Something Traveller can not effectively capture in its tech and weapon rules is ingenuity. We have missiles - they hit and go boom, or they go boom a short ways off and riddle you with fragmentation hits. What we don't have ...
The venerable Sidewinder missile has something called an "annular blast fragmentation" warhead. Basic idea is, instead of blasting fragments everywhere, you blast in a ring for a more concentrated punch. In this case, the take a bunch of rods and mount them in a cylinder pattern around the explosive charge. The top of one rod is welded to its neighbor on one side, the bottom to its neighbor on the other.
The effect is accordian-like: when the central exlosive charge goes off, the rods are hurled outwards, the welds hold, and the whole expands into a wide zig-zagged ring that, should it happen to intersect an airplane while expanding rapidly outward, will slash through like an axe - generally having an unpleasant effect on hydraulics or mechanical equipment in its path. This allows the small missile with its small warhead to do much more damage than it would otherwise be capable of because that solid ring is much more damaging than a fragment when it intersects something as it expands outward.
The venerable Sidewinder missile has something called an "annular blast fragmentation" warhead. Basic idea is, instead of blasting fragments everywhere, you blast in a ring for a more concentrated punch. In this case, the take a bunch of rods and mount them in a cylinder pattern around the explosive charge. The top of one rod is welded to its neighbor on one side, the bottom to its neighbor on the other.
The effect is accordian-like: when the central exlosive charge goes off, the rods are hurled outwards, the welds hold, and the whole expands into a wide zig-zagged ring that, should it happen to intersect an airplane while expanding rapidly outward, will slash through like an axe - generally having an unpleasant effect on hydraulics or mechanical equipment in its path. This allows the small missile with its small warhead to do much more damage than it would otherwise be capable of because that solid ring is much more damaging than a fragment when it intersects something as it expands outward.
