How Overpowered Scifi Space Combat Would Be

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Or a relatavistic auto cannon - small rocks can do a lot of damage once you get them up to speed! 

 

Not so easy in practice... you would need a massive vessel to handlr the waste heat.

That said... missiles are a poor man's weapon and are actuallly inefficient for space war given the vast distances and speeds involved.

 

What you need and want is high damage with high speed.

Answer?

Either relativistic. particle beams that cause fusion on contact, or even better, a relativistic antimatter particle beam.

 

Blow new craters onto the moon a light second away.... or farther.

Magnetic fields may or may not help, since a particle beam is more focused than the stuff Earth's magnetic field deflects.

It depends on power and configuration I suppose 

[radonek]

On 7/13/2020 at 10:44 PM, Spacescifi said:

Not so easy in practice... you would need a massive vessel to handlr the waste heat.

That said... missiles are a poor man's weapon and are actuallly inefficient for space war given the vast distances and speeds involved.

I  would say it's quite opposite. Long range beam weapons have problem with collimation. Missiles work at any range. Beam weapons have light lag. Missiles can have terminal guidance. Beam weapons power/time is  limited by cooling capacity. Missiles can be deployed in swarms of any size.

No, unless you conjure up some magic laser that can be perfectly focused at any range and travels faster then light, beam weapons will do much better as point defense or cqb.

As for antimatter weaponry, you are, as usual, wildly mixing tech levels. If you can't mass-produce antimatter easily, it's not worth it for reasons already stated - you'd be wasting resources to package energy in form that is particulary hard to handle. On the other hand if your civilization CAN produce and handle antimatter at scale (and we are talking significant Kardashev factor here), then game is singularity projectiles, strangelet bombs, stellar engineering and similar funnies. At this playground, pure antimatter warhead is crude and ineffective toy. (I say cut the violence and go for information/memetic warfare).

[Spacescifi]

6 hours ago, radonek said:

I  would say it's quite opposite. Long range beam weapons have problem with collimation. Missiles work at any range. Beam weapons have light lag. Missiles can have terminal guidance. Beam weapons power/time is  limited by cooling capacity. Missiles can be deployed in swarms of any size.

No, unless you conjure up some magic laser that can be perfectly focused at any range and travels faster then light, beam weapons will do much better as point defense or cqb.

As for antimatter weaponry, you are, as usual, wildly mixing tech levels. If you can't mass-produce antimatter easily, it's not worth it for reasons already stated - you'd be wasting resources to package energy in form that is particulary hard to handle. On the other hand if your civilization CAN produce and handle antimatter at scale (and we are talking significant Kardashev factor here), then game is singularity projectiles, strangelet bombs, stellar engineering and similar funnies. At this playground, pure antimatter warhead is crude and ineffective toy. (I say cut the violence and go for information/memetic warfare).

 

I no not what stranglet bombs are... but in general, kardashev's idea of advanced tech meant go large or go stay home.

 

As far as weapons go, they are made only to destroy more efficiently.

An antimatter 99% lightspeed particle beam does that well.

I cannot think of a reason for firing mini black holes, unless the target is the size of a small moon or planet size or greater...  which is basically what Kardashev was thinking of.

Spaceships/stations the size of moons/planets.

Basically, unless an offense method can COUNTER 99% antimatter particle beans, they remain viable.

Coincidentally, although firing black holes seems inherently dangerous, it COULD deflect antimatter particle beams if used properly.

[Bill Phil]

21 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

 

I no not what stranglet bombs are... but in general, kardashev's idea of advanced tech meant go large or go stay home.

 

As far as weapons go, they are made only to destroy more efficiently.

An antimatter 99% lightspeed particle beam does that well.

I cannot think of a reason for firing mini black holes, unless the target is the size of a small moon or planet size or greater...  which is basically what Kardashev was thinking of.

Spaceships/stations the size of moons/planets.

Basically, unless an offense method can COUNTER 99% antimatter particle beans, they remain viable.

Coincidentally, although firing black holes seems inherently dangerous, it COULD deflect antimatter particle beams if used properly.

Except you can shoot a non-antimatter particle beam at 99.233% the speed of light and it would be just as destructive as an antimatter beam at 99% the speed of light - it would have equivalent energy. There's no reason to use antimatter as the particles in the beam - you're only wasting resources to make that antimatter. It ain't worth it.

