Replace (or supplement!) “hidden casualty of war” with “dangerous criminal” and I agree with you. Suicide is one thing. Violent support of fascism is something else.
Indeed. This is just such a trivial thing to get right that either the standards are so low that no one cares, or (I suspect) the more sensational ‘story’ is what gets play even if it is obviously untrue. With the potential of this story to engender fear about terrorism and be used to justify heightened restrictions of civil liberties and more authority for federal law enforcement by the incoming administration, it is important to characterize this even accurately, i.e. as the suicidal action of a single individual with probably mental health issues and neurological impairment, who purchased openly available pyrotechnics that do not require any kind of license or background check, and did not seriously injure anyone else or destroy a building.
From your link:
Explosion
An explosion is a sudden, rapid release of energy that produces potentially damaging pressures.
Neither the glass doors almost immediately adjacent to the vehicle, nor the portico directly above it or the entire glass facia of the hotel show signs of blast damage. As the windows of large glass-front buildings will crack or shatter with as little as a 0.25 psi overpressure wave, it is apparent that the acoustic output of this event was not very energetic. None of the seven victims in or around the car park suffered life threatening injuries which would be produced in proximity to an explosive blast:
Describing this event as an “explosion” (much less using the term “detonation”, which authorities did and reporters carelessly repeated) even in colloquial usage of the term is inaccurate and sensationalist.
Stranger
I’ve got all of five minutes to scan the thread before waiting for my flight, but I’ll pipe in. @Loach has the military aspect pretty much covered.
VBIEDs, normally by amateurs, tend to be stochastic in performance. Too many variables in play, and normally performance comes down to the simple math of “how much high explosive can I pack into this thing?” The vehicle is just that: a delivery platform. I’ll spare further details on a public message board
[Fun, true story!]
Back in '09 or '10, I was building a shot for a “major laboratory” who wanted to map blast wave propagation, and component distribution after a VBIED detonation. So, there I am with another NCO, stacking 1,100 lbs of C-4 in the back of a small-ish “breadbox” delivery van kind of a small shot, but hey, t’was a paying job.
We primed in, ran det cord out, set a timed fuze and rode our ATVs away. I really reckoned the compartment would be vaporized, the cab heavily damaged, but engine & chassis would just sort of shift forward five feet or so.
Nope.
That shot not only vaporized the storage and personnel compartments, it shattered the engine block, spraying it forward, and flipped what was left of the chassis a couple of times. ~25 lb chunks of the engine block were splayed up to 300’ forward, and the chassis had rolled twice, coming to rest about 40’ away from the detonation site.
Talking with the test engineer post-event, I picked up that the recently playa-like mud flats of the range’s site may have reflected the shock up and out radially, which exceeded his expectations too. He was only planning to map out a radius of 100’ with his GPS in about an afternoon, so we stayed with him for another day afterwards scoping out pieces.
[/Fun, true story!]
Bottom line: “Vics” don’t matter. Charge composition and mass matters. Site environment matters.
Tripler
I miss those days.
What damaged the truck? What caused pieces of the truck to fly apart?
Pressure.
I am not going to get drawn into yet another hijack with you based on your misperceptions. If you want to discuss this further, start a separate thread and I’ll be happy to explain what an “explosion” is and is not.
Stranger
I said my piece and provided a cite from an expert who supports my position. I’m good leaving it at that.
It looks more like a suicide than a bombing. The explosion managed to pop the roll top bed cover off but not much else. If he shot himself with a Desert Eagle 50 cal gun that would have made a mess.
I think for most people, half a ton of C-4 would not be classified as “a small shot”, but I have been witness to the “energetic reduction” of a CMDB motors with an NEW of over four thousand pounds detonated with a couple of bricks of C-4. Occasionally we would find an identifiable piece of fiberglass case or a portion of the aft closure but virtually everything else is consumed or reduced to unidentifiable fragments. I am told that there was once a test where one of these motors which was dropped from a C-141 or C-17 to see if it would detonate completely upon impact and…it did. Unfortunately, I have never been able to secure any video of that test.
Stranger
Here is an interview with the owner of the cybertruck that the guy rented. The renter asked specifically about how to turn on the outlet in the back from the screen and from the phone app.
Oh, I was being a bit of a wiseguy. I would figure for most people, a 1.25 lb “brick-‘o’-C” would be a fun day. Those of us in that world though–you included–would regularly handle hundreds of pounds on a routine basis. My “fun days” were ‘thermal treatment’ of SLBM motors (87,000 lbs TNT Eqv.), initiated with, like you said, just a couple of bricks.
Tripler
I do have my video–self narrated for authenticity. 
To be clear, my question wasn’t about what reaction he could initiate that would set off the explosives. It was about what he, personally, did to start it. Did he push a button, flip a switch, light a fuse, etc.
In particular: This certainly sounds like a way that someone could set off the IED. But using a touchscreen menu on a phone or dashboard is not something that you can do after you’ve shot yourself in the head. Does the app include a timer that you could use to turn on the outlet after a one-minute delay, or something of the sort?
Or you could flip a switch that turns on a timer to set off the fireworks, then shoot yourself in that short interval.
No. Good point. But it could turn on a timer.
Or just use a few feet of cannon fuse.
Stranger
Hey y’all! Watch this!
TPM:
The perp reportedly had a number of violent relationships with women, PTSD, probable traumatic brain injury.
He also had a couple of short manifestos on his iPhone. Huh. Josh Marshall:
Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Did you miss that stuff?
Yeah, me too!
The perp also explains his use of fireworks:
As a final point, let me return to the question we’ve discussed over the last few days: what was the political message of torching a Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel? He actually answers that more or less clearly in the second minifesto: “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”
So we have a terrorist or maybe an attention seeker or maybe a very frustrated comedian who used fireworks because he didn’t want to kill people.
Yeah. Taking his life in a cybertruck would have made the news. Doing it with a big fiery (but relatively safe) boom in front of a Trump property and we’re still talking about it.
Letters from a loony loser:
https://www.jezebel.com/cybertruck-bomber-manifesto-masculinity-tk
Credit where credit is due: I have often felt that we’d have fewer murder-suicides in this country if we started calling them suicide-murders.
I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.