How can The Temple of Elementary Evil reliably protect itself against kinetic bombardment? [closed]

Question

This building is the centerpiece of my world and the reason for everything. Why would chromatic dragons and adventurers fight together? To take down this temple, of course. But why do I need them?

I'm Anon Alighieri, the god of absolute hyper death. The temple is the base of my greatest foes, and I have 12 unhackable satellites and the 13th satellite, The Moon, at my disposal, ready to crush my enemies and drive them before me as I hear the lamentation of their women.

I mean, the goons at the temple have charged particle beam weapons, so nuking them isn't really an option, but that still leaves them vulnerable to kinetic bombardment, against which not even I know how to defend.

The Temple of Elementary Evil for beginner elder gods and creepypastas come true

• The temple is a fairly large building, let's stick to analogs, and imagine something like St. Peter's Basilica.
• The building's most important parts (the factory and the mines) are located in an underground complex, the building on the surface is an oversized security checkpoint.
• They do have a rather large resource pool but are limited to science-based stuff.
• They can't, however, take the satellites out.

The Long, Hard Rods of Penetration (Project Thor)

• Orbiting around the planet are 13 satellites with considerable reserves of tungsten rods of destruction.
• Rods reach the maximum speed of Mach 10 before impacting with the kinetic energy of 11.5 tons of TNT.
• The projectiles need 12-15 minutes to hit the target and usually penetrate deep enough to heavily damage underground bunkers.
• Each satellite has 24 rods, it can fire before needing to reload, and a reload time of 30 mins.

Your defense is successful if the underground factory suffers little to no damage and remains functional after an all-out, f#ck-em-all barrage of 13*24=312 rods.

• Making the defense mechanism reliable and scalable is the most important,
• making it cost-effective is secondary,
• and simplicity would also be appreciated.

How can The Temple of Elementary Evil defend itself against the wrath of God?

Notes

Why I (Mephistopheles) don't use magic?

Because it needs to be added to both sides of the equation. If they hide the temple in a pocket dimension, I just simply relocate the entrance to the bottom of the Mariana Trench or a neutron star, go big or go home. See, we're back at square one.

Answer 1

Dead Hand switch on Doomsday Weapon(s)

A dead hand switch is simple: A countdown is always active. If it ever reaches zero, it activates... whatever it's hooked up to. The idea is that the dead hand switch is reset periodically by its owner. Only, if the owner were to become unable to take care of this little task, then the dead hand switch eventually goes off. (Hence the name: it's a switch that responds when its minders' hands go dead.)

So your bad guy builds several dead hand switches. Exactly how many, is undisclosed. S/he allows the Forces of Good to send in heroes to inspect at least one of them, and verify it is - in fact - a dead hand switch, and it really is hooked up to a bona fide doomsday device.

Then s/he announces to the world that there may or may not be other switches hooked up to other devices. Any attempt to tamper with the publicly-revealed one is tantamount to an attempt to kill the bad guy, so, you know, maybe don't.

Consequently, the good guys don't dare just blow up the Temple. That would also blow up everything they need to know to find and dismantle all the doomsday devices.

Remember, a key part of this is they don't even know how many of the devices there are, just that there's at least one. They don't know how many different dead hand switches have been rigged to set them off, either; they were only shown the one.

Sure, they can try to find out. But without capturing the Temple, they'd basically just be hoping and praying they'd found them all, and you don't take those kind of chances with doomsday weapons on a hair trigger unless you have no other choice.

And they have got another choice: Storm the temple. Take it over so deviously and quickly the doomsday cultists, who've been told to commit suicide rather than be captured, don't have time to do that (even though they have, like, cyanide pills in their teeth, and everything). That way you have the best chance of finding out everything you need to know to stop the bad guy's last middle finger to the world.

Answer 2

You can know the flight path of the rod. Hit the rod midflight.

