User blog comment:Xanneer/PHYSICS!/@comment-24911350-20140529232559/@comment-24911350-20140530025824

It's not much of an exaggeration really. Almost all of the killing power with explosives (Aside from ones like nuclear bombs obviously) comes from shrapnel, and their potential for secondary explosions. You could stand a few meters away from a straight TNT blast  in the middle of a field and you'd be largely unharmed by the shockwave aside from ruptured eardrums, (Maybe some rock shards or something could hurt you though). VV doesn't have shrapnel because it uses dust rounds, so the comparison stands.

Let's say the shockwave is only strong enough to knock over an empty soda bottle. That means if you placed 100 bottles in a radius around the shockwave, they'd all be knocked over, and if you could somehow place them in mid-air as well, at the same distance from the epicenter, they would be knocked over too. It might not be much acting on a single object, but all the force that acts on anything, or could act on anything adds up, and it ends up being a lot of force when it all comes together. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so the equivelant of all that cumulative force also acts on Zahn as recoil. The total force that your shockwave could ever be capable of applying to anything is also applied to Zahn in the opposite direction, that's the bottom line, and that force is going to be really big if the shockwave is going to be strong enough to be even worth mentioning.