just how hot is a fireball

[jk7275]

As a fireball can melt gold and other types of metal just how hot does it get and how long for everything to cool down ?
Has anyone worked out the physics of a fireball? Yes I know there is a lot of factors but I like to get some idea of the aftereffects

[Mehangel]

I don't know how accurate it is, nor the math behind it, but in "The Order of the Stick - On the Origin of PCs" a fireball is described as releasing a thermal signature no less than 1850° Kelvin.

[Malphegor]

I'm not sure if the Pathfinder version of fireball is any different (looks mostly the same minus the 'dull roar' bit missing), but it melts gold, silver, lead, copper, and bronze in 3.5

(note that metals go softer as we get closer to the melting point so in colloquial terms a layman might think of something of lower temperature as 'melted' when it's just hot enough for the structure to become closer to being fluid and is more malleable)


Gold melts at 1064.18 °C (note that it's reasonable to expect most coinage to be an somewhat adulterated alloy even if in a fantasy setting the purity of the gold would be valued which may mean that the melting point is a bit lower)

Lead melts at 327°C, Silver is 961°C, Copper is 1084°C, Bronze depends on the ratio of the alloys that compose it, but is generally lower than steel if it's mainly copper based and wikipedia says it's about 950°C. (For comparison, iron and steel is about 1300-1500ish?)

So our range for the temperature for a fireball is probably between 327-1084°C due to its melting properties.

We also know that it 'detonates with a dull roar' in the 3.5 version.
That's because the air is igniting around it I think? Which would be 5538°C maybe?

That seems extreme, maybe the fireball explosion is just pushing air away and that's causing the dull soundwave that users hear.

Just to be safe I'd say it's about 1500-2000°C so as rapidly heat things in a hurry in virtually any environment. (2000°C is about the most you can get in an oxygen-rich environment with an actual fire, afaik), which seems about right for a spell wizards would develop.

"How hot can we make fire at maximum without any new gasses involved?"
"VERY."
"Let's make that the signature lower level spell of wizardry"
"Awesome."

[Hackulator]

The physics of fireball don't work. If they did, it wouldn't be magic it would be science. People's above calculations don't take into account specific heat. In order for the instantaneous effect of a fireball in the air to melt things it would need to be way hotter than their melting point or it would need to magically deliver energy in a way that is incompatible with physics. Fireball does the latter, because it is magic.

[Malphegor]

Fireball does the latter, because it is magic.

This is the real answer here. If we were to use the ridiculously high numbers I was finding above, you'd be setting forests on fire every time you fight a group of kobolds. It's more likely that the melting of gold etc is an intrinsically magical effect unique to fireball.

Just found this on searching, a blogpost on the history of the spell. https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2011/07/spells-through-ages-fireball.html

[ericgrau]

I'm not sure if the Pathfinder version of fireball is any different (looks mostly the same minus the 'dull roar' bit missing), but it melts gold, silver, lead, copper, and bronze in 3.5

(note that metals go softer as we get closer to the melting point so in colloquial terms a layman might think of something of lower temperature as 'melted' when it's just hot enough for the structure to become closer to being fluid and is more malleable)


Gold melts at 1064.18 °C (note that it's reasonable to expect most coinage to be an somewhat adulterated alloy even if in a fantasy setting the purity of the gold would be valued which may mean that the melting point is a bit lower)

Lead melts at 327°C, Silver is 961°C, Copper is 1084°C, Bronze depends on the ratio of the alloys that compose it, but is generally lower than steel if it's mainly copper based and wikipedia says it's about 950°C. (For comparison, iron and steel is about 1300-1500ish?)

So our range for the temperature for a fireball is probably between 327-1084°C due to its melting properties.

We also know that it 'detonates with a dull roar' in the 3.5 version.
That's because the air is igniting around it I think? Which would be 5538°C maybe?

That seems extreme, maybe the fireball explosion is just pushing air away and that's causing the dull soundwave that users hear.

Just to be safe I'd say it's about 1500-2000°C so as rapidly heat things in a hurry in virtually any environment. (2000°C is about the most you can get in an oxygen-rich environment with an actual fire, afaik), which seems about right for a spell wizards would develop.

"How hot can we make fire at maximum without any new gasses involved?"
"VERY."
"Let's make that the signature lower level spell of wizardry"
"Awesome."

