Can’t we just imagine it as a really strong wind that knocks you off your feet?
In: 2
We can indeed imagine that, but a strong wind builds up its energy and pressure over a far longer time than the shockwave (blastwave) from an explosion. If strong enough the sudden change in pressure can kill you.
SYL
The shockwave goes into your body and causes small blodd vessels to burst or, in case of really strong shockwaves, cause your internal organs themselves to get rips and tears
It’s a bit more than a strong wind, it’s the Delta-pressure (rapid rise/fall in pressure) that is the danger, it’s more like a punch. Humans are squishy. The shockwave travels through your body too, squishing and expanding your internal organs. If you’ve seen a slow-mo video of someone getting punched/slapped in the face, the skin flubbers out everywhere. And an explosion is a STRONG punch.
Think of it more as a pulse of wind rather than a constant stream. A shockwave is the energy of the explosion dissipating into the environment. If there is only air to move to dissipate the energy, than the shockwave travels for a long time at a high rate of speed, because the air doesn’t absorb much of the energy. Then it hits your body, with its liquids and solids and soft tissues and membranes, and that absords LOTS of energy. Unfortunately the way your body absorbs this energy is the same way your car absorbs the energy of a traffic accident: by breaking.
If it helps, think of a Shockwave as more like a pulse of wind traveling VERY quickly. Like hundreds of miles an hour (I believe it’s actually right about the speed of sound but I may be wrong). However, the wind analogy doesn’t really illustrate what’s happening, so think of it this way: a large amount of kinetic energy dissipating across the front of your body (assuming you were facing the explosion) is directly analogous to falling and landing on your face.
How do a bus that hit you kill you, it is just like a really strong push on one side of your body?
If you get hit by something that quickly accelerates you there is not a fundamental difference between something solid or a fluid.
So an impact of a shockwave from an explosion and a bus impact kill you in much the same way. You get pushed hard on now side of the body and when force travels through your body to accelerate another part they are stronger than the tissue can handle and it ger damaged/destroyed.
It would be more correct to imagine it as a strong wind which bashes your head but have the common decency to leave you standing upright.
It’s really not “wind”. The pressure drop across a human-sized object in the wind is a fraction of a PSI. An explosive shock wave can be 10PSI. It you measure how large a shadow you cast while lying on your side, you might be 70×12=840 square inches. At 10 PSI, that’s 8400 pounds of force, the same as a 4 ton car squishing you. People aren’t nearly sturdy enough for that level of pressure.
Here’s [strong wind](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/19/91/9e/19919e051485b69c75ed8c2e43ca61c7.jpg) deforming someone’s face.
Now imagine that wind being even more strong, and more importantly, very sudden. Pieces of the face would be ripped off.
And imagine it happening not just to the face, but to the abdomen where the internal organs are also squished and pushed and rippled like that.
A lethal shockwave is more like several tons of force slamming into your whole body all at once, turning a bunch of your internal organs into jelly in the process.
Depending on the rendition, there is an immense arsenal of weaponry he could use against you. He often has a cannon of some sort, and some renditions even transform into a tank or stationary gun. That alone could be incredibly devastating, and that is before you factor in that he is known as a mad-scientist of sorts, and has conducted a vast number of ethically-ambiguous experiments and has created things that even scare Megatron!
There is almost no limit to the ways he could kill you.
Latest Answers