User blog:Skaffolding/Magelight: Dust being yote through graves

This is a calculation of a feat that takes place in a chapter of Magelight, here's the quote.

He ducked, but not in time to avoid the large arc of lightning which collided with his chest, lifting him up and sending him through several gravestones. Dust grunted in moderate pain, winded, as he dragged himself to his feet, the bottoms of his boots scraping against the fresh pile of gravel he'd just created, to continue with his battle.

Assumptions

 * "Several" gravestones means 3.


 * Average weight of a gravestone is 86- 1,000 pounds. For balance I'll be using 543.5 as an in-between.

The calculation
Step 1: Volume.

543.5 x 3 = 1630.5lbs. This is equal to 741.14 kilograms. Density of granite is 2.65 grams per cubic centimetre, so dividing this gives us a volume of 279,675.5 cubic centimetres.

Since there's mention of the impact creating gravel, I'll be using violent fragmentation. For granite, that's 400 MPa.

279,675.5 x 400 = 111,870,200 joules. That's 26.74 Kilograms of TNT, or Small Building Level.

If accepted, this will be scaled to Dust's durability instead of the energy from a lightning bolt. Since assuming it was as powerful as a real one seems somewhat unreasonable.