Adventure Path: Descent into Midnight - Failure: Impact size?


Second Darkness


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Good day!

I was looking at the "What if Allevrah Wins?" and wanted to plot out what the impact would look like on a map of Golarion rather than just go by the narrative description ... but I ran into a bit of a snag.

After using these sites ...

http://simulator.down2earth.eu
https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi

... to figure out the outcome, I was met with two contradictory issues. If the impactor results in 'Kyonin (being) transformed into a massive crater', the overall blast would be immense ... while if it only destroyed 'many of the neighboring nations' (but not all of Avistan), it couldn't simultaneously turn all of Kyonin into a crater.

Apologies in advance for switching back and forth between metric and imperial.

To break down the numbers, for both impactors I used a dense rock (3000 kg/m^3), falling at 30 km/s at a 90 degree angle to the surface hitting crystalline rock (as Kyonin seems to be in the middle of it's plate, unlikely to be sedimentary rock).

For the large crater scenario, we have a crater 127 miles in radius (I assumed that was when all was said and done, not merely transitory). When I worked out the numbers, that meant the impactor had to be about 18 miles in diameter and the crater would end up being about 1.1 miles deep. Everything within 1100 miles would be buried in ash and debris up to at least 10 feet ... if it could burn, anything within 1500 miles would be alight (including people, so if you're this close, you're dead) ... multistory, wall-bearing buildings (bread and butter of castles and stone/masonry construction) collapse within 3800 miles ... and wood frame buildings collapse at 4900 miles.

I tried initially to overlay this over a map of Avistan alone ... but it was too small ... then over Avistan and Garund ... still too small ... so I used this:

Fan Made Golarion Map

And produced this as a result:

Second Darkness Huge Impact

As you can see ... this impact would, in my opinion, be on the scale as Earthfall, wiping out all life not immune to fire on Avistan and destroying all civilization in the neighbouring continents. The earthquakes would likely destroy Zirnakaynin alongside much of the Darklands.

So I put together a more reasonable result:

Second Darkness 'Reasonable' Impact

Here, while Kyonin isn't turned into a crater, it is completely buried under ash and debris (to at least 10 feet), with Druma and Razmiran being completely wiped out and Galt and the River Kingdoms suffering massive damage. Now you may wonder why, while the circles for building construction are similar between the two maps but the ignition radius is quite different ... that's because in the larger impact, the curvature of the planet gets in the way of cooking everyone.

I believe this latter scenario is far more reasonable ... even Nirmathas (and Zirnakynin beneath it) is mostly untouched.

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