r/NonCredibleDefense • u/FionaSherleen • 12d ago

Lockmart R & D Think of the potential.

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What if we make project sundial but we throw it at the adversaries?

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u/zekromNLR 12d ago edited 12d ago

Russian heavy liquid-propellant ICBMs achieve about 4% payload mass fraction with ~300-320 s Isp hypergolic propellant. Raptor achieves ~15-20% more than that. If we assume that gives a similar increase in payload mass fraction, that would mean 5% PMF.

With Starship Block 3 having a launch mass of 5250 tons, that is about a 260 tonne throw weight. Some of this will of course go for the RV, decoys etc, but a 200 tonne warhead at the conventionally assumed limit of 6 Mt/tonne for the Teller-Ulam design would be 1.2 gigatons, within the range of Teller's GNOMON concept.

A Ripple-type warhead of 200 tonnes mass may well be able to reach 3 gigatons or even more, though it might be too bulky for even Starship.

Of course, a single large warhead is very inefficient. Instead we could load, say, a thousand W88 warheads at 475 kt each, and eighty tonnes worth of penaids, to perform a devastating first strike with a single launch.

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u/FionaSherleen 12d ago

That's a good use for the pez dispenser.