Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ReverseLunge |
*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.
Linear Mode
