Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Certainly usable veocities for kinetic weapons but not bunker busters with delayed action fuses. Above 2200 meters/sec projectiles made out of normal matter will structurally fail rather than penetrate intact.
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My point was that at SS velocities, you're no longer talking about fusing explosives and behind-armor penetration, you're calculating damage in terms of kinetic energy carried by the mass sort of regardless of what that mass actually is. Around 2mps is the threshold when you pass TNT for energy per mass (so adding chemical explosive filler doesn't help), and as you mentioned keeping a nuclear weapon together when you're impacting at those kinds of energies is impractical - about the best that I could imagine would be some sort of nuclear squash-head warhead. More or less whatever projectile you're throwing is going to vaporize on impact and the internal damage is going to be based on shock, spallation, and heat transfer rather than any explosives in the projectile.