If it can melt all of those then its temperature is at least the highest one. 1084°C is a minimum. Since it does it in an "instant" (A D&D "instant" is merely much less than 6 seconds), it must be much hotter. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFd1huCQL-c) a 2020°C MAPP gas torch takes a while to melt silver with a melting point of 961.8°C. A couple minutes to fully melt it. In an enclosure to speed it up. Fireball does have the advantage of being a wider area and perhaps an even faster flame speed due to "detonates with a low roar". Still I'd peg fireball at 2500°C+. A typical grenade is 2,800 °C. And I'd presume that fireball doesn't fully melt metals in its area, only makes them droop. OTOH too hot might be more of a bang than a roar, and fantasy writers took some liberties. Though if it burns more as it spreads maybe it wouldn't bang. So perhaps not so hot or perhaps not much hotter if it is so hot. FWIW a furnace gets to 2000 °C to 2300 °C, and that would be a familiar fantasy point of reference. So I'm guessing 2,000 °C to 2,800 °C, and probably somewhere in the middle? It's hard to pin it down but I do think at bare minimum it's 2000 °C (and probably a bit more).

[Andreaz]

If it can melt all of those then its temperature is at least the highest one. 1084°C is a minimum. Since it does it in an "instant" (A D&D "instant" is merely much less than 6 seconds), it must be much hotter. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFd1huCQL-c) a 2020°C MAPP gas torch takes a while to melt silver with a melting point of 961.8°C. A couple minutes to fully melt it. In an enclosure to speed it up. Fireball does have the advantage of being a wider area and perhaps an even faster flame speed due to "detonates with a low roar". Still I'd peg fireball at 2500°C+. A typical grenade is 2,800 °C. And I'd presume that fireball doesn't fully melt metals in its area, only makes them droop. OTOH too hot might be more of a bang than a roar, and fantasy writers took some liberties. Though if it burns more as it spreads maybe it wouldn't bang. So perhaps not so hot or perhaps not much hotter if it is so hot. FWIW a furnace gets to 2000 °C to 2300 °C, and that would be a familiar fantasy point of reference. So I'm guessing 2,000 °C to 2,800 °C, and probably somewhere in the middle? It's hard to pin it down but I do think at bare minimum it's 2000 °C (and probably a bit more).

For its action in the span of a couple seconds at most I'm ballparking it on the house of hundreds of thousands of °C
Math later at lunch.

[jk7275]

Fireball does the latter, because it is magic.


This is the real answer here. If we were to use the ridiculously high numbers I was finding above, you'd be setting forests on fire every time you fight a group of kobolds. It's more likely that the melting of gold etc is an intrinsically magical effect unique to fireball.

Just found this on searching, a blogpost on the history of the spell. https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2011/07/spells-through-ages-fireball.html

Saying well its just magic and we can ignore all known laws of physics strikes me as something of a cop out.
The spell description says in addition to melting metal "The fireball sets fire to combustibles and damages objects
in the area" How does that line fit in with your position? What is stopping a fireball from setting trees on fire or doing sever damage?

[zergling.exe]

Saying well its just magic and we can ignore all known laws of physics strikes me as something of a cop out.
The spell description says in addition to melting metal "The fireball sets fire to combustibles and damages objects
in the area" How does that line fit in with your position? What is stopping a fireball from setting trees on fire or doing sever damage?

The magic specifically empowers it to melt the listed metals, otherwise the heat produced to melt them in the short timeframe would vaporize flesh, bone, wood and other things; as it would need to be at least tens of thousands of degrees to cause instantaneous melting of gold and other metals.

So it melts the metals it says it melts, sets combustibles on fire, and deals fire damage to objects. All of these things are possible without trying to torture physics to try and find out how it can be hot enough to do the first, while cold enough to do the second without vaporizing them instantly.

[Hackulator]

Saying well its just magic and we can ignore all known laws of physics strikes me as something of a cop out.
The spell description says in addition to melting metal "The fireball sets fire to combustibles and damages objects
in the area" How does that line fit in with your position? What is stopping a fireball from setting trees on fire or doing sever damage?

Dude its not a cop out, it's magic in a system that doesn't even attempt to model real physics. You are already ignoring all known laws of physics just by having a fireball appear by wiggling your fingers, speaking some gibberish and throwing some bat guano in the air. Physics and D&D have nothing to do with each other. Why does the amount of damage not change the rules on what melts? I mean, something hot enough to INSTANTLY melt gold would make the liquids in your body boil violently and you would literally explode, not just get burned a bit. D&D does not model real physics and that is fine because the only way to model real physics is with actual physics.