1. The satellites are in a predictable orbit. They can be seen coming.

2. The tungsten rods are not steerable. They fall with a predictable ballistic flight path. Any drop will come right down this path.

3. To hit the temple, each satellite has one flight path it can use for its rod. Reload time is immaterial if there is only one target. 30 minutes later it will be past the drop zone corresponding with the temple. Each satellite gets one rod drop per orbit.

4. When the satellite is coming into position to drop, launch countermeasures. These would be massive objects (e.g. cannonballs) which follow trajectories that intercept the falling rod. The higher it is intercepted, the better. Chainshot (cannonballs connected with chains) would be ideal for this use.

An impact which confers a small amount of lateral momentum will mean the rod misses the temple and impacts the surrounding wastelands.

Answer 3

Build it right next to the Pentagon/Kremlin/Great Hall of People

Delegate defenses to the most powerful nations in the world. If whomever is attacking you is also personally targeting Putin, for example, then any attacker would be destroyed BEFORE they were able to start an attack against you. Even if they do attack, the projectiles may well be destroyed by your allies' anti-aerial barrages.

Nukes. Can't go wrong with nukes.

This is a variation o Willk's excellent answer. However, targetting ballistic stuff with ballistic stuff is hard. A nuke does not require much precision, the shockwave does the trick.

On top of that, the nukes are also a nice way to sig al to your citizens that there is an emergency going on.

And if denotated high enough after launch, your citizens will not be affected by too much radiation, nor will you cause yourself structural damage. You may wish to distribute some iodine pills to the populace though. Also neighbouring nations will hate you more.

The phantom menace

It turns out that in the real world, strategic weapons operations are kinda lax in security and it's a miracle humanity has not destroyed itself by accident. If your world mirrors ours in anyway, a pizza guy can invade the command center for the satellites. From there you just need to fool the machinery into thinking that your base is actually located where the enemy's is.

If the enemy satellites are guided by GPS, you can fool them from the ground by messing with GPS itself, which has had staff problems in the past. Find a disgruntled corporal and use them to flip the south and north coordinates for every satellite. Or just shoot fake GPS signals at the enemy satellites from the ground. They will go crazy and won't be able to fire accuratelly. They will even report to ground that they are in different coordinates than their actual ones.

Use a decoy

During WW2 the allied forces would use real sized inflatable tank replicas to fool nazi aerial scounts. The nazis thought the alliance was amassing forces to attack anywhere anywhere but in Normandy. See what they did there?

Your main building is just a façade. The actual one is in some (other) poor country, and its location and appearance are known to just a few people.

Let the enemy attack the decoy - and piss off world + dog for all the civillian casualties. Then just proceed with your business as usual. The cost of the first attack will be too great, specially in human lives, for them to try a second time.

Answer 4

Well by far the simplest answer would be to bury the factory so far underground so the kinetic bombardment would be ineffective, they simply wouldn’t be able to reach far enough, ensuring the survival of the facility. However, i dont think that would be cost effective and material above the factory would need to be replaced.

Another option is anti-air guns or air-to-air missiles which could destroy the tungsten rods mid air, before they impacted with the building. This would be relatively reliable and scaleable (just add more guns and missiles). Cost effectiveness may be questionable, depending on how often the place is attacked and the value of the factories beneath the building. You also may have issues if the missiles and/or guns fail to destroy some of the rods and they hit the building anyway.

You could have a large reservoir of water above the facility. When the rods hit the water, the surface tension would cause the water to act like concrete, causing energy to be transferred into the water instead of your bunker. Water could be pumped into the reservoir as the tungsten rods would likely throw water up and out (though, if the body of water is large enough, pumps may not be needed as the water would fall back down into the main body). This also may have the added benefit of causing thermal shock to the rods as the water would be significantly colder relative to the tungsten rod.

