How does a blast wave kill you?

[Medic]

I believe, if you put that as a search on the internet, you'd get plenty of porn.

Mostly the problem is there if the cavity is either filled with something compressable (bowel) or is in close connection to the outside (ear). Technically opening one's mouth when the shockwave hits might help with the ears, but the bowel - well, just try to keep out of the way of the blast.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, I don't think that would be too much fun to game/role-play.

[Medic]

Well, in roleplaying games, you might make a house rule about damage caused by shockwave - if it hits abdomen, make a check against the damage in point. If unsuccessful, you have just received internal damage that requires surgery. If it hits the head, same thing, except that you are deafened (at least for a while).

[Grimace]

I was a little bit too close to a few explosions back when I was a shotfirer (aka powder monkey). I know exactly what Grimace says about the "funny feeling" you get in your chest. I suspect he's talking about an explosion that occurred near him in actual combat, and I'll wager that he was somewhat closer to his explosions than I was to mine.

No, not combat for me. Underground mining and blasting "rounds". Still, the blasts were fairly sizable, and I while I was "technically" at a safe distance, when close to 700 pounds(around 300 kilos)of explosives went off, it still had quite an impressive effect on me. I could only imagine what it would be like being closer to the blast and within range of the flying debris.

[Cpl. Kalkwarf]

Ummm Guys isnt this already taken into effect using the Concussive damage in the rules already.... in an abstract way of coarse.

[Graebarde]

I was reading Pegasus Bridge and it gave a report where a group of Brits were killed by the blast wave of a shell. The ghastly thing about it was that they were playing cards in a foxhole and were basically frozen in that position. My cousin who's in the army said that a .50 machine gun can kill you if it even hits a foot away from your head from the shock wave.

How does the blast wave kill


Thanks,

Michael

You know reading this again I KNOW what blast killed those boys. It was the RSM that caught them playing cards and not a shell. The shell story is the coverup to protect the innocent. <grin>

[Targan]

No, not combat for me. Underground mining and blasting "rounds". Still, the blasts were fairly sizable, and I while I was "technically" at a safe distance, when close to 700 pounds(around 300 kilos)of explosives went off, it still had quite an impressive effect on me. I could only imagine what it would be like being closer to the blast and within range of the flying debris.

Ah, underground blasting. I've never done any of that. To be honest I don't think I'd want to. Those 300kg of explosives must have been in smaller rounds on delay, surely That's a hell of a blast all in one go. Don't get me wrong, here in Australia on the iron ore mines they let off tonnes of the stuff at a time but it's in a ripple, quarter-second or so delays between lines of blast holes.

[Grimace]

300 kg of explosive put into 36 holes, detonated in a series. 0.1 ms up to 20 ms delay. Det cord was used to set off the blasting caps. So when you were a long distance away you could hear "pwump-pwump-pwump-pwump" in rapid succession. When you were the distance I was, into one big PWUMPF!

[James Langham]

Another injury often forgotten is cranial compression, caused (in this case) by a bleed inside the skull putting pressure on the brain. Signs and symptoms may not show for up to 48 hrs after the impact and it can be fatal (the actress Natasha Richardson is a good example). It is the reason that children bring home notes from school saying they have bumped their head. Treatment is removing a section of the skull to allow the swelling to expand outwards and relieve pressure on the brain.

[dragoon500ly]

Came across this description of being under heavy artillery fire

oeThe most clichd but accurate metaphor for the sound of incoming shells in flight is that of an old-fashioned steam express train rushing past a few feet away. Depending on their distance, speed and angle, shells tunneling through the air make slightly different noises, so a heavy barrage weaves itself into a bewildering cacophony of sounds; but the rushing always ends the same way, with a thunderclap detonation. Hollywoods microphones fail to convey either the sharpness or the loudness of battlefield explosions; and the visual effects normally used to simulate shellfire---with plastic bags of gasoline and aluminum silicate---are equally misleading. In reality the eye usually registers a shell burst as an instantaneous orange-yellow flash inside a dark, leaping fountain of mixed smoke and pulverized earth, sometimes studded and fringed with large pieces of slower-moving debris. The bigger, heavier chunks of earth and stones thrown up by the explosion fall near by first; the smaller debris, blown much higher, comes pattering and clinking down for a considerable time afterwards and over a wider area.