[Torpin]

Saying well its just magic and we can ignore all known laws of physics strikes me as something of a cop out.
The spell description says in addition to melting metal "The fireball sets fire to combustibles and damages objects
in the area" How does that line fit in with your position? What is stopping a fireball from setting trees on fire or doing sever damage?

when i am dming and someone cast fireball in a forest, trees get burnt and catch on fire, it does double damage since you can argue trees are vulnerable to fire cause they are. so any tree less than 1 foot in diameter on an average roll is destroyed.

[ericgrau]

For its action in the span of a couple seconds at most I'm ballparking it on the house of hundreds of thousands of °C
Math later at lunch.

Dang where's the math? I was going to find this entertaining.

Note that high flame speed could aid the heat transfer. Assuming a subsonic roar not supersonic bang, maybe at most 767 mph?


Dude its not a cop out, it's magic in a system that doesn't even attempt to model real physics. You are already ignoring all known laws of physics just by having a fireball appear by wiggling your fingers, speaking some gibberish and throwing some bat guano in the air. Physics and D&D have nothing to do with each other. Why does the amount of damage not change the rules on what melts? I mean, something hot enough to INSTANTLY melt gold would make the liquids in your body boil violently and you would literally explode, not just get burned a bit. D&D does not model real physics and that is fine because the only way to model real physics is with actual physics.

There's a basic assumption that whatever isn't the direct result of magic, Ex or otherwise spelled out in the rules is realistic-ish. It's in the rules too. If there's not a rule for it, you use the real world version. The spell is called "fireball", not "melt metals". Melting metals isn't even a rider effect. Based on context it's most likely 100% a side effect of the main effect. Now could the authors have gotten that wrong because of their limited understanding of physics? Absolutely. But we can still at least try to make ballpark temperature estimates or else prove conclusively that the authors screwed up the physics via a contradiction. For example if it really is hundreds of thousands of degrees based on the effect on metals but not based on the damage. That's also more entertaining than "Cuz magic!" Even if we prove the spell is impossible by real world physics, at least say "They got it wrong but who cares, it's a game."

[DarkSoul]

I think people are looking at the physics a little too hard.

Keep in mind that there are very few people on this forum that will have more than 4-6 hp if they lived in a D&D world. A CL 10 fireball deals, on average, 35 damage on a failed save. That's enough to kill 6-8 people just from the heat applied to a single person caught in the area.

Everyone who's saying "if it were hot enough to instantly melt soft metals it would vaporize a human!"... Who says it doesn't? 8 people's worth of damage taken all at once could easily vaporize and/or detonate a person. A maximized fireball would be even hotter.

[zergling.exe]

I think people are looking at the physics a little too hard.

Keep in mind that there are very few people on this forum that will have more than 4-6 hp if they lived in a D&D world. A CL 10 fireball deals, on average, 35 damage on a failed save. That's enough to kill 6-8 people just from the heat applied to a single person caught in the area.

Everyone who's saying "if it were hot enough to instantly melt soft metals it would vaporize a human!"... Who says it doesn't? 8 people's worth of damage taken all at once could easily vaporize and/or detonate a person. A maximized fireball would be even hotter.

It will also do this at 5d6, the minimum to cast it, which averages ~17 damage, which on average will knock out but not kill hyenas, donkeys, riding dogs (probably saint bernards?), octopi, ponies, porpoise, medium sharks, squids and wolves. It doesn't even on average knock out black bears, boars, camels, cheetahs, crocodiles, horses, leopards, monitor lizards, manta rays, mules, or constrictor snakes. And a 10d6 fireball on average won't even kill apes (gorillas), lions, huge vipers, or wolverines. And even then it won't even knock out brown or polar bears, bison, or tigers.

If a fireball generated enough heat to vaporize a human, most if not all of those critters would be gone as well. But at some point or another, fireball's constant heat level (since it can melt gold as easily at 5th level as 10th) doesn't even kill your average hyena more than half the time.

