Thanks for the infos, it makes a bit more sense to me now. I'm still trying to understand as a layman with engineering background, so I'm pulling a few numbers

Thanks for the infos, it makes a bit more sense to me now. I'm still trying to understand as a layman with engineering background, so I'm pulling a few numbers out of my ass now.. Let's say we have a unit power output of P_therm and P_bomb (in case of the bomb its time plot should look close to dirac pulses while P_thermal should look like a flat line), we have efficiencies eps_therm, eps_bomb and we have the mass of the propellant systems m_ohterm, m_ohbomb. I'm assuming P_thermal to be 1e+7W (1/100 of a powerplant), P_bomb = 0.15 kiloton per second ~= 6e+11W => lets make that 1e+12. Efficiency: eps_therm = 1'000 * eps_bomb Mass: m_therm = 10 * m_bomb so if these numbers work out the bombs give you about 10^5 times the power output of the furnace, deliver 10x the power to the ship (efficiency differences) and yield about 100x the effect per unit of mass. hmmmm... I think I'm starting to get it ;). However here's the thing: I'm imagining that the furnaces can be scaled up much easier than the orion design. You can just make them bigger up to a certain point and when that doesn't help anymore you can strap them together. You can't really strap together the orion propellers because it would become incredibly susceptible to timing (one bomb goes off 1ms earlier and you end up spiraling everyone to death with 20G acceleration or so :D ).