oeThe instantaneous pressure wave from the explosion moves outwards at supersonic speed---this is the expanding ring effect seen fleetingly in, for example, aerial footage showing the explosions of sticks of bombs. It is followed after a slight, but appreciable interval by a blast wind---the bulk of hot gases, fragments and ground debris away from the explosion. People in the target area experience the pressure wave as a sharp squeezing sensation in the chest, and its shock is also felt through the ground underfoot; this shuddering of the earth is powerful enough to make those sheltering in trenches fear (justifiably!) that they are about to be buried alive, and those who are lying flat feel themselves being shrugged violently into the air. These sensations are accompanied by stupefying noise and under heavy and persistent fire all the physical senses are overwhelmed. Completely impotent to affect their chances of survival, soldiers find sustained shelling and mortaring the worst ordeal of battle; those experiencing it often become temporarily unhinged, losing all muscular control (including of the bladder and sphincter) and the capacity for any rational thought. These effects are particularly marked among those exposed to shellfire for the first time.

oeIn the minority of cases when men suffer a virtually direct hit from artillery, the result is complete destruction of the body. The shell literally destroys the body, leaving, perhaps, a booted foot, a section of the human cranium, a bunch of fingers, a bit of clothing. When a body is blown up, the spinal column---surprisingly resilient---often survives; after a shell has fallen among a group of men, counting the remaining spines is often the only way to determine the number of dead.

oeMost injuries, however, occur further out from the site of the explosion. Blast injuries to the human body are categorized as primary, secondary and tertiary. The first is the direct effect of the pressure wave; the second the effects of fragments and debris carried by the blast wave; the third, the result of the body being thrown through the air and striking the ground or other obstacles.

oeThe most obvious sign of primary injury is rupture of the eardrums, which may occur when air pressure rises to anything between 5 and 15 pounds per square inch; men who are killed by blast often appear peacefully asleep apart from the tell-tale bleeding from the ears. The lethal internal damage caused by pressures of 50psi and upwards do not present dramatic outward signs. It is the gas-containing organs which sustain immediate and often fatal damage from the pressure wave; the lungs and occasionally the colon suffer catastrophic injury from the instantaneous compression effect of the blast. Large, blood-filled cavities are formed in the spongy alveoli of the lung, and fatal air embolisms are released into the arterial system; less often, the bowels may rupture, as may the spleen and liver.

oeSecondary injures will be more obviously dramatic. When a shell bursts the steel case breaks up into fragments of all shapes and sizes, from tiny beads to twisted chunks weighing several pounds. These, together with stones, pieces of weapons and equipment, and even large bone fragments from casualties nearer the blast---whirl outwards from the center at different speeds. The effects of being stuck by shell fragments vary as widely as the size and speed of the shards. Sometimes a man is unaware that he has been pierced by a small splinter until somebody points out the bloodstained hole in his clothing. Larger fragments, cart wheeling unevenly through the air edged with jagged blades and hooks, can dismember and disembowel.

oeIn many cases the evidence confronting an eyewitness is all too vivid. In others the immediate reaction is one of simple puzzlement: blast and steel can play such extreme games with the human form that the observer does not understand what he is looking at. When some random physical reference point suddenly jerks the whole image into a comprehensible pattern, the shock of recognition may be appalling. The results of massive destruction, the ruined hulk of a torso, the crimson rack of ribs, the glistening entrails, limbs ripped away and scattered, a severed head---have a charnel house squalor that denies all human dignity. On chilly evenings, the warm, gaping body cavities steam visibly, and the opened up bowels gave off the stick of feces.

Source is oeThe Last Valley, Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

[pmulcahy11b]

Ummm Guys isnt this already taken into effect using the Concussive damage in the rules already.... in an abstract way of coarse.

By necessity, T2K (and most other RPGs) oversimplify complex effects to facilitate game play. But yes, that, at its heart, is what causes most of the damage in an explosion: concussion. What's being compressed is air itself, and it can hit someone or something like a freight train. That's concussion. Imagine being slammed against a brick wall suddenly. (Or more like the brick wall being slammed against you.) Another way to look at compression is as overpressure; momentarily, the atmospheric pressure in the shock wave radiating out from the explosion is much higher (depending upon the force of the explosion).

What's worse is that some concussion injuries aren't immediately obvious. It may be weeks or months before someone realizes, "Dale's been acting more and more strange lately."

Here's something not in the rules: Very large explosions, such as from Daisy Cutters or nuclear explosions, can hit you with a concussive blast wave when the air is pushed out from the explosion, and then the air that got displaced suddenly gets sucked back in, fast enough to cause another damaging concussive wave on the way back in!