What all can be manufactured in the Fallout world?

[Drake Connally]

As in, weapons, clothes, materials, etc.

 

[Gizmojunk]

I would presume just about anything below a certain tech level; I wouldn't expect Warhammer 40k tech from their 2077, but anything seen in Robocop to be sure.

**Of course I don't at all ascribe to the notion that if it wasn't 50's it can't happen... That's nuts, and not in line with a 50's inspired future; that's a 50's crippled future. Fallout was the future they expected could happen. The designers watched Forbidden Planet and Mad Max for inspiration.
A cell phone or pocket media player would look like they might have imagined and/or designed one to look ~were they to make devices that did the job.

 

[naossano]

I would say that every tech that is available today could be manufactured again by advanced societies of the Fallout World. And some more advanced tech as well, like Van Graff energy weapons.

On the other hand, the many advanced technologies are vestige from the old world, with the blueprint being lost. But not all of them. Some technologies can be manufactured by groups like BOS/Enclave/Think Tank. Some high-tec were also made post-war, like the Advanced Power Armor.

Also, there is the issue of cost. A building like the Hoover Dam could, in theory, be built again, if it was somehow destroy during the NCR/BOS/Legion war, but rebluiding it could not only take decades but also cost way more money than the NCR itself can afford. That question of cost is, IMO the major issue about post-war tech.

Some other technology are also easier to adapt, than to rebuild.
I assume that the car technology is something the NCR can master, but i wouldn't be cost-effective or outright impossible to mass produce them yet. So it better to keep the already available cars in good shape and build/replace only the missing parts when needed. So, not everyone would have them. Only the officials, the army and the rich people.

 

[TorontoReign]

Some other technology are also easier to adapt, than to rebuild.
I assume that the car technology is something the NCR can master, but i wouldn't be cost-effective or outright impossible to mass produce them yet. So it better to keep the already available cars in good shape and build/replace only the missing parts when needed. So, not everyone would have them. Only the officials, the army and the rich people.

The roads would need to be repaired too.

 

[naossano]

I don't expect the road to be exactly the same as before the war, but a level of maintenance in the civilised areas is a given, not only for cars, but for caravans/patrol/other travellers. They have a too much strategic value to be outright ignored. On the other hand, i doubt tribal areas would have the same level of maintenance. Also, some vehicle don't require road maintenance as much as the others.

 

[zegh8578]

It is unrealistic to imagine a "wasteland" that lasts for very long. People are productive, and roads are the least of our problems, those will be fixed with some gravel and tar - tadaa: New roads!

Everything else will slowly tiptoe back again, including large scale industrial production. It's not like armageddon selectively kills off everyone who has a know-how of these things. It is mostly a narrative convenience to imagine a world where reconstruction is as painfully slow as it is in Fallout

 

[RetroAmerica]

It depends on where you take your source materials from, since Classic Fallout seemed to be much more advanced in both technology and society, than Bethesda's Fallout-Doom which was basically stuck in 1955.

 

[Zerginfestor]

Some other technology are also easier to adapt, than to rebuild.
I assume that the car technology is something the NCR can master, but i wouldn't be cost-effective or outright impossible to mass produce them yet. So it better to keep the already available cars in good shape and build/replace only the missing parts when needed. So, not everyone would have them. Only the officials, the army and the rich people.

pretty much, yup. I recall vehicles on the I-95 when you nuke the NCR in NV to apparently have Vertibirds and destroyed vehicles if I'm not mistaken, good sign that yes, they do have the technology to make vehicles operational again. Also, doesn't the NCR have forcefields back at home or something? I'm just guessing here, don't mind me, tired.

Also, funny how the BoS goal in hoarding 'rare tech' just suddenly gets shafted when knowing the Van Graffs and Gun Runners manufacture Energy Weapons .

 

[Gizmojunk]

It depends on where you take your source materials from, since Classic Fallout seemed to be much more advanced in both technology and society, than Bethesda's Fallout-Doom which was basically stuck in 1955.

One would like to think them clueless about the series... but I think it's more sinister than that. I think they know better, but they know their audience doesn't, and that's who they are selling to.

 

[naossano]

Also, doesn't the NCR have forcefields back at home or something? I'm just guessing here, don't mind me, tired.

If my memory serves me right, the only examples of post-war forcefield appeared in Fo3-FoNV. Before that, you could only see pre-war facilities with force field that you could turn on/off.

Fo3-FoNV seem to imply that The East Coast Enclave & Elijah are able to put some forcefield in new places. (Or unknown to the audience activate some existing ones)

 

[RetroAmerica]

Also, doesn't the NCR have forcefields back at home or something? I'm just guessing here, don't mind me, tired.

If my memory serves me right, the only examples of post-war forcefield appeared in Fo3-FoNV. Before that, you could only see pre-war facilities with force field that you could turn on/off.

