That would be the shittest code name of all time. "I wonder what they're talking about" is what people will say 2 seconds before they realise they're gonna get stuff dropped on them from space.
You need to spend billions to get the "telephone pole" into orbit, develop the targeting system for that "pole", develop deploy, and maintain the surveillance system so that you can find the carrier to target. Also, unlike a bunker, a carrier moves at over 30 knots. The "pole" will now needs an active guidance system to constantly change course and to hit the carrier. Lastly, to be useful, the Thor launcher and it's targeting systems need to be in low / mid orbit, and are vulnerable to anti-satellite weapons, including missiles such as SM-3.
@@edwhlam I think you are complicating stuff a little bit here, you just need a very stronk man to throw the pole into orbit for 5 dollars, then the satelite will use a a very stronk magnet to pull the pole and attach it, and firing it is even easier just throw it on top of your enemy and use a guidance spell and a old compose from 1600AD to give it +5 accaurcy buff and if it don't hit the target just keep throwing poles at it until it hits, very easy.
@@abualil8808 You need to find the carrier first. You can't just keep firing rods and hope they will hit. Low orbit is an altitude of 160 to 2,000Km. You will not hit a moving target from 2,000KM+ or even 160 km away without guidance correction. Oh. It will be shooting back with SM-3 missiles and likely will also be shooting at your command center.
You people need to stop assuming kyle is a super villain. He's a regular every day guy, who has totally *NOT* kidnapped my son. He's babysitting him. Can i have my kid back now?
Yeah and Mr Madrazo is a totally legitimate businessman who was accused of running a latin American crime ring, But those charges were dropped when a few of the witnesses.. uhh.. went missing.
Guys hear me out. I have an hypothesis that Kyle suffers from multiple personality disorder combined with schizophrenia. Here are the symptoms: - Hallucinations. The void might not be real and is a constant hallucination were he see impossible things. We even have seen several Kyles in the void. - Small seizures. Everytime Kyle gets hurt in the void he recovers in the next scene this could be those small attacks that his brain interpret as physical attacks - Trauma. We have seen Kyle expressing extreme remorse and sadness when talking about losing a girlfriend (captain america episode) or losing a love one (in spiderman episodes). He even starts crying. - Change of mannerisms. As he has said, he is very different when he acts IRL that when he is in the void, he not only become left and right handed between footnotes and episodes he even becomes a way better artist in the void than he is IRL because he was unable to draw as good and he confirm us once that he "draws" all the drawing himself and without help. - Memory lose. Kyle has never been able to tell us how he gets out or in of the void, it might be the jump between personalities - Time lapses. We just saw him talking to himself in a different timeframe meaning that personalities may be independent, also in the episodes of timetravel he is able to talk to himself from the future and past but he is sure timetravel isn't possible. - Compulsive. Maybe the telephone is the way he is able to connect both personalities to become functional (is this a jojo reference?) - Dominant personality. We see super villain Kyle ordering around science Kyle to make world ending projects and defeat superheroes. We may have in our hands a Kyle with 2 personalities were one was created as a cooping mechanic for a past trauma were another more demanding personality orders around to get work done. There may be more symptoms but there has been already 12 minutes and I have to get out of my building.
Because Science: "Order the Strike." RU-vid: "Copyright Strike?" Because Science: "Wait what n-" RU-vid: "Copyright Strike!" Unsuspecting RU-vidr: *Obliterated*
@@Gorvahog Like in that scan they did in Andromeda Strain (1971) (Not the Benjamin Bratt two-parter... I don't think they even mentioned that specific scan in that version... I could watch it again tho...)
Wait does that mean the clone is in the void? Has it been the clone in the void all this time? Does the clone ever get out of the void? omg sooo many questions that need to be answered. Also the void is outside of our space time so does that mean Kyle can order clone Kyle to kill someone before they were born?
@@vyiz1004 I saw the first moove, so no time mutateing stuff there. But large meat bags in some armoring and high heat resistance at the end. And the ending is solved to just kill that category 5 Slattern , with a bunch of those glorified TIG rods , put a nuke on it and drop the thing in to the portal. And BOOM. Less cool tho.
Everyone: "Hey Kyle, are you a supervillain?" Kyle: "Whaaaaat no hold on I gotta make a phone call..." Kyle: " *E X E C U T E O R D E R 6 6* " Kyle: "Sorry, I was just... ordering a pizza."
