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As we all know, the Nova Bomb is the Super of the Voidwalker sub-class of Warlock Guardians. In the first game, this Super was given an...interesting lore description:
Channel the Traveler's Light into a bolt of energy with the power of a collapsing star. The devastating Nova Bomb scours the battlefield with ethereal fire - but be careful in its use. It takes precious moments to summon, and it must be aimed precisely to avoid obstacles.
For my part, I have been skeptical about this description in the past because of how I thought this could get inflated to unreasonable levels i.e. actual supernova levels, and I've puzzled over how to actually calculate this.
For the purpose of this calc, however, I'll be taking the description at face-value. As for what I could use to calculate this, the Nova Bomb description makes note of ethereal fire, so I'll use the below formula:
http://www.endmemo.com/physics/radenergy.php
Credits to @MatthewSchroeder for their example of the above formula at work.
Two variants exist for the Nova Bomb (in Destiny 2) - Attunement of Chaos, which launches a sphere the size of an average Guardian (official height is apparently 1.88 meters) which is slow but tracks enemies with explosive power that generates smaller Void Light spheres on imact; Attunement of Hunger Nova Bomb is a large sphere about bowling ball-sized (I think), but trades its size for speed and creates an intense gravity well (description calls it a singularity) that damages enemies caught inside it.
In the original Destiny, the Nova Bomb was more akin to Attunement of Hunger's variant with three modifiers: Vortex, Shatter (splits into three) and Lance (travels further and faster)
The two should be roughly equal in power (same ability, different application), but I'll do a calculation for both sizes.
Chaos - Surface area (sphere) = 11.10 m^2; Destructive Capacity = 5.3050788E+37
Hunger (and Destiny 1 variant) - 226.98 in^2; Destructive Capacity = 7.6387662132163E+35
It is entirely possible there is a flaw in this calculation, but there you have it.
Taking the "power of a collapsing star" description at face value, the above is the end result. While ten magnitudes lower than the unreasonable levels I imagined it being inflated to, this is still quite an insane number.
Large Planet-level Destiny Guardians aka. 5-B to 5-A. Other Guardian Supers should roughly scale to this, as should the more powerful enemies in Destiny.
Channel the Traveler's Light into a bolt of energy with the power of a collapsing star. The devastating Nova Bomb scours the battlefield with ethereal fire - but be careful in its use. It takes precious moments to summon, and it must be aimed precisely to avoid obstacles.
For my part, I have been skeptical about this description in the past because of how I thought this could get inflated to unreasonable levels i.e. actual supernova levels, and I've puzzled over how to actually calculate this.
For the purpose of this calc, however, I'll be taking the description at face-value. As for what I could use to calculate this, the Nova Bomb description makes note of ethereal fire, so I'll use the below formula:
http://www.endmemo.com/physics/radenergy.php
Credits to @MatthewSchroeder for their example of the above formula at work.
Two variants exist for the Nova Bomb (in Destiny 2) - Attunement of Chaos, which launches a sphere the size of an average Guardian (official height is apparently 1.88 meters) which is slow but tracks enemies with explosive power that generates smaller Void Light spheres on imact; Attunement of Hunger Nova Bomb is a large sphere about bowling ball-sized (I think), but trades its size for speed and creates an intense gravity well (description calls it a singularity) that damages enemies caught inside it.
In the original Destiny, the Nova Bomb was more akin to Attunement of Hunger's variant with three modifiers: Vortex, Shatter (splits into three) and Lance (travels further and faster)
The two should be roughly equal in power (same ability, different application), but I'll do a calculation for both sizes.
Chaos - Surface area (sphere) = 11.10 m^2; Destructive Capacity = 5.3050788E+37
Hunger (and Destiny 1 variant) - 226.98 in^2; Destructive Capacity = 7.6387662132163E+35
It is entirely possible there is a flaw in this calculation, but there you have it.
Taking the "power of a collapsing star" description at face value, the above is the end result. While ten magnitudes lower than the unreasonable levels I imagined it being inflated to, this is still quite an insane number.
Large Planet-level Destiny Guardians aka. 5-B to 5-A. Other Guardian Supers should roughly scale to this, as should the more powerful enemies in Destiny.
