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Sorry, questions are not allowed.
Into the chasm with you.
Wow what a great review. I did start dabbling with the energy side of things but scrapped it because it was almost midnight, so I remember the most powerful thermonuclear has an output of 33.8 x 10²⁴ Watts. Or 33.8 x 10²⁴ Joules per second.
So, like, this is more than enough energy to heat the human body from 36°C to 60°C in an instant. In fact, enough to instantly turn all the blood and water into vapour in an instant, thus the body exploding in a… ahem vapourwave…
EDIT: ffs they changed their name to vapourfire so the joke doesn’t even work anymore 
Or were they always vapourfire and I just always misremembered it as vapourwave…?
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Yeah, the general idea is pretty much that, but in details it’s slightly more complicated.
Now that I’m back home I can go into those details if you want.
First of all, using Watts for evaluating the yield of a nuclear blast is not reliable. It’s a blast, right? Not a power station with a constant output. It goes BOOM, the power output rises exponentially, then it goes back to zero. Total energy is much more reliable.
Let’s take for example a pretty standard yield bomb, Minuteman III, which has a yield of approximately 300 Kilotons of TNT. Then we google an energy equivalent in Joules for TNT and calculate that 300 KT translates into 300*4.184×10^12 J = 1.2552×10^15 J
That is, obviously A LOT!!!
But now we must understand, that not all the energy that yields those 300 KT is relevant to us. We are only interested in the energy that is transferred via thermal radiation. Wiki says it’s between 30% and 50% of the total energy: Effects of nuclear explosions - Wikipedia
So that’s 6.276×10^14 J.
Which is still a lot, of course.
But then we didn’t consider, that this energy is for the whole blast, right? I.e. if you draw an imaginary hemi-sphere of a certain radius, covering the the blast entirely (assuming that the blast is happening on ground surface) – this is gonna be the energy flow, that is “spread” across this entire hemi-sphere.
But our dude is relatively small, right?
We are interested in particular in the surface of the average human body – the google says it’s 1.9 m^2 for adult men. Let’s make it 2 for simplicity, and because our sent is larger than average dude, right? (we take into account the full surface, assuming that the heat is piercing the body from ALL directions)
Now we need to place our sent at some distance from the bomb, let’s say R = 10 m.
Here’s a little illustration by me:
https://i.imgur.com/VebPChz.png
So, now we can calculate what percentage of the energy from the entire hemisphere of the blast is going to our sent. 2/(0.54pi*R^2) = 0.0032 – that’s not much, right?
Now we can calculate the total energy that our dude receives, standing at 10 m from the epicenter: 6.276×10^14 J * 0.0032 = 1.8828 ×10^12 J.
As I pointed out in my previous post, in order to kill an average human via heating you need approximately 10 MJ = 1×10^7 J. Which in LE terms equals 128 effective HP.
But our sent dude is not an average human, right? He has ~10 MILLIONS of effective HP (via ward, armor and resistances). So in order to kill our sent by heating we need 1×10^7 J * 10^7/128 ~= 7.8 ×10^11 J.
Which is approximately ONLY 2.4 TIMES LESS that what he’ll receive standing in the middle of a MInuteman III explosion, 10 m away from the bomb.
But if he was standing >16 meters from the bomb detonation point – he’d survived.
Needless to say, that the smaller the yield of the bomb, the closer he can stand.
Up to the point, that he could probably shove the Hiroshima bomb up his ass and be okay with that 
The calculations for the core of a star are quite similar, I’ll leave it to the reader 
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“The proof is left as an exercise to the reader” OH MY FUCKING GOD 
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Doing the necessary, and critical math I would never dare. Great job! I’ll just trust your numbers are correct. Though it does leave me to wonder how much the odds would change if the Sentinel had a shield of bees?
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for comparison’s sake, this is how we could balance the game around defense!
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Haha! Glad you’re liking our little arithmetic shenanigans
The biggest assumption in my calculations was the parallel that I draw between real life humans and LE character.
That “killing an average human by heating them from 36.6C to 60C” and “dealing 128 points of fire damage to LE character” is exactly the same thing physically.
The rest is just data from google and wiki and some middle-school math and may be a pinch of high school physics.
So it’s not like I’m solving non-linear differential equations here
Well, obviously, in LE terms if the sent “blocks the nuclear blast” he receives less damage.
But in real life terms I doubt it would change anything, because as soon as our sent is engulfed by a nuke’s plasma ball, he starts absorbing the heat from ALL directions. Front, behind – even his heels are on fire.
- That’s why I used full surface S of the human body in my calculations, and not just the frontal half S/2, as I would do, for example in vacuum, where there’s no surrounding matter to heat
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I come to forums for dumb memes and whiners not for a math and thermonuclear physics lesson.
Ugh.
My head…
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I don’t seem to recall glancing blow, endurance or dodge being factored. Don’t forget, all this could be for naught, if the sentinel passes his dodge check(s).
That would only affect the initial shockwave, not the radiation (which is clearly a DoT) or the fireball or any subsequent effects.
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But those would still be subject to armor reductions, resistances, and endurance.
Resists & endurance, yes, armour, no. But it’d still be a several million degree (and I’ll even let you use your barbarian “farenheit” degrees rather than the proper centigrade/celsius or enlightened Kelvin) fireball…
Oh, I don’t use farenheit. My heat scale goes from: ‘hot as ballz up in here’ to ‘hotter than a whore in church’
and, just because I know you’d be curious, my cold scale ranges from:
‘freezing my ass off’ to ‘colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra’
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I’ll ponder whether that scale is acceptable over a cup of tea. Though I’m curious as to where “hotter than satan’s ####hole” fits in.
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TBH, I find the concept of dodging/blocking/glancing an obvious (and massive) AOE attack rather ridiculous in general. Even in terms of a game mechanic, not even mentioning the real world applications. I mean… you can not possibly dodge a nuclear blast, holy crap, right?
Therefore I did not account for that in my calculations. Armor/resistance/ward is another thing, because it’s “magic”, so it’s at least acceptable.
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And yet, it happens all the time, in-game. And, since we’re talking about a LE Sentinel, I would imagine he’d benefit from all the rules, ridiculous as they might seem 
maths are hard. i like the BEEEEEES
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Texas in the Summer.
Or, for a better visual image, and for dinosaurs like me who remember Super Mario Bros on NES, the Angry Sun…
We are quickly approaching this point already and I don’t like it 
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This is why sensible/civilised people live in the (South East of) England. Even the French are jealous of our civilised weather… And tea, cricket, etc.