BigGuyCIA
Yer fond of me Lobster!
I went on a tangent but it's not related to CA.
New York isn’t a crater. Fallout 4 confirms as much.
- Thread starter stevejock1
- Start date
I went on a tangent but it's not related to CA.
Okay, I was mostly curious as to who you were mad about flip flopping haha. I could see Chris doing it easily as I said I just kinda ran with the idea that it was him. The only thing that didn't line up was anime profile picture. But who knows?
BigGuyCIA
Yer fond of me Lobster!
The guy I was referencing on the forums had some smug profile picture.
My Dude, you do realize there' a whole upstate? Also called New York? And even if you want NYC to be a crater, I certainly do.....I mean in the game and certainly not in real life...then New York City is a Crater is likely not include ALL the whole of all five boroughs. Staten Island would almost certainly be intact and while it's true actual Staten Islanders would go Horray, we're not part of NYC anymore, refugees from NYC proper are gonna go "Oh look, Staten Island is full of raiders! KILL THEM!" On October 26, 2077 no less.
In a fanfic I was writing, DC was completely destroyed but the Fallout 3 map doesn't include all of DC, no the area south of the Anacostia River is the 8th District, which nobody cares about because it's a total ghetto tract with nothing for the non-locals. But in my fanfic, based partially on the Librarian, it's largely intact with and completely rebuilt where damaged, so it doesn't look 2077 nice but it's something the Lomans from Death of a Salesman and the gangs from West Side Story would find comfortable if a bit dreary, only with some horses and brahmin pulling carts, a few motorcycles and working delivery trucks. The DC you never think of is in fact, the only DC left. Other than ghoul communities in Underworld and ghoul academics in Georgetown University
At the very least, the outer edges of Queens wouldn't be totally destroyed by a bomb blast designed to take out the real power center of the NYC, which has always been Manhatten
You sure about that? No clue how accurate this is though ...
http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Now you have to remember that at the height of the cold war, there have been if I remember correctly more than 40 000 nuclear weapons available. I am sure New York, as a large city would have seen more than just one hit and probably not all in the same place but spread across a wide area to inflict as much damage as possible.
Like I said earlier, in a realistic scenario, the whole urban area of New York, if not the whole state, would be just a crater. But yeah, in Bethesdas Fallout, or well the world of Fallout in general the yield and effects of nuclear weapons works very different to the real world for obvious reasons.
There's something you have to remember, a couple of things: 1. ABM systems DO exist, the whole reason SLC got hit with seven is that their ABM system probably malfunctioned entirely. House's system was a lot more advanced but 88 missiles headed for Nevada sounds about right.2. Treaty restrictions limited nukes to under a megaton, actually 750 KT 3. Unstated but very very clear: the Chinese attack was not designed to cripple the United States, it was to eradicate entity entirely. They hit places of no military values because the goal was genocide, well more so than usual MAD strikes on urban centers. 3. The damage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are extremely atypical of modern cities. Japanese cities were built mostly with wood, modern cities are built with stone and concrete.
If you want to know what a modern city hit with a nuke would look like, Berlin at the end of the war is a good template. Washington DC's damage I think is pretty accurate, structural damage is extreme at the blast sights and minimal everywhere else, and most of the damage was from the flash fires, which is how you get the pocket effect. New York would be similar, with broken skyscrapers like in the opening of Fallout but much much bigger.
If you want New York City to be a crater, you need it hit with a Case Bravo at 15 MT at least and really a Czar Bomba at 50 MT. But Upstate New York? No way, that's about the size of all of West Germany, not even a 100 MT bomb could scorch that, much less kiss the ground lightly.
Honestly, the most unrealistic part of Bethesda's ruined cities is that the streets aren't collapsing. All the infrastructure runs under the streets as it's the only publically owned land that can connect everything. In DC, they seemed to have gone out of their away to avoid this trope because the sewer systems and Metro as filled to the brim with still working supercomputers and control stations? Why? They're keeping the entire system from flooding, which without power it would do in three days to a week. And this IS in keeping with Fallout's wonderful notion of extreme over-engineering. Boston doesn't seem to have this, but that's the least of Boston's world-building problems. But why the cities are so intact has everything to do with the stupid levels of overengineering the pre-war world was prone to.
I think I understand you now. I can not speak for everyone, but I think the notion "crater" was not to be taken literally here like as New York would be hit by a giant asteroid which would leave a no clue 50 foot crater or what ever. At least that's not what I meant so sorry for any misunderstanding on my part I was being merely hyperbolic. Nukes usually detonate in the air anyway for maximum structural damage, so there would be probably no crater. Unless we're talking about bunker-bursting weapons but even those leave only small craters. But I think it is fair to assume that pretty much most buildings would be levelled with just the bare skeletton structure of a few of them left.
