Rods From God in KSP on console (PS4), first hit:

Done for a challenege in a console KSP Facebook group. It took a few tries, but I finally scored a hit, and at what feels like peak survivable energy too! Much more than this and the shell explodes and the mass rips apart in an instant, just before impact. Anything less is, well, less. This ballistic trajectory should be more or less repeatable on timing and process, so now it's just a matter of time, and luck, and repetition until successfully destroying something with a ~16t mass traveling at Mach 4.34

[@dg_squared2735]

Wow! That re entry burn

[@elitestalker673]

Only diffrance is that the rods from god go 10x times faster when they hit the target. Still, very impressive. Good job👍🏻

[@jbozarth81]

This thing hit at Mach 4.34. From a USAF proposal for kinetic impactors the impact speed would be Mach 10. So, I got almost half the speed. Their impactor was 8t, mine 16t... But it is the velocity that matters. They get 48GJ of impact energy, and even with double the mass I'd get 16GJ
It should be noted: the home planet in stock KSP is not Earth, and it is not Earth-sized. The whole solar-system analog that KSP uses is much smaller than ours (to keep interplanetary travel times from becoming obscenely long). As such, there just isn't the same orbital energy available to me.
I could get a bit more energy with a higher deorbit and more aggressive angle, but I would need to nest fairings and accept explosively ablating layers to solve the thermal issue that way.