Re: Effects of single-ship orbital bombardment

Bruce Pihlamae says:
>Would you really use ship-to-ship nuke missiles against ground targets?
>I would have thought you'd need specialist missiles for atmospheric
>re-entry and atmospheric operation.

Many ships in civilian operation have ship-to-ship missiles, while
space-to-ground weapons would be hard to justify, both in economic
terms and to the authourities.  Occasionally, someone is going to have
the desire to hit something on the ground, and they just have to use
what's available.
    I agree that a ship with a design mission that includes ground
attack would have specialised weapons, in which case I would expect
both MIRV-type warheads and slow-entry stealthy precision-target
drones (it's hard to be stealthy on a fast atmospheric entry, to say
nothing of the radio communication problems under those conditions).
    Remember also that not every target is in some place with an
atmosphere... although in that case an analogy with ship combat can
probably provide an excellent approximation.

>Assuming you get the warhead to the target then it should be fairly
>easy to calculate blast radius etc for current day Kiloton payloads.

Yes, but what *is* the payload of a standard anti-ship missile?
Surely someone has worked this out already?

Martyn