The point I am trying to make is that with a full nuclear war and the cold war is the only reference we can use when it comes to the estimated number of nuclear weapons it would probably leave a state like New York so devastated that you would be lucky to find any noteworthy life or structures left, leave alone the radiation that would probably do the rest. Survival would be literally impossible I think. But this is all very theoretical anyway. This is what I mean when the games, like F3 and F4 are not realistic, if you so want. But hands down I personally believe humanity would not have survived a full scale nuclear war like between the NATO and Warsaw Pact states anyway. Not with more than 45 000 Nukes going off.
If we're talking about the Fallout games in particular. Bethesdas visual representation of the destruction is I think wrong from a more realistic point of view as there is way to much structure still standing in their games particularly after such a long time. I would be surprised if anyone could tell that there was a real city standing even after a few decades. Why do the Bethesda games still show such kind of infrastructure and landscape? Probably because they want the player to have something interesting to explore and not just keep everything a flat surface, desert or what ever with some rubble here and there overtaken by vegetation and erosion. You could say what Bethesda is showing here is an extremely idealised idea of a nuclear war.
The point I am trying to make is that with a full nuclear war and the cold war is the only reference we can use when it comes to the estimated number of nuclear weapons it would probably leave a state like New York so devastated that you would be lucky to find any noteworthy life or structures left, leave alone the radiation that would probably do the rest. Survival would be literally impossible I think. But this is all very theoretical anyway. This is what I mean when the games, like F3 and F4 are not realistic, if you so want. But hands down I personally believe humanity would not have survived a full scale nuclear war like between the NATO and Warsaw Pact states anyway. Not with more than 45 000 Nukes going off.
If we're talking about the Fallout games in particular. Bethesdas visual representation of the destruction is I think wrong from a more realistic point of view as there is way to much structure still standing in their games particularly after such a long time. I would be surprised if anyone could tell that there was a real city standing even after a few decades. Why do the Bethesda games still show such kind of infrastructure and landscape? Probably because they want the player to have something interesting to explore and not just keep everything a flat surface, desert or what ever with some rubble here and there overtaken by vegetation and erosion. You could say what Bethesda is showing here is an extremely idealised idea of a nuclear war.
OK, the thing about us surviving a full-scale nuclear war, I disagree with you. Me personally, I might not ever have been born (actually I would as my parents were both born in small towns) but humanity would survive. Fallout's only bad for two weeks and after three days you're at least as likely to live as die, and after that, you get the same cancer risk as being a nudist in Boulder Colorado. The risks of low-level radiation are VASTLY overstated and in fact it's kinda good for you and you're immune system, in the same way, feral orks are a good thing on resettled worlds of the Imperium of Man as they are great targets to bloody new recruits on before they get shipped properly into the Imperial Gaurd.
The biggest risk of nuclear war is always famine due to trade collapse.
But the real reason the ruins are like the way they are in Fallout? Cause these cities aren't built with modern materials. They're built with super durable materials with built-in maintenance protocols and independent power sources. The BOS bunker in Hidden Valley was abandoned because it ONLY had enough power for 700 years. The material science of the Fallout universe borders on Clarktech. That's why the buildings re so durable.
But honestly you want to get an idea of what modern city decay would look like, look no further to my favorite post-apocalyptic fiction ever, Life After People:
And while I cannot blame Bethesda for not watching this as it came out in January of 2008, anyone who wants to write post-apocalyptic fiction after Lie After People must watch it and it's series or be remiss in their worldbuilding duties. That's not to say Life After People is LAW, because material science and construction techniques change, but it must be considered.
Also, the episode on LA makes the Boneyard make MUCH more sense. TLDR, epic firestorms like you wouldn't beleive.
Strong radiation would dissipate relatively quickly that's true but you would still have long lasting isotopes all over the place making its way in to the food chain. And even the strong harmful radiation would still stay around long enough to make it near impossible for people to survive in the hit areas. Remember, radiation never just disappears, it only means that half of the isotopes are gone after a given amount of time. That's why you have some areas in Chernobyl where people could technically live normal lives and other areas which are still highly radioactive. So you would most probably have a serious problem with finding food after a full scale nuclear attack.
Gotta disagree with you there. And I think I got decent reasons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb
What you're talking about, in practice is a salted bomb. Now there's never been real formal tests of the stuff, but experiments in that direction have been tried and they failed.
