1. You have to position the rod satellite in the right orbit, or have enough so one is generally over the target.

2. Then when the order comes in to kill the carrier, your 1-ton rod plus satellite has to de-orbit from ~8km/s. Basically it needs the rocket that launched it, but up in orbit to drop it back down. (It's not quite so bad because gravity is assisting rather than fighting as during launch, but it's still a decent de-orbit vehicle.) The de-orbit takes time, and either you're dropping from ~1000km up or re-entering at some kind of ballistic arc from ~200km up.

3. Obviously the carrier will be maneuvering the moment that massive de-orbit burn is detected. So when course corrections will be necessary throughout the re-entry and maybe even into terminal flight, when your rod is hypersonic in the thickest part of the atmosphere, sheathed in sensor-blinding, comms-blackouting plasma.

(I'm assuming a CIWS—point defense gatling—throwing up a cloud of metal wouldn't do much to the rod, nor would an IR missile be able to hit the rod, but maybe those things could alter its trajectory enough to cause a miss.)

4. Then if you actually hit the target, did you over-penetrate it, smashing a 1m hole clean through the hull into the water, or did the rod explode like a bomb against the hull? (I assume the former but am very unsure here.) If it's just an unstoppable but small hole, damage repair teams would patch it and seal off those compartments to keep the ship fighting.

So in the end, you have a very expensive (let's use your $260M), unmaintainable hypersonic slug that everyone can see launch (and who launched it) and it might be able to poke some holes in a carrier.

Or you use normal hypersonic missiles, which should be harder to detect launching, more maneuverable, and might deliver explosive or nuclear payloads.

Or you launch a swarm of hundreds of relatively cheap anti-ship missiles and just overwhelm the carrier defenses that way.

So I agree the dominance of the carrier will last only as long as the next great powers war (and also that guided missile submarines might well be the future) but it's from fear of God raining down tungsten wrath.

1. getting knocked out at the commencement of hostilities by an anti-satellite weapon

2. the Defense Intelligence Agency/National Reconnaissance Office noticing and telling the carrier to change course

3. getting blown up by an anti-satellite missile fired by an aircraft, or a member of the carrier’s strike group

Rods from god are a much more potent weapon when used against static targets!

2. As a species we can land a rocket on a barge, do you think we can't land a big crowbar on a slowly moving target?

3. Might make 2 more difficult but a 1-ton tungsten rod is pretty durable.

Certainly more potent against a static target but with modern tech and one skilled, ethically ambivalent engineer, these days you could probably hit a row boat.

Satellites are not 'sitting in orbit', they are falling on earth extremely fast, and not reaching it only because they fall sideways. Since they go very fast, they have immense momentum. To attack a target you have to steer that momentum elsewhere, and that takes a lot of energy and precision,and you also have a very small attack area for every satellite. So to cover all earth reliably you'll need a constellation with numbers like Musk's Starlink - i.e. thousands of satellites.

However, a huge amount of mass (for dropping) invalidates the former of those.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect....

Just sit up there with a receiver, bank of charged batteries, and just enough awake to monitor for wake transmissions.

Assuming you can successfully attack one, you still have plenty of cruisers, assault ships, support craft, secondary/light carriers, subs, and several other carrier groups now headed straight for you. It's not like countries can't make a crazy plan to take out a single carrier right now, it's what would happen after that is the deterrent.

You're confusing the Air Force and the Navy.

Who is that demonstrated a system capable of delivering these with a CEP that would give it, say, even odds of a hit on a carrier with 100 shots?

> aircraft carrier and destroy how many billions of dollars worth of F22s and ammunition?

$0 billion worth in of F-22s, because Sea Raptor never happened.