[Spacescifi]

26 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Except you can shoot a non-antimatter particle beam at 99.233% the speed of light and it would be just as destructive as an antimatter beam at 99% the speed of light - it would have equivalent energy. There's no reason to use antimatter as the particles in the beam - you're only wasting resources to make that antimatter. It ain't worth it.

 

Yes and no.

What is my target? Is it a drifting, unpowered predictable asteroid?

If so I can throttle back my particle beam power to something more reasonable, even missile speed if I want LOL.

With antimatter I can do that because it will HURT either way if it's slow or fast.

Meaning I can save ship power when I get fly close to immobile or predictable targets I want to blow to smithereens.

 

Now if it is a mobile high thrust spaceship a light second away... then yeah... I have to use more power to throttle up the particle beam to max so I can destroy it.

[Bill Phil]

1 minute ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Yes and no.

What is my target? Is it a drifting, unpowered predictable asteroid?

If so I can throttle back my particle beam power to something more reasonable, even missile speed if I want LOL.

With antimatter I can do that because it will HURT either way if it's slow or fast.

Meaning I can save ship power when I get fly close to immobile or predictable targets I want to blow to smithereens.

 

Now if it is a mobile high thrust spaceship a light second away... then yeah... I have to use more power to throttle up the particle beam to max so I can destroy it.

How is that relevant? We're discussing particle beam weapons that have speeds close to the speed of light - in that context antimatter isn't worth it.

But it's also not worth it in the context you describe - because we can use other more effective and cheaper weapons to destroy targets like that. For example, a macron beam loaded with fusion or fission fuel.

There's never a reason to use antimatter as a weapon. It just isn't worth the expense. It's insanely expensive. 

[Spacescifi]

10 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

How is that relevant? We're discussing particle beam weapons that have speeds close to the speed of light - in that context antimatter isn't worth it.

But it's also not worth it in the context you describe - because we can use other more effective and cheaper weapons to destroy targets like that. For example, a macron beam loaded with fusion or fission fuel.

There's never a reason to use antimatter as a weapon. It just isn't worth the expense. It's insanely expensive. 

 

Expensive?

Depends on the setting does it not?

Frankly... any setting that has FTL or warp frieighters and luxury liners gets a pass on antimatter being cheap.

 

Since unless another way of generating lots of energy with tiny amounts of mass is found or made up fictionally... how else are they powering it?

Billions of barrels of gasoline fed through portal gates to their reactor LOL?

Sounds crazy but you get my point?

Edited July 15, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Bill Phil]

Just now, Spacescifi said:

 

Expensive?

Depends on the setting does it not.

Frankly... any settibg that has FTL or warp frieghters and luxury liners gets a pass on antimatter being cheap.

 

Since unless another way of fenerating lots of energy with tiny amounts of mass is found or made up fictionally.. how else are they powering it?

Billions of barrels of gasoline fed through portal gates to their reactor LOL?

Sounds crazy but you get my point?

Sure - but expensive is still expensive. 

Antimatter won't be cheap - ever. It will always be expensive. 

Relative to FTL, antimatter is easy - but not cheap. We know how to make it and have seen it before. But that just means it's easier to do - not necessarily cheaper. 

Not only that but even if it is cheaper it's still not likely to be needed. You have FTL. You probably also have other technology that pretty much destroys any usefulness antimatter might have. Black holes could provide immense energy both with small masses and in dense packages. Advanced understanding of particle physics could allow direct energy conversion without using antimatter at any step of the way.

Antimatter has very few unique uses to advanced civilizations - of any tech level. 

[radonek]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

I no not what stranglet bombs are...

Theory: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Strangelet_Bomb

"Practice": https://eldraeverse.com/tag/burning-of-litash/  (read from bottom up).

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

I cannot think of a reason for firing mini black holes, unless the target is the size of a small moon or planet size or greater... 

That would still be stellar-size black holes. Think smaller. Think tiny, rapidly evaporating singularity. You have projectile going right through anything made of matter, making nice holes in the process via tidal forces. You have mass turning into energy, lots of energy, just as AM bomb, and if you time things right, detonating just where you want. And all of this without any containment or other delicate machinery. Yes, this would not be any easier to handle then AM, but it would be WAY harder to counter (not saying impossible) than antimatter charge (where you just damage containment and it fizzles).

