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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

That's why "dense rock" setting was used. Imagine if they had selected "solid iron". I don't know what settings are available for the calculator used, but "loose bunch of rocks" would probably fall apart in the atmo, dense rock would hold together until impact, and solid iron would just keep burrowing further

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A 15km chunk of solid iron, now that's the kind of bunker buster you throw around in an interplanetary war.

Would it do more damage to the surface than a rocky asteriod of comparable mass, though? If it burrows deeper, it means it transfers more of its energy to the mantle and core of the Earth, and less to the crust. It will be like a full metal jacket bullet that goes straight through the target and transfers most of its energy to the wall on the other side, versus a regular bullet that tumbles and expands as soon as it hits the target.

Throwing Meteors as interplanetary weapons was a storyline from The Expanse books/TV series if I recall.

Deorbiting a multi-million dollar satellite as a weapon was the plot of of a Tom Clancy book. The bad guy was going to launch a nuke from his ship and the only thing that could get there in time was the super special satellite.

Was this an OpCenter plot? It's definitely not a Jack Ryan series plot. I never really picked up the post-divorce stuff he wrote.

Yeah. Bad guy mounted thrusters on large asteroids from the belts. Not technically meteors, but close enough.

Neat sci-fi.

At that speed I’m pretty sure that it would be vaporised on impact, so it wouldn’t matter.

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