Current top contender for how I want to go out.

https://news.yahoo.com/us-forces-kill-jihadist-leader-141622855.html

...and yeah...it looks exactly like what you think it looks like.

Yeah, that sounds about right for you.

Surgical strikes apparently now involve...surgery.

man I would have loved be a fly on the wall when the idea for this weapon was pitched.....pure genius!

Conversation between defense contractor and Pentagon official:

"So, we've got a very cool upgrade for the Hellfire."

"Let's hear it."

"We target some terrorist asshole, right? And we fire the missile. The missile comes down and..."

"Boom?"

"No, man. Six fucking Samurai swords pop out. If the missile doesn't hit him, he still gets chopped into bloody sushi."

(long pause) "Oh, that's good. We'll take a million."

Lockheed Martin pitch man.

I just wish Dayton was here for this. .

The scary thing is that weapon accuracy has reached the point that we can essentially throw fucking knives from high-speed tactical aircraft.

We need a "less than lethal" version that deploys six spinning nunchucks.

Is this not basically an arrow with an engine?

Tossed from an aircraft at altitude, F=ma makes it a lethal proposition either way. (I know you already know that...)

They should have called it Shredder.

E=MCsquared.

I'd have thought K.E. = 1/2 m v2 would have more to do with it's effectiveness?

I would imagine there'd be a pretty good chance of being killed if that missile struck near one, regardless of whether it had a warhead or protruding steak knives. Because, as you say, E=1/2mv^2.

However, the explosives and/or blades make it certain death.

Hmmmm.... someone was stuck with cleaning up that mess of chopped up body bits.

Worst day at work, ever.

That's probably how the sales pitch really went down.

Pentagon: Could we get just a kinetic version to minimize collateral damage?

Lockheed Rep: Yawn.

Pentagon: Um...with...um...swords?

Lockheed Rep: You. Freaky. SLUT! You're killing me ya fucking wierdo! Who says the 80s are dead? I like where your head's at.

Ever heard of Project Thor? It was a plan to hit things with telephone poles from space!

an Air Force buddy of mine used to work at an amusement park. One time a drunk hobo snuck in there after hours and was sleeping on the tracks of a roller coaster ride.
Yada yada yada my buddy had to help spread out all the sawdust/cat litter stuff to soak up blood, shit and other hobo fluids once the authorities left the scene. Then they had to sweep it all back up, which was even worse. Yes loading bombs sucked at times, but it still beat cleaning up mangled hobos, and it paid better!

Riddle me this Batman! How can the rods fall any faster than terminal velocity? Okay let's say the rods are dropped from space and they can then build up tremendous speeds from the lack of air resistance - won't they burn up from friction when they enter thicker atmosphere?

Pardon the lack typos, there isn’t a digital copy of our grandfathers book so my brother just typed it up.

THE TWENTY-THIRD LEG

Eglin Field, Florida
April 1941

One of the most unpleasant incidents with which I was directly connected had to do with one of the companys of the Negro Engineer Battalion which was stationed at Eglin Field. Both officers and men in this outfit were constantly moving in, being trained, and then being moved out as cadres around which larger units could be built. When an officer took a cadre out, he naturally took with him the key people. Sometimes this left certain companys with inexperienced
non-coms, and that is one of the best ways to get an outfit fouled up that I know.

When a new inexperienced white officer came in and took over one of the black companies, he sometimes did not realize that every non-com he had might be newly promoted and completely inexperienced, and that he must closely supervise every last little detail of company administration. Due to such situations there were some classic foul-ups resulting in people not getting paid, wrong ration issues, etc., etc.

One day, one such company was out on one of the bombing ranges for training use of dynamite. The new Lieutenant who was in charge had picked out a large bomb crater some 30 yards across and 15 to 20 feet deep. The Lieutenant had his First Sergeant and six or eight platoons of men with him for the demonstration and training session, They would all go down in the crater, plant a charge of dynamite, and then climb out and take cover behind the rim of dirt thrown up around the perimeter of the crater. The charge would be detonated, and they would all go back dow in the crater to see what kind and size of hole had been blown out. They were
using varying amounts of dynamite, and burying the charge at various depths to illustrate the different kinds of things that could be done.

Finally they came to the last demonstration of the day, in which they were to use a very large charge of dynamite. It was buried with the detonating cap wired to the detonator. The Lieutenant carefully checked everyone out of the crater, warned them to cover their ears and to use all the other precautions for a large explosion. When everything was ready, he pushed down on the plunger of the detonator. Nothing happened.

All of this story is taken from bits and pieces of information that we were able to get later from the survivors. The Lieutenant got out his manual which told him to check the wiring and then again depress the plunger which he carefully did. Still no explosion. Then everything was rechecked and the plunger depressed for the third time. Nothing The manual now said to wait for
a prescribed length of time, and then for one man to go to the charge and rem the vires from the detonating cap. The Lieutenant waited for the proper number of minutes, and then told his Sergeant, "Keep everybody back." He then climbed over the edge of the crater and started slowly down toward the charge, manually watching it closely.

Evidently the Sergeant misunderstood the order for he stood up and waved everybody else over the edge and down into the crater also. The Lieutenant, intent on the charge, did not notice that all the men were following him into the crater. Just as he got to the charge, it exploded.