In short, if you want overpowered combat with  "magic" level technology (and I claim that mass production of antimatter is firmly there), you should aim for properly "magic" weaponry and not just slap bigger boom on medieval technology. Those are not overpowered nearly enough.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Bill Phil said:

Except you can shoot a non-antimatter particle beam at 99.233% the speed of light and it would be just as destructive as an antimatter beam at 99% the speed of light - it would have equivalent energy. There's no reason to use antimatter as the particles in the beam - you're only wasting resources to make that antimatter. It ain't worth it.

Good point, antimatter makes some sense as an dust cloud or bird shot round as it should eat trough an missile storm fast, an anti matter powered bomb does not. 
An anti matter engine missile makes some sense because high ISP and trust for an so simple design. 
On the other hand, the last thing you want onboard an warship about to take combat damage is antimatter. 
Magazine detonations has always been an major problem and this is gunpowder, gasoline and solid rocket fuel you need to ignite, antimatter you just need to take down the containment for an faction of an second. 

[StrandedonEarth]

Conventional and nuclear weapons, not a laser in sight...

Spoiler

 

 

[KerikBalm]

22 hours ago, radonek said:

I  would say it's quite opposite. Long range beam weapons have problem with collimation. Missiles work at any range. Beam weapons have light lag. Missiles can have terminal guidance. Beam weapons power/time is  limited by cooling capacity. Missiles can be deployed in swarms of any size.

No, unless you conjure up some magic laser that can be perfectly focused at any range and travels faster then light, beam weapons will do much better as point defense or cqb.

Well, when operating in the X ray range, with a focusing array on the order of tens of meters, you can at least get a range of few to several AU out of them, which starts to get light lag on the order of tens of minutes/around an hour. 

If your target is jinking upredictably, then the laser becomes worthless at those ranges. If the target waits until being fired upon.... well your first salvo will hit because they won't see the laser pulse coming.

If your missile is not relativistic, then lasers firing at several AUs away will start to look attractive vs missiles that take weeks to get there, giving the laser plenty of time to take out a missile swarm (assuming the missile doesn't have the dV to jink randomly for weeks on end).

If you have cheap compact, powerful, and high Isp drives to make relativistic missiles a thing, you definitely want those over a laser.... similar time to target, basically no escape, no range limit.

If we assume a tech level of simple nuclear powered spacecraft, with compact fission drives and bulky fusion drives, a laser can look like a pretty good offensive weapon.

[Bill Phil]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Well, when operating in the X ray range, with a focusing array on the order of tens of meters, you can at least get a range of few to several AU out of them, which starts to get light lag on the order of tens of minutes/around an hour. 

If your target is jinking upredictably, then the laser becomes worthless at those ranges. If the target waits until being fired upon.... well your first salvo will hit because they won't see the laser pulse coming.

If your missile is not relativistic, then lasers firing at several AUs away will start to look attractive vs missiles that take weeks to get there, giving the laser plenty of time to take out a missile swarm (assuming the missile doesn't have the dV to jink randomly for weeks on end).

If you have cheap compact, powerful, and high Isp drives to make relativistic missiles a thing, you definitely want those over a laser.... similar time to target, basically no escape, no range limit.

If we assume a tech level of simple nuclear powered spacecraft, with compact fission drives and bulky fusion drives, a laser can look like a pretty good offensive weapon.

Sure. But then you run into issues of how fast and effectively you can aim the laser. Ships that are AU away will be tiny dots - 100 meters at 1 AU is 6.67e-10 radians. And the lag between target observation and the beam arriving at the target will be around 16 minutes and a lot can happen in 16 minutes. Even just tiny movements may make it very difficult to land a surprise hit, and a tiny movement is all you need to effectively dodge since we’re dealing with sub-nanoradian accuracies here. A meter per second in any perpendicular direction will put the target a km away from where you observed it. And that’s assuming you instantly arrive at a targeting solution and fire the laser the moment you observe the enemy come into range. It would take time to acquire a solution and move to it. Even if only a few seconds there’s a good chance the solution is too out of date to be useful.

