>>11871995>>11872009Guys, Earth's atmosphere is gonna render anything less massive than a few kilotons totally ineffective.
When attacking ground targets it makes the most sense to use loose piles of gravel held together by static electric charges and a thin refractory crust, which come down at a very steep angle above your target at at least 20 km/s or so. The ball of material holds together for a couple seconds as it comes down, getting it to within a few dozen kilometers of the surface before dynamic pressure causes the crust to shatter, which allows wind pressure to blow all the rubble apart, resulting in a very fast deceleration rate which corresponds to a very large and rapid release of heat energy, producing a massive shockwave akin to an airburst nuclear bomb. Obviously the bigger your rubble pile the wider the affected area and the worse the damage.
For hyper-velocity weapons in space you want to be shooting a dispenser that releases a columnar cloud of aluminum pellets, which will shred any wiffle shield of any number of layers and allow the dispenser itself to impact the inner hull of the target, causing massive damage akin to a better-than-chemical high explosive change pressed against the side of the object.
Due to the speeds involved and the energy released on impact, the material strength of pure tungsten vs a block of water ice really doesn't matter for how much damage is caused; the only affect of using a material like tungsten is the increased pressures produced by having a denser material striking at the same velocity. The performance of tungsten would be better than lead, for example, but probably not by enough to matter, and certainly not enough to offset the relative abundance and low cost of lead.
