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Another thing that constantly astonishes me is how the immediate direct damage caused by any kind of intentional explosion is consistently overestimated by publ
by dfox 9y ago
Another thing that constantly astonishes me is how the immediate direct damage caused by any kind of intentional explosion is consistently overestimated by public at large. I largely blame action movies where C4 block of the size typically used for initiating industrial explosives in bore holes is often shown as leveling complete buildings.
- megaman22 9y agoOr war movies, where a round from a tank gun or small artillery piece completely wrecks a house. I have a handful of decommissioned 76mm tank destroyer rounds, probsbly from an M18 Hellcat - comparable to most WW2 tank guns. It's about the size of a one-liter soda bottle, and a significant portion of that is aerodynamic casing, propellant, and fuse. It's interesting, too, to read historical accounts of sieges in the Napoleonic and earlier eras; it would take days or weeks of pounding by breaching batteries of heavy cannon to reduce masonry walls to effect a breach and allow an assault over the pile of broken rubble remaining, in a bloody, hand-to-hand melee. And often there would be so much time between firings that the defenders could rebuild new defenses in depth behind the breach. Unless a powder magazine was struck, massive damage was relatively rare.