The fact this weapon has a lower yield then a nuke makes its use for more likely and given that launch costs are only getting cheaper together with SPACE FORCE make this quite likely.
You would only see benefits if you could harvest and refine materials from space, as such you would need a full scale moon or satellite based refinery, a fleet of asteroid mining equipment and people or A.I. running the project. No country can militarize or colonize the moon so it would have to be a private company in that situation or a violation of international law, and you would need to be able to defend it all.
@@Doi- In Pournelle & Niven's book "Football" that is pretty much what the aliens used...dropping rocks - including one BIG rock, towed or pushed towards the Earth from the asteroid belt...and dropped into the Indian ocean. And in Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", a rebellious Lunar colony repurposed their mining mass driver designed to lob dumb payloads of rock and metal and ice into space...into a sort of rail gun, with their target being basically the entire Earth. You don't even need precision bombing (though some targets WILL fortuitously be in just the right...or just the *wrong*...place and time that you COULD hit some of them with precision, but if you could lob ENOUGH mass, precision isn't needed, you just need to get *near* your target. Hell, much of the Earth is covered with water, and most of the human race lives near coasts (and rivers and lakes)...so you just need to cause a bunch of tsunamis. You could *continuously* generate tsunamis for days and weeks and months and even *years* on end...just using strike after strike after strike.
SpaceX Starship can lift a dozen "Orbital Lawn Darts" per launch for a small fraction the cost launches were in the 80s. It will just about be practical with the first successful launch and landing.
Guys it’s not Kyle’s fault, The void has slowly been corrupting him all this time. The real him Has to still be in their deep inside. Everyone chant “ Kyle I love your hair” it will snap him out of it but you have to really believe
I'm a huge nerd when it comes to the cold war, and one of the most important things about Project THOR is not only its cost, but its political ramifications! In 1967 *The Outer Space Treaty* was signed, and it laid out the basic legal framework for international space law. Among its principles it bars states party to the treaty from placing weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit. This is incredibly important from a political point of view. Placing a weapon in space is literally aiming a gun at every single man, woman, and child on earth... and the weapon holder is effectively threatening the whole world at once. If you go to war with someone, they might want to remove your Orbital Weapons to protect themselves, and when they blow up your THORs, all of that space debris will scattershot across space, *creating a deadly cloud of shattered tungsten,* taking out friendly and peaceful satellites in it's path. This is why placing any weapons in space is *an EXTREMELY BAD IDEA!!!* Not to mention the threat of someone committing a Cyber Attack on your own THORs an then hacking them to attack you instead... or worse... one of your own Allies, sparking a war between you and your best friend!
VideoGrimes weapons pointed at your own planet is dumb but once we start colonizing our solar system and expanding, weapons on space ships will be a necessity, especially if you are going really fast, because at high speeds with no air resistance or drag any little piece of debris is a potential ship destroying projectile so some weapons in the form of point defense systems are going to be likely necessary. So that means there will likely be warships with far more weapons as an extension of that, it’s just human nature to war
Gi Joe Retaliation which is the sequel to rise of cobra. Also CoD Ghost did it but Gi Joe came out in march and CoD in november that year 2013. So you can say they were both exploring the idea just one got it out sooner.
@@yamadiyoo9658 ACTUALLY russia was developing a kinetic energy missle aka KEM made of tungten if droped it will be going at 10 times the speed of sound
Hey Kyle. Love the show. Two additional drawbacks to project Thor: 1. Once you build it, and get it up in orbit you have to maintain that orbit forever. If the orbit ever degrades, you drop all the rods on wherever it would fall. That would be a lot of energy. 2. I don't think a "Rod from God" would impart nearly as much energy as it has. Though it contains roughly as much kinetic energy as the MOAB you showed on screen, I think most of that energy would be spent burying the rod deep underground (not in an explosion.) Given that the mass and velocity of the rod is so high, I think it would just punch clean through the target, akin to a bullet through paper. So, while the energy is high, it could be possible to be not very far from the impact site and be relatively unharmed. Additionally, you mentioned Project Thor would be "prohibitively expensive." I did some research to flesh that out a little more. 2018 Price of Tungsten $30,300.00 /metric ton $30.30 /kg Volume of Rod 0.4 m^3 Weight/Cubic meter 19250 kg Weight of single rod 7700 kg Cost of single Rod $233,310.00 Number of Rods / Station 70 Cost of Rods in station $16,331,700.00 Weight of rods in station 539,000.00 kg Cost per kg - Falcon Heavy $1,700.00 /kg Cost of lifting rods into space $916,300,000.00 Total cost of rods - Less manufacturing $932,631,700.00 Cost of station - Half of ISS $75,000,000,000.00 Total cost $75,932,631,700.00 Cost of a battleship $100,000,000.00 Cost of Project Thor: 760 battleships (Accountants can be super nerds, too.)