[Hackulator]

It will also do this at 5d6, the minimum to cast it, which averages ~17 damage, which on average will knock out but not kill hyenas, donkeys, riding dogs (probably saint bernards?), octopi, ponies, porpoise, medium sharks, squids and wolves. It doesn't even on average knock out black bears, boars, camels, cheetahs, crocodiles, horses, leopards, monitor lizards, manta rays, mules, or constrictor snakes. And a 10d6 fireball on average won't even kill apes (gorillas), lions, huge vipers, or wolverines. And even then it won't even knock out brown or polar bears, bison, or tigers.

If a fireball generated enough heat to vaporize a human, most if not all of those critters would be gone as well. But at some point or another, fireball's constant heat level (since it can melt gold as easily at 5th level as 10th) doesn't even kill your average hyena more than half the time.

Exactly, a very good example of D&D and physics just not working together.

[AlanBruce]

It will also do this at 5d6, the minimum to cast it, which averages ~17 damage, which on average will knock out but not kill hyenas, donkeys, riding dogs (probably saint bernards?), octopi, ponies, porpoise, medium sharks, squids and wolves. It doesn't even on average knock out black bears, boars, camels, cheetahs, crocodiles, horses, leopards, monitor lizards, manta rays, mules, or constrictor snakes. And a 10d6 fireball on average won't even kill apes (gorillas), lions, huge vipers, or wolverines. And even then it won't even knock out brown or polar bears, bison, or tigers.

.

It might not knock or kill the animals listed above, but if such an effect were used in real life, those beasts will definitely give you a wide berth and possibly even run away, since animals don’t like getting burnt.

[Jack_Simth]

when i am dming and someone cast fireball in a forest, trees get burnt and catch on fire, it does double damage since you can argue trees are vulnerable to fire cause they are. so any tree less than 1 foot in diameter on an average roll is destroyed.
A rather lot of trees are quite fire resistant, unless there's been a drought lately. There's a reason not every thunderstorm results in a forest fire. While you can start a fire with "green" wood, it's seldom going to be a good one. If you want a nice fire, you cut the tree down, break it up into small chunks... and then stick it in a barn for several months to dry out. Otherwise, it'll be quite hard to set on fire, and once you do, it'll burn colder and smoulder a lot.

Sure, trees burn, and after you've got a lot of them burning, the heat of the fire dries out the ones near the edges of the fire, permitting the fire to spread. But generally, you don't worry much about fire unless there hasn't been much rain in the past couple of weeks (or if there's too much deadfall, which acts as tinder and kindling to get the fire started long enough to dry out and burn the healthy trees).



We also know that it 'detonates with a dull roar' in the 3.5 version.
That's because the air is igniting around it I think? Which would be 5538°C maybe?
Probably not... you'd get a dull roar from any rapid heating of the air - it expands, pushing other air out of the way. If that's not even, it would make sound waves. Suppose for a moment that the fireball takes 2-3 seconds to go off (could help explain the reflex save). Longer exposure means more time to deposit heat on nearby surfaces, and so a 'colder' but longer fireball will have similar effects as a hotter but shorter one on exposed minerals ... possibly minus a lot of the "Instant death for everything" results.

[Thurbane]

According to Dragon #123: 1250-1950°C (2280-3540°F).

"Fire For Effect" by Richard W. Emerich. Honestly, if you have access to it (I bought the old Dragon archive on CD, and have the original issue somewhere), the best written and most comprehensive article I've ever seen on magical fire and real world physics.

Admittedly, the crunch is related to AD&D 1E, but still well worth a read.

[ericgrau]

According to Dragon #123: 1250-1950°C (2280-3540°F).

"Fire For Effect" by Richard W. Emerich. Honestly, if you have access to it (I bought the old Dragon archive on CD, and have the original issue somewhere), the best written and most comprehensive article I've ever seen on magical fire and real world physics.

Admittedly, the crunch is related to AD&D 1E, but still well worth a read.

Well that was pretty straightforward. I think then the answer is simply the authors didn't understand melting time.

[Hackulator]

Well that was pretty straightforward. I think then the answer is simply the authors didn't understand melting time.

I think more just that they did understand that magic being consistent with physics is literally a contradiction in terms and thus time spent worrying about that consistency is mostly wasted.

[Thurbane]

Somewhat related question - this question came up in the Simple RAW Thread:


Q638
Do zones of cold spells such as Ice Storm or Zone of Glacial Cold count as "area of extreme cold" for the purposes of the Frost Mage feat?

