Heat Obliteration Unleashed- Mathematically

[Edgedancer]

So I'm not an expert on nukes and the like but I would assume that a nuke doesn't work simply by heat but mostly by... well exploding. Obliteration melted Houston, as in just pure heat turning stone into magma. For a not expert that seems like it would need even more energy than a bomb would.

[TheSpartanDuck]

Yeah I was going to try and explain that in the next section of my calculations, but that might thanks some time. I'm gonna need to find what building material in Houston has the highest melting temp, and then will need to convert and find the amount of degrees to the amout of Joules, wich would then add to the original Joule count, if 810,334,800,000,000 Joules isn't already enough kinetic energy converted into heat energy to melt metals and concrete.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles]

I have nothing to add to this conversation, but this clip seemed oddly appropriate. 

[TheSpartanDuck]

Well I started doing research and part of the story doesn't make sense. Concrete CANT MELT. It has never been recorded to have a melting point, and most sky scrapers are shelled in concrete...

[TheSpartanDuck]

All I have to say is yes

[TheSpartanDuck]

This is part of my second part of the calculations.

Concrete has never been recorded to have a melting point, however there is a point that in which concrete degrades into the many materials it is made of. The degration point of concrete is recorded to be 450-550* Celsius, so I safely split the difference since much of Houston's buildings are neither very old or very new. Using a conversion calculator, I converted 500* Celsius to joules, and got 949,550.25 Joules. Since we're doing calculations in Farenheight, we have to multiply 949,550.25 Joules by 33.80 Farenheight, since 1* Celsius= 33.80* Farenheight. You get 32,094,798.45.

Steel has a recorded melting point, and it is 1,370* Celsius. I used the conversion calculator and got 2,601,767.685 Joules. Then I multiplied that by 33.800 to get 87,939,747.753 joules .

The amount of joules that are required to be emitted to destroy all of Houston is 810,334,800,000,000 joules, which is a towing amount over the required 32,094,798.45 joules and the 87,939,747.753 joules needed to melt and degrade and destroy the buildings of Houston.

By converting Kinetic Energy to Heat Energy to Tempeture back to Heat Energy to Kinetic Energy we can figure that my original calculation matches with the story and is EASILY enough to completly destroy, degrade, and decentagrate concrete and mortar, and BOIL steel.

[Blaze1616]

How are you converting from temp to heat without a unit of mass involved via specific heat? Moreover, where did you get the 1C=33.80F? Why are you not using °C x 9/5 + 32 = °F? I understand plugging 1C into that gives 33.80, but the way you converted is not how that works. Like at all. Maybe I've missed something you've done?

[king of nowhere]

 

Dood. I litterally JUST SAID THAT!!! And btw the unit we've been measuring in is just Joukes, so kiloJoules is incorrect when you said that the Hiroshima bomb was 60 bil kilaJoules. It's 63 TRILLION JOULES.

And how are 63 billion KJ and 63 trillion J different? You do remember what the prefix "kilo" means, right? Or, you could go scientific and directly say 6.3*10¹³ J

 

So I'm not an expert on nukes and the like but I would assume that a nuke doesn't work simply by heat but mostly by... well exploding. Obliteration melted Houston, as in just pure heat turning stone into magma. For a not expert that seems like it would need even more energy than a bomb would.

As far as I know, the nuke releases a huge amount of heat, and that heat makes the air expand (air heated to 30 thousand degrees occupy a volume 100 times greater than it does at room temperature), and that expansion causes the shockwave. The explosion mechanism is therefore completely different from that of a chemical bomb, where a compund decomposes into smaller gaseous molecules, increasing its volume and therefore creating a shockwave. But any release of heat big and sudden enough would cause an explosion. obliteration likely released his power gradually, so there was no explosion

 

This is part of my second part of the calculations.

Concrete has never been recorded to have a melting point, however there is a point that in which concrete degrades into the many materials it is made of. The degration point of concrete is recorded to be 450-550* Celsius, so I safely split the difference since much of Houston's buildings are neither very old or very new. Using a conversion calculator, I converted 500* Celsius to joules, and got 949,550.25 Joules. Since we're doing calculations in Farenheight, we have to multiply 949,550.25 Joules by 33.80 Farenheight, since 1* Celsius= 33.80* Farenheight. You get 32,094,798.45.

