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To: norwaypinesavage
I suspect the blast front traveled at the speed of sound.

To get a little technical, because this is FR and you made a good guess, you're close. The shock wave (thickness 0.0001 inches or less) travels at what can reasonably be treated as a weighted average of the speeds that sound would travel in the media on either side of it, accounting for what are initially very different densities and temperatures. For "short" distances from the blast, the shock wave is supersonic relative to the speed of sound in normal air. At the radius where the wave goes subsonic, the nature of the sound changes, not that anyone near the MOAB would notice. At long distances, the blast wave slows down a lot before the movement reverses direction as the return wave fills in the partial vacuum left by momentum and over-expansion.

67 posted on 04/14/2017 9:50:57 AM PDT by Pollster1 ("Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed")
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To: Pollster1
Yep. She blowed up REAL GOOD.


72 posted on 04/14/2017 10:18:05 AM PDT by Delta 21 (The minority demands NOTHING !)
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