Bakugo’s strength for his explosions scale directly to the durability of his opponents, if you’re having doubts about how strong the force of his explosions always are. For example, despite his explosions being far smaller than is required, Bakugo is capable of harming 5% Deku who has building+ durability from several calcs. Bakugo’s calced 8-C+ explosion harmed Deku similarly to how those other attacks did, despite the fact that Deku should have taken less damage. That is evidence for his explosions scaling based off size, as well as them not needing to be the same size to inflict similar damage.
More examples of this is him being able to harm Kirishima despite his hardening making him able to withstand attacks from Sato. Sato, in regards to your calc questions, is directly able to break Bakugo’s gauntlets, which are designed to handle the full force of his standard explosions, as is calced to High 8-C+. Despite this, Sato can break them, and Bakugo is regarded as superior to Sato, specifically in strength. It’s a strange scaling chain based off the mechanics of Bakugo’s quirk.
More examples include Bakugo being able to one shot standard thugs with small explosions, as well as being able to harm other students in training. In all of these examples, Bakugo uses explosions that are FAR smaller than can be reliably calc’d for the tier of opponents he’s hurting, yet he’s often always portrayed as completely dominating and overpowering in strength. The conclusion is therefore that the size doesn’t matter for any more than a gauge of how strong his explosions can get. He can harm people with his large explosions the same way he harms them with his smaller.
Does it not make sense? Yes. Is that how it works? Yes.
He can make his explosions bigger than normal, but that doesn’t change their potency, or if it does, it isn’t by much. The size is just the scale for how much damage he’s doing.
Huh, weird, but yeah do you see where im coming from? His explosions before that one are all notably smaller and were able to be blocked by Nine's barriers
I know right? Weird. For your question though, he used AP shot against that barrier initially actually, which is designed to be the weakest explosions he can make. He uses them for distraction, counterattack or covering fire rather than damage, and even uses them to block the projectiles of others.
As you can notice right before he shoots those shots though, he directly blocks Nine’s laser beam attacks, and those same attacks were able to severely injure other students who are baseline High 8-C. The explosions he used to block those attacks were no where near High 8-C in size, but they worked as if they were High 8-C in strength.
Further supporting evidence of Bakugo scaling to his explosions is when he, just physically, tossed Deku at High 8-C levels of force. When he had OFA, he was able to harm an amped Nine despite him having far higher Dura than the size of explosion he used. He even can just scale to characters like Aoyama who have an accepted High 8-C+ calc. Heck, Deku at 8% kicks Weakened Nine in the face, and despite your calcs of his point blank explosions only being 9-B Force, Bakugo’s explosion was able to harm Nine and almost defeat him.
Essentially, there is far more evidence that Bakugo‘s explosions are the same strength at all times than that they aren’t. The size is just a reference for how much energy is being put into each explosion.
