Glow Question

[Talisien]

Of,course, everyone is assuming that tech is better in regards to shielding equipment. But I think that the nukes would have changed, become more powerful, over time too.

And what's this talk of vaccum tubes? Are they still being used? I thought they went the way of the dodo a long time ago. As far as I can tell, only the LOOK of things is all 50's scifi, not the actual tech. I would imagine that things have progressed far enough by the time of the Great War in 2077 that even what's considered high tech today will have LONG since been obsolete.

I remember reading a study in high school that said the human race as a whole doubles it's total sum of knowledge in slightly more than a generation, about every 34 years. So a war that would take place 90 years in the future (at the time of the game's release) would almost HAVE to involve a level of technology that would be nearly incomprehensible now.

 

[Sander]

Of,course, everyone is assuming that tech is better in regards to shielding equipment. But I think that the nukes would have changed, become more powerful, over time too.

Ehm, so? There have been many anti-EMP measures in existance since before the fifties. One of the best example is good old Cheyenne Mountain, which should be able to properly withstand nuclear blasts, including EMP.

And what's this talk of vaccum tubes? Are they still being used? I thought they went the way of the dodo a long time ago. As far as I can tell, only the LOOK of things is all 50's scifi, not the actual tech. I would imagine that things have progressed far enough by the time of the Great War in 2077 that even what's considered high tech today will have LONG since been obsolete.

Except that you're *wrong*. Plain and simple. If you'd actually look at the interface you'd see a lot of vacuum tubes as well. The whole point of Fallout is that it is based in 50s Sci-Fi, when transistors and semi-conductors were not yet invented. In the world of Fallout they were *never* invented. This is simply a fact. Whatever you can tell is completely irrelevant to this.

I remember reading a study in high school that said the human race as a whole doubles it's total sum of knowledge in slightly more than a generation, about every 34 years. So a war that would take place 90 years in the future (at the time of the game's release) would almost HAVE to involve a level of technology that would be nearly incomprehensible now.

Except that Fallout's world is not the same as the world we currently live in. Whatever you think would have to happen on a completely ridiculous theory that tries to formulate something that is essentially intangible and very subjective is irrelevant to Fallout's design.

 

[Roshambo]

Holodisk/tape technology is actually extant (but little known) technology developed by RCA as a home video format and surprisingly, envisioned by the Fallout Devs without them knowing a lick of info about RCA's device.
http://www.cedmagic.com/history/holotape.html
and also Motorola sent another system to market:
http://www.labguysworld.com/Motorola_EVR.htm
It's a perfectly viable non-magnetic storage medium and wouldn't have been affected by EMP by virture of being optical. The terminals themselves, I don't believe, had any local storage anyway. If they did it always seemed to be strictly Holotape handlers, and as I said Holotapes can survive the EMP as long as they don't melt .

Having worked with optical systems a bit as well, I can relate a few of the key features they were working to accomplish - at least some of the unclassified and commercial-grade stuff. One of which is a purely EMP-proof fiber-optic machine that IS feasable. Any signal transference or non-optic system parts were held natively shielded in the equipment's own case acting as a thrice-shielded Faraday Cage. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet FCC regulations by that, and therefore is not publicly available for purchase.

To address Talisien's points in relation to this, it would suggest that Fallout's technological level had a mixture of magnetic and optical technology, optical being relatively new and preserved for sensitive areas. Given the tube nature of Fallout's systems, the timing and such would not be comparable to a digital setup of today, and so in Fallout they managed to arrive to a vacuum tube supercomputer.

Also, about The Glow, due to the higher technology - if they have the tech to make Zax a super-computer based upon tubes and possibly optics, then they certainly would have built the bunker for relative nuclear power. It appears that nukes got a *bit* more advanced than the bunker was rated at, so perhaps the bunker was a decade or three older than the war, no longer. Top quality top secret research projects are not given the bottom of the site list, so I'm guessing it was no older than a decade or two, and satisfied some if not all of its intended design.

I was going to mention the bit about the huge steel cases of the computer terminals being effective faraday cages but Rosh beat me to it. Not to mention it all being mil-spec equipment and probably shielded and grounded beyond belief deliberately.

Actually, I would fear for anything *NEAR* the terminal and raised to over 1' in height, over anything happening to the terminal itself. The voltage differences can achieve momentary Tesla coil spark gap effect. So imagine someone sitting in a chair at the time of impact, if the blast didn't already kill them. They might have been incinerated from the high amperage, as the surrounding metal would have built up one hell of a collected charge at that range, in a few moments before it dissipates to earth ground.

Combine that with the natural resistance of a vacuum-tube circuit to interferance (operating at 20-50 kV helps to "shrug off" little things like EMP ) and you've got a recipe for survival. A few odd systems errors at most; Perhaps the main generators are off line due to a pulse down the line? Faulty failsafe or some such let it slip through?

Or, maybe just a tube needs to be replaced due to a burn-out, and the system is good to go for power again. This was one of my favorite applications for radar, because it lends to an enduring system that doesn't have too many digital timing problems, and it can microwave seagulls.

 

[Lord 342]

Or, maybe just a tube needs to be replaced due to a burn-out, and the system is good to go for power again. This was one of my favorite applications for radar, because it lends to an enduring system that doesn't have too many digital timing problems, and it can microwave seagulls.