I have a hard time seeing such high accuracy being desired in space combat, especially if you want it quickly. Any mistake and you miss. It may be possible but the question becomes whether or not it’s desirable. If the range becomes multi-AU then it would be preferable to have battle stations that don’t really move from their orbits and just destroy anything you don’t like. Put a whole bunch all around the solar system and the entire system is basically a fortress. Destroy any internal and external threat.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

I forget - was it the Honor Harrington or Moties books that had the more impressive space weaponry? 

[Okhin]

In Liu Cixin trilogy Remembrance of the Earth's Past (there will be some spoilers next), Earth is confronted to an issue with another space fairing civilization which, basically, finds a way to mess with particle accelerator, making any experimental physics stalling (basically, they destroy the ability to reproduce experiments), making discovery and exploration of physics impossible.

However, earthlings knows that they have a lot to do to catch up with their theories. They know antimatter, they know about fusions, and stuff, and so they build an insane fleet of spaceship to intercept the invaders (they'll be there in 400 years, so they have time to do it, destroying earth environment and society in the process. Anyway, they end up with awesome spaceship, built on our current understanding of physics laws. No quantum stuff, no nanites. Just proper engineering applied.

And then a probe of the alien flotilla enter the solar system.Its surfaces is so smooth that it looks like the kernel of a neutron star, each particle is extremely precisely arranged (at a zoom level of 1 000 000, it still looks like a mirror). It destroys the whole fleet of a thousand ship in half an hour just pouring through their fusion drive as if it was butter. The invading aliens have mastered the string nuclear force allowing them to build matter cutting systems, which basically deflects anything, is invisible to EM analysis, and cannot seems to be damaged in anyway, making all the technology developed by earthlings useless.

So yeah, antimatter might be overpowered. Or not. Or lasers. But if you can master more fundamental forces than your opponent, you win, no matter what energy they can through at your face. Because you can deflect it. Convert it. Dig through the fabric of matter, etc ... And they do not even need to be a lot of them. Just one small item that we cannot comprehend is enough to destroy entire armadas of lower physics level.

If I can mess with the way matter is made and you can't, I won. your antimatter does not impress me. nor your X-Rays, Gamma rays or other kind of rays. Same goes for whatever parts of physics we don't know about yet.

Edited July 16, 2020 by Okhin
Messed up some translation of physics forces name

[magnemoe]

On 7/15/2020 at 3:43 PM, radonek said:

I  would say it's quite opposite. Long range beam weapons have problem with collimation. Missiles work at any range. Beam weapons have light lag. Missiles can have terminal guidance. Beam weapons power/time is  limited by cooling capacity. Missiles can be deployed in swarms of any size.

No, unless you conjure up some magic laser that can be perfectly focused at any range and travels faster then light, beam weapons will do much better as point defense or cqb.

As for antimatter weaponry, you are, as usual, wildly mixing tech levels. If you can't mass-produce antimatter easily, it's not worth it for reasons already stated - you'd be wasting resources to package energy in form that is particulary hard to handle. On the other hand if your civilization CAN produce and handle antimatter at scale (and we are talking significant Kardashev factor here), then game is singularity projectiles, strangelet bombs, stellar engineering and similar funnies. At this playground, pure antimatter warhead is crude and ineffective toy. (I say cut the violence and go for information/memetic warfare).

Long range beam weapons would probably be an an a bit special combat type, you can deploy mirrors to focus form guns far away, think mines or missiles. As its light speed its hard to dodge, it also don't need to be shipkiller shots, if it damages or even jams sensors it would be an asset. 
Damage to secondary systems like close in weapons would be fantastic. During WW2 it made perfect sense to strafe battleships with fighter planes machine guns to suppress AAA fire from from all the unarmored guns. 
Hint lasers will be very nice as close in weapon systems 

Antimatter, stuff you want the enemy to have on their ships. In the best case as in they just have an faction of an gram they might survive it going off but it also take out the front part of the ship. Having more and they took out all our missiles within 10 K km 
Majority of US causalities in the air battle against battleship Yamato was then the magazine blew up 

[KerikBalm]

2 hours ago, Okhin said:

If I can mess with the way matter is made and you can't, I won. your antimatter does not impress me. nor your X-Rays, Gamma rays or other kind of rays. Same goes for whatever parts of physics we don't know about yet.