Although, i do question if this would be necessary at all. Given that these satellites are “in orbit” around the planet, they must be well above the atmosphere. So, as the tungsten rods were fired at such great speeds towards the planet, the would undergo (re)entry into the atmosphere. According to NASA “Now a spacecraft entering the Earth's atmosphere at, for example, Mach 10, will experience a stagnation air temperature at the nose of approximately 8000 ° F. (4426.667°C)” For referance, the melting point of tungsten is 6192°F or 3422°C meaning your tungsten rods would melt as they tried to enter the atmosphere. If they did not have adequate heat shielding, they would melt upon reentry into the planet’s atmosphere.

Edit: From the Wikipedia article referenced “One drawback of the system is that the weapon's sensors would almost certainly be blind during atmospheric reentry due to the plasma sheath […] The system would also have to cope with atmospheric heating from re-entry, which could melt non-tungsten components of the weapon.[14]”

Whilst the rods’ terminal velocity would be closer to Mach 10 than i thought originally (as i assumed the rods were a lot smaller), they may still melt due to the heat from reenty and the sensors and guidance systems could be blinded or damaged if not adequately heat shielded.

Answer 5

SAMs. You know the orbits, you can position the launchers so the birds are going straight out, no cross-range component. Big birds, no warheads, they ram for a kinetic kill. A descending Thor round has a huge heat signature, tracking won't be an issue.

The normal problem with shooting at a Thor round is reaction time and the cross-range component of the intercept, neither of these are a serious issue in this case.

Answer 6

Several good answers have already been given, but there is one option that hasn't been suggested yet: shoot down the satellites.

Thor requires rather big satellites to be put in orbit - at the very least the telephone pole-sized tungsten rods themselves. You will have detected those: rocket launches are highly visible, and so is manoeuvring orbital thrust, so satellite stealth tech is useless. You know where satellites are. And anti-satellite weapons are not that hard.

If you are not sure, destroy all the satellites. Debris will will take care of the few you may have missed, and prevent new launches for some time. If you go for anti-satellite nukes, you will also fill the Van Allen belt with deadly, satellite-frying radiation for a few years.

They may still launch beefed-up ICBM kinetic strikes (and for those, I defer to other answers), but those would give you a longer warning time, and probably be more technically difficult. Especially if they have to go through an orbital debris cloud.

Answer 7

A Human shield the size of the world, i.e. everyone else. The temple is covered by a shield made of Caesium, Polonium, Badthingium. The shield will not hold back the tungsten rods, but their explosive disintegration will throw the stuff mile high - everybody else on the planet is a human shield to the temple.

Answer 8

Swat the rods away.

The Temple "have charged particle beam weapons, so nuking them isn't really an option, but that still leaves them vulnerable to kinetic bombardment".

Each rod carries around fifty megajoules. With sufficiently powerful lasers, you can achieve explosive ablation on the rod's surface, imparting the rod a significant kick. With enough kicks, the rod would actually disappear, but you don't need that.

Landing ten megajoules of energy on the rod when it's still about 5 km high, and assuming the vaporized tungsten carries away most of that energy as lateral thrust (which also alters the rod's aerodynamic profile), the rod deviates a full 10° from its trajectory, landing 870 meters off target.

The usual missile countermeasures of making the rod highly reflective and rotate on its longitudinal axis avail nothing, since any reflective layer would be abraded or made opaque by the reentry speed, and the rotation only distributes the damage, but does nothing against the thrust (this is important for missiles, which in addition to being slower, have an onboard source of thrust and a flight correction system. The rod has neither. If it has controlling fins, just target them first).

The amount of energy reflected by the plasma sheath around the rod (at an altitude and air density of 5000 m the plasma formation due to reentry temperature is negligible, but the laser itself will form a plasma on the target) is comparatively high, but enough energy makes it through - so while it will take maybe a full gigajoule of energy to deposit those ten megajoules, if the ground-based station has enough juice, the rod is toast. This is not the typical nanosecond laser, depositing little energy but in so small a time that the power is immense; rather we want the contrary: we want the largest energy deposited with the minimum possible power (waste is a function of power and wavelength, more than energy per se).