Fo3-FoNV seem to imply that The East Coast Enclave & Elijah are able to put some forcefield in new places. (Or unknown to the audience activate some existing ones)

The entrance to the NCR was some sort of forcefield or energy based contraption, and so was the entrance to the residence of Congressman West(I believe that was his name). Also, even the Shi, Hubologists and Vault City could manufacture those technologies....so the gap between Classic and Fallout-Doom and Fallout: NV show a strange mix of technological progress, followed by regression!

 

[naossano]

Good point. Indeed, NCR not only use forcefield in Shady Sands, put also put them here in the first place, considering the city was built post-war.
If NCR can do it, there is no reason the Shi/Hubologist/Vault City can't, considering they are technologically more advanced in Fo2.

 

[TomJ]

I would say that every tech that is available today could be manufactured again by advanced societies of the Fallout World. And some more advanced tech as well, like Van Graff energy weapons.

On the other hand, the many advanced technologies are vestige from the old world, with the blueprint being lost. But not all of them. Some technologies can be manufactured by groups like BOS/Enclave/Think Tank. Some high-tec were also made post-war, like the Advanced Power Armor.

Also, there is the issue of cost. A building like the Hoover Dam could, in theory, be built again, if it was somehow destroy during the NCR/BOS/Legion war, but rebluiding it could not only take decades but also cost way more money than the NCR itself can afford. That question of cost is, IMO the major issue about post-war tech.

Some other technology are also easier to adapt, than to rebuild.
I assume that the car technology is something the NCR can master, but i wouldn't be cost-effective or outright impossible to mass produce them yet. So it better to keep the already available cars in good shape and build/replace only the missing parts when needed. So, not everyone would have them. Only the officials, the army and the rich people.

Don't forget economies of scale. It is easier and more important to learn how to manufacture clothing and every day items than cars or other such large machines. Also, you can manufacture a large amount of fabric or boots and get good at it and make it cheaper. Its hard to do that with a car, considering there is only maybe 2-3 million people in the NCR, most of whom wouldn't need a car.

The larger groups like the NCR, Shi and Midwestern BoS could manufacture a lot of things, it just depends on what they need. Groups aren't going to waste resources making things they don't really need. The Shi could have built vertibirds within a few years. They wouldn't need infrastructure like roads with aircraft. Which brings up another point, it also depends on what goes into producing the technology or what support is needed. Cars wouldn't be a priority because of expense to build them, but also maintaining roads. That's also assuming the NCR could get rubber, make lubricants and build fusion reactors to power the cars. Making consumer staples like clothing is easy, all you need is cotton to turn into cloth or food to fill cans, also much less resource intensive in a resource poor environment.

 

[peadar87]

I always imagined that the thing stopping motorised vehicles wasn't a lack of technology, but a lack of fuel. There's no oil left, and uranium is scarce (the only reactors we see are all pre-war, running vaults and military facilities, as far as I remember, no new reactors are being commissioned). That means that cars have to run on things like biodiesel, and in the fallout universe, anything that takes water and fertile land to produce is going to be very expensive.

Stuff like microfusion cells and fission batteries, I headcanon away as brand names for conventional high-density energy storage devices, as if you could manufacture something like a microfusion cell, there would be absolutely no need for Hoover Dam. Or resource wars, in fact.

 

[Vault Maker]

Apart from short term nuke targets like the military and government operations, the next most important set of targets (medium term) is usually military manufacturing, followed by (long term) sectors that would directly contribute to "recovery" (steel, aluminum, concrete, electricity, and petroleum being the main ones).

War plans tend to reflect the belief that the most important thing to destroy to stop manufacturing is the skilled personnel. And as Strategic Air Command planners used to say in the 50s, "what is a city but a collection of industries?" In practice, that meant targeting of most cities with 20,000 or more people (by the US, for at least part of the cold war).

In the war that creates the Fallout setting, it is likely that people, factories, and transportation have been attacked in a way that is so comprehensive, any kind of large scale, complex manufacturing is very difficult for a long time to come.

80 years later, production of food, clothing, and basic shelter are believable. Weapons manufacture by the Gunrunners seems like something done by a skilled cadre of experts, not an assembly line.

Cars and vertibirds? In real life these are assembled from components made by many manufacturers. Defense projects often have production spread across the nation, to maximize the number of Congressional districts that benefit from the money spent. The whole depends on a complex system to function. New production after the war from scratch, with people, factories, and transportation in shambles, looks like a long shot.