So your argument is that we don't know everything, therefore nothing we know about is impressive because we can't prove a negative?

[Okhin]

No, my argument is that there's a high probability that someone somewhere have a comprehension of the universe that makes all of our current ways of thinking about it obsolete. So, the most powerfull weapon we can imagine with our understanding of physics is relative to the understanding of physics of the opponents.

And since you cannot really know that before establishing contact, neither can you figure out if they will takes a risk at trying to communicate with you before obliterating you, just to be safe, it is kind of dangerous to seek for other civilisation. Therefore, building the biggest gun to protect us against what could come to us is not really an interesting thing of doing science. But then, I do not want to kill the party and the fun you have :)

And for all I know, this someone somewhere could be humankind in some years.

[KerikBalm]

15 hours ago, Okhin said:

No, my argument is that there's a high probability that someone somewhere have a comprehension of the universe that makes all of our current ways of thinking about it obsolete.

There have been very few new discoveries that render a then current comprehension of the universe obsolete. Its always been iterative, never did they throw out everything they knew, but tweak things one element at a time. 

I think you've got a bad assumption that we should assume the best of our knowledge is worthless compared to a being with a knowledge that is closer to "perfection"

Quote

neither can you figure out if they will takes a risk at trying to communicate with you before obliterating you, just to be safe, it is kind of dangerous to seek for other civilisation. Therefore, building the biggest gun to protect us against what could come to us is not really an interesting thing of doing science.

With this, I agree. Seeking out other civilizations could be very dangerous, and building a weapon to defend us before we've encountered any enemy is likely to be a waste of time.

Even if our understanding of the universe is pretty good, anything we build now will be obsolete quickly.

I have mentioned X ray lasers with massive focusing arrays for multi AU shots... that is beyond our current tech level, but we know its possible. If we built a UV-C laser instead, because its our best available tech, and an alien probe shows up with a 100+m focusing array and hard X-ray laser, our weapon is useless - the alieans could safely wipe out all of our spacecraft from beyond Saturn... 

And I already conceeded that if the enemy has relativistic missiles, then such massive lasers are irrelevant.

[radonek]

16 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Antimatter, stuff you want the enemy to have on their ships. 

Yes, antimatter is incredibly dangerous. So was gunpowder at times. Or steam engine. Or nuclear power… So, it depends. Civilization that laboriously manage to squeze out a limited stock of antimattert as a last resort doomsday device may be in for some fireworks. Civilization that can produce and use antimatter at scale is likely to know a thing or two about safe containment.

[Okhin]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

There have been very few new discoveries that render a then current comprehension of the universe obsolete. Its always been iterative, never did they throw out everything they knew, but tweak things one element at a time. 

I think you've got a bad assumption that we should assume the best of our knowledge is worthless compared to a being with a knowledge that is closer to "perfection"

Yes it is iterative, but i you look at the iteration of our knowledge and understanding it's kind of exploding (going very fast on a short amount of period, less than a century). Also, some theories did invalidate a lot of what we assumed to be true, that's how scientific exploration work : you submit your understanding of the world to trials, until it breaks and makes part of it invalid, revealing new questions.

And at interstellar scale, those explosion of tech knowledge are big loveers. If it takes you 400 years, at least, to reach another civilization, you won't be able to benefit from it (the ship you're launching are built with today's tech, not the tech you'll have in 400 years), same goes for your contact target. They might seems to not master high level of physics when your fleet departs, but you cannot anticipate what they will do with their 400 years of probable knowledge expansions. Maybe they'll stall, but maybe they'll find a way to weaponize higgs boson, or they'll understand what we call black matter and use it to fuel their everyday needs and weaponery. And your fleet will be 400 years outdated when it reaches its target.

That makes our own knowledge worthless. Like throwing stones at a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. If they have a better understanding at antimatter than us, and if they weaponized it, they probably have a way to reduce / negates its impact with some shielding that we cannot yet imagine. The funny things is that, technically, that makes their knowledge worthless too, they can't know if we won't develop a better understanding of the world and solves some engineering and industrialization challenges in the time it will takes them to reach us with their obsoleted fleet.