_______ Add a couple billion just because it's government funded, so therefore 'fat'. (The CIA, etc. need mission money from somewhere, cough, NASA budgets) Also, shot placement is the overarching criteria to the entire endeavor. All of it is for naught if said rod cannot do the kinetic energy dump Precisely On Target. So there's that whole unbeatable guidance system to be perfected. However, the 'unshootdownable' characteristics of the cylinder make it very attractive. Now it's a cinderblock dropped from an overpass into the windshield of whoever's pissed off the Pentagon that week. But therein lies the rub... say somehow that infrastructure is in place, and the weapon system is viable, how does that then not become the new arms race? Especially since there is no fallout. All the times a nation wanted to nuke but didn't for political and MAD reasons? Now they could. Call it surgical. Essentially a 'tactical nuke' with no repercussions lasting generations. I imagine, by generation 3, it would be able to hit HVTs in moving vehicle convoys no problem. Plausible deniability is gone, but target destruction is 100% certain. And the world is held hostage. THIS is what Captain America fought against, Fury! Just kidding. Hail Hydra...
@@ryankunst668 sure it does. If we could make a cable out of carbon nanotubes, we could have a space elevator, with a cable just a inch thick. Carbon also conducts electricity, so it would work just like any other landline phone.
Good kyle, or void kyle, is just an AI created by evil Kyle. He is good because he is doing just as he was created to do, and as such, done nothing evil. The evil actions of the AI fall on the creator.
@@ZUMYnivedo touche. maybe all of this is a farce in the void has slowly tainted Kyle's mind over the years turning him into the super villain that he is today!
Actually, Tungsten is rare and expensive, but durable and tough. So it’s still tough to get, but nowhere near as expensive as the metals you mentioned.
What is space force? Not what you think it is. It has nothing at all to do with putting military assets in space, and we are only spending like 10 million on it.
@@Attaxalotl seeing as how we only have hypervelocity impacts from extremely large masses one would be led to believe there is a size minimum for projectile needed to not instantly gooify itself punching through an atmosphere at those speeds (separate argument then becoming more ok...so you're saying i can shotgun an area with in process molten mass, it's still mass at speed..) or is it straight self annihilated? One means you need one mother of all railguns to be effective, but so cost prohibitive to be practical. Or maybe you just need a solid tungsten slug the size of a vw wagon, just worry a 1' x 20' tungsten rod (can that even be fired by railgun? I suppose if aluminum shelled sabot) fired by railgun would just fracture and annihilate itself upon entry, think same problem with .50cal bullets hitting water... Hypervelocity impactor would react much the same way to a planetary atmosphere wouldn't it?
Evil Kyle simply figured that now that Dolly's dead it's okay for him to reveal all the new advances in "reproductive" science made since then. Why try for a designer baby when you can have a designer Kyle?
I was really hoping Sci-Kyle would say, "k, love you" and Vil-Kyle would answer back with something like, "love you too. Yes, I'll pick up bread on the way home".
"Oh, you're still here?" Because Science is like MCU movies; you should ALWAYS stay until the very end. It may just be everyone eating shawarma, or Kyle crawling under his desk, but it's worth the wait.
In less than five years you'll realize how overhyped that man is. From what I've heard eletric cars will hurt the environment more due to the HIGHLY toxic chemicals the batteries use. Plus they have to be replaced almost as often as your phone's battery.
@@clampmotosua1789 Don't know who Alex Jones is, ill look it up. I know Elon is not scientist, but he is still smart guy pushing innovation. And he is quite meme-friendly.
@@WwZa7 Alex Jones is from info wars. Honestly I only care about his memes. Thunderfoot is a nuclear physicists who breaks down inaccurate scientific products like the hyper tube and solar roadways. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-L9-T9c44zxs.html
Thanks for posting this. I knew about this when I worked for General dynamics. Whenever I mentioned project Thor people looked at me like I was crazy. Next project you need to check out is the space laser that can melt rock into lava. A Marine brother of mine mentioned an incident in Afghanistan. The choppers couldn't land in the valley we were in do to high wind. His unit was told to fall back to another valley. He said around midnight there was a flash of light, like a welding flash, and a large explosion. It only lasted few minutes. When they went back to the valley a few days there was an airfield made from what he described as obsidian. Planes where already off loading equipment and supplies. I was to trust that he wasn't FOS, but I haven't found anything online about that airstrip. I've even scanned Google earth for God knows how many weeks looking for anything. Thanks again for posting this, now at least I have a reference to use to prove I'm not Coo Coo kachoo.
