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 a bloody god for fork's sake. 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 I really don't 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.

You successfully defended the building 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 I defend The Temple of Elementary Evil against the wrath of God?

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, meaning they would never hit the building without you ever doing a thing. Its an entirely free, very simple and very effective form of defence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.