3 ms·

What, exactly, is the formula for "damage"?

• ars 5y ago
  There are more exact things, but at a bare minimum "damage" needs to fill the volume it's interacting with, and the volume of a sphere goes up by the cube of distance. It's what led to the development of the smart bomb - they figured out that it's a losing game to increase the power of a bomb - that cube root is painful. So instead they made small, but more accurate, bombs. It's also why the nuclear bomb is not as useful as people think: It's strong, but a large number of accurate, small, smart bombs works better to destroy your target (as opposed to digging holes in the ground).
• tyingq 5y ago
  This web page is interesting in that space https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Pick a spot, the yield of the weapon, and it will draw radius circles for the fireball, ionizing radiation, 3 degrees of blast damage, and finally, the broad thermal radiation damage. I imagine there's others with things like fallout, etc.
• dboreham 5y ago
  There are books on this (I own one, but don't have it to hand right now), but I suspect it's related to the area within which blast impulse energy is above some threshold (enough to damage stuff to some agreed level).