According to this site, peak yield on a hybrid fission/fusion bomb to date is around 5 kt yield per kg of bomb (including casing, detonators, controls -- the whole package. So we need to increase kinetic energy by a factor of around 5000 to match the increase in yield. KE goes as V squared, so we'll want to go sqrt(5000) times faster -- approximately 70. So you get KE yield equivalent to the same mass of high-efficiency fusion bomb at around 200 km/sec. That's not all that fast, in a game with drives that can accelerate at multiple gees for days at a time. For comparison, it's 4 times Mercury's mean orbital velocity.

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 8:44 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <kurt@thepaw.org> wrote:
On 6/29/2015 11:38 PM, shadow@shadowgard.com wrote:
The thing is, at a relatively low speed in space-weaponry terms
>(can't find it right now, and don't have time to derive it, sorry)
>the kinetic energy of a given mass equals the explosive yield of that
>amount of TNT.
Roughly 3 km/sec.


What would be the velocity where a kinetic weapon of mass "X" would equal the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon of a similar mass "X"?

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Kurt Feltenberger
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