Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
Except 1. That's not how it works and 2. They hadn't even started it yet so where did those "Irradiated particles" come from?
Your dad's death in FO3 was stupid, but would this be any better?
- Thread starter Poopicus Butts
- Start date
This ghoul has seen it all
Except 1. That's not how it works and 2. They hadn't even started it yet so where did those "Irradiated particles" come from?
AskWazzup
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
PossibleCabbage
Vault 22 Survivor
It's really sort of unclear how exactly water stays radioactive for 200 years anyway. I mean, the emitters that are suspended in the water are much heavier than water so you can isolate them just through evaporation. Literally all you would need to get drinking water in Capital Wasteland is "run a dehumidifier".
Plus, the GECK works by turning kinds of matter into other kinds of matter, and the purifier includes a GECK, so I don't know why you wouldn't just turn the radioactive waste suspended in the water into, say, inert carbon or something. Maybe James and Dr. Li just weren't very good at their jobs.
Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
In real life that IS how it works. Presumably, it's particulate matter in the Potomac that's keeping it irradiated. And in real life, salt is essentially impossible to get radiation out of. And even if they hadn't started it yet, they've certainly done experiments with it before. There would be sand, salt and dust leftover in the filters. James did some computer bullshit and made it explode.
I'm not trying to justify Bethesda, here. THEY should be explaining these things. There's just no reason to assume that particular facet is impossible
Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
Could you explain the former point a bit more?
And for the latter point- how do you know that's the GECK isn't modulating the water?
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
There is a difference between radioactive particles being filttered from the water and just creating a magic Radiation field on a room, I mean, they hadn't even activated it in the first place, why would there even be a button for that? Why si there a "Flood command chamber on purifier with radiation so no one can even use it" combination? Was James just a merry prankster? How did Autum get out of there even after applying the magical plot device without killing anyone around when the sealed envirorment opened up? Wouldn't his clothes and hair get contaminated too? There would be a point where the entirety of the Jefferson Memorial would be just a dead zone.
PossibleCabbage
Vault 22 Survivor
Okay, so basically radiation is "something unstable emits a particle" (there are three kinds of ionizing radiation depending on which particle is released) and the way this damages your body is that it's a high energy particle on a microscopic scale, and that's going to do damage at a cellular level. There's only two ways for water to be radioactive: the water itself is radioactive (i.e. the hydrogen in your H2O is Tritium) or it contains heavier unstable particles (Carbon-14, say) so that ingesting or being around the water subjects you to radiation from that source, not from the water itself.
It's entirely implausible that the water in the Potomac basin is mostly tritium, since tritium has a half-life of like 12 years, and it's only produced in the upper atmosphere in small amounts from cosmic ray bombardment or from working reactors (you make it by bombarding Lithium-6 with neutrons in a working fission reactor.) So there's not going to be anything that conceivably produces a significant amount of tritium and dumps it in the river.
So the only way the water is plausibly radioactive is "it contains unstable isotopes of things other than H2O". So there's say, Carbon-14 and Radium-226 in your water supply, so drinking it and being around it is a bad idea. But here's the simple solution: Water boils at 100 degrees celsius, Radium boils at around 1100 degrees, whereas carbon boils at around 4800 degrees. So if you heat water to its boiling point you're going to get nothing but pure H2O in the steam, which you can collect and condense to get pure clean water. Since evaporation on the atomic level basically works through individual molecules being excited enough to "go ballistic" and boil, pretty much all of the water vapor in the atmosphere is going to be clean too, so you could just run a standard dehumidifier that you could buy at any department store before the war.
Alternatively, you could always just filter water through dirt too, since the clay in the dirt will bind with all the radioactive particles and what comes out will be purified (this is what the American Civil Defense Organization recommends in the case of nuclear war: get a 5-gallon bucket, punch holes in the bottom, put 2" of pebbles on it, cover with a porous cloth, put 8" of clay on top, cover with a pourous cloth, top with another 2 inches of pebbles. Then pour water through it letting it drain into a clean container, replace the clay every 10 gallons or so.) The fact that radioactive particles will get trapped in the clay makes "purify the land so we can grow stuff to eat" a much more interesting plot than "purify the water."
But the problem here is that Fallout 3 treats radiation like it's magic. In a fantasy game, like the Elder Scrolls, we can only understand how magic works based on the information given in the text, because magic is not a real thing, so when something doesn't make sense we can wave our hands and say "that's just how the magic works, I guess." But radiation is a real thing, and people who play the game (like me) may know a thing or two about how radiation works, so when the game doesn't bother to explain how this works (which it doesn't, except through the mechanics for gaining/losing Rads, which are an okay if gamey abstraction), we can actually drill down on this by saying "wait a minute, I have a degree in physics..."
As for the latter point, the GECK is designed to transmute blasted irradiated landscape into a verdant clean garden. Fallout 3 itself states "The G.E.C.K. will collapse all matter within its given radius and recombine it..." So it's a hyperscience qua magic device that turns one kind of matter into another kind of matter. So if you're running water with unstable isotopes in it through the GECK, why aren't you turning them into something inert? That's what we're told the GECK does- it transmutes matter. So there's no reason there should be a large amount of radiation present waiting to be released in the Jefferson memorial, as the actual radioactive particles will just lose their energy if contained and become harmless helium, electrons, or light, and the emitters theoretically held in suspension in the water could be processed by the GECK.
The long and short of this is that you shouldn't do plots about "radiation" in Fallout games unless you're prepared to show a bunch of leaking hazardous waste casks or some other plausible source for that radiation. It's been 200 years, so all but the 7 long-lived fission byproducts from the bombs should have been rendered almost completely inert (and these are a very small portion of a given fission reaction, like .1%) You can justify the presence of the nasty 7 if you show vats of glowing stuff, but not in the general environment just handwaving "there was a nuclear war 7 generations of ago." If you want to invoke technology or a scientific phenomenon as the cause of something, go ahead and posit something that doesn't actually exist (a fission battery, a way to preserve brains in gel, FEV, etc.) Don't go invoking something that actually exists, make it work some way it can't actually work, and don't bother explaining how it's supposed to work in this context.
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Earth
Vault Senior Citizen
I get the feeling Bethesda didn't go with this idea more because their rubbish game engine animations couldn't manage it than because of artistic integrity.
Emperor
Simplesmente Rajuma
NMA is culture! Just had a radiation class! ( Really, I didn't know/forget about that)
Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
