The MIRV - spoiler

[AnimalAl]

What exactly is wrong with a shoulder mounted tactical nuclear launcher? I have you know they are not that far from something that once existed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

Have not been to the Nat Guard armory yet to find this weapon tho, where is the place on the map or where do you uncover its location at?

500 meter safety range, hello? It's been discussed to death, and the Fatman is still an infinitely retarded weapon.

Technically speaking, the concept of operations was to fire it from behind a hill so that one would be screened from the initial blast and radioactive energy release. Just saying.

 

[Per]

Haha. This is only the 453rd iteration of the "Fat Man existed in reale lief! Uh wait maby not" cycle.

 

[Tejlgaard]

Heheh well sorry for not witnessing the prior cycles, since I went here just to see what the good folk of NMA were thinking about this.

I tried reading through some of the old debates, but the ones I found focus on people who are worried about the gameplay and fiction vs. people posing with a picture of the crocket.

Now I'm no nuclear physcicist, and my highschool physics teacher didn't focus all too much on nuclear bombs so forgive me if I sound like a doofus for asking this, but has anyone done any actual yeild calculations for the fat mans mini nukes?,

I'm curious because I would like a scientific oppinion on this. Handheld nukes seem kindof mesmerizing to me....if they're actually plausible =P - I know it's kindof silly but this is one of those things where, if it's possible, it's instantly much more interesting within fiction than if it's impossible. My gut tells me it's just wrong, but my brain is like "hey...wait a minute...do I actually _know_ if this is possible?"

Because I mean...it's obviously possible to construct a mininuke. All it takes is sufficient density of the nuclear material and it goes boom.

And according to wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon#cite_note-Hansen-1
(Which, I know, is wikipedia, but it's sourced to "Hansen, Chuck. U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History", and that appears to be rather reliable.)
...According to wikipedia, nuclear fission can yeild less than 1 ton of TNT explosives.

Again, according to wiki, the Davy Crocket went down to 0.01kt, or 10 tons of TNT, which seems rather retarded unless you're a mile away or something - but if less than a single ton is possible, that might actually make some sort of sense if the wearer is in power armor.

According to this calculater:
http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/nuke.php

at 10 meters, a 1 ton nuclear fission bomb would only blast away 0,8mm of titanium armor...which is arguably still too hot for comfort of the wearer, but at 100 meters it's hardly a scratch at 0.001mm.

According to the project Orion research results:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

At 30-50 meters, all a power armor wearing guy would have to do is to spray himself a nice and black colour with a can of sprayable graphite, and his armor wouldn't even recieve damage if we suppose a warhead with a yeild at about 7-800 kg. Oh, and duck and cover.

Another think I got to thinking of was that the fat man is even more viable if nuclear decay has an impact on the fuel - it's been 200 years since the mininukes were made, supposedly, so radioactive decay could have weakened the munition considerably. Considering an implosion based explosion can create a density to explode even a small mass of fissile material if we allow for the implosion technology of 2075 to be used.

So we could actually be looking at a 100kg explosion, I'd say?

Have any of these things been considered in past discussions of the fat man? Could I get a link to where, if so?

 

[ShatteredJon]

From my understanding of physics, you can't make a payload as small as the fatman round and still have it be a viable weapon. You need a decent chunk of fissible material and a large shot chamber (the piece of the bomb that smashes the fissible material together)

The animation is all messed up, because even if it were viable to make that small of nuke, it would not mushroom cloud. Mushroom clouds exist because of the immense ammount of heat and air being displaced. I may be wrong on this, as I haven't studied nukes in a while.

 

[Eyenixon]

Frank Horrigan is widely lambasted as a terrible idea.

Don't forget that he was also in Power Armor, your character in Power Armor is practically a third larger than without.
Frank's Power Armor was modified as well to keep him functioning, it's not esoteric to assume that he was so large because of his customized Power Armor.

However, it's completely idiotic to assume that Frank Horrigan was a Behemoth.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

at 10 meters, a 1 ton nuclear fission bomb would only blast away 0,8mm of titanium armor...which is arguably still too hot for comfort of the wearer, but at 100 meters it's hardly a scratch at 0.001mm.

It'd probably bake the wearer if it was blasting away .8mm of titanium. That said, that site is set up for calculating in terms of megatons, not in terms of tons and thus the amount of conventional explosives and their comparative effect might very well be miscalculated.

That said, why would you ever make a 1 ton nuclear bomb? Hell, part of the reason the Davey Crocket is retarded is because we can make conventional explosive weapons with the same blast yield that don't irradiate everything close by and don't have the potential to kill the operator and anyone else in his direction if the wind is blowing the wrong way. Also, why would you arm infantry with such a weapon when the same effect (minus the nasty radiation) could be achieved with cruise missiles, bombs dropped from planes, or an armored weapons platform?

Keep in mind that the point of nuclear weapons (other than neutron bombs) were to create larger explosions, not irradiate the hell out of everything (a nasty and generally less than desirable co-effect).

 

[ShatteredJon]

Oh wow, just found out something really neat with the MIRV.

