Nuffsaid98

Nuffsaid98 t1_je1us93 wrote

I was more wondering if it helped them survive where a taller person might have died rather than thinking of it as a thought experiment or something to test.

Did it help them? Did it save them? That kind of thing.

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Nuffsaid98 t1_j5ae6p0 wrote

I think you're ignoring orbital mechanics here.

If a satellite is orbiting the Earth at a given speed then anything dropped from it would continue at that speed. You would need to retro thrust to scrub off that speed or factor it in.

In other words, anything dropped from orbit has to fall in a curved path.

Avoiding burnup in the atmosphere dictates the angle of entry.

The payload would be dropped when the satellite is over a completely different part of the Earth, not the target.

If you are firing the weapon at high speed instead of using the gravity well to do the work, you still need to allow for the spin. Also recoil will throw your satellite around.

Not as simple as you might think.

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