Super late reply, but for project Thor, the problem is that all that energy comes from somewhere. You have to boost stuff into space, burn to set up the orbit, then burn to de-orbit (both of which are impossible to do stealthily). It's about as fast on target to just mount a rod on an ICBM and do a suborbital strike from the ground.
I sort of assume the crowbar sized ones probably are already up there in some sat. There is also that new nasa space plan that has just been lurking around for a while which would make a pretty good vehicle for carrying a load of crowbars of this kind and popping them out wherever needed.
Hey Kyle , mother of all bombs is just the nickname for MOAB the acronym actually stands for massive ordnance air burst. They detonate above the ground more like an atomic bomb than the rods from god. Where a rod uses kinetic energy from impact, I believe the MOAB and nuclear bombs use the stacking up of blast waves to increase their power. This is something scientists studied after the Halifax explosion during WW1. Thanks Kyle love the show been a long time fan. Remember a villain can be a hero from a certain point of view. Have fun buddy from a friendly Canadian eh.
Kinda cool that Canada has the wierd distinction of having held the world's largest non nuclear, manmade, explosion. And subsequently that caused the invention of brail.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around what you mean by 'stacking up of blast waves to increase their power', and how it's relevant to MOABs and nukes
Wait, so the "agency" he calls is also Kyle. Is it a clone? Is it a timey wimey thing where that's the same Kyle but at a different time? Is it a multiverse thing like all the Ricks in the Citadel of Ricks? Is it a quantum thing where as all possibilities of Kyle all exist in the void at the same time? Is it that all of Kyle's alien species just look a lot like him and our optical receptors aren't advanced enough to tell his species apart?
I personally think the void has just made multiple kyles. I mean remember that ep. where he died multiple times (all because he kept wearing a red shirt...)
Maybe Kyle in the void is simply suffering from isolation related mental issues and inventing other personalities to keep his mind intact. But one went off.
Ok, inside a void I can see that time wouldn’t exist. Time happens (I think) as a function of matter curving space. So, if Kyle doesn’t have mass, his void exists outside of space time, and therefore all of his thoughts and actions would happen simultaneously to an outside observer. Right? Or are we screwing it all up by watching it?
Outstanding! You have great taste in literature sir. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. Mannie and Man.
In GI Joe, the rods were platinum coated. I know this metal to super heat when heated (which is how a catalytic converter works). Would this, heated by friction from drag, add significant force, as in the heat makes the ground around it explode or something?
I think the intense kinetic energy already creates a ton of heat and probably an explosion. Think of a meteorite hitting the earth and causing a huge explosion. Same kinda thing. I think the platinum was just a cool idea fictionally but I could be wrong.
@@robertkeller9969 It is only expensive if you wish it to be fast as speed is costs. You can use a collection mirror array and a redirect mirror to turn sunlight into movement of the target as long as you don't care it will take years to get it to the needed spot but you never need to touch it and once on path you can swap to the next target to move. Move the target to a Lagrange point and it becomes very economical to mine as that is the point you would want materials anyway or put it in orbit around the Earth as a temporary moon if you want to drop materials to the surface or create infrastructure in orbit.
@@robertkeller9969 In reality, if you can get to space, almost any hunk of metal that is enclosed enough for air will work as a space ship. Then all you need are some miners (whether human/robot/machine) and fabricators. Once that is established then you can begin working in space and build it up.
@@charlescochran5103 in reality if you have the ability to get into space and turn hunks of metal into spaceships capable of manufacturing orbital weapon systems? ... You wouldn't need to. Your ability to manufacture ground based weapons will be much superior. All things being equal, it is far easier to build stuff on Earth than it is to build in space.
There is also the Outer Space Treaty to take into account which, among other things, bans the placement of WMDs in Earth orbit, on the moon, or otherwise stationing them in space. Whether or not something like Project Thor would run afoul of this treaty would depend on if it could be defined as a weapon of mass destruction. Considering it would have the destructive power of a MOAB and global strike capability, I think a pretty strong argument could be made that it would, indeed, be against the Outer Space Treaty.
