Explosions

POSTED BY: SerenityValley
UPDATED: Friday, May 23, 2003 17:59
VIEWED: 4362
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MARK

Friday, May 23, 2003 5:00 PM

With this whole explosion thing... I just put it down to the Bringers being really bad at building bombs... I mean, let's look at what we have here... The bomb is essentially what looks like a Zinc, Tin or Galvanized steel box/trunk packed with bricks of C4 and a timer... This would make a terrible bomb. I'm going to assume that the trunk was constructed out of a single sheet of metal and then folded to shape, maybe being welded or riveted at the edges. Now, when the bomb goes off, this would blow the lid off upwards and flatten the metal of the trunk down against the floor as the side-seams give way... So what do we have now? An expanding sphere of gas and whatever shrapnel it can pick up and throw... Now, while this would cause MASSIVE overpressure that could blow apart any building, it's relatively harmless to homogenous human beings... Pressure doesn't hurt us so much. Comes of being mostly water. It might rupture ear-drums but if the girls were screaming as it went off them they might even have avoided that.

What does that leave us with? It was a cement tunnel... Minimal shrapnel, minimal collapse damage... If the Bringers had done a half-decent job and replaced half the C4 with ball-bearings, or even nails, then all the girls would be dead... But the way they did it, it was like they WANTED them to survive.

Twelve spheres of unendurable brightness spalled the velvety blackness of space.
The silence on Lester Tourville's flag bridge was absolute
And then the spell was broken as Shannon Foraker looked up from her console from where she had just sent a seemingly innocent command to the main computers of State Security's finest Superdreadnoughts.
"Oops." She said.

THEGN

Friday, May 23, 2003 5:59 PM

I hate to play devil’s advocate, but I must point out that expanding air pressure can and does kill people. First the shockwave can pick someone up and throw him or her into walls and other unmovable surfaces, which can kill you. Second, there is something called expanding pressure gradients, this is the real kicker, and is what makes explosions so nasty. A pressure gradient is difference in pressure over some area, in this case direction of the pressure is what is different, because the pressure vectors are basically radial in nature, i.e. they expand out in all directions, like a sphere. If you are far away from the explosion the pressure gradients will be small and the pressure will seem like a wall of gas which exerts the same force across the incident surface of your body, BUT if you close to the explosion, there will be significant pressure gradients and the force will be different on different parts of your body, effectively tearing you to shreds. So pressure can do a little more then just rupture eardrums.

Although I must also agree with you that the explosion would have been far more effective had it been laced with flack. Consider this, if you are close to the explosion but behind some heavy object, you might survive an explosion, even a big one, if you can avoid the pressure gradients and escape the initial blast in some way. BUT if there had been flack in the explosion, such as ball bearings, this might have ripped through the object and killed you.

But flack is generally used to kill outside of the blast radius of the explosion, because flack usually flies out further then the blast radius and can expand the kill radius of a bomb. This is generally not a big problem with large explosion, but for small explosions, such as with hand grenades; it can be a major issue. Grenades don’t always carry enough explosive to be really effective in all situations, but most grenades today are designed to fragment, call frag grenades. Such as the US M61, which has a notched coil inside. When the grenade detonates, fragments of this coil can be deadly up to 150 meters.

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In the Dark Ages, Romano-Celtic Britannia was over-run by Viking-like cultures collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. They were led by warlords called Drytinns, and the greatest warriors among them were the Thegns.

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