 

[Moosick]

IDK, I guess it depends on how you approach it. In Mad Max everything is completely and totally ruined (yet Max somehow survived - I have the headcanon that this is the result of non-direct hits to the outback, but nuclear winds/storms as seen in Fury Road and ruined soil in The Green Place I could buy a little more. If Fallout NV I can get behind because it's the Mojave and on top of the area getting bombed, it is a desert, so I can appreciate sparser populations and Vegas being more heavily populated. I actually 'get' Gun Runners because it's a syndicalist business/community, and if some master repairmen got ahold of the necessary equipment, or moved into a small-time manufacturing plant, it would be possible, perhaps with weapons at a little lower quality. For 3, considering the state of DC and the wasteland, dangerous storms, etc would be a little more buyable and as I type this I realise I'm basically parrotting Vault Maker sue me

but yeah honestly I view the fallout world as a slightly more optimistic Dark Souls-ian world - ruined and struggling, the last bastions of humanity desperately clinging on, only just making it. The protagonists play a large part in keeping it going a little longer before it succumbs to the horrors of the wastes. By NV things are going towards building larger established governments but it's not really working out and it's more about seizure and control of land than anything else, and frankly if the NCR did win (as I imagine the future canon will be) I don't see it lasting long at all. House wouldn't have it and it'd take a super mutant army to get past the securitrons. Honestly I find it hard to believe that the Legion would ever manage to take control of The Strip because House would sooner blow it up (which he undoubtedly had the resources to do) before giving it to them. In the end I see it as a series of temporarily flourishing communities that try to get bigger, fail due to spreading too thin, and suffer big time in the future. I heard about the NCR and the Legion having their own places that were flourishing but frankly I can't see it being much better than NV, which was surprisingly busy as it was.

 

[Kathy]

It is unrealistic to imagine a "wasteland" that lasts for very long. People are productive, and roads are the least of our problems, those will be fixed with some gravel and tar - tadaa: New roads!

Everything else will slowly tiptoe back again, including large scale industrial production. It's not like armageddon selectively kills off everyone who has a know-how of these things. It is mostly a narrative convenience to imagine a world where reconstruction is as painfully slow as it is in Fallout

Eh...
About industry, I think it's going to be really hard for post war people to kickstart it on their own, especially when the amount of fossilized old world tech begins to lessen with time, since the lore basically says earth was pretty much stripped of its finite natural resources like oil.

The readily available natural resources are gone and the atmosphere probably took sustained damage. It's fool's thinking to propose history has a set path in general, and it's fool's thinking to believe the old world has no impact on the new. The people in the wasteland are far from starting from zero if there can be such a thing, but what they've inherited is unsustainable if they simply "rebuild" and "progress" in one direction.

I dunno, something about setting a 'pace' for fallout setting to "progress" is pretty ahistorical.

 

[peadar87]

Apart from short term nuke targets like the military and government operations, the next most important set of targets (medium term) is usually military manufacturing, followed by (long term) sectors that would directly contribute to "recovery" (steel, aluminum, concrete, electricity, and petroleum being the main ones).

War plans tend to reflect the belief that the most important thing to destroy to stop manufacturing is the skilled personnel. And as Strategic Air Command planners used to say in the 50s, "what is a city but a collection of industries?" In practice, that meant targeting of most cities with 20,000 or more people (by the US, for at least part of the cold war).

In the war that creates the Fallout setting, it is likely that people, factories, and transportation have been attacked in a way that is so comprehensive, any kind of large scale, complex manufacturing is very difficult for a long time to come.

80 years later, production of food, clothing, and basic shelter are believable. Weapons manufacture by the Gunrunners seems like something done by a skilled cadre of experts, not an assembly line.

Cars and vertibirds? In real life these are assembled from components made by many manufacturers. Defense projects often have production spread across the nation, to maximize the number of Congressional districts that benefit from the money spent. The whole depends on a complex system to function. New production after the war from scratch, with people, factories, and transportation in shambles, looks like a long shot.

Once you have an organisation and a structure in place, mass production isn't that hard, it's the economics that are the issue. You need to invest in specialised tooling that can't be reused, and it has to be built from scratch. For small populations and early post-apocalyptic societies, this doesn't make sense. You're not going to be making a million identical cars, or tables, or rifles, so you're not going to make back your investment on tooling.

And for small production runs of complex items, like cars, the price is going to be through the roof.

At least in the short term, you're probably going to be limited to lathes, milling machines, bandsaws and hand tools. All of it pretty skilled work. Raw materials aren't really a problem, because you don't have to mine ore or anything, the pure metal is just sitting there in the ruins of the old world.

I'd say the NCR are starting to have some limited mass production. I can imagine them having the capability to build steam engines, for example. Wood for raising steam is probably a resource that can be had cheaply enough to make them worthwhile. Small components to repair Vertibirds can probably be manufactured if they fail, but a full engine or airframe would be beyond their manufacturing capabilities (which is probably why we don't see them in combat. They are incredibly rare, and the NCR don't want to lose them to enemy action.

 

[TomJ]

The Shi in San Francisco had large manufacturing capabilities compared to most groups in the wasteland, specifically the Enclave. They did manufacture their own weapons and could potentially produce vertibirds. This manufacturing capability and the NCR's lack thereof is one of the reasons why I don't believe the SF Bay Area isn't under the NCR. The Shi would have had the resources to resist/bribe the local populace and would have wanted a buffer zone between them and the NCR.