) and met Glenda the Good Witch. I hear that Heinlien was under heavy medication at the time. It shows.

Anyway, as for Thor shots, whatever the method, put them on the top of my list for 'Things I don't want to be standing under."

Listed just above 'Lofwyr taking a dump'.

i'm not sure 'nice' is the word i'd use to describe the movie. 'fun', okay, 'campy, but in a good way', sure. not 'nice', though, and certainly not 'a viable adaption of heinlein's novel'.

roughneck chronicles, on the other hand...

Thor Shots first appeared - if I am not mistaken - in FASA's Renegade Legion series of minitaures games. It's a good name, but I like the slang thrown around in the military these days: "Rod from God" Big tungsten rod, dropped from orbit.

A couple of issues:
1. Flight time. Presumably these are coming from Low Earth Orbit, but your flight time is still going to be several minutes from the fire request. At pure free-fall from 300 kilometers out, it's around 250 seconds. Geo-synch is even worse, at 45 minutes. You can assume an initial booster stage as well, but it probably wouldn't be that big because the whole point is mass, and burning propellent drops your mass.
2. Guidance. At impact from LEo, you are going to be going around 2 km/sec. This is really fast. Bullet fast. Steering is going to be awfully tricky. Hitting a widely moving target is possible, but the expense of such a system hardly justifies bothering. GEO is of course a lot worse (25+ km/sec).

In combination, the expense of adding a guidance system and flight time means that thor shots are not practical against moving targets, but awfully effective against fixed implacements (and maybe naval vessels).

As for the damage of the impact, it's kind of hard to say. You have an awful lot of kinetic energy impacting a small area. An educated guess: On contact with anything more substantial than air, the rod shatters into numerous high-velocity shards with some plasma thrown into the mix. All of this will still be moving down at an obscene speed - the damage pattern would be that of a slowly expanding cone. Upon impacting bedrock, the fragments would further atomize, and the plasma wave would reflect, losing a massive amount of energy, but still pretty impressive. This would geyser back up the descent path, carrying a bunch of (atomized) rock with it. The end result is much like any other crater, but much narrower and deeper.

The practical result of all this is that a Thor shot is really good against buildings (skyscrapers are screwed a la Independence Day), and underground facilities. No amount of armor is going to help you, and you are going to be really deep underground to be safe. Interceptors are of no help, as even if you manage to hit it in flight, you are still left with a bunch of hypersonic fragments moving roughly where they were going before you it. Laser interceptors simply wouldn't be able to put enough energy into the rod to atomize it fast enough.

There are some other problems with such a system: tracking the rod's origin is easy, so any launcher is not going to last long once it has fired. And the rod is in no way stealthy - everybody is going to know who fired it at what. Not well suited to quiet corporate shadow wars.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter. Had this come up in a game once, and had to do a fair amount of thinking about it.

- Runner Smurf

I Hand of God!

the thor shots are not, i believe, in geosynchronous orbit. unless i'm mistaken, they're actually in an orbit counter to the earth's rotation, meaning (unless there's something about re-entry i'm unaware of) they'd add the speed of the earth's rotation to their imact energy.

Also, I don't think Thor munitions were ever really supposed to be used singly. I always had the impression that they were supposed to be used in disposable 1-shot 'packs'.

So you call for a strike, and a minute later, the target area is pummeled by a flock of these things. Metal rain, in effect. Not exactly a precision munition.

unless i misremember, the instances in SR when thor shots have been used, it's been a single, precise hit.

You get a more precise hit if you Call the Thor Shot, or Aim First and then Call it.

You get more damage if you dikote the shot.

And though it's called a "Shot", it does not have a "spread" like normal Shot Ammo, unless the rock fragments due to heat upon reentry. If so, treat it as having a Choke of 10. For every 10m of fall, from 10,000 meters on down, the area of affect becomes 1 meter wider and the power drops by one. Even with a reduction in power of 1000, and counting impact (actually only 'heavy impact' armor should apply to a Thor Shot, but it has not been corrected by ShadowFaq yet) characters still need to resist damage with a base power of 2. If the rock fragments at 10,000 meters, then the TN for the shot is at -1000. Karma pool can be used, as normal, by the person who pushes the button. People that are hit get one additional die for their body roll for each person between them and the point of fragmentation. Dodge target numbers are increased by +1 due to the area affect of the fragmented shot. No penalty to the dodge number if the Thor Shot does not fragment, unless a burst or Full-Auto Thor shots are done. For each 3 shots in the Thor Burst or Full-Auto Burst, the target has a +1 penalty to his/her Dodge Test. Wound modifiers do apply to the Dodge Test. If the target gets more successes on the Dodge Test than the guy who pushes the button, the result is a clean miss.

Don't forget Range Finders.

If you Attune the Thor Weapon platform, can you get a -1TN to hit with it?.

stop. just stop, for the sake of the children.

You could Anchor Enhance Aim on it before sending it up into Space. That way, when it hits the Manasphere, the spell will kick in and fine tune the aim.

Problem Fortune:

Interpretation of the way the spell works aside, Anchoring foci are always active, even when they have yet to be triggered. Unless we're dealing with a force 15 focus, I doubt it would survive being active in a mana warp.

Force 15 doesn't seem too much of a stretch for either Ares or SK.

And by the way, it was mentioned in one of the books (May have been House of the Sun) That the Thor was a rod of depleted uranium that was in orbit counterrotating against the earth's orbit. This served several advantages, primarily that a thor could be brought on target much faster while counterrotating as it crosses the whole of the drop zone significantly more often that one not, and it should around double the deliverable kinetic energy.

So, Cray, what kind of energy delivery would we look at at a re-entering tungsten or depleted uranium penetrator from a counterrotating trajectory? would it look cool at night? How long would the penetrator be visible before impact?