Aparently the total god mode cheat gives you causes your ammo to lock, meaning shots won't be used up. With the MIRV, this is fun as hell. I just spent about five minutes launching nukes up and over the northern DC barrier and laughing as I starting racking in xp. This is also fun to do in outdoor towns like Bigtown or Paradise Falls. Still kind of pisses me off that after I level a town with 5 volleys of 8 nukes, the kids are still alive cowering. At least have them harmlessly vaporize or something.... yeesh

 

[Nodder]

Davy Crockett was in MGS3, everyone who opposes it is just player-hatin'.

 

[Tagaziel]

Davy Crockett was in MGS3, everyone who opposes it is just player-hatin'.

If you weren't sarcastic, do note the massive blast.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Yep, one of those things took out the fortress Grozney Grad, and that place was pretty well armored.

 

[Nodder]

Davy Crockett was in MGS3, everyone who opposes it is just player-hatin'.

If you weren't sarcastic, do note the massive blast.

There's got to be a fine line between forbidding things for being too unrealistic and allowing things because they are cool.

MGS3? Cool.

Teddy Bear Launchers? Eh... not so much.

 

[ShatteredJon]

Wait, I got an idea for the next Fallout. Nuclear teddy bear launchers. They could be timed, so you could see the teddy bear rip off a raiders head right before it detonates into a cloud of radioactive fluff.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

There's got to be a fine line between forbidding things for being too unrealistic and allowing things because they are cool.

MGS3? Cool.

Teddy Bear Launchers? Eh... not so much.

In the case of the Fat Man in Fallout, the issue really ends up being a thematical one. Does the Fat Man fit in with the theme of Fallout, a world after a nuclear holocaust in which nuclear weapons have been treated with respect and used in an ironic fashion to save the world, or does it not? If you want to talk about the Davey Crocket as an example then let's talk, only a couple thousand were made, they were never used outside of testing, they were only in service for a short time, they did not effectively and/or efficiently achieve their goal, other weapons could accomplish it's goal more effectively and efficiently, and it was one of a kind with nothing similar to follow it or mirror it in another nation.

 

[Nodder]

Didn't they kind of balance it out with the concept of Megaton, though? So atomic weapons weren't quite as feared in one place (where you can get the Fat Man), but elsewhere, people really paid reverence to the Bomb.

If you want to talk about the Davey Crocket as an example then let's talk, only a couple thousand were made, they were never used outside of testing, they were only in service for a short time, they did not effectively and/or efficiently achieve their goal, other weapons could accomplish it's goal more effectively and efficiently, and it was one of a kind with nothing similar to follow it or mirror it in another nation.

I can understand the thematic criticism of a Davy Crockett in FO 3 but criticizing it based on real-world viability of such a weapon appearing seems kind of silly.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

Didn't they kind of balance it out with the concept of Megaton, though?

Not really, it also treats nukes more frivolously than previous games. Yes, it's better treatment. No, it's not good treatment. Besides which, the whole reason for the bomb being there in the first place and not being disarmed by people who know how is fucking retarded.

I can understand the thematic criticism of a Davy Crockett in FO 3 but criticizing it based on real-world viability of such a weapon appearing seems kind of silly.

It's feasible but not viable. As I said, it accomplishes a military task in an inferior manner via inferior means through a method (infantry) which is not used to complete that type of task (special ops [who aren't infantry] do laser targeting but the Davy Crockett is no special ops weapon).

 

[Nodder]

Were all of the games in the original FO viable? I can understand stupid things like the teddy bear launcher being worth criticism, but it seems that most games have at least one over-the-top weapon for the sake of being the most overpowered gun.

 

[Sander]

Were all of the games in the original FO viable? I can understand stupid things like the teddy bear launcher being worth criticism, but it seems that most games have at least one over-the-top weapon for the sake of being the most overpowered gun.

Fallout didn't (unless you mean the Turbo Plasma Rifle in Fallout 1).

And really, 'all games have one' is a pretty dumb argument.

 

[Nodder]

Not really, it's lame to criticize a genre convention unless it directly contradicts something integral to the series. Did Fallout 1 and 2 deliberately not have a "most powerful" superweapon? Is the presence of a superweapon contradictory to the game's themes? Is the series supposed to be so realistic that having a superweapon would undermine its realism? Does the addition of a superweapon hurt the game mechanics in any way?

 

[UncannyGarlic]

Besides the fact that super weapons are in and of themselves stupid, especially so in RPGs (fucks up balance), a hand-held nuclear bomb launcher in a Fallout game is contradictory to the series' theme because of how it treats nuclear weapons. It's also stupid because, as has already been said, it's a weapon specifically there for the sake of bosses which is crappy game design. I think we agree that the MIRV is fucking retarded and thus that we're discussing the Fat Man, right?

 

[ShatteredJon]

The MIRV is quite dumb. Only use I found for it in the game other than messing around was for fighting the Enclave army at the end. That, to me, was quite satisfying to hear ten simultaneous screams of agony as I unloaded the only mini nukes I had into their midst.