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kergonathtoday at 11:06 AM2 repliesview on HN

Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).


Replies

eigenspacetoday at 11:18 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

The idea is to use tungsten because of the high melting point and hardness so that it survives re-entry in order to best strike the rival datacentre.