After the rod has been successfully deflected, a follow-up shot fries the satellite. Being evil Gods, it stands to reason that they can perform a MIRACL.

Answer 9

Your temple has a rather monumental double roof.

• Lower roof: Bunker-like plate of reinforced concrete.

  The entire structure is covered by a gigantic plate of strong concrete, able to withstand a 11.5 ton TNT explosion 50m above it.

• Upper roof: An extravagant garden.

  At that distance of 50m above the first plate is the second plate, supported by many pillars. This upper plate itself may be rather thin, but it is covered by several meters of soil. On this, the temple may grow its foods, or have some plants, or even a small forest, that just depends on the creativity of the gardeners. The only requirement is, that this upper roof needs to be heavy.

Now, when that tungsten rod hits the upper plate (more precise: the dirt above it), it does what it's supposed to do. It explodes in an impressive 11.5 ton TNT explosion within that upper plate. The gardeners won't be happy about this, but that doesn't matter. This explosion will punch a big hole in the upper roof, and will throw a lot of hot debris at the lower roof.

Now, since the two roofs are so far apart, the lower roof is impacted on a much larger scale than the hole in the upper roof, allowing it to reflect the shock-wave and withstand the impact of the much smaller, less energetic, and scattered bits of the upper plate that rain down on it.

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The idea is basically a scaled-up version of the Whipple Shields that are used to armor spacecrafts against micrometeorites. The velocities in question are the same, the only difference is the masses of the projectile, and, by consequence, of the first shield layer.

For a Whipple Shield to work, the amount of first-layer shield matter in the path of the projectile needs to be comparable to the weight of the projectile. This ensures that the projectile actually gets destructed on the first impact and is converted into a cloud of debris, which the secondary layer(s) are supposed to stop.

Answer 10

The thing about "rods from god" is that it's a seriously considered weapon and really hard to do anything about. It launches "silently" and the first you know about it is the streaks in the sky to say they're coming. It's already too late. When such weapons are available the concept of a single centralised temple of all evil really needs to be abandoned.

In practice the only way to defend against it is to stop the satellites getting up there in the first place. Whether you do that by use of the various international conventions preventing the use of orbital launched weapons, or by shooting down anything in orbit (you are evil after all), remember that total denial of the launch zone is by far the best defence.

Since you say the satellites are already up, the real question is can you get them all down again before any of them are in a position to launch against you?

Answer 11

Make it costly to attack

Put the temple in the middle of the most populated city on the planet, any space-based attack, which may not have pin point accuracy is going to kill alot of civilians then. Or have other important buildings in/next to the temple. Would you really want risk destroying the main hospital in the city? or the orphanage next door?

Call it the Temple of good

Hide in plain sight. Its total not the place where all evil is, honest. Its a fun happy place which looks after orphaned children and kittens that got stuck in trees. Never mind that once the orphans and kittens go in they come out blood thirsty monsters. That is entirely a coincidence. Or be even more dastardly and put an actual temple to the good gods above your temple of evil. Any attack on you means attacking the other gods temple.

Answer 12

I think the answer lies in your question

The Temple of Elementary Evil for beginner elder gods and creepypastas

Your evil dudes are not regular joes, they are not you nor me.

They do have a rather large resource pool but are limited to science-based stuff.

Another key information to what you have to do.

So you basically have gods, with intellectual prowess we could never dream of, with a large resourceful limited to science based stuff but unlimited in the story's context.

1) Hack the satellites

• If you can't destroy those, hack them! OWN THEM! We got loads of sci fi movies that hacks space satellites, from Geostorm to GI Joe. Surely you got elementary elder gods. BUT THEY ARE ELDER GODS! So nothing is impossible when it comes to hacking these... satellites.