The Outer Space Treaty limits the deployment of WMD's in space, however it does not limit conventional weapons systems. There is sufficient argument that an Orbital Kinetic Weapons System, so long as it doesn't use nuclear, biological or chemical warheads, could be placed in space without running afoul of the treaty because it simply isn't as destructive as "normal, conventional" WMD's.
@@MonkeyJedi99 pfft, if anything. I'm Australian, so I want to run on a platform of Australia deploying these weapons, to at least get on some sort of equal partiality with the five superpowers. Make Australia A Superpower! Haha 😂
@@KillianHarlocke True, but that depends on how one defines a WMD. The 'legality' of something like Project Thor really comes down to an argument about semantics, which is complicated by the fact that there is no international law with an authoritative definition. For example, under U.S. Title Code 18, something as small as a hand grenade is considered a WMD. Granted this is specifically a civilian definition, but the point is that the definition of a WMD is not clear-cut.
Believe it or not, as my end of year exam last year, I wrote an essay on Kintetic Bombardment. The brief was to choose a topic we were passionate about, and write an opinionated article on said topic. We were given a week of research and preparation. My essay scored me an A* and, more importantly, was (to my knowledge) scientifically accurate.
Hey, can i ask something... Base on your essay, is the effect of kinetic bombardment will be like on g.i joe movie??? I mean with all the destruction area and all... Or the projectile just drop in to the earth with small area effecr??? Thanks for listening to my stupid question...
@@mas_embek5839 so something like the pole that Kyle described would from what I understand absolutely obliterate a human target and anything around it in just a few square ft. And nothing else as it's less destroy large areas and more pin point accuracy and reduced civilian casualties
@@tukuiPat thank you bro... I'm just asuming it will be pin point destruction and piercing power, not like nuclear explosion... But it also mean that this rod from god is not an mass destructive weapon, and loose it's "threatening power"... Kyle was right, is not profitable as a weapon...
@@mas_embek5839 sadly, no, as Kyle said in the video and based on my essay, the level of destruction would not be equal or even close to that shown in the film, more like a small, targeted strike, enough to say, flatten a skyscraper. The scary factor of this type of weapon is the (theoretical) mass production. Imagine hundreds of those, all dropping in one town/city/country.
You forgot to talk about the international treaties prohibiting space based weapons. Still, if some shadow agency like SHIELD wanted to, they could smuggle the system into space, Johny Cash style (one piece at a time). You could construct the rods out of smaller, bolt together cylinders. You're right that it wouldn't be practical for a strategic scale, but it would be a nearly perfect tactical, covert type of weapon. It would be a hell of a thing to have in your back pocket, just in case you don't have any other options. And you wouldn't *have* to make them large enough to create MOAB style energy releases. Something that could deliver even a 105mm howitzer sized explosion would be super useful if you could summon it *anywhere* on Earth in just a few minutes, considering it can easily take that long for a call for fire on an active battlefield. And the fact that it could be extremely precise and defeat practically any bunker or destroy any vehicle would be even more attractive. You could load up a launch platform with two or three different diameter cylinders and by choosing diameter and number of sections, you could dial in the yield pretty precisely. With modern electronics, I'll bet you could get something down to the size of a Pringles can to be capable of guiding itself to a target. And it would be a plausibly deniable way of downing an aircraft over the ocean, if it were precise enough. In the extremely unlikely event that anyone directly observed the launch platform, it would *still* be deniable unless someone literally saw it fire because you could disguise it as pretty much any other kind of satellite. Holy shit, I'm scaring myself.
I think metal rods dont actually fall under the space weapns agreement as it techncally isnt a wmd, nuclear weapon, biological weapon or chemical weapon.
@@hariodinio I guess it could be how you define "mass destruction". if they scaled them up more, it could hit with the power of a Hiroshima sized nuke, although the cost would be nuts. However Bill Whittle did a video a week or so ago about a asteroid basically made out of metal.. If we captured that, and made rods the size of semi tractor trailers in space, pretty sure that would count as a wmd.
@@hariodinio you may be right. I thought it was a prohibition on any weapons in space. In any case, it would be easy enough to hide and it's not like the major powers give two fucks about what's legal.
Another reason we haven't implemented this, or any other space based weapon system is international law. We basically treat space as a neutral zone, and even anti satellite weapons are banned under treaty.
