On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 04:18:05PM +0000, Bruce  Johnson wrote:
> Sounds all cool and sciencey but is purely numbers plucked from the
> air. 10 kg of TL-6 HE is precisely the warhead of the AIM-9
> sidewinder. Does lots of damage (if lucky) to an essentially
> unarmored (by Traveller scales) aircraft, but against a starship
> would be sort of like shooting a destroyer in the hull with a RPG.

Not that the explosive has any effect at all except turning the
missile into a shotgun blast of extremely high velocity fragments
instead of a single impactor.  The kinetic energy of impact from each
48 kg missile hitting at 600 km/s would be equivalent to a couple
thousand tonnes of TNT.  It would be comparable to embedding a small
nuclear weapon in the hull, and detonating it.

That woudl be enough to thoroughly disintegrate most ships, and
seriously damage even capital ships.

- Tim