The Lieutenant was killed. There wasn't enough of him left to identify anything. The Sergeant was also killed along with 10 other men in the company. Over fifty were cut, bruised, broken and otherwise blown around. Several were knocked out of their senses and disappeared in the woods we found the last one 48 hours after the accident. For 50 yards around the crater, the place a shambles. Pieces of bodies were on the ground, in the trees, buried in the dirt in the crater. Blood, entrails and clothing were mixed up and scattered all over. Three medical teams worked from mid afternoon until late that night trying to pick up all the pieces. By the next morning it was obvious that we could not tell, from what they had, how many men had died.

The way I got mixed up in the matter was due to the Quartermaster having charge of burials. When we went to check the company records, we found that the clerk, who had not been killed, had no idea of who was supposed to be in the company. Some of the men were not wearing their dog tags. No entries had been made in the day book for over two weeks. When we informed the Post Commander, he turned absolutely livid. "My God," he whispered, "we can't even release a casualty list?"

"No sir," I told him, "Somehow or other we are going to have to try to trace down everyone who is supposed to be in that company and we are still digging them out of the woods we don't know how many more have just wandered off and got lost." (Eglin Field had some 400,000 acres in it, and people could have stayed lost for a week or more.)

We started teams working in every way we could think of to try to determine who was dead. We put together every order concerning personnel in the Engineer Battalion. We questioned every live soldier in the company to determine who slept in the bunks near him. We checked the hospital for some who might be sick.

We checked the check-out register to try to find those on pass, on leave, on T.D.Y., etc. We put search planes over the area, and jeeps all through it, to try to find the stragglers. Within 48 hours we thought we had an accurate roster of the company, and had determined that, in addition to the Lieutenant, 11 men had been killed. As a double check, we found that one part of the bodies that was relatively intact was the legs. When we counted 22 legs, we felt reasonably sure enough to release a list of the dead men. When I turned it into headquarters, the c.o. wanted to know, "Are you sure this is the complete list?"

"Yes, Sir," I said, "I think that is as accurate a list as we can get."

Well, it sure as Hell better be," he told me, "I've really been on the hot seat with Washington. They can't understand why it's taken this long to come out with a casualty list."

We were taking the bodies to a mortuary in Pensacola for further processing, so I went back to my office to wait. I had given specific orders to call me about everything that happened, and I had detailed one of my junior officers to accompany the bodies. The trip from Eglin should have taken about an hour. Almost three hours after he left, the officer called me. "Captain," he said without any preliminaries, we've got twenty-three."

"Oh, no!" I said, "that means we've got somebody else dead and we don't know who. Are you sure?

Yes, Sir. I'm so sick I can hardly stand up. The mortician and I have counted those legs ten times. We even watched then up by color and laid the out in pairs. There is no doubt -we have 23 legs."

"If I have to tell the Commanding Officer that, the whole damn top of Eglin Field is going to blow off." I leaned back in my chair. "Hold the line." I held the phone in sy lap and thought about what I could do, and then made up my mind. You sit tight - I don't want word of this to get to anybody. You bottle up those men you have with you. Don't let them talk to anybody don't let them get to a phone. I'm going to send you some help. You stay right there
and don't talk to anybody."

When he hung up, I called the Post Surgeon and told him what we were up against. He said to me, "Bill, for God's sake don't tell the Commanding Officer."

"I've already decided that," I said. "I've got Dick sitting on this thing in Pensacola. As of right now, you, I, Dick and the mortician are the only ones who know. Can you let se have two of your doctors to go to Pensacola to verify that twenty-third leg?

I’ll Have them on the way in ten minutes and I'll instruct them to report to nobody but me. Bill if you have to report a dead blow to the Colonel, he's going to absolutely explode. If it comes to that, I'll go with you. Shouldn't anybody have to make a report like that by himself."

Thanks," I Said, "I appreciate it. As soon as you hear something, let me know.”

Less than two hours later he was back on the phone. "I've just had a report from Pensacola," he told me, "There are only 22 legs. There were 23 that looked like legs, but the men I sent down probed and one of the legs didn't have any bone in it. It looks like a leg but it isn't."

I heaved a mighty sigh of relief. "Thanks for the help," I told him. For all practical purposes that was the end of the story for me. However, for all of the officers of the Engineer Battalion there was a red hot briefing on company administration that I don't imagine any of them ever forgot. And for those of us who had charge of handling the situation, for months after even the simple mention of legs was enough to make us turn green.

-Lt. Colonel William F Corman, “One Year Temporary Duty”

I'm having trouble visualizing how this works.

How fast is it going when it hits?

Is it supposed to impact the target and ideally kill them with blunt force trauma, and then the blades are just there for backup?

Is it the blades that do the primary damage?

Mounted the way they are, how do the blades do enough damage to kill a person?

Terminal velocity is dependant upon a number of factors. Something shaped like a telephone pole is going to have a higher terminal velocity than something shaped like an aircraft, even if they have the same weight.

Tungsten has a melting point of over 6000F, the space shuttle got around 3000F on its way down.

The tungsten rods from orbit are commonly referred to as a 'kinetic lance', and the concept has been around quite a while.

While they can be simply dropped on ballistic trajectories, they are far more effective (and energetic) if launched at high velocity from orbit, say, from a railgun.

I read an anthology that was all about the future of warfare, and one of the stories had those in it. The only other thing I remember about it was vertical launch anti-tank missiles. I must have it around here somewhere. I think Tom Clancy edited it or something.

oh I see! The tungsten won't melt, but will get hotter than hell - so a super fast moving hotter than hell heavy rod will "knock you hat into the creek" as they say!

It's also extremely dense, which is why it's been used for anti-armor projectiles for decades.

If thats how you wana go out, good on you. I myself, had I a choice, wound be death by snoo snoo.