[Spaceships] 'Triple' bomb size instead of triple ammo count?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Molokh

How about saying that bombs have a pseudovelocity field, which prevents them from losing pseudovelocity upon launch, but since their velocity is pseudovelocity, it still doesn't count for the purposes of kinetic damage (and thus delivers explosive damage only, be it conventional or nuke . . . or the X-burst)?

Conventional HE would probably be pretty useless, between the lack of atmosphere to propagate blasts, the low mass and lower impact mass of missiles, and the tendency of ships to carry armor.

If we assume you can fit a full-diameter shaped charge into the warhead, and that you can get it to the target's hull, such a warhead would do approximately half the damage on the conventional warhead damage table (maybe a bit less before TL10), with no multiplication for velocity and a (10) armor divisor. You also should probably treat any armor Metallic Laminate or better as being laminated and thus doubled against the shaped charge, and you might see EMA bringing that up to triple.

It looks like that would still be enough to sting ships, at least at the small end. Even a 16cm warhead could still penetrate an SM+10 ship with 2 layers of hardened nanocomposite, albeit barely. Small fighters wouldn't usually be killed by a missile hit, but their armor wouldn't help very much. Midsized ships get damaged through their protection, but only a little bit.

There's absolutely no proximity detonation mode for these conventional warheads, though, which is a big drawback.