Had some spare time in class today, so I put together four missiles, one for each damage type missiles can deliver.

The Armor Piercing Missile is based on real armor piercing shells.
The Kinetic Missile is based on kinetic enrgery penetrators and has a sabot-like structure around the glowy bit.
The Nuclear Missile is based on the Trident II ballistic missile.
The Cheetah Missile (surgical) is based on precision guided missiles.

I'll give them proper textures later.

I on the other hand think you did an awesome job.

Don't need to be very big if you're going very fast. A 1 ton slab of steel, if dropped from the ISS, can do the same damage as a small-medium sized nuclear weapon. Now imagine if I could fling those big rocks from the asteroid belt...

Drop that same slab from the top of a battleship's mast onto the hull...you don't get nuclear impact crater.

It may not look as good, but Coper is accurate on what such weapons would do in real life, which works just fine in SS.


Also, what Trevor said.

Those look too high poly.

This is what jeff directed me to make a while back, untextured as yet. Though i think when he last saw it he didnt like it as much been a while.

And wrong, very wrong. There is a little something called terminal velocity and drag. look at satilites ditched in the outback, some barely make a crater.

in that case just drop a one ton telephone pole, with fins. there.

Darth's missiles look truely awesome.

20 ft tall, 3 ft wide cylinder/slab of titanium, uranium, or tungsten, dropped from even low orbit, with 8000mph speed, some guidance equipment...and it does NOT get the impact of a nuclear weapon?

You have really out done your self, Feathers.

Wikipedia, Project Thor, USAF

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/kew.htm

Each missile is under 500 polys. Considering that many light fighters that are not much bigger than a missile have more than double the poly count in some cases, I'd think that under 500 is fine for missiles

Also, there is a difference between an old sattelite that is unaerodynamic and tends to break up a bit on reentry and a solid, arrow-like rod of tungsten being dropped from orbit. These "rods from God" would be as destructive as small meteorites. Using asteroids as kinetic weapons would be even worse. Imagine if you woke up one morning only to look out the window to see Vesta smashing into the horizon...

You missiles look really cool, but I do think 500 is way too many polys, especially for low end systems. I would think 100 polys or so would be a more appropriate upper limit for missiles. If we do too many polys, that would limit us in the future, in case we wanted to do bosses that spam lots of missiles, or change Gunner to do volleys of multiple missiles.

I should be able to make 100 poly versions and keep the same designs. I'll fiddle with it more later.

Allright lets do this...

Tungsten density is 19250kg/m3

one ton ~ 907kg that is a .3612m sided cube or 0.04712m3. Though for these calculations we will assume a long cylinder, because that is the shape of a penatrator. Cd = 0.82. To find terminal velocity it is v=sqrt(2mg/rhoACd). So with an aspect ratio of 10 then the diameter of the rod can be found by solving d=(2/5*Volume*pi)^(1/3) which in this case is 0.3898m which gives a frontal area of 0.1193m2. The density of air at sea level is 1.2250kg/m3. so solving our equation for v we get 385.3523m/s or 172.2679mph for our non metric people. Or if we assume no friction, aka rediculous, then from a hieght of 350km it would have the velocity of 2621m/s, M=7.5. So energy released by the impact, simple KE=1/2m*v^2: 174,757J and 1,188,623J. So for the second firctionless case you get 2.84*10^-7 kilotons of TNT. The Trinity test was 19 kt.

It is 9 orders of magnitude less than one of the weekest nuclear test in history.

Now for the 1m diameter 6.5m long cylinder that no one sane would put in space. It weighs 98272.9452kg and just assuming the frictionless ballistic fall from the altitude of the ISS 350km again the KE is 3.3755*10^11 or 0.0807kt, still 3 orders of magnitude less. Now 8000mph is 3576.32 so that is 0.1502kt. Even man portable devices are a half kt.

p.s. Saturn V has a payload of 119000kg to leo so... yeah

*907kg at 0.1C is 97.55 mega tons, guys use nukes its cheeper.

Terminal velocity and resistance have very little meaning or effect in space. We're not bombing planets, ergo they don't apply at all. unless you really want to get into like the corona of a star or density of a nebula... in which case you're no longer talking about star sonata since you dont melt next to the sun like ya should. And you're bigger than it.

So try accelerating that ton of tungsten to .1c at least

Though now that at look back, Churchill's comment was about bombing planets so yeah hes an idiot.

Damage...damage...damage, what a wonderful word. I don't have to blow up a city to get the same impact as a nuclear weapon. Dropping one right onto the Capitol produces the same effect: an invincible enemy on the high ground of space. It's also cheaper, faster, and you have no where to run.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare


As for Coper, do you have a capship firing those missiles?

Yea, the more I'm looking into it, the more it seems like rods (at least made of tungsten) would be difficult at best to use. Even if they survive reentry, maybe thanks to some sort of thermal coating, it's possible that they'd just vaporize on impact. I found an old Popular Science article that I remember reading when it first came out about this topic. Makes this type of KE weapon seem more like a bunker buster rather than a WMD. All in all it might just be cheaper and easier to tow small asteroids into orbit and threaten nations with them...

/me scibbles a note in his "Plans to Take Over the World" notepad...