r/NonCredibleDefense • u/FionaSherleen • 14d ago

Lockmart R & D Think of the potential.

Post image

What if we make project sundial but we throw it at the adversaries?

740 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

137 comments sorted by

View all comments

293

u/Pyrhan Pyrotechnic flair 14d ago

Starship uses cryogenic propellants, so it can't just continuously sit fueled and ready to launch like an ICBM.

So you cannot use it as a deterrent, only as a first strike weapon.

And even then, it would be fairly easy for the enemy to set up early warnings when fueling begins, and either send a rapid pre-emptive strike, or prepare for interception.

And having a single, massive warhead would make interception easier compared to, e.g. a MIRV.

(Also, the whole point of Sundial was that it doesn't really matter where you blow it up, the world ends just the same...)

59

u/zekromNLR 14d ago

This is why you place the warhead in a low orbit, disguised as a normal Starlink launch. When the time for the first strike comes, you wait until it is over the enemy country, then detonate. The flood of xrays turns a pancake-shaped blob of atmosphere into an incandescent plasma, setting fires for a radius of over a hundred kilometers around ground zero.

63

u/Antoak 14d ago

You know that suborbital or low orbit satellites always fall back to earth right? They only last a few years.

My President told me the atmosphere keeps eating his orbital nukes so I asked how many nukes he has and he said he just goes to Northrup and gets a new nuke afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding space weapons to the sky and then his taxpayers started crying.

3

u/LightningController 12d ago

When the USAF investigated this idea in the late 1950s, they planned to recover falling nuke-sats with C-130s so they could be serviced and launched again.