There's also a very real difference between radioactive isotopes and chemical agents like DDT (the pesticide that made shells of birds fragile). Chem agents work primarily in protein folding in a way that the body can't anticipate. Radiation, well, we've been dealing with that for a long long time, including long bouts of virtually no ozone. Plus, those isotopes are gonna be carried by rain and gravity and almost all of it's gonna end up in the sea. You, in theory, could end up with something like in an endorheic basin like around the Great Salt Lake, but in general, almost all products dangerous to humans in any capacity will be gone in five years. Cause the IIRC the danger a radioactive substance poses decreases logarithmically with its half-life. Trying to damage living tissue with radiation is like trying to destroy a fortress with grapeshot: when you have hundreds of thousands of shots coming in one volley then yeah you can get the flesh melting awfulness of Chernobyl. But once you get to something that a couple of potshots every few days, damage control becomes trivial.
That's the thing to remember, the body is VERY good at repairing radiation damage. You're biggest radiation threat from nuclear war are power plants that meltdown. And even in a near worst-case like Chernybl, 80-90% pf the exclusion zone was perfectly fine for long term habitation within five years, which is how it became the biggest wildlife preserve in Europe.
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TorontoReign
Guest
So I guess people are getting ready for Fallout: New New York City.
Eh, no. What I am talking about is plastering a state with nuclear bombs from one end to another. A state like New York, would have seen at very high number of nuclear attacks during the cold war. Again, the Warsaw Pakt had like 20 000 nuclear weapons at their disposal. We're talking about a lot of energy released in a very short time. There is a theory floating around that the sheer number of forest fires, burning cities and structures alone releasing all that ash and smoke, would have darken the planet for days, if not weeks - nuclear winter. Think about the fires in Australia which have been so severe it caused it's own weather pattern and now multiply that with like no clue 10.000?. The ash and dust would have very likely contained radioactive isotopes and rain would have washed it off from most surfaces polluting the ground. Again, yes very strong radiation would disappear in a relatively short amount of time - but we're still talking about months if not years here. But I do not see how anyone could potentially survive out there if large areas would have been hit by countless of nuclear weapons.
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TorontoReign
Guest
You guys are debating real science and geopolitical consequences of nuclear war. This is a retarded game currently run by retarded retards. It was retarded in the first place because radiation does not make talking mole rats. Now nukes blew up everything except for the spots where they magically didn't, canon doesn't matter due to BoS existing before they existed, and the Enclave will run New York City because of course they run New York City.
Bloomberg was actually behind all of the Enclave.
You're right though. Talking actual science of Fallout's A-bombs and radiation isn't really going to do much since the games have been about the concept of atomic war results rather than the reality of it.
That's ok and I think everyone can understand that. Fallout, a setting that contained ghosts, ghouls and all sorts of S.C.I.E.N.C.E.(!) stuff ... isn't about the most realistic presentation of nuclear weapons and their devastation.
However, I always had the feeling that Fallout 1 and 2 still had a fundamentally different approach to what nuclear weapons represented in the Fallout world compared to what Bethesdas take was on the issue. Which is best represented by one feature :
The fucking Fatman.
For Bethesda everything "nuclear" is equal to "lulz! We gotta have to give the player that!". The dark undertone in Fallout was replaced by a kidz toy. They even had a commercial for it.
So yeah, talking about it as a general concept in Fallout on what a real nuclear war would be like? It's fruitless. But hey we didn't discuss it for that purpose anyway. I just thought it was a nice little chit chat.
Yeah, that's a good example of a fundamental misunderstanding or lack of caring about what Fallout was about from Bethesda.
Fair.
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TorontoReign
Guest
That's ok and I think everyone can understand that. Fallout, a setting that contained ghosts, ghouls and all sorts of S.C.I.E.N.C.E.(!) stuff ... isn't about the most realistic presentation of nuclear weapons and their devastation.
However, I always had the feeling that Fallout 1 and 2 still had a fundamentally different approach to what nuclear weapons represented in the Fallout world compared to what Bethesdas take was on the issue. Which is best represented by one feature :
The fucking Fatman.
For Bethesda everything "nuclear" is equal to "lulz! We gotta have to give the player that!". The dark undertone in Fallout was replaced by a kidz toy. They even had a commercial for it.
So yeah, talking about it as a general concept in Fallout on what a real nuclear war would be like? It's fruitless. But hey we didn't discuss it for that purpose anyway. I just thought it was a nice little chit chat.
It is but it behooves people to know that it is fan larping. It's easy to think you are talking about something that actually makes sense (Fallout 1) when in fact the series is totally based around stupid kids now. If you are debating Fallout 5 (essentially) it is important to realize all of your careful fan theories are null and void when it involves magically reversing Super Mutant transformations, Mothman aliens, and radiation that never goes away. You can try to measure the geopolitical likelihood of fictional NYC getting wiped off the map, along with the estimated yield, but in the end some fag with a leather jacket will say "That crater is too big let's try to put a city on it."
I thought we make a good job here at NMA in scaring those kidz away.
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TorontoReign
Guest
We do a good job of scaring everyone away.
The power of the glittering gem of hatred is not for everyone.