Britannian Aircraft

[Rodondo]

Yield of this aberration? Unless the target is 500+ meters underground, I don't see the point, besides a parachute will slow it down, reducing its ability to penetrate the ground, also it'd be very hard to get the angle right with a parachute

[eswube]

APDAF, if You want it to detonate underground, then the parachute makes no sense at all. Ability of bunker-buster bombs to penetrate ground is because they enter the ground with high speed. With parachute it will simply lack kinetic energy to dig more than few feet below.
Better read this (and think hard about it):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallboy_bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-12_Cloudmaker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_Or ... Penetrator

[Raxar]

the bomb is designed to detonate underground and it needs to be at certain angle and hit soft ground in order to burrow to detonation depth.

What if your target happens to be a a fortified concrete bunker? Going to all the trouble to design an H-bomb that can only attack areas where the ground is soft makes no sense. Also, atomic bombs don't detonate on impact, they explode hundreds (or thousands) of feet above the target.

[Blackbuck]

Well not all do. B61 Mod 11s are specifically designed to burrow and blow up bunkers.

[ezgo394]

Yes, but it's more effective if burst from the air. The resulting shockwave will be bigger, and the blast will do more damage.

[Blackbuck]

How!? The reason nuclear bunkers are where they are is to mitigate the effects of blast (amongst other things) hence the bunker buster. the only reason why a nuclear weapon explodes above the ground is to enhance the blast damage caused by the shockwave produced by the bomb bouncing back off the ground and creating a stronger overall blast wave. This would do sweet frak all to something tens of metres underground.

[ezgo394]

I mean if you're attacking a large area like a city with just a conventional plane dropped bomb. Sorry, I should have specified.

[APDAF]

To be 100% honest I don't know much about bombs.

[eswube]

So perhaps it's time to learn.
If You want a bunker-buster, then it doesn't need to be a nuke, but just a relatively big conventional bomb that will be dropped from high altitude and hit the ground with high speed (it would gain during a free-fall, and perhaps thanks to rocket booster in the final phase - but that's really not essential), allowing it to deeply penertate the ground. If You want a nuclear bunker-buster, then it doesn't really need to be big.
Large size nukes are mainly for area attacks (therefore high yield H-bombs are called city-killers), but they explode above the ground (for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was several hundred feet, if I remember correctly).

[APDAF]

Well due to some of the circumstances you would want a big nuclear bunker buster.

Given that one of the main targets is the new Vatican which is 10-12 times bigger than the one in Rome I would want a bomb to go though all of the floors of the building then burrow into to Pope's bunker if that was possible.