Rewriting Fallout 3: The 200 years issue

[Tagaziel]

Now ya'll are just nitpicking.
You want to be really technical?

Nothing would be around after the nuclear holocaust. Radiation would heavily remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, not just in certain places.

Most bridges and buildings would've begun to collapse just a few decades after the drop. Not only would the heavy explosion due damage, but most bridges receive maintenece every few years.

Basically, after a nuclear holocaust, nothing would remain excluding areas that were almost completely untouched. Highly populated areas that would have been prime targets would no longer even exist.

Of course, that would make for a far less entertaining game, eh.

Funny you say that actually, as in the original Fallouts, post-nuclear cities were just that: few walls left standing, empty, covered in dust.

 

[Sushi Gatorade]

Now ya'll are just nitpicking.
You want to be really technical?

Nothing would be around after the nuclear holocaust. Radiation would heavily remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, not just in certain places.

Most bridges and buildings would've begun to collapse just a few decades after the drop. Not only would the heavy explosion due damage, but most bridges receive maintenece every few years.

Basically, after a nuclear holocaust, nothing would remain excluding areas that were almost completely untouched. Highly populated areas that would have been prime targets would no longer even exist.

Of course, that would make for a far less entertaining game, eh.

Funny you say that actually, as in the original Fallouts, post-nuclear cities were just that: few walls left standing, empty, covered in dust.

Beautiful.

 

[chipk]

I think we should look at "real" Fallout areas...

Nagasaki and Hiroshima - had survivors that live to this day. The city is populated today without danger of rad poisoning.

Chernobyl - Has a much greater possibility of radiation poisoning yet it is teeming with life.

Bikini Atol - Was bombed/tested 13 times, Life has returned after 40 years and there are mutant sharks . Bunkers and concrete structures still stand.

Everglades - had radiation spillage, wildlife is freakin huge there.

It's safe to assume that humans would most likely re-emerge after 200 years after the bombs and primative structures would be common sight due to. Well built structures should be able to hold to some degree. Wildlife should be abundant without human interaction.

 

[Roy Calbeck]

Okay, few things here:

Megaton: It's established that it started out as a big hole that D.C.-area survivors congregated in to shield from the dust storms that followed the holocaust, complete with undetonated bomb in the middle (though for some reason, we're told the bomb's impact didn't make the crater). The reason they even went to the hole in the first place was to try and get into Vault 101. Once Raiders had enough time to become an organized threat, the need for walls led to cannibalizing aircraft from nearby airfields, and the town itself developed from there.

Food: Radiation does weird stuff in all the Fallout games, the sort of thing that '50s sci-fi authors dreamed of...and so you have things like growing an extra toe in FO2. A "Fallout Bible" discussion with some of the devs revealed long ago that another of the FO-Universe properties of radiation is to act as a regenerating preservative of sorts --- food was deliberately irradiated before the bombs fell, and THAT is why even tinned food is radioactive. It's also why Ghouls exist: radiation preserves their bodies to an extent and allows for regeneration of the cells...though in a horribly disfigured, half-assed fashion.

Everything else: FO was designed from the get-go with copious amounts of Balonium and Unbelievium, so...don't take it all TOO seriously. -

 

[Tagaziel]

The difference being that Fallout was internally consistent and everything made sense within its own, retrofuturistic microcosm. Fallout 3... not so much, especially Megaton.

Why build a town around a nuke by hauling metal scrap for kilometers, when you have perfectly fine buildings to inhabit a few minutes away? The Springvale School for example.

 

[Roy Calbeck]

That was also explained in the in-game history lesson. The crater was considered more defensible (who knows, maybe once word got out there was a NUKE in the middle of the place waiting to go off, Raiders decided safer meat was elsewhere). And the Church of Atom got a very early start worshipping the bomb, becoming large and influential enough that it had to be courted in order to provide the necessary extra labor. Fortifying Springvale would likely have required more labor and resources...so Megaton was simply the "path of least resistance".

The Church believes the bomb is live but doesn't mind that, while everyone else has convinced themselves it was a dud so they don't care...which just goes to show how delusional people can be when they think they need to be. Only the Sheriff and a couple of other folks consider it an actual threat.

 

[Danilh]

Well there is a discussion at the fallout 3 general discussion forum, about Megaton, so i will transcript some arguments about megaton.

Someone explain to me why a Fat Man-design bomb (a US design) is lying unexploded in a crater near Washington DC? I don't recall the Chinese using bombs dropped from aircraft. The bomb must be American. Why is it lying around in the DC Wasteland? In a crater created by an explosion that seemingly could never have happened, as the bomb that would have created it is undetonated

as already said, the crater is rather from the airplane and not the bomb, which would as well explain why its unexploded. A crash with a plane is usually something that a nuclear warhead can survive without much issues.

