bunker buster

[ReverseLunge]

So how deep of a hole can a bunker buster missile make?

http://www.filecabi.net/download.php...ker-buster.wmv

[ChrisBrasel]

I can poop a nice one out if you know what I mean.

[Teme]

With a casing capable of taking horrible punishment, it can dig about 12 meters (40 feet) into a solid rock. Deeper is not possible, because the required impact speed would destroy any casing on impact. Anyway, anything beyond 2 meters (6.5 feet) doesn't add to the final result -- it's completely dependent on the payload.
A 100 kt nuclear warhead would be able to at least severely damage structures to the depth of 100 meters. That's five times the official yield of "Fat Man".

Not really a surgical strike type of weapon...

[Mergs]

With a casing capable of taking horrible punishment, it can dig about 12 meters (40 feet) into a solid rock. Deeper is not possible, because the required impact speed would destroy any casing on impact. Anyway, anything beyond 2 meters (6.5 feet) doesn't add to the final result -- it's completely dependent on the payload.
A 100 kt nuclear warhead would be able to at least severely damage structures to the depth of 100 meters. That's five times the official yield of "Fat Man".

Not really a surgical strike type of weapon...

The casing on the GBU-28 Bunker Buster was an 203mm howitzer gun tube with a tungsten penetrator cap. Sled testing up to terminal velocity punched through almost 15m of concrete and landed several hundred meters down range. And the 203mm (or 8") was a tactical nuclear capable howizter. Ergo...........

And surgery is not always done with a fine scalpel.

[keith]

The casing on the GBU-28 Bunker Buster was an 203mm howitzer gun tube with a tungsten penetrator cap. Sled testing up to terminal velocity punched through almost 15m of concrete and landed several hundred meters down range.

Next time you see someone break a brick with their hand ask them to put it flat on the ground and repeat the trick.

[Teme]

Sled testing up to terminal velocity punched through almost 15m of concrete and landed several hundred meters down range.

Well, granite has about 5 times more resistance against penetration than concrete, but that's not the point.
The main effect of bunker buster comes from the seismic shock it creates making the bunker (or parts of it) to cave in, and that shock doesn't get any bigger beyond 2 meter depth, unless the payload is increased. Anything deeper is a 'waste of energy'.

[Larrison]

So how deep of a hole can a bunker buster missile make?

http://www.filecabi.net/download.php...ker-buster.wmv

*shrugs* depends -- you may not want to make a hole but collapse an underground bunker on itself.

A couple of comments -- rule of thumb is stuff currently in the US arsenal can do 25 meter of concrete, or 100 meters of dirt to hit something. But the big effect is that by doing a below-surface detonation, you get a much (orders of magnitude) coupling of blast between the weapon and shock. Even a meter of penetration will do this. The game then is to get the warhead close enough to the underground target so the blast will collapse the buried structure -- which may be tricky for structures whose location is not well known.

Lastly, there's been some interesting work with hypervelocity pentrating warheads that may be able to increase the penetration by more than 10x or much more. At high energies the penetrator and the material it is penetrating is more like a liquid than a solid, so hydrodynamic effects dominate. It's been proposed that a cavitating warhead (essentially produces a "bubble" of gas or plasma in front of the warhead) could slide through 100's of meters of rock. I haven't seen any published reports of test of such a weapon though, although I've seen reference to a couple of companies working on it.