How much power is in a harmonium-trellium bomb?

[Beodrakis he/him]

does anyone have a rough estimate of it's power in kT of TnT?

[alder24]

25 minutes ago, Beodrakis said:

does anyone have a rough estimate of it's power in kT of TnT?

It's really hard to say what damage the fully operational bomb would do. It didn't go off. Telsin or Harmony said that if it were to explode in between Bilming and Elendel, it would destroy both cities. That's a lot of power, they are around 160 km away so their yield would have to be bigger than the Tsar Bomb. But we have no real data so we don't really know what would happen. 

However, we can estimate what power the explosion Wayne had. It falls within the range of the Beirut explosion, of around 1 kt. Here are some topics about it:

 

 

[CtrlAltDepressed]

56 minutes ago, alder24 said:

That's a lot of power, they are around 160 km away so their yield would have to be bigger than the Tsar Bomb. But we have no real data so we don't really know what would happen. 

Harmony also mentioned the possibility of ending life on Scadrial completely if the Harmonium-Trellium bomb went off - I think specifically he mentions the atmosphere igniting. This was a real life concern with the Tsar Bomba, and actually resulted in them reducing the yield to avoid that issue. I believe we have determined this to be neigh impossible (igniting atmosphere) in the real world, but I would like to think Harmony has an accurate idea of the destruction it would cause. 

 

I think a safe assumption is the original yield of the tsar bomba for the bomb as it makes sense that Brandon would draw that real life parallel specifically to give us an idea of the yield. That yield was 100MT

Quote

Wikipedia: The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around 58 Mt (243 PJ),^[13] which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of 50 Mt (209 PJ).^[4] As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate.^[4][12] In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238^[14] tamper which featured in the design but was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout.

 

If we compare that on nukemap to the real world - its terrifying. This is overlaid onto LA. There would be earthquakes for thousands of miles, tsunamis in the pacific, wildfires for thousands of miles, radiation clouds across most of the americas at least. San Bernadino is 100km away on this map. If those were the only population centers, this bomb could easily wipe out both cities. I hope this gives some idea of the destruction. 

[alder24]

21 minutes ago, CtrlAltDepressed said:

Harmony also mentioned the possibility of ending life on Scadrial completely if the Harmonium-Trellium bomb went off - I think specifically he mentions the atmosphere igniting. This was a real life concern with the Tsar Bomba, and actually resulted in them reducing the yield to avoid that issue. I believe we have determined this to be neigh impossible (igniting atmosphere) in the real world, but I would like to think Harmony has an accurate idea of the destruction it would cause. 

This idea wasn't really popular by scientists back during the Manhattan project and very, very generous calculations proved it to be impossible under any real scenario. Harmony even admitted he has no idea how much power it has. He was panicked, blinded, without his future vision, not knowing what this bomb can really do - this claim can be safely rejected. Telsin also believed that both cities could have been destroyed if the bomb went off. So I think a medium estimate that both cities would get destroyed can be used. TLM ch 69:

Quote

[Telsin:] No! she thought. No! The bomb cannot be stopped. If they interfere, they will destroy themselves and the city. Potentially both cities. Rusts.
[...]
[Harmony:] I have no idea how much power that would release. I can’t exactly be sure what will happen if something this powerful is ignited. It could set the very atmosphere ablaze.
If not, it would potentially vaporize not just Elendel and Bilming, but many cities nearby as well

 

33 minutes ago, CtrlAltDepressed said:

I think a safe assumption is the original yield of the tsar bomba for the bomb as it makes sense that Brandon would draw that real life parallel specifically to give us an idea of the yield. That yield was 100MT

Quote

Wikipedia: The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around 58 Mt (243 PJ),[13] which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of 50 Mt (209 PJ).[4] As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate.[4][12] In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238[14] tamper which featured in the design but was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout.

 

If we compare that on nukemap to the real world - its terrifying. This is overlaid onto LA. There would be earthquakes for thousands of miles, tsunamis in the pacific, wildfires for thousands of miles, radiation clouds across most of the americas at least. San Bernadino is 100km away on this map. If those were the only population centers, this bomb could easily wipe out both cities. I hope this gives some idea of the destruction. 

It's more. Both moderate and light blast damage radius of a surface explosion isn't within 80 km value (thermal radiation too). So if we want to have both of those cities destroyed, the bomb has to be even bigger to destroy it by the blast damage alone. But truthfully it's really hard to estimate the value if the characters in the book were just guessing, they could have been wrong and vastly overestimate its power, or underestimate it - like with the Castle Bravo test. 

Realistically speaking, I think Brandon would want to keep the power of the bomb within a more manageable level of real fusion bombs, so 100 Mt can be a limit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter had real values calculated.