If you ask me though the bigger issue is that you have the bomb in the town, with a lot of factions around it, starting with the Brotherhood and Enclave, to Rivet City and that are just to the player "known" factions (you could call Raiders and such a faction too or the mercenaries). And yet the only person that really has a interest in the nuclear weapon is Burke and his employer Tenn Penny. How comes that it doesnt bother anyone else ? Why would not the Enclave want to get their hands on a WORKING! nuclear weapon? Or the Brotherhood? The Outcast? Even if it would be only for the reason to have the weapon somewhere save so that not someone (like the Player or Tennpenny ...) could walk up to it and blow it up.

The blast radius of the Bomb is also more then laughable. Did you ever bothered to blow up Megaton? The effect of the weapon is not bigger then 30m ... really much for a nuclear warhead ...

Also: setting off an explosive charge attached to the bomb will not likely cause the desired NUKE effect IIRC, it will simply turn it into a radiological device. A very specific and well-timed simultaneous detonation of a number of explosive charges surrounding the plutonium sphere and compacting it to critical mass is what will cause a nuclear explosion. Tenpenny and Burke don't know shit about nukes, obviously.

Also, why didn't anyone drag the fucking bomb outside, it cant be hard with that back part being easily tied to a rope and some brahmin pulling it out of town. A vertibird(or two) could easily steal it for the Enclave and the Brotherhood could have their soldiers drag it as power armor makes people really strong.

The Brotherhood and the Enclave should have been all over that bomb like stink on shit. Pre-war weapons tech? Right up BoS' alley. Especially since the bomb likely used plutonium, which cannot be obtained naturally and must be manufactured, and the means with which to manufacture plutonium are probably RATHER scarce in post-apoc America.

I don't think they could move that thing far enough away from the Megaton city limits to make me comfortable living in Megaton. We aren't talking about conventional explosives here - a few hundred yards, a few miles even, will not save your ass if that thing goes off.

Oh, and IIRC those bombs aren't armed until mid-flight, when the aircraft is near its target (which I assume would have been Alaska/Canada and NOT Washington DC), so that bomb would have been UNARMED, despite what the game tells you. Maybe the crash might have broken/jarred some electronics, but an amateur explosives tech would have about as much chance of successfully disarming it as a paper dog would have of successfully chasing an asbestos cat through hell.

You would have to carefully disconnect the explosive charges from the detonator without setting off a dirty bomb (or possibly worse in the event of a critical failure and you managing to accidentally trigger enough of those charges to send that plutonium sphere into critical mass), remove the electronics for the detonator device to prevent it from being reconnected, and possibly get rid of the explosive charges before bringing in a suitable containment vessel to put the plutonium sphere in for transporting it out of the town.

Another thought - plutonium is unstable IIRC and degrades quickly. I would think that an attempted nuclear detonation might well fizzle rather than go all Nagasaki due to degradation of the fissile material after 200+ years. Of course, even a fizzle might make enough of a boom to obliterate Megaton and much of the surrounding countryside.

I wonder why the Americans are using Fat Man class atom bombs when the first ICBMs were made during the 50s which would be more appropriate to the setting. Using a bomb they made in 1945 200 years later is pretty damn stupid.
Also somehow knowing how to throw grenades means you can deactivate something that would require dedicated work by a skilled engineer. Saying that after 200 years the electronics and connections would have been so rusted so it would be impossible to arm or disarm it.

I can suspend disbelief only so far. It would have taken POWERFUL shaped-charge explosives and HEAT-type rockets to get through one of those doors, I think. If the steel doors (were they steel?) had a high enough carbon content (but why would you use high-carbon steel for this?) they might be brittle enough to be shattered.

as said, with the right knowledge and some access to technology that should be no problem after all. Its not like you dont have a few factions in F3 around that have not access to a technology that might have such effect.

You just have to try it enough times. And depending the way most vaults are equipped, again its a question why not more tried to get inside, considering that the location of vault 101 is known to almost everyone ...

but the whole concept in Fallout 3 makes not so much sense. The Brotherhood knows the location of a lot of vault tec places, and yet no one ever got the idea to loot those places. You have somewhere an ICBM, pretty much untouched, armory ruins etc. ... all just waiting for the player, there, untouched ... after 200 years.

So, the bomb is Chinese or American.

