Supernovae, their functioning, lightcurves, and remnants

Ever since Shklovskii's influential 1962 paper, the literature tends to model supernovae (SNe) with strong shock waves (or blast waves), implying reverse shocks, Sedov stages, and the like. Here I repeat my conviction since 1988, that all SNe are of the core-collapse type, and are expelled by the collapsing core's wound-up magnetic field plus its decay product - an ultra-high-energy (UHE) relativistic cavity - which serves as the ultimate piston. The piston's Rayleigh-Taylor instability tears the ejected envelope into a huge number (≫103) of (magnetized, filamentary) fragments, or splinters. The critical stellar mass Mcrit for core collapse to happen is closer to 5 M⊙ than to 8 M⊙. SN remnants are former stellar windzones, collisionally heated when traversed by the shell of ejected SN splinters and by its relativistic piston (which has strongly cooled, though, via adiabatic expansion).