Steel has a recorded melting point, and it is 1,370* Celsius. I used the conversion calculator and got 2,601,767.685 Joules. Then I multiplied that by 33.800 to get 87,939,747.753 joules .

The amount of joules that are required to be emitted to destroy all of Houston is 810,334,800,000,000 joules, which is a towing amount over the required 32,094,798.45 joules and the 87,939,747.753 joules needed to melt and degrade and destroy the buildings of Houston.

By converting Kinetic Energy to Heat Energy to Tempeture back to Heat Energy to Kinetic Energy we can figure that my original calculation matches with the story and is EASILY enough to completly destroy, degrade, and decentagrate concrete and mortar, and BOIL steel.

You are doing many things wrong in your calculations.

First, the degradation temperature of concrete is not an energy. to obtain an energy, you need to multiply a temperature for a heat capacity, and that for a mass. Once you know how many tons of concrete are in houston, you can multiply that for the heat capacity of conccrete to know how much energy you need to heat them all by one degree. Multiply that by the difference from the decomposition point of concrete and the room temperature, and you have the energy it takes to melt all the concrete in houston.

Also, the conversion degrees-to-faranheits is not what you said. I don't remember what's the zero point, but I'm fairly sure one Celsius is equal to 1.8 Faranheit.

 

But anyway, that's moot because, when they said that he destroied houston, they did not mean that he melted each and every single building completely. If nothing else, plenty of people run away to tell the story, otherwise the protagonists would not be discussing it. Also, there isn't a clear, well defined limit to what "houston" is, except on paper, and I doubted he looked at the maps before deciding which buildings to burn. Furthermore, he seems  incapable of that kind of control required to heat each building individually, or he would have used that to melt David, or to melt the ground under his feet. So the most realistic scenario is that he just released a big heat blast from the center of the city, and that melted everythng in a radius around him and gradually lost strenght as it got farther away. the release of heat wasn't instantaneous, but gradual, so there was no exxplosion. the city center was completely devastated, while the damage was gradually less when moving outside. only buildings close to the center were melted completely, and the people burned to death too quickly to do anything. farther than that, there is a range where it got very hot but people who were fast could still run away. wood and paper may have caught fire, so the whole city burned anyway. And plenty of the heat got wasted heating the sky, or the ground, so there's no way to make an accurate calculation. The energy released could have been anything from 10 kiloton to 1 megaton.

Edited April 9, 2015 by king of nowhere

[Edgedancer]

But anyway, that's moot because, when they said that he destroied houston, they did not mean that he melted each and every single building completely. If nothing else, plenty of people run away to tell the story, otherwise the protagonists would not be discussing it. Also, there isn't a clear, well defined limit to what "houston" is, except on paper, and I doubted he looked at the maps before deciding which buildings to burn. Furthermore, he seems  incapable of that kind of control required to heat each building individually, or he would have used that to melt David, or to melt the ground under his feet. So the most realistic scenario is that he just released a big heat blast from the center of the city, and that melted everythng in a radius around him and gradually lost strenght as it got farther away. the release of heat wasn't instantaneous, but gradual, so there was no exxplosion. the city center was completely devastated, while the damage was gradually less when moving outside. only buildings close to the center were melted completely, and the people burned to death too quickly to do anything. farther than that, there is a range where it got very hot but people who were fast could still run away. wood and paper may have caught fire, so the whole city burned anyway. And plenty of the heat got wasted heating the sky, or the ground, so there's no way to make an accurate calculation. The energy released could have been anything from 10 kiloton to 1 megaton.

 

 

It may seem ridiculous but from the descriptions we get in chapter 12 there wasn't an explosion, just heat and it actually did spread over the entire city. It might be that the physics of it are not accurate but that's what Obliteration did. That's why they call him a monster and force of nature.

 

[...]he'd eventually decided to destroy his city completely. Every single person in Houston. He was an indiscriminant killer.

 

He'd melted Houston. Literally. He'd spent weeks sitting in the center of town bare-chested like some ancient god, drawing heat out of the air, basking in the sunlight. He'd stored heat up, then released it all at once. I'd seen photos, read the descriptions. Asphalt turned to soup. Buildings burst into flames. Stones melted to magma.

Tens of thousands dead in moments.

