Honest question: I’ve always wondered what causes so much stuff to catch fire when hit by explosions. Like, I’m just imagining trying to light normal cotton clothes on fire: You would need to hold a lighter to it for quite some time, and then wait a while for the fire to spread before you could get anything like what this guy has on him. How are these short blasts of heat, air and shrapnel able to seemingly set pretty much anything on fire instantly?
Intensity is the answer I believe. They are short blasts as you say, but they exceed basically every design metric on every product. A lighter has a low intensity flame, but a blast has a small amount of much hotter gasses and flames which can make a material’s surface temperature exceed its flash point and combust, feeding the fire further.
Plus, shrapnel flying around punching holes in gas tanks and sending sparks everywhere helps out a lot too.
