Kinetic kill vehicle that actually works? (Post your design)

Well, even with 9Mt you shouldn't need such a thick penetrator to get the job done (my NEFPs originally used 100Mt warheads and ~2cm thick penetrators, back when we basically had pure fusion nukes). Thin it out to a couple centimeters, and make sure it's the same radius as your nuke or slightly larger to capture as much of the blast as possible, you're basically making an Orion drive that launches its pusher plate at the enemy. You also might want to try a 1Mt warhead instead, you should notice very little change in performance but a significant decrease in cost. Make sure your penetrator is Osmium or Tungsten, most other materials are likely to get vaporized.

Radiation shields can be formed into highly effective long-rod penetrators for inert KKVs. They'll punch through just about anything if you put enough velocity behind them, though of course their damage zone will be small.

One interesting catch I've discovered with radiator-based KKVs: if the missile runs out of dV before impact, the radiators won't count toward the hit for some reason. A radiator KKV needs to still have some fuel when it hits in order to work.

Also, for testing inert KKVs make sure your target has a laser to give you a bit of stand-off distance. Inert KKVs don't work very well if they don't have time to get up to speed, so you need enough room for a running start in order to see their peak performance. IRL of course this acceleration would take place long before "engagement range", but in-game that'll have to wait until we can reliably get high-speed intercepts that are on target.

These are all great ideas. Thank you! One question though: do you think that detonation distance has an effect on a NEFP? Does it matter if it detonates on contact, vs. 1m or 100m, etc?

I would imagine that the answer to this is a function of the nuke's output and the penetrator's dimensions, materials, etc. But, frankly, my higher education was in the humanities so the best I can do is understand how little I truly understand!

With short engagement ranges at the start of an encounter you need very high accell to get em upto enough speed.

1.5 to 2 km/s and you start to see through and throughs on the stock ships.

Broadside targets generally get punctured near the Center of Heat generation.

Needleships tend to get hit perpendicular on the skin and a very few hits along the central axis. Ie...you get streaks on the ships sides.

The same goes for EFPs.

I get much better results with frag warheads vs needleships. You generally get detonations and impacts all along the targets length and thus tend to take out all the internals.

Ive tried to get better seperation of physical penetrators by explosives but that is hampered ( read : just about impossible ) by not being able to place explosives centrally in the core of a bundle of long rod rad shields.....enabling weapon like placement for them would be great.

This missile has been working well for me.  Tends to over-penetrate a lot but reliably gets reactor hits on stock ships.  Usually use it with only 3-5Km/s intercepts so it hits more reliably.
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The NTR design was backed off from maximum thrust to keep the missile (marginally) stable.  The radiation shield between the engine and remote control keeps the missile alive longer after a laser kills the engine because missiles will do a full 180 if they're far enough off intercept.  Could slot a pocket nuke under the remote control if you want more ragged impact holes.  (Yup, a 57c micro nuke below the remote control is a massive lethality boost.)

I have this design -- potentially the most interesting part is the engine.  Not too sure about the armor to use here.

Main thing going for it is that it is really cheap, and a good way of killing the delta-v of hostile ships that try to dodge all of them.




The engine:

I tried a few kinetics with teenyweeny little NTRs, and they got alarmingly high deltaV (~8.5 km/s) but 1000 credits a missile is a little steep. This thing on the other hand:    


imgur.com/4FHO65v

Cheap, light, and the launcher with full payload of 500 rounds only weighs about 5 tons.

Edit: okay after editing this about 6 times, how do you do an embedded image?