Meaning that the only civilization who will finds us will be either so advanced that we won't register (and they'll probably ignore us the way we ignore ants), or threatened by us but willing to take the bet that they can still crush us quickly if they act now. Or they will be under powered, and thy will remains hidden because they do not want to take the rik that we could decide to obliterate them.

[SOXBLOX]

1 TON!?! Exactly how do you store 1 ton of AM? The powerplant to power containment for it would be huge, and the waste heat would melt your ship/missile/monstrosity. And why would you want this? AM just gives you x-rays and gammas, same as a nuke. Plus, creating it has a maximum 50% efficiency, which we are nowhere near.

Just use kinetics instead.

Okhin, how much is there to know that we don't know already? How can you know? Kerik is right, iterative is the way science works. It isn't a result of human processes, it is the result of the flow of time and discovery processes.

Any discussion of tactics ending with "it would be invincible!" is too simplistic, and laughably so. The obvious consequence of cheap, OP fleet-destroying weaponry is that fleet engagements would not take place. War would be AM-fuelled relativistic missiles lobbed between planets, and it would last about 1 day. Congratulations, you've replicated the effect of nukes on Earth on a solar scale. Deterrence and mutually assured planetary destruction, and all that.

Every new development forces adaptation. Big developments force big adaptations. Your task as an SF author is to invent developments and deduce their consequences.

Edited July 20, 2020 by SOXBLOX

[DDE]

48 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

Big developments force big adaptations. Your task as an SF author is to invent developments and deduce their consequences.

*laughs in space opera*

[Spacescifi]

7 hours ago, SOXBLOX said:

1 TON!?! Exactly how do you store 1 ton of AM? The powerplant to power containment for it would be huge, and the waste heat would melt your ship/missile/monstrosity. And why would you want this? AM just gives you x-rays and gammas, same as a nuke. Plus, creating it has a maximum 50% efficiency, which we are nowhere near.

Every new development forces adaptation. Big developments force big adaptations. Your task as an SF author is to invent developments and deduce their consequences.

 

Maybe science fiction that has fictional stuff should be called Science Fantasy then?

Because anything we dream up that we know does not exist is just that... until we learn otherwise.

Regarding such, it is my approach to modify or enhance or manipulate stuff we already know to make scifi super tech.

Technology like culture is iterative, the future is based on the manifold acomplishments/failures of the past.

For example, the greeks/romans developed primitve steam engine technology, but even if they had went further to actually utilize it in an industrial manner it would not be as efficient as modern tech steam engines 

Since they lacked the fine and precise tools and machinery that made steam engines an efficient choice for the 18th century. They would have likely resorted to some manpower and gear/pulley analog to run their primitive steam machines if they chose to industrialize them.

As for tech scaling... warp and FTL is fantasy... since even known theory admits as much that we need *we hope it exists* 'exotic' stuff to make it work. Which if it does not... is fantasy again.

Thus, the way I see it, if an author chooses to use antimatter freely because the civilization has WARP starships... it does not bother me.

 

Warp literally involves messing with fabric of space itself! If a civilization can do THAT... then engineering a material that won't go boom when it touches antimatter gets a pass as far as my suspension of disbelief goes.

It may not yours... but I cannot have an alien race with cars rely on bow and arrows if you get my drift.

Edited July 20, 2020 by Spacescifi

[ARS]

If I had to express my opinion, I think the space combat would be fought primarily by kinetic weapons (railguns, coilguns, etc.) over extremely long distance. Energy weapon tend to get weaker with distance, judging from collimation and energy dissipation, while missiles has limited propellant, which, since the target spacecraft could maneuver away (and has way more deltaV than missiles), even tracking would be ineffective if the target could outmaneuver it, not to mention the missile could be shot down (and warships tend to fit defense turrets for that reason). Even if missile explodes, the fragment it creates may not be any different than a hail of highspeed micrometeorite strikes, which, a military-grade warship operating in space is certainly equipped to deal with that. A good weapon would be guided railgun, firing a kinetic slug with course correction thrusters. The initial firing will immediately close the distance to the target before course correction will be made to compensate if the target in maneuvering away for evasive action. No need for explosives, since kinetic energy will do the job. A hull breach is much more catastrophic for spacecraft than shockwave explosions