Elon Musk showed Everyday Astronaut the SpaceX Starbase and rocket factories. SpaceX has a new Raptor engine that will be a couple hundred pounds lighter without a heat shield. It will have built in cooling channels. This is the version of the Raptor engine which wil be produced by the thousands. The Texas Starbase will eventually be able to produce one hundred Starships and Boosters per year. This will need about 4000 Raptor engines per year. There will eventually be other SpaceX facilities that will enable about one thousand Starships and boosters per year. This will need 40,000 Raptor engines per year.
Elon talked about eventually getting the SpaceX engines to 330-335 tons of thrust per engine. This will mean 33 SpaceX raptor engines will give Starship triple the thrust of the Saturn V. In expendable mode, the Starship will be able to deliver 400-500 tons to orbit.
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35 engines. Block 2 has 35
There are so many great applications for this vehicle; exploration, giant space stations, transportation, etc. etc. Using a starship for destructive purposes seems like a failure.
Two hundred one-ton bombs thumping down into your enemies infrastructure. They couldn’t stop the rain. The impactors wouldn’t even need to be explosive, just lumps of concrete would do the job. Mmmmm.
And repeat the job with a single craft every 24 hours. Mmmmmmm.
Until you invent space opera level fictional space engines, “rods from god” (kinetic impact weapons) will always spend more expense & weight in fuel to put them up into orbit & then de-orbit onto target.
Even with starship the cost will be still too high. Your future space war is still fairly conventional.
I don’t think so.
Not at $100/lb to LEO.
Not even at $500/lb.
Have you seen Rapid Dragon?
Imagine Starship makes a suborbital hop, slows down to maybe 2,000km/h, deploys a few of those and then boosts back to the landing zone.
Level a couple enemy bases and formations in one go.
if you use ONE starship.