i think youd have to invoke physics we dont know yet.

 it would require nuke levels of energy if done by heat.

maybe a stupidly powerful maser?

 

forgive any sp.. quite battered

 

matter of phrasing

have some nuclear shit you fuckers

 

is that pc?

 

I'm going to ignore the relatively trivial amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of the water in your enemy to the boiling point. This will be utterly lethal but it only requires a bit more than 60cal per gram of water in their bodies, is so relatively miniscule compared to what it takes to vaporize them.

 

It takes about 1.2kcal to force that water to change phase into vapor,  per gram or cubic centimeter. For a rather large human of 100kg (100000g) that is 120000kcal, or 120000000cal. at 4.2J/cal that is 504000000J. 504MJ or 0.5GJ. Most militaries have better things to do with a half gigajoule than convert the bodies of enemies that are already very very dead into vapor.

 

The other complication is that in order to get your usual vaporization effect you need to pump that energy into the target in a uniform way, otherwise some parts will vaporize before others. It's been a long time since I've seen Mars Attacks. they may have vaporized some parts before others. I'm mostly thinking of Phasers here.

 

It is possible you could use some other (*highly* speculative) technology to vaporize someone without needing to deal with the energy needed to force water to change phase. However it still won't look anything like your typical sci fi vaporization effect.

 

The temperature of the expanding gas in a HE explosion isn't as important as the fact that you have suddenly converted the entire mass of the solid explosive compound into gas that still occupies the same volume that the solid did. It is the sudden and rapidly expandsion of that gas that causes the explosion. If you were to take the entire mass of a person and instantly convert it into vapor you'd get quite a large explosion as well, Because of the much lower temperature of the gas, its not going to be anywhere near as large as you'd get with a similar mass of HE, but would still be enough to make quite a mess.

how about a field that turns off the electromagnetic force for a second?

they would just turn into a cloud of elements

which , a lot would react together after the field effect faded,so there would still be an explosion

but you wouldnt need such a thing to get the whole man, just a 10 cm sphere would do

now that is a terror weapon