I was jus about to say that, I knew I read somewhere that making something like this was made illegal because space isn’t necessarily an area you can control or own. Let alone build weapons of mass destruction
ASAT weapons are banned under treaty, yet China has tested them (and before the tankie idiots start their whataboutism, yes, I'm aware the US probably has them too).
00:20 & 6:21 Sooo that’s who Kyle has been calling all of this time!!😱😰 I had faith in him but he is cloning himself a sure sign of a super villain 🦹♂️
I know right! But what if it's a future Kyle using a stretched wormhole or just void time physics!? If in the future space travel is cheaper + easier that explains all these strikes he's calling in 😲🤐 Either way we all know too much already, best go underground before Thor comes!
side note on bullets, the X1 was shaped the way it was because it was modeled after a .50 cal. [quick wikipedia check for confirmation on brain stuff] because it was stable at super sonic flight.
Sami Gabriel Jacquin he is my imaginary friend, that’s kind almost right. I love him to death, particularly when he says “knowing is half the battle”. Have you ever tried DMT? Now you know.
One version of this that would be far more feasible comes from “The Moon is A Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein where a lunar prison colony fights back against Earth by “throwing rocks at them”. Instead of having to get the mass up into Earth orbit, they take shipping containers filled solid with lunar rocks out of lunar orbit and use Earths gravity well to accelerate them with minor guidance systems to get them to their targets. Since the lunar gravity is so much weaker, using moon rocks and ordinance would be much more efficient, were you to have the equipment and personnel there to do so. Also, the containers would not need to be fully powered once pushed into the right trajectory, so they would be almost completely stealthed to the point where it would be almost impossible to know it was coming, or to find it in time to stop it.
I wonder if Project Thor evolved into the electromagnetic railguns that fire hypervelocity projectiles. Similar concept. Throw a chunk of metal really friggin fast, except with electromagnetism instead of the drop from space.
Because Space will return! Dr. Moo just has a fancy day job building actual robots for Mars missions, so we work around her schedule. And sometimes there's a space-related idea I'm particularly interested in -- kH
@@MonkeyJedi99 I would never out a fellow "totally-not-a-villain", you don't DO that. I mean, come on! You should show potential allies courtesy. You never know when you may need to 'borrow' their rod cannon.
@@Lrbearclaw @MonkeyJedi99 Plus let's face it, it's much more likely that Doctor Moo would keep Kyle locked up than the other way around. Sure, he may have clones and robot bees, but she is the the queen of Mars with the endless army of robots...
Ok now it's clear to me that you have an evil twin who is a Super villain and that keeps you in the void to be his personal scientist. You are innocent, he isn't. Please knock 3 times if I'm correct and i will come rescue you!
@@asianotakuguy man, it's a joke, don't cry please. You know that you can have fun with a person without meaning harm. And he is fueling the joke, playing along, that's what adults do.
Just be a pretty lass and you shall get the rod from horny gods like- Zeus, Indra and the likes....their (s)exploits can put rapists paedophiles and other depraved of today to shame
This bad boy is solid metal takes me to when I worked as a sports environmentalist for the U.S Navy there on Mare Island in Vallejo Ca during the engineering of my 5th semester of college. Terrill TC!
Something kinda similar but different is a weapon called "Angel Teeth" from the book Freedom by Daniel Suarez. Instead of dropping metal phone poles from orbit, it had what were essentially targeted rc darts dropping from atmosphere. It was definitely meant as a soft target weapon, but I had to note the similarities
You say the “rods could be over the targets in 15 minutes” while meant to be that they can be in attack position as over would not take into account the preserved momentum from the initial orbit. You do rectify this with the illustration accounting for the preserved momentum. However, the name and concept behind this made me think of how the bifrost must work in the marvel universe. The idea that essentially an intergalactic laser bridge can pin point a perfect circle on a planet revolving 30 kilometers per second and rotating ~460 meters per second at the equator is impossible without curving the light. In Thor 2, the bifrost scene leaving earth is at least 3 seconds. Just taking into account rotation and assuming speed at 250 m/s since it’s not at the equator, that would leave essentially a line longer that the height of the 1.97 Empire State Buildings or 8.2 football fields. In order to accomplish the feats as shown in the movie, the light would only be able to create a focus point for a millisecond and have to emit enough energy to scorch concrete. By keeping that energy focused on a target, Odin had no need to invade worlds as he could provide enough devastation with what essentially is melting ants from space. This may be a better investment for galactic concocting plans once you have conquered Earth.
