I don’t think plutonium is the right comparison. Plutonium is expensive, and nuclear bombs are neither cheap nor particularly useful for doing things like attacking 10k different targets in some foreign country.
I’m imagining a launcher in a spacecraft that kicks out a bunch of payloads, one at a time, out the back, into orbits with perigee on or before the ground. (An LLM calculates the needed delta-V at under 200m/s, which is likely quite manageable with a small mass driver-style launcher or a very small rocket.) The payloads will lose a bunch of energy to the atmosphere, but all the remaining energy is kinetic energy delivered directly on target, assuming that you can inexpensively aim the thing at a target. Look up “Rods From God” on Wikipedia — you don’t even necessarily need any explosives.
So the question becomes: how economically can one build the guidance systems, avionics packages, and whatever heat shielding is needed to survive reentry?
(Cold War-era ICBMs with MIRV payloads are sort of in this category, but they treated launch vehicle as disposable, which means that the launch would be far more expensive but the reentry system could likely be a bit simpler as the payloads could be launched from a launch vehicle on a non-recoverable orbit. And it appears that Russia has attacked Ukraine with a MIRV-equipped missile with non-nuclear payloads, so there is precedent.)
Near real time fpv drones anywhere on the planet, free of jamming due to starlink is the real game changing capability. What would any military pay for that? Plenty I wager.
Wait a moment. How exactly is Starship supposed to usefully deliver a pile of FPV drones to a hostile area?
Starship itself is highly engineered to survive reentry and can even land anywhere that an appropriately flat surface is available. It will conveniently toast anything hanging out on the landing zone. But it is extremely far from stealthy, it seems likely to be extremely vulnerable both before and after landing (a hole in a cryogenic fuel tank = big boom), and I don’t think any of the design mission profiles involve Starship’s second stage, minus most of its fuel and minus the first stage, taking off again from Earth. And the value proposition isn’t there if you don’t get to reuse it.
A common cheap FPV drone dropped from orbit or from a suborbital ballistic trajectory is a small meteor, not a weapon.
ISTM it would be a better bet to equip an F-35 or a larger UAV to drop a pile of small drones.
Not sure how you made that leap because that would be absurd. The point was that fpv drones enabled with starlink render icbms, mervs, rods from god, etc unnecessary and uneconomical.
I’m imagining a launcher in a spacecraft that kicks out a bunch of payloads, one at a time, out the back, into orbits with perigee on or before the ground. (An LLM calculates the needed delta-V at under 200m/s, which is likely quite manageable with a small mass driver-style launcher or a very small rocket.) The payloads will lose a bunch of energy to the atmosphere, but all the remaining energy is kinetic energy delivered directly on target, assuming that you can inexpensively aim the thing at a target. Look up “Rods From God” on Wikipedia — you don’t even necessarily need any explosives.
So the question becomes: how economically can one build the guidance systems, avionics packages, and whatever heat shielding is needed to survive reentry?
(Cold War-era ICBMs with MIRV payloads are sort of in this category, but they treated launch vehicle as disposable, which means that the launch would be far more expensive but the reentry system could likely be a bit simpler as the payloads could be launched from a launch vehicle on a non-recoverable orbit. And it appears that Russia has attacked Ukraine with a MIRV-equipped missile with non-nuclear payloads, so there is precedent.)