For the last couple of weeks,
I have been playing the Uncharted series game. It has been quite a
challenge to complete all the different difficulties the game has. As you
increase the difficulty the accuracy of enemies shot and damage increase to a
point where it feels totally unfair, but something that has struck me as
unacceptable is how grenades work. Their range of explosion and their damage
varies from game to game, and from difficulty to difficulty. I did not know
much about grenades so I could not make a proper judgment, therefore I decided
to do some research to satisfy my curiosity.
The grenade I want to
describe is an explosive weapon that is thrown by hand which is why it is
usually called a “hand grenade”. What I did not know is that there are
varieties in the grenade: fragmentation grenade which when explodes it
spreads fragments. These are the popular ones, and the ones people refer to
when they talk about grenades, shockwaves grenades which propagate a
disturbance at high speeds to neutralize. Here you have stun and anti-tank
grenades, chemical, and incendiary grenade use chemical reaction to
create signals like a smoke bomb and crowd control like tear gas or set fire
with temperature as high as 2,200 ℃
such as the famous Molotov cocktail.
They are usually cylindrical in shape and of a size that fits in the hand of an average adult. They also have a time delay to allow the user to stay safe from the explosion. In cartoons we often see the spherical design of grenades refer to as bombs. Those have a long match that indicates the time of explosion (as the picture below). It is also very popular in pirate movies.
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| A cartoon bomb which in disguise is a form of grenade |
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| Internal structure of a modern grenade. |
Fragmentation grenades
usually can be thrown 130 ft of distance and have a harmful radius of 50 ft,
that is about the radius covered by the shrapnel. So, let’s see, an ordinary
grenade weighs about 0.9 kg and I want to say one piece of shrapnel weighs
0.005 kg (this is just a guess not an actual measurement). According to Wikipedia
a classic hand grenade contains 50g of TNT. Since TNT contains about 4KJ/g this
is an energy content of 200 KJ. One shrapnel can easily be traveling at
a speed of 9 km/s, which will make it a dangerous projectile to anyone in the
radius of explosion. Not only is the explosion that can cause you damage but
getting hit by thousands of shrapnel can inflict injuries to anyone, not even
being underwater will guarantee your security as you may find in movies, in
fact water can be more dangerous as the water can served as a medium of
propagation of the shockwave created by the explosion.
While playing the Uncharted
games I threw a lot of grenades at enemies, and while they remained located
less than one feet away from where I threw the grenade, they would continue to
move as if nothing happened while when grenades were thrown to me, I suffered
damage even while I was in cover.
Calculating the effects
of a grenade involves a lot of data. You have to take into account how many
shrapnel will be created by the blast, take into account the conservation of
momentum, the combustible used to consider the energy released by the
explosion, the material used to make the outer shell of the grenade. It is not
as simple as counting its kinetic energy on release, there are a lot of physics
principles that apply in this case.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/grenade2.htm
https://aoav.org.uk/2021/what-is-a-hand-grenade/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoVNZGwOnZI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4DnuQOtA8E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenade
https://man.fas.org/dod-101/sys/land/m67.htm
