So...About that energy crisis...

Atomic Postman

Atomic Postman

Vault Archives Overseer
In Fallout 2, we see the Highwayman, a tough,reliable car.

We are told that there were too many people, and too many demanding resources like Oil and Fuel, and the sources for these things were running dry.

Yet, the Highwayman is essentially powered by batteries! would this not be a solution to the resource crisis? or was the Highwayman an early prototype or a model that never saw widespread usage?

Also, a final slightly offtopic question:

Are Terminals nuclear powered? because I don't see how one could remain running for nearly 200 years.
 
Probably the highwayman and the terminals are some old tech that only use smaller amount of energy than the pre-war mainstream tech.
 
The United States' collective motor pool was in a period of transition when the bombs fell. Fusion cells had only been invented about a decade prior to the end of the world, and by the time the first fusion-powered cars started rolling off the lines China and the US were already at war. On top of that, cars aren't the only-- or, it could be argued, even the most important-- use of a nation's oil reserves. Petrochemicals are crucial to several fields of technology and manufacture, plastics not least among them, so at that point it would have been oil or death even if the entire world's power grid had been running on sunshine and leprechaun farts.

As to the terminals, it's never mentioned, anywhere. It's one of the glaring logical flaws in the game and it's always bugged the crap out of me. I suppose that if one takes Occam's Razor to it, they have to have some kind of long-lasting fusion battery because so many of them are still running, even though building them that way defies logic in a multitude of ways. Regardless of power source, the odds that any piece of consumer electronics that intricate would boast the dependability to remain in operation, exposed to the elements and without maintenance for over 200 years, is a bit of a stretch even for Fallout.
 
Last edited:
Batteries don't produce energy out of nothing, they need to be charged in some way or the other.
And producing power on a large scale seems to be dependent on uranium (nuclear fusion seems only to be applied in a weirdly small scale), so electrical power would become expensive, too.
 
I always assumed that the terminals in towns and vaults were maintained by the townspeople / vault dwellers who kept them running, and thats how they were still running.

As for the ones in places like the Glow, I assumed that the Glow's secondary power source (or the Military Base or wherever that didn't have humans maintaining them for a long time) kept the terminals running there where there weren't humans to maintain them.
 
The ones in Fallout/Fallout 2 are all pretty legitimate, yeah. The ones in 3 and New Vegas are the problem.
 
The terminals are great though, I think they serve a good purpose in the modern games.

I think'll you'll just have to attribute it to game logic, which something not uncommon in the first and second games.
 
Hmm.. I always assumed all still operable tech was using some sort of long-lasting energy source. Aren't some of the lightposts and computers visibly plugged in to power sources in New Vegas for example? I seem to remember at least a number of them were. Guess that was enough explanation for me to not let it become bothersome.
 
Censor said:
Hmm.. I always assumed all still operable tech was using some sort of long-lasting energy source. Aren't some of the lightposts and computers visibly plugged in to power sources in New Vegas for example? I seem to remember at least a number of them were. Guess that was enough explanation for me to not let it become bothersome.
Click to expand...

New Vegas wasn't hit that hard, so some isolated reactors might still work (although those reactors should have dried out long ago, as they are probably for emergencies only). Also, I don't recall seeing computers in any ruins in Vegas. In Fallout 3 is a bit more unexplainable, as you can see some computers working in severely hit and abandoned places.
 
In Fallout 3, I always assumed that the abandoned terminals you find throughout the Metro and so on are/were belonging to certain inhabitants which were driven out of there by critters etc.

But yeah, there are many terminal which have no logic behind them. I recall one in the Dunwich Building, a building ridden with ghouls, still working.
Yet again, it's Fallout 3, it's not the worst of the illogical stuff it did.
 
Oppen said:
New Vegas wasn't hit that hard, so some isolated reactors might still work (although those reactors should have dried out long ago, as they are probably for emergencies only). Also, I don't recall seeing computers in any ruins in Vegas. In Fallout 3 is a bit more unexplainable, as you can see some computers working in severely hit and abandoned places.
Click to expand...

True, and Hoover Dam is still a source of power for New Vegas - even if it is only running at 1% of its full potential.
 
Yamu said:
The United States' collective motor pool was in a period of transition when the bombs fell. Fusion cells had only been invented about a decade prior to the end of the world, and by the time the first fusion-powered cars started rolling off the lines China and the US were already at war.
Click to expand...

Fusion cells?? :crazy: I always thought that they were fairly ordinary fuel cells. Powered by methanol perhaps (though more advanced and compact fuel cells, such as those that NASA has been using for decades, would be powered by hydrogen - and I know that they are called Micro Fusion Power Cells in game, but I always chalked that up to marketing. E.g. "Powered by MicroFusion! (TM) Technology!").

C.f. your discussion below of the terminals - true fusion power cells would certainly not be still providing power after 200 years!!! I doubt that even Star Trek style matter/antimatter reaction based power could still be supplying power 200 years later. You would need one of those nifty ZPMs from Stargate for that...

Yamu said:
On top of that, cars aren't the only-- or, it could be argued, even the most important-- use of a nation's oil reserves. Petrochemicals are crucial to several fields of technology and manufacture, plastics not least among them, so at that point it would have been oil or death even if the entire world's power grid had been running on sunshine and leprechaun farts.
Click to expand...

This is absolutely true (and, may I say, very astutely phrased). The details are complicated, but what it all boils down to is this: right now there is still enough oil that the oil companies (and many national governments, the United States's government included) want to maintain a sufficiently high demand for oil so that that demand will allow for a certain volume of oil to be pumped out of the ground every year and sold for not less than a certain amount of money. In other words an oil glut would be (almost) just as bad as a 2008 style oil shortage (whether that shortage was real or perceived is far beyond the scope of this discussion).

When oil reserves are seriously depleted, in a century more or less, things will be very, very different.

Yamu said:
As to the terminals, it's never mentioned, anywhere. It's one of the glaring logical flaws in the game and it's always bugged the crap out of me. I suppose that if one takes Occam's Razor to it, they have to have some kind of long-lasting fusion battery because so many of them are still running, even though building them that way defies logic in a multitude of ways. Regardless of power source, the odds that any piece of consumer electronics that intricate would boast the dependability to remain in operation, exposed to the elements and without maintenance for over 200 years, is a bit of a stretch even for Fallout.
Click to expand...


Streetlights. Streetlights never change...
 
Last edited:
A hadnwave for terminals working could be that other prospectors/Adventurers like you fixed them while exploring and didn't bother to turn off all of them and you just find them by coincidence? I know it requires a lot of bullshit.
 
Holy mother-of-god. Does Obsidian know how much 50% of Hoover Dam's max power is? Cause that's bonkers.
 
Wumbology said:
Holy mother-of-god. Does Obsidian know how much 50% of Hoover Dam's max power is? Cause that's bonkers.
Click to expand...
New Vegas gets 5% of that and House claims it's more than enough, so yeah, power output is pretty damn good for a post-apocalyptic society.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top