In the original game, the power source explosions at crash sites seemed to have a variable damage value. I've seen many asymmetrical terror ship interiors, with the interior section being divided into quadrants on whether or not the walls are blown out. Sometimes one quadrant has all the walls standing while the other three are blown flat. Sometimes three quadrants are standing while one is blown flat. Or other variances. On battleships, sometimes a power pod has a bit of smoke peeking out, other times it's blown clean open. Large scouts sometimes have the interior room blown apart, other times the destruction takes out the central walls, dividing the ship into four limbs minus the central section. But perhaps the most drastic of these is the medium scout. Usually in a crash it has a neat little hole in the top, and all the chairs are blown out. But sometimes it is so flattened you have to wonder how it all arrived on the ground in the same place.
I didn't bother to find an actual example, but instead I simulated one with a 255 power blaster bomb:
Surely if you've played the original game, you've seen this before, right?
As the explosions seem to have exactly two power values rather than varying across any spectrum, I suspect that they are either 200 (neat little hole in the top) or 255 (blows out any nearby walls), with 200 being the more common of the two. Why 200? That's the exact amount needed to blow out exactly one wall section. That's definitely a value that is used, and I'm quite certain openxcom preserves this as I have seen it plenty of times. Why 255? It's the largest value you can fit in an unsigned 2-byte integer, it's a reasonable guess, and as you can see from the image above, it produces an effect similar to what we see occasionally in vanilla X-Com: UFO Defense on crash sites.