A 638

I can't find the feat in question, but Frostburn (p.9) defines extreme cold as -50° F to -20° F.

As far as I know, no temperature range is given for Ice Storm or Zone of Glacial Cold, so you'll need to ask your DM.

...any idea if the temperature range of cold spells is mentioned anywhere, or could be calculated?

[upho]

Somewhat related question - this question came up in the Simple RAW Thread:That's... interesting. I don't recall that there's actually a defined category of cold below "extreme cold" in Frostburn or any other book. If so, that begs the question of why there's a low end −50 °F/−45.56 °C cap, and why that cap is way too high by RL Earth standards. I mean, some Wikipedia searching reveals that for example the ground area at Vostok Station (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station) in Antarctica during a very cold winter's night would then be far too cold to count as an "area of extreme cold" per RAW, since it would likely be far far colder than -50° F (the confirmed measured record here being −89.2 °C/−128.6 °F)).


...any idea if the temperature range of cold spells is mentioned anywhere, or could be calculated?Well, if mixing the above RAW with RL physics and assuming the Frost Mage feat actually does NOT protect against zone of cold spells, their temperature would be somewhere lower than −45.6 °C/−50 °F and presumably above absolute zero (−273.15 °C/−459.67 °F).

However, considering for example that I have personally held 1 liter "bricks" of carbon dioxide ice (sublimates at −78.5 °C/−109.3 °F) for at least a couple of seconds with my bare hands without hurting myself the slightest, it implies that such spells - and anything else causing instant cold damage - are far colder. In RL, I believe you'd need temperatures as low as approximately that of liquid nitrogen, which is −195.79 °C/−320 °F. That is of course assuming that there's "magically" no need for a pressurized chamber to prevent instant (potentially explosive) sublimation of the cold air and that there's no Leidenfrost effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect) delaying the contact damage (as in RL).

[Segev]

The physics of fireball don't work. If they did, it wouldn't be magic it would be science. People's above calculations don't take into account specific heat. In order for the instantaneous effect of a fireball in the air to melt things it would need to be way hotter than their melting point or it would need to magically deliver energy in a way that is incompatible with physics. Fireball does the latter, because it is magic.It could be that, because it's an Evocation (and not a Conjuration), it actually magically super-heats everything to its temperature as the energy field sweeps over it. This would permit us to calculate the temperature things would need to be for the listed effects, while ignoring heat capacity and the bleed-off of additional heat. It's energy Evoked from the Plane of Fire, and gone again in an instant. In that instant, metal briefly melts, combustables catch fire, and the very air briefly ignites with the luminous detritus that makes up visible flame bursting from the bead of guano and sulfer used as the material component. After that instant, anything not actively driven to exothermic reactions drops back to normal temperature, the elemental energy expended.


I think people are looking at the physics a little too hard.

Keep in mind that there are very few people on this forum that will have more than 4-6 hp if they lived in a D&D world. A CL 10 fireball deals, on average, 35 damage on a failed save. That's enough to kill 6-8 people just from the heat applied to a single person caught in the area.

Everyone who's saying "if it were hot enough to instantly melt soft metals it would vaporize a human!"... Who says it doesn't? 8 people's worth of damage taken all at once could easily vaporize and/or detonate a person. A maximized fireball would be even hotter.


It will also do this at 5d6, the minimum to cast it, which averages ~17 damage, which on average will knock out but not kill hyenas, donkeys, riding dogs (probably saint bernards?), octopi, ponies, porpoise, medium sharks, squids and wolves. It doesn't even on average knock out black bears, boars, camels, cheetahs, crocodiles, horses, leopards, monitor lizards, manta rays, mules, or constrictor snakes. And a 10d6 fireball on average won't even kill apes (gorillas), lions, huge vipers, or wolverines. And even then it won't even knock out brown or polar bears, bison, or tigers.

If a fireball generated enough heat to vaporize a human, most if not all of those critters would be gone as well. But at some point or another, fireball's constant heat level (since it can melt gold as easily at 5th level as 10th) doesn't even kill your average hyena more than half the time.

Both of these are adequately dealt with by the abstraction that hp damage doesn't necessarily represent uniform direct physical harm. It can also - and frequently does - represent capacity to narrowly avoid or stave off much more serious wounds. A first level human with 3-8 hp is probably flat-out dead from even a base 5th CL fireball. His body is an incinerated, charred mess of cooked or even flash-vaporized meat and blackened bone, like somebody Jack Nicholson's Joker shook hands with. Paper flash-burns away, wood spontaneously combusts and stays on fire, gold and lead momentarily liquify.

