How Far Out is This Weapon Idea?

[TromboneAl]

An upcoming book may feature this scenario:

A weapon has been developed which can kill satellites from the ground. Terrorists start knocking off satellites, and will destroy the ISS unless their demands are met.

The device is like a pulsed laser (think photon torpedo).

Remember, this is fiction, but the two problems I see

1. Energy consumption
2. Hitting the target (the beam spreads out a bit)

Thoughts?

 

[braumeister]

A ground-launched missile can hit a satellite.
It's been done at least twice so far.

For a laser weapon to do the same, it would require enormous power to counter the atmospheric scattering as well as the beam spread. Not impossible, but definitely beyond the reach of the average terrorist.

 

[Texas Proud]

Heck, it is science fiction.... you can make it up...

People will believe that a laser can knock out a satellite... not as far fetched as other things out there...

 

[ls99]

On a nice clear day, with load shedding of everything in the LA area from Nuke plants, plenty of power. Maybe even get a twofer with beam spreading.

 

[MichaelB]

1. Energy consumption

Tap into or take over a power plant?

 

[IBWino]

I was told that Sandia National Labs has a large flash x-ray machine that is in a shielded building because when they fire it, it could bring down an airliner if happened to be flying above the facility. Flash x-ray machines work by discharging a high voltage capacitor bank to generate a narrow pulse of very high level radiation. Maybe your weapon could be some form of this.

 

[mh]

I would think hijacking a commercial space plane would be more their speed. Admittedly more pedestrian as far as sci-fi plots go though


Sent from my iPhone using Early Retirement Forum

 

[growing_older]

Consider a pulsed laser of some sort. You can store energy in a capacitor or flywheel, then discharge in a concentrated sub second (science fiction, sub-millisecond or whatever makes the story work) pulse. The extra energy in the pulse will help with penetrating atmosphere and you only need a short burst to fry your satellite target.

 

[Fermion]

Perhaps a rail gun accelerated scram jet? Would not require a great leap in technology and would get a several pound object on a collision course with a satellite if launched correctly. Orbital speed of the satellite would do the rest.

 

[ampeep]

Something like this? It's been cancelled, but if they could steal this 747, they'd still have to figure out how to use it.

 

[ampeep]

oops, my mistake; I thought it was to take out missiles, not satellites (never mind!)

 

[Car-Guy]

In your book, please don't target the TV service providers satellites, especially during baseball, football or NASCAR seasons.

 

[M Paquette]

I was told that Sandia National Labs has a large flash x-ray machine that is in a shielded building because when they fire it, it could bring down an airliner if happened to be flying above the facility. Flash x-ray machines work by discharging a high voltage capacitor bank to generate a narrow pulse of very high level radiation. Maybe your weapon could be some form of this.

That works for the little lab model. The proposed satellite killer X-ray laser used a somewhat higher energy power source, an enhanced fission pit [1]. Alas, this means the weapon is rated for 1 (one) shot, and the firing location will not be accessible for some time after that shot.




1. Translation: It used a freaking atom bomb to kickstart the laser.

 

[donheff]

Where's the love/sex interest?

 

[eytonxav]

Not far fetched at all, see this link for a few examples of space weapons:
Top 10 Space Weapons

 

[TromboneAl]

Great ideas. The capacitor/flywheel thing is perfect. They have to recharge between shots, giving the good guys time to catch them.

>In your book, please don't target the TV service providers satellites, especially during baseball, football or NASCAR seasons.

Actually, that's a great idea. Joe sixpack doesn't care about people dying in Yemen, but cut out his TV during March Madness ...

This will probably be a mad scientist who has been radicalized.

The book will be a short-fiction prequel to Contact Us. It will tell Jake Corby's backstory. I will provide this book to people who sign up for my readers' newsletter.

Apparently getting people to sign up for your readers' newsletter is the most important part of being a writer.

 

[nuke_diver]

I suppose it would be fine for a novel but a large fixed location installation which this would seem to require is kind of easy to eliminate...It might get one or 2 satellites before the smart bombs eliminate it I would think

Mobile missiles would be a more effective and harder to detect/eliminate

 

[BigMoneyJim]

ISS is nowhere near geostationary. I think it circles the earth every 90 minutes. (Googling...yup every 92 minutes.) Tracking it with a camera is not simple; tracking it with a line-of-sight weapon sounds unfeasible to me. If they could track and hurt the ISS then they could target airliners much more easily.

I think most satellites civilians care about--aside from GPS and Sirius radio--are more or less geostationary. I don't think it is real-world feasible, but I suppose it could be a reasonable fiction device for terrorists to figure out a way to deploy, target and disable weather sats and comm sats. Weather and comm sats don't sound too terror-y, but actually losing them could lead to much larger loss of life in weather events, and combine comm sat destruction with sea-cable attacks and suddenly the world is thrust backwards a few decades in communication ability.

Spy sats--and I'm basing this mostly off of Tom Clancy novels and movies-I think move much more slowly than ISS but aren't geostationary. I'm not sure how fast they move; maybe a fictional device could track and disable, but I'm not sure it's a good plot device as the public wouldn't know about it. Also, if the fictional device could track an orbiting object with angular velocity then it would be a more effective terror device to use it against airliners.

 

[TromboneAl]

How big might the capacitor have to be? I can't find any pictures of capacitors larger than a breadbox. Is it something that could be scaled up with a huge number of smaller caps?

 

[TromboneAl]

> If they could track and hurt the ISS then they could target airliners much more easily.

My plan is that the target can only be damaged if it's in a vacuum.

 

[Fermion]

I took apart a free, junked 10J ruby medical laser and the capacitors were the size of a kitchen garbage can. I don't remember the capacitance but they were rated at 4kV IIRC. I sold them on ebay to people building tesla coils or coin shrinkers

 

[HFWR]

"You'll shoot your eye out..."

 

[growing_older]

Here is a video of a capacitor bank that can generate enough EMP through a wire coil to shrink a quarter to about the size of a dime. The discharge is very fast, so perhaps as a pulse of energy it fits the needs of the story.

Coin shrinking with high voltage in slow motion - Make: | Make:

 

[M Paquette]

How big might the capacitor have to be? I can't find any pictures of capacitors larger than a breadbox. Is it something that could be scaled up with a huge number of smaller caps?

Yup.

Here's such a capacitor bank at the Vulcan project:

This bank hold 3.2 MegaJoules, for delivery to a series of disk amplifiers that eventually develop a 1 PW (petawatt, or 10 to the 15th power watts) pulse that lasts 500 femtoseconds (10 to the negative 15th power seconds)

 

[ls99]

Them are high tech bug zappers!