[TheSpartanDuck]

How are you converting from temp to heat without a unit of mass involved via specific heat? Moreover, where did you get the 1C=33.80F? Why are you not using °C x 9/5 + 32 = °F? I understand plugging 1C into that gives 33.80, but the way you converted is not how that works. Like at all. Maybe I've missed something you've done?

I skipped typing a lot of my calculations since they were boring but I wrote them on paper, checked on calculator and wrote them in notes.

EDIT: ok I do need a unit of mass to put into my calculations.. I overlooked that in my speedy calculations and didn't take my time. Again, my science AND math teachers would kick me to France... Even IF BOTH of theme are way too lazy and idiotic to attempt to do half of the calculations I just did.. Even if half of it was incorrect. I will fix this in my next half of the post, but that more than likely won't come out until... Either next Wednesday or next weekend. Sorry guys, my calculations were crap. I sped through (even if I did take an hour, which is speedy to my standard) calculations. I'll fix em.

[Voidus]

Dood. I litterally JUST SAID THAT!!! And btw the unit we've been measuring in is just Joukes, so kiloJoules is incorrect when you said that the Hiroshima bomb was 60 bil kilaJoules. It's 63 TRILLION JOULES.

That's the same thing, the 'kilo' prefix is just a way to designate a thousan of something, then mega is a thousand times that, giga is a thousand times that.

[natc]

In this discussion we try to perform physics calculations with the metric system despite not knowing the fundamental fact of metric prefixes.

jk jk

Seriously, other than the usual time units above "seconds" being arranged in base-60 instead of base-10 (dammit Babylon) all other units joules can be derived from work that way. If anything we should probably be writi some of these numbers in megajoules or something. These zeroes are getting obnoxious.

Though with numbers like that I would guess that the amount of actual energy he gets per unit of heat absorbs he gets the longer he charges? Might even be dark energy that he's draining.

Edited April 10, 2015 by natc

[Voidus]

Actually, something else to consider, Obliteration isn't dark when he absorbs sunlight, he still reflects light just like normal and in fact even starts glowing later on which means he can't be absorbing anywhere near 100% of the sunlight that hits him so either he's absorbing the energy directly from the air or else he's actually absorbing the energy from the sun once he's connected to it by a ray of light.

So rather than just absorbing sunlight he's actually just using it to connect his powers to the sun itself and siphoning off a portion of it's energy. This would allow energy to be conserved without needing to multiply it and would allow him to absorb enough energy to melt a city.

Thoughts?

[natc]

I've entertained that thought before but it sounded too bizarre so I never said anything.

Now I remember he's an Epic. Bizarre is normal. Though I still find it amusing that we care so much about energy conservation with Oblit but not mass conservation with Prof.

[Blaze1616]

Are we seriously considering the energy required, or are we just discussing for fun? If we're really serious about this, I can perform the calculations when I get some free time. After all, this is essentially what I got my degree in.

 

I think the evidence points to him absorbing the energy from the sunlight, specifically the UV rays, as there is no mention of a killer sunburn when David confronts Obliteration at the end of the novel. As for whether you're right, Voidus, and he's connecting to the sun itself, his rate of absorption needs to be capped somehow, otherwise it wouldn't have taken weeks, but rather seconds.

[Voidus]

I've entertained that thought before but it sounded too bizarre so I never said anything.

Now I remember he's an Epic. Bizarre is normal. Though I still find it amusing that we care so much about energy conservation with Oblit but not mass conservation with Prof.

Well only because he's explicitly stated to absorb energy rather than just create it. I mean Steelheart obviously doesn't eat enough food to power his energy blasts so Epics definitely can create energy out of nothing, just than for Obi that's said not to be the case.

 

 

Are we seriously considering the energy required, or are we just discussing for fun? If we're really serious about this, I can perform the calculations when I get some free time. After all, this is essentially what I got my degree in.

 

I think the evidence points to him absorbing the energy from the sunlight, specifically the UV rays, as there is no mention of a killer sunburn when David confronts Obliteration at the end of the novel. As for whether you're right, Voidus, and he's connecting to the sun itself, his rate of absorption needs to be capped somehow, otherwise it wouldn't have taken weeks, but rather seconds.

I definitely think there's some kind of cap otherwise he could obliterate (heh) the entire planet in half a second but having too much energy to play with is an easier problem than it appearing from nowhere.