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Post by goduranus on Oct 9, 2016 3:24:03 GMT
Seems like nukes in this game are implosion type? But those tend to get squashed when they take a direct hit.
For space weapons where direct hits are preferred, wouldn't it be better to use the gun-type? Since the force of the impact can push the fissile material together and trigger the nuke even without a fuse.
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Post by RA2lover on Oct 9, 2016 4:38:41 GMT
Gun-type nukes are extremely inefficient regarding mass. You're better off at getting direct hits by firing an equivalent mass of implosion-type nukes instead.
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Post by goduranus on Oct 9, 2016 6:20:04 GMT
With a gun type you could create critical mass through the force of impact, you can dispense with conventional explosives for triggering it, so in terms of total warhead mass gun type could be more efficient, despite requiring more fissile material to reach a certain yield.
Plus if you can trigger critical mass through impact, it's less likely to become a dud, which can happen to implosion type because the warhead got squashed.
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Post by blothorn on Oct 9, 2016 7:21:24 GMT
A few notes:
+ Gun-type plutonium weapons are impractical due to the slow assembly (although we seem to have the ability to isolate pure Pu-239, which might avoid the problem). Uranium is going to be much heavier.
+ The "more fissile material to reach a certain yield" is by a factor of about 10.
+ Gun-type weapons cannot scale up well, because each component cannot be critical on its own (and they cannot be extended in the direction of travel due to the slow assembly).
+ While several gun-type warheads were intended to detonate after impact, impact speeds were very low. Even a 3km/s impact is at about the speed of sound in uranium, which indicates substantial (and unpredictable) deformation which may interfere with assembly.
So yes, a gun-type weapon would give a (probably small) chance of post-impact detonation, but the small maximum yield and low efficiency suggest that a close proximity-fused implosion weapon would be much more effective.
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