Ah, fun with radar!
My dad was a controller in the Air Force. In an exercise once a bomber was about to slip through the defenses (due to it putting out massive amounts of jamming), so they ordered 3 or 4 height-finders LOCKED on it (as opposed to their normal operation of a vertical sweep). This caused all the jamming equipment in it to catch on fire. The bomber declared an actual emergency and had to leave the exercise .
They also cooked a border patrol agent who stepped on top of a gap-filler radar truck while the antenna was going around, in spite of the "DO NOT CLIMB LADDER WHILE ANTENNA IS IN MOTION" sign. He wanted to look at something while the radar crew taught the rest of the agents how to use the radar set. He kept saying how he felt "funny". Naturally, they insisted he go to the hospital.
Somewhere he's got a slide of burnt-out fluorescent tubes zip-tied to a cyclone fence spelling out "MERRY X-MAS". They would glow as the sweep went by.

But yes, one tube blowing out and stopping the propagation of the failure is likely. If the equipment didn't have redundant circuitry then it would've been a simple matter for either ZAX's robots (assuming they failed some time after the attack) or someone from the Brotherhood to repair the computer.

 

[Talisien]

Sander wrote:

Except that you're *wrong*. Plain and simple. If you'd actually look at the interface you'd see a lot of vacuum tubes as well. The whole point of Fallout is that it is based in 50s Sci-Fi, when transistors and semi-conductors were not yet invented. In the world of Fallout they were *never* invented. This is simply a fact. Whatever you can tell is completely irrelevant to this

Never invented? Okay, it's a game, suspension of disbelief for purpose of fun and all, but do you really believe that in 125 or so years, science never moved beyond vaccuum tubes? And as for the interface screen, that could be explained by the fact that even in a vault, they would have to have some things that were low-tech and easy to manufacture replacements for. The war happened 2077. How could ANYONE believe that in 125 years, science just sat still and never developed transistors and semi-conductors, and yet has laser and plasma weapons, and cybernetic computers? Not to mention power armor, which has it's own internal fusion reactor?

How were they *never* invented? No sarcasm, seriously. You have a lot of experience in electronics, and it shows. I respect that. But how could science advance as far as cybernetic computers and brain bots, but not invent the transistor? I don't get it.

 

[Tagaziel]

It's called "50s science"?

It was repeatedly stated, that Fallout was inspired by the vision of the future people in the fifities had - nuked out. Fallout timeline diverged from ours in the fifties.

Is it this hard to comprehend? A world existing in an alternate timeline has alternate technology. They don't have transistors and microprocessors - they have tubes, and lots of them, refined to the point, that they can be used in hand-held devices with a lot of processing power (PIP-Boy 2000, Stealth Boy), weapons (Winchester P94, Wattz 2000, Wattz 1000, Glock 86...), mainframes (ZAX), even armours (T-51b Powered Infantry Combat Armor).

Fallout was designed this way, not the other, with alternative tech in mind. Why weren't transistors and semi-conductors invented? Because they weren't. Progress of technology doesn't mean it's taking one, single path. There are a multitude of ways it can developed, and Fallout's world, as well as ours, are just two possible ones.

 

[Lord 342]

Sander wrote:

Except that you're *wrong*. Plain and simple. If you'd actually look at the interface you'd see a lot of vacuum tubes as well. The whole point of Fallout is that it is based in 50s Sci-Fi, when transistors and semi-conductors were not yet invented. In the world of Fallout they were *never* invented. This is simply a fact. Whatever you can tell is completely irrelevant to this

Never invented? Okay, it's a game, suspension of disbelief for purpose of fun and all, but do you really believe that in 125 or so years, science never moved beyond vaccuum tubes? And as for the interface screen, that could be explained by the fact that even in a vault, they would have to have some things that were low-tech and easy to manufacture replacements for. The war happened 2077. How could ANYONE believe that in 125 years, science just sat still and never developed transistors and semi-conductors, and yet has laser and plasma weapons, and cybernetic computers? Not to mention power armor, which has it's own internal fusion reactor?

How were they *never* invented? No sarcasm, seriously. You have a lot of experience in electronics, and it shows. I respect that. But how could science advance as far as cybernetic computers and brain bots, but not invent the transistor? I don't get it.

It's not that tech sat still; it's just extrapolated out from a point. Clearly what they do with tubes surpasses what we do with transistors; they have tubes with 125 years of research on top of them. Just because it is a tube it must not be thought of in terms of a mid-20th century tube. It is a tube with 125 years of development and is that much faster, better, more reliable and more versatile.

 

[Talisien]

I still don't see how any amount of research could make a vacuum tube THAT good, but... I'm going to apply the same technique here that I sometimes use when arguing with my woman: "The Smile and Nod." You guys won't convince me, and I won't convince you, so I'm just going to smile and nod, and let it go. Not that I don't like a good argument, but I think this one has accomplished all that it's going to accomplish. Might as well just move on to other things, and let this one rot in a shallow grave. No sense kicking the dead horse- unless you've got power armor and Bloody Mess, in which case it might be fun for a bit, LOL.

 

[Sander]

Sander wrote:


Never invented? Okay, it's a game, suspension of disbelief for purpose of fun and all, but do you really believe that in 125 or so years, science never moved beyond vaccuum tubes? And as for the interface screen, that could be explained by the fact that even in a vault, they would have to have some things that were low-tech and easy to manufacture replacements for. The war happened 2077. How could ANYONE believe that in 125 years, science just sat still and never developed transistors and semi-conductors, and yet has laser and plasma weapons, and cybernetic computers? Not to mention power armor, which has it's own internal fusion reactor?

How were they *never* invented? No sarcasm, seriously. You have a lot of experience in electronics, and it shows. I respect that. But how could science advance as far as cybernetic computers and rain bots, but not invent the transistor? I don't get it.

Oh, for fuck's sake.
This is not about what is likely to happen in the *real* world, since Fallout is not based on the real world. It is based on an alternate history scenario, where certain things didn't happen. One of those things is the invention of the transistor. Whether or not you think this is stupid is completely irrelevant to what is actually the case in Fallout, because that is a design choice the designers of Fallout made, not you.