r/NonCredibleDefense • u/combatwombat- Sex-Obsessed Beer Lover • 9d ago
It Just Works Rods from God, and Cleaning up Surplus
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u/Blindmailman Furthermore, I consider Switzerland to need to be destroyed 9d ago
Anyone else remember the 2010 movie The A-Team where they fly a tank?
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u/LovableCoward 9d ago
No one’s giving any orders. No one’s giving any anything. There’s no coordination. So the captain is the ultimate authority 6th Company has. That’s fine with Braellen. They’ll move in, deploy, secure. Rescue and secure, they’ve trained for that. And if it’s not an accident, if it’s an attack… They’ve trained for that too. He’s thinking that when things change and their plans change with them. It starts raining main battle tanks.
The first impact is surreal. Braellen sees it plainly. A Shadowsword super-heavy, almost perfectly intact apart from one trailing track section, drops out of the stained sky about sixteen hundred metres ahead of him. The tank’s hull plating is faintly glowing pink from re-entry. It hits. Hammer blow. Blinding light. Shock-wash. The impact creates an explosion akin to a primary plasma mine. Battle-brothers are thrown through the air like toys. Some bounce off transports or stacked freight.
Braellen’s squad is at the edge of the blast force. They stay upright as their power armour auto-locks and braces, sensing the explosion. Inertial dampers straining. Braellen feels grit and micro-debris spattering off his armour like smallarms fire. The shock passes, the auto-lock relaxes. Discipline wavers for a second. No fear, just bemusement.
A tank doesn’t just fall out of the– A second one does. A Baneblade, this time. It’s tumbling end over end. It hits the company shelters a kilometre west, and causes an impact blast that splits the ground and triggers a landslip on the facing hill. Then two more, both Fellblades, in quick succession. One crushes a pair of parked Thunderhawks. The other hits just off the trackway a split-second later and punches a crater, but doesn’t explode. It actually bounces, disintegrating. It bounces and tumbles through a scattering line of battle-brothers, mowing them down, shedding torn plate and wheel assemblies.
More fall, all around. Like bombs. Like impossible hail. Like playthings tipped out of a child’s toybox. Some explode. Some fracture on impact and bounce. Some bury themselves in the open ground like bullets in flesh.
Braellen looks up into the sky. It’s almost blue apart from the smoke stains from the city. It’s full of falling objects: tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, troop carriers, cargo pods, lumps of debris. They turn in the air, catching the sunlight, glinting, spinning, some fast, some slow. Ash and metal-fibres rain down with them. Strands of cable. Wire. Optical leads. Pieces of haptic keyboard. Pieces of data-slate. Glass and brass splinters. Flakes of ceramite.
Somewhere, far above, a low orbit depot has broken up and the packed contents have spilled out like treasure from a sack. Enough war machines and equipment for a full division have been thrown down to be smashed by gravity. They’re too low to fully burn up. Air friction is simply heating them.
To his west, amongst the impossible skyfall, Braellen spots the flashing delta-shape of a Stormbird, rotating as it falls. Then he sees falling bodies too. They have not endured the drop as well as the machine parts. They have scorched and cooked. They land like bundles of wet branches, and burst. They do not gouge vast craters and explode like the falling armour, but their impacts are somehow far more devastating.
Know No Fear by Dan Abnett.
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u/kloudykat 5d ago
Nice choice of quote
Also excuse me, I need to step aside for a minute and pull-start my chainsword.
Heaven forbid I do a salute with a non-running chainsword!
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u/INTPoissible B-52 Carpetbombing Connoisseur 9d ago
Reminds me of when the Automatons would literally drop tanks on me in Evacuate High-Value Assets missions.
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u/nYghtHawkGamer Cyberspace Conversational Irregular TM 9d ago
Two questions for OP:
- Where'd you get the art?
- Could I get an honorable mention for pointing out that uranium is already used as reentry shielding?
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u/combatwombat- Sex-Obsessed Beer Lover 9d ago
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u/Usual_Philosopher355 9d ago
Oh no, Think of the vaporised DU, you might give an entire continent cancerÂ
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u/P3Abathur 8d ago
How vulnerable are they to interception by T-72/T-90 Surface-to-Space ballistic turrets ?
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u/User_joined_channel 9d ago
US Marines have figured out how to full send it on a combat drop in this new space age.
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u/TheirCanadianBoi 9d ago edited 9d ago
I'm not sure if an Abrams could reenter in one piece. The space around the turret and gun would basically act like a plasma cutter.
Does anyone know what the terminal velocity of an Abrams would be? I would assume it would fall front down, but it might also tumble.
It would be fun to try.