I thoroughly enjoy many of Stackpole's Battletech novels. Even with their rather bizarre fetish for insisting that lasers capable of burning through tanks transfer kilojoules of energy. I mean, seriously, if kilojoules were that bad then the surface of the Earth would be molten; one square meter of the Earth's surface absorbs one kilojoule of solar radiation per SECOND.
Granted, if you focused it onto a square millimeter and dumped it in a millisecond that would generate more oomph. But still, one ton of TNT generates about 4 gigajoules (billions), 2 pounds of TNT generates ~4 megajoules (millions), so 3.2 ounces of TNT would generate ~4 kilojoules (thousands). That's nasty, but hardly the kind of thing that blows up tanks.
Now, dozens or hundreds of kilojoules...that would be exciting.
Interesting sidebar: TNT has about 4.6 megajoules per kilogram, but gasoline (when you have an oxidant in there giving it the O2 it needs) has 47.2 megajoules per kilogram. So now you know.