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Assuming that the satellites are created by a greater god

2) Create your own Atlantis by making your world somewhat Uranus

• This answer still abuses the no bounderies a elder god's knowledge has.
• This answer points out that there is no information regarding the planets size
• Your planet should be water, EVERYWHERE and maybe create your temple to be mobile, and indestructible to extreme pressures. You then fill your planet with rain, (well.. water) and throw your temple to the deepest point of the planet. Then move your temple so that the water makes it rather hidden visibly, and the water will help slow down the entrance of the projectiles.

BONUS

3) Liquid Diamonds

• Since we got elder gods and creepypastas, why can't we put a little handwavium over here? Liquid diamond might be your best defence, assuming you handwave all the physics involve. You can release liquid diamond in your temple's grounds, like a huge umbrella covering most of the the land which the temple is built. The liquid diamond MIGHT withstand all the barrage of the satellites, I'm thinking its like a huge pool of glue with the sturdiness of a diamond but a composition of a gel. (I should however state that I am not familiar with Liquid diamond, this is just my assumption.)

Answer 13

The most effective defense would be preemptive rather than reactive. My first thought is you could have the eggs or egg-layers of your chromatic dragons imprisoned within the temple. Establish a reason why it would be unthinkable to simply level the place and everything in it. This gives a narratively compelling reason for your dragons to be working alongside humans to crack this place open and save their children.

Other reasons could be that it contains the source/connection to magic, or a sacred artifact, or contains goodness in equal measure to the evil within. Or perhaps the site is protected by a set of treaties between good and evil powers enacted in the aftermath of a war which nearly erased life on the planet, and such an attack nullifies protections against something EVEN WORSE that will end everyone. Or the temple also functions as a seal on a doomsday evil which would arise from the smoking ruin of the bombing and from its 7 mouths will sing the song that ends the world. Or perhaps the evil temple has evil asbestos and a bombardment putting particles of that into the air will kill everyone downwind for hundreds of miles.

Answer 14

launch small, magnetic drones that latch onto the tungston rods and then deploy fins and flaps. now you can fly it the earlier you get it the less you have to influence its flight. just gotta decide where to steer it. back up at the satillite? at one of their bases? just off to the ocean? whatever.

Answer 15

The kinetic bombardment will scour the surface of your base quite thoroughly.

The energy release over the course of the bombardment is: 11.5 tons * 312 rods * ~4 gigajoules/ton = 1.5*10^13 joules

A magnitude 5.5 Earthquake releases about 4.0*10^13 joules... which will be concentrated and delivered on your doorstep.

Your only real defense is to dig deep enough to prevent the bombardment from destroying everything. I would assume that the facility should be considered "destroyed" if all tunnels to the surface are rendered inaccessible, and there's not enough resources left to dig back out.

Having a single elevator shaft would be begging for obliteration. Ideally you would want to have multiple real elevator stations, with a dozen decoy stations as well. Extended monitoring would help the "enemies" determine which stations were real by traffic in and out, so maybe shallow tunnels connecting them all could be used .

Your underground facilities would need an extended power source for surviving without access to the surface. Fission reactors are the obvious choice here but you will need access to an aquifer and somewhere to vent steam.

You will need tunnel boring equipment capable of drilling up at an angle. You will also need somewhere to store all the material removed to create the tunnels. Access to a large cave system would help with this immensely. However, you also run the risk that the bombardment causes cave-ins, so you'd want to reinforce critical pathways.

Surviving the attack would be a cycle of: getting hit and losing tunnels, digging new tunnels, resupplying vital resources from the surface, retreating, and waiting for more attacks.

Imagine an anthill after repeatedly stepping on it. Or shooting it with a BB gun in this case.

Answer 16

If magic is involved, you can have a wizard or a group of wizards create an artificial hurricane/ tornado that disrupts the wind around your base. Using the technology on board the tungsten rods they can adjust their trajectory a bit but I doubt they would be able to account for the wind.

Even if magic isn't involved you could potentially create an artificial hurricane/ tornado using enough energy and resources.