I understand a megaton is a million tons of TNT, but how much is a ton, or to shorten the discussion, a kilogram of TNT?

909 kilograms.

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I always thought a ton was 1000 kilograms.

What's going on here?

Welcome to the board. A kilogram of TNT releases about 4.2 million joules when it explodes, which is about 1.2 kilowatt-hours if that's a more familiar unit of energy to you. A typical hand grenade has about 150 grams of explosive, so a kilogram would be the equivalent of seven of those. Interestingly, 4 million joules is also about half the energy you burn every day to stay alive.

that's another one like Yards and Metres

English Bushel = 36.4 litres while 1 US bushel is 35.3 litres
metric tonne is 1000 , ton in the USA = 2000 lb about 900 ?? 907, 909 kgs ??
British pint = 34.68 Cu while the American pint is 33.60 Cu

I think there was a news story that a Space probe was lost because somebody confused British and American units of measurement

A metric tonne is, sensibly, 1,000kg.

A 'short' ton like what only one country in the world [1] insists on still using, guess who is exactly 2000lb, i.e 907.18474 kg

A 'long' ton, like what another (entirely different) country in the world [2] sometimes still uses [3], is 2,240lb or approx 1,016kg.

It's not simple, but most people in the world assume you mean metric when you say it.

[1] USA, of course.

[2] UK, but increasingly rarely, thank heavens.

[3] Great fraud opportunities, but we might get rumbled, so I shall say no more.

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Fin
Skep-ti-cult® member #488-28303-790

So is megaton a metric or american form of measurment?

A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, so I don't know if that means that by definition "kilo" means 1,024 (which is by the way 2^10).

Back to the discussion: 909 kilograms of TNT, I understand. But how powerful is a kg of TNT? Compare to horsepower, or manpower or something I can understand please.

Yeah! I assumed, for some reason, that megaton used american units, but upon reflection, that may be silly.

Better?

Edit:

Apparently kilotons and such are measured in metric tons. Sorry.

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
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I think "kilobyte" is actually a misnomer.

The "mectric" system in a "decimal" system (based on "ten"). In the "decimal" system you have:

1 gramm = 1 gramm
1 decagramm = 10 gramms
1 centigramm = 100 gramms
1 kilogramm = 1000 gramms.

But bit/bytes are in a "binary" system (based on "two").

"Kilobyte" measures the first amount of bytes (2^10) to cross the thousand threshold. But the "thousand" threshold is a product of the "decimal" system.

The two just don't fit together, but they do help us meager humans think straight.

At these small amounts, even with superbytes, things remain somewhat reasonable. Somewhere up beyond that that the two systems drift apart. But those numbers are mostly beyond our conception anyway.

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Not sure about that, after all 1MegaUnit is only 1,048,576 units, not terribly above a million. A teraunit, for that, is perilously close to 1.1x10^12 units, 'bout a 1000 billion. (I'm using 'unit' because bits and bytes get conflated a lot these days.)

I'm also not sure that these numbers are beyond our conception - just above, or maybe below, our conscious awareness. Don't want to go there right now...

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Fin
Skep-ti-cult® member #488-28303-790

The question he's trying to ask is not "how much is a kilogram of TNT" but rather, "what is the size of an explosion made by a kilogram of TNT?" Unfortunately, I have no idea. Well, maybe you could find the amount of explosive in an M80 (I think that's the name for a big firecracker) and work up from there.

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As above, so below

Oh, I see what you are saying...

Um, very roughly 4.5 kilograms of of some unknown high explosive blew up a bus full of people last week in London. IIR that acual explosive used did not have the yield of tnt or other plastic explosives, but it is really close.

Also, if you want to see how it is all calibrated, during the trinity tests of the atomic bomb, they also blew up 100(iirc) tons of tnt right next to the trinity bomb so they could figure out their yield. I bet just a little bit of googling around can find all the relevant pictures and some movies even.

I know there are several yield calculators around on the net all basically explaining how the yield is estimated damage done fallout that sort of thing. It will be really handy because its hard to wrap your head around the actual size of megaton sized explosions. For example, a 20 megaton bomb airburst will leave a crater 1000 feet accross, 200 feet deep. Everything in about 4-5 miles will be burnt to a crisp, with total destruction out 10 miles, and minor damage 20 miles out.


Wow, that got really macabe, but we are talking about explosives...

Or maybe the amount in a grenade? Or is nobody but Musashi reading my posts? :wink:

Except that grenades use gunpowder, not high explosives.

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To end the confusion, in 1999 the IEC introduced the binary prefixes kibi-, mibi, gibi-, etc. So a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a kibibyte is 1024.
But this has not yet been commonly adopted, so we still often have to have a closer look.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

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Yes, I saw your post, but from the rest of the conversation it seemed you were pretty much the only one to understand the real question. It was posed pretty ambiguously, but I kind of guessed that what he was asking was not the weight of a kilogram of TNT... That was pretty interesting, though, that we need about the equivalent of a kilogram of TNT to survive for a day.

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As above, so below

Two kilograms per day (in fact, the explosive power of a gram of TNT is almost exactly one kilocalorie, or food calorie, so two kilograms almost exactly matches the energy in a 2,000 calorie diet). I thought so, too. Note that burning a gram of food will actually release significantly more energy than an exploding gram of TNT, which is why you don't have to eat two kilograms of food every day.

[edit to add:]
And in the process of checking this further (it seemed like too large a coincidence when I found that the numbers matched to several decimal places), I find that, for arms control purposes, the explosive energy of a gram of TNT is defined to be exactly 1000 thermochemical calories; the measured output is actually more like 650 calories. So you actually need the energy from about three kilograms of TNT to live for a day.

This example nicely shows, that explosives are not so much a matter of energy, but of power. It's not impressingly much energy, but it is released in a very short time. Similar to lightning. High power, but the energy isn't that impressive.

Harald

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Lets see, a cup of gassoline, vaporized then ignited, is roughly equivelent to five sticks of TnT (which weighs about a pound).

a ton of tnt (american measure) is 10000 stick's of TnT, or 2000cups (125 gallons of gasoline)

A metric tonne of tnt would be equivelent to 137 Galons of gas vapor exploding.

So a megaton would be equiplent of 137,000,000 Gallons of gas vapor in an explosion, or 10,960,000,000 sticks of TnT dynomite.

*edit* was tired and did math wrong on the amount of TnT, changed from 685 mill

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