Destructive Capacity

Destructive Capacity is simply the capacity of a character to cause destruction. It is useful for scaling the power of a character and is the most common method of determining how much damage a character can dish out, but it is not absolute, since destruction of certain things such as cities requires range (AoE), and some attacks like focused lasers might not even qualify as, say, building busters even though they are much more damaging than the punch of someone who takes down a building in one go. Even still, it's useful for a general comparison and placing characters into leagues. Destructive capacity is based on the ability to destroy with a single attack.

- An alternate method of calculation is to determine what materials the attack is capable of destroying. Someone who can cut steel is... a steel cutter. It can even be applied to fictional materials, for example, a villain boasting "This tank is made of Barritium, which is ten thousand times the strength of steel! You'll never defeat me! Mwhahahahahaha!" ...and then the hero smashes the tank in one go, and we have our answer! However, this scenario does not present itself often due to it requiring the author to actually tell us these things through the writing. We are usually left with existing materials, or scaling from what the material has withstood (a spaceship which withstood the gravitational shearing of a black hole is made out of something hard to destroy) -

The terms used here are not thoroughly classified, and are quite general on the lower scales, some such as building buster, island buster, and country buster are very vague, being subject to colloquialism and too much generalization. As such, this page attempts to formalize them with calculated values so we can all learn to stop being retards and classify things a bit better. This list is an extensive breakdown and includes known estimates of multiples from the bottom of a level to the top in terms of explosive energy, if it is quantifiable. Note: for things such as physical strikes, energy just gives an idea of the equivalent magnitude and is important in general terms, whereas force due to deceleration and then the pressure due to area are the factors that deliver the damage (a handgun bullet can have kinetic energy in range of a human punch, but is way more lethal), so this becomes more important for explosive/energy attacks than physical ones.

Attack Potency Chart
NOTE If you wish to know the equivalent prefix of a particular exponential value, please see this page.