For it to be chinese, a chinese plane would have flied to DC to drop it, in the middle of the nuclear storm.

If it is american, an american plane would have taken off in DC to fly to china, but it fell mysteriously(of course a nuke would not disintegrate it mid-air....???) and made a crater in a rocky ground.

I'm giving Beth far more credit than they deserve when I look this deeply into the Megaton quandary, I think - I'm putting more effort into trying to figure it out than they had ever put into its design and creation in the first place.

The thought of simply dismissing this or anything else in FO3 as being nothing more than Bethesda jerking off onto the Fallout franchise makes me grind my teeth. But it seems I'm looking for something that simply isn't there - a good story.

*i corrected some typos

 

[Mackerel]

I think it would be easier to change the setting than to rewrite it. Add in some vegetation, a few farms, and increase the population of the cities by adding a few NPCs. You could even completely replace all the canned/boxed food from the game with empty cans or piles of rust or dust.

Of course this doesn't fix all the other glaring problems like wooden buildings standing and perfectly sound but it would help a little.

 

[Magnus]

What I'm interested in knowing is how all those Super Mutants managed to haul their huge, green bollocks clear across the continent in just, what, 20 years? Did they all hop on the Highwayman? And why, for that matter?

I remember overhearing two muties having an incredibly slow conversation inside Germantown police station about carrying out some kind of mission and then going back south. FO3 crashed on me before I had any chance of completing it, mind you, so there may be a huge part of the plot I'm missing here.

 

[Roy Calbeck]

Also covered in in-game lore. The DC-area muties were created locally and have no ties at all to the West Coast or Chicago-area bunch. More specifically, they [spoiler:ee0e76b241]were created by a particular experimental Vault program which was set up to infect humans with FEV under controlled circumstances. The mutants have actually taken over that Vault and have been kidnapping humans in order to make more of themselves.[/spoiler:ee0e76b241]

So far as the Bomb goes, recall that you aren't putting an explosive charge on the thing...you're using a pulse generator designed to set off the bomb's internal detonator. Burke makes a point of saying it was expressly built for this purpose. Now, that's kind of an interesting point, being that no one in the Capital Wasteland has that kind of high-tech knowhow short of the Brotherhood or Enclave --- with the possible exception of the Commonwealth's surviving MIT labs.

The Brotherhood would be diametrically opposed to doing the deed; not even the Outcasts would appear to support nuking Megaton. The Enclave's Colonel Autumn might consider blowing the bomb to be a worthwhile means of eliminating a possible major center of resistance to the planned annexation of the DC Wasteland, but President Eden would probably not be interested in that sort of move (being more focused on seizing Project Purity, and achieving his aims that way).

But the Commonwealth, blow up a major regional rival which they consider inhabited by a bunch of Neanderthalic throwbacks anyways? Oh yes. I can see them trying to pull that.

As for Tenpenny himself, he seems largely clueless as to what Mr. Burke is actually up to and appears to be more concerned with aesthetics in general than anything else. He bears no animosity towards Megaton save that it sits within view of his penthouse balcony and looks rather scruffy. So Burke, apparently acting as a free-agent in Tenpenny's name and using his resources, makes bank from the Commonwealth, and gets some other poor schlub (you) to do the dirty work.

Getting back to the Bomb itself, who says it's necessarily Chinese? Lore makes clear that once the nukes started flying, everyone chipped in. It could just as easily be a Russian device that was flown by Bear bomber (or the equivalent) over the Arctic to strike the Eastern Seaboard. There would have been a wave of those, if not several waves...the likelihood of at least a single dud out of all the strikes would have been high.

Also, two hundred years is a long time for radioactive material to decay --- and it will decay. Half-life is not something one can simply arrest; and if you could, the bomb wouldn't be radioactive. The blast is going to be much weaker than one would expect from such a large bomb simply because there's not as much useful fissionable material left in it. That said, yeah, nuclear explosions are REALLY underpowered in this game (blast radii are small, Fat Men can't even kill the Behemoths, etc).

Finally, note that there are plenty of areas around the DC Wasteland where craters show actual nuke detonations having gone off --- none of which are particularly huge. But then again, in real life, a one-megaton blast leaves a crater "only" about 1000 feet across (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/1mtblast.html). This seems to be largely in line with the bigger craters found in-game.

In this context, it looks like the Megaton Bomb was originally intended to destroy a major local airport --- the one nearby, that gets plundered for building materials later by survivors. A bomb intended to detonate on impact with runway tarmac, instead hitting a soft-dirt area nearby --- possibly landfill? --- might have failed to detonate simply because it missed its target.