The bear, riding dog, etc, all have better instincts to duck and cover, roll, and possibly just metaphysical oomph to stave off the elemental fire energy, and so have less of their flesh exposed or better hold it off, and are badly burned and probably unconscious, but not likely dead.

The rogue probably dodged the whole effect, somehow. It's an extraordinary special ability of his. The high-level fighter contemptuously sliced at the air with his two-handed sword, and was singed, but the energy he put into his swing parted the worst of it around him. He's down the requisite number of hp; he can only do stunts like that for so long before he'll slip up or be too tired and slow. But the physical damage to him is nearly nothing; all the hp damage is stamina and luck expenditure.

The sorcerer may similarly be able to duck and cover, or he could simply have sufficient inner reserves of mystical resistance to have the fire energies part around him (but still get a bit crispy from proximity).

How the high level hp manifests is essentially what Exalted would call a "stunt," but also neatly explains why your wizard's spellbook doesn't ignite, the fighter's potions don't boil away, and the barbarian's leather loincloth doesn't turn to rather embarassing ash: they've all lost hp, but deflected and avoided the real damage to their physical selves and property.

If they go to zero or lower hp, though, they didn't. They took the fire to the face and are really that badly injured by it.

[Albions_Angel]

Im not sure the physics will ever work, because, as others have said, its magic. But also because its literally a bunch of people LIKE US in a room designing a NEW SYSTEM. Sure, 20 years later, we all sit down and say "Hey, can that actually work" but lets be honest, how many of us, if we go together to make a NEW game, wouldnt let a few cool but impractical things slip through the gaps.

That said -

Organic lifeforms are surprisingly resilient to instantaneous heat. Im not an expert but its probably some combination of just how much water we have in us, and our waterproof, manylayered insulation system - our skin. And the various other systems other beings have. Bark. Fur. Etc.

Lets take a real world example. My dad, when he was in his teens, was home alone, with instructions to remove an old record cabinet. Rather than drag it to the car, take it to the dump, and carry it over to the skip, he decided to push it down the garden and burn it on the bonfire. He did this, filled it with paper, soaked it with petrol, patted his pockets, sighed, shut the doors, and went to find what he had done with the matches. Hopefully you are all cringing right now. Well, he finds them, comes back, strikes one, and opens the doors.

I think its fairly accurate to say that he heard a dull roar. He says he remembers not being in pain. I remembers going back to the house. His face feeling hot. Washing his face and wondering at all the ash in the sink. Then seeing the burns. The pain came later, after the shock wore off.

He lost all his hair. Eyebrows, beard, head hair, everything. But he only suffered minor surface burns to his face. The flash was that quick. Too quick to do major damage to his skin. The only sever burns were where the wires of his glasses touched his face...

Now, back to D&D. Yeah, you are right. The heat capacity of large lumps of gold, copper, silver is probably very high. Too high for the fireball to melt them AND not kill a rhino. Quick flash or not. But is it talking about lumps? Who carries a lump of bronze with them? Especially in a time of iron? No, the metals the spell talks about are likely accents. Inlay. Wires. Thin enough to snap with your hands without noticing. That and gold leaf, but we can discout that. Something that thin would SEEM to burn rather than to melt, I would imagine. And what is melt? Actual liquid pools? Or deformation? Because the latter is easy. All those metals are very conductive to heat. A quick flash might well heat them all enough for them to deform, to droop or pop out of their housings. For the ends of exposed wires to shrink and form little dropplets. If you saw that, and were asked, you would say they melted.

I dont know what temp it would have to be. But I imagine probably not much hotter than a decent balcksmiths forge. For a fraction of a second, the heat of a forge, yeah, wet organics would survive quite well. Exposed thin metals? I can see them melting. Thicker bits of iron (swords)? Nah, warmer, but not much.

Its not an explosion like a bomb. Its a fireball. Its this (https://youtu.be/vX7L-0689dA?t=5).

EDIT: for those of use that did chem classes. You can run your hand through a roaring flame. It will burn. Badly. But you can do it and still have a hand. You can also pass a very thin gold wire (not the neodymium special wires) through the same flame, at the same speed, and the end will bead up and curl instantly.