Going through it now. It seems if you have a 3rd year fluid mechanics course and perhaps a vector calculus course, you could at least "follow" the math, but you'd have to assume the derivations of the velocity and pressure expressions are valid. Basically, use bernoulli's equation for flow balance and you can plug and chug the velocity functions. Once you start getting to the ratios, this is something called "dimensional analysis" where you can "knock off" a few variables and get numerical functions that are "unitless".
Regarding that second page (pg 53 in the pdf), it shows how the distance "scales" with the "energy" by using dimensionless ratios (see eqn 3.56.1 for example). On the page before (the one I mentioned was "impulse") is indeed "force x time" but modified a little to "pressure x time", but note that "pressure" is a scalar value (meaning non vector) and is a "projection" (like a "dot product" in vector calculus) of the force (a vector) / Area in the direction of the surface normal (normal vector means perpendicular to a surface).
Let me know if you find something you don't understand and I don't mind giving a peek or two if I'm around.
Dingo 3 points 3 weeks ago
No problem. You can get a PDF here: https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfNuclearWeapons
Going through it now. It seems if you have a 3rd year fluid mechanics course and perhaps a vector calculus course, you could at least "follow" the math, but you'd have to assume the derivations of the velocity and pressure expressions are valid. Basically, use bernoulli's equation for flow balance and you can plug and chug the velocity functions. Once you start getting to the ratios, this is something called "dimensional analysis" where you can "knock off" a few variables and get numerical functions that are "unitless".
Regarding that second page (pg 53 in the pdf), it shows how the distance "scales" with the "energy" by using dimensionless ratios (see eqn 3.56.1 for example). On the page before (the one I mentioned was "impulse") is indeed "force x time" but modified a little to "pressure x time", but note that "pressure" is a scalar value (meaning non vector) and is a "projection" (like a "dot product" in vector calculus) of the force (a vector) / Area in the direction of the surface normal (normal vector means perpendicular to a surface).
Let me know if you find something you don't understand and I don't mind giving a peek or two if I'm around.
Good luck!