[reitzensteinm]

No doubt that's true in the individual case, but surely you'd attempt to run a "train" into the atmosphere with this kind of thing? Meaning that each projectile is slipstreaming behind the one in front.

It still might not be possible, but it seems like friction would be much less of a problem. Although starting up would be a significant issue with many thousands of projectiles hitting earth at high velocity - you'd want to run it 24x7 indefinitely.

That doesn't sound like a low cost project, though; certainly well beyond our current capabilities. But you might achieve very nice energy efficiency with it.

[tjradcliffe]

This is my imagination vs your imagination, so neither of us really has anything resembling an argument, but I'm wondering if in such a scenario the following projectiles might not find themselves running into the plasma wake left by the preceding projectiles. As such, your scenario might actually be worse than firing things one at a time.

The plasma wake will be less dense than the atmosphere displaced by the leading projectile, but it'll be much hotter and comprised of [#] much heavier atoms.

[#] "comprised of" is a correct usage, for anyone sucked in by the poor guy obsessed with editing it out of Wikipedia (many words have opposing meanings and some great English poetry depends on this; the term causes no confusion amongst native speakers; etymology is irrelevant to modern usage...)

[simplemath]

>[#] "comprised of" is a correct usage, for anyone sucked in by the poor guy obsessed with editing it out of Wikipedia (many words have opposing meanings and some great English poetry depends on this; the term causes no confusion amongst native speakers; etymology is irrelevant to modern usage...)

The tyranny of the minority, in this case, is comprised of a single man, whose idiosyncratic reign of grammatical terror is now reaching out from Wikipedialand into the Greater Internet.

I find this all very amusing.

[reitzensteinm]

In my mind, I'm picturing this being used to shoot pretty much blocks of solid materials, not anything delicate, so the only issue is how much they are slowed down; by the time we could build something like this, fabricating in space is not going to be an issue.

Of course, by the time we could build this (assuming its even possible), mining asteroids could already have surpassed it.

[stolio]

This could maybe be an xkcd "what if" problem....I suspect a train of mach 27 projectiles would have some interesting effects on our atmosphere.