So I had an idea to make a character’s death more heroic and meaningful, but first I need to know the circumstances in which an explosion would not kill them instantly so they have time for a tender final moment. The scenario: the rebels are positioned behind a barricade in the street. The enemy brings out a tripod cannon. If you’ve seen the finale of The Mandalorian, you’ll recognize this weapon as the E-Web heavy repeating blaster. You’ll also know what happens when you shoot the power pack. (If not, you can probably guess from the thread title.) What you may not know is that E-Webs have a personal shield around them. This makes sense, because the gunners do not usually have cover and could be picked off easily. I would assume the shield’s radius is about twenty feet. In addition, the weapon takes about ten minutes to charge up, but can fire low-power blasts before a full charging. So obviously, because of the shield, the rebels behind the barricade can’t touch it because it’s about forty feet from their position. I had a resolution for this, but now I want to change it for reasons I stated above. The character, Portia, is eighteen years old, has been living on scraps for eight years of her life until a few days ago, and has pachydermic skin. That should give you enough to speculate what her body could take. I want her to destroy the power pack and die from her injuries from the resulting explosion. Under what circumstances would this be believable? (How far away she is from the explosion, what kind of injuries she sustains, how long she would have to live, etc.)
Skin isn't really an issue with people dying because of explosions. Usually what happens is that when the massive pressure wave of the blast passes over someone, their body pressure goes from normal, to bottom of the ocean, to the borders of space, and back to normal all within a fraction of a second. Most internal organs and soft tissue aren't meant to handle that and turn into some kind of ruptured jelly, brain included, and wouldn't leave any time for sentiment and even if they were conscious, they'd probably be too busy drowning on their own blood to give anyone around them much notice. Maybe if they were outside the blast radius and only got hit with shrapnel, bleeding out could take a while, but that would be similar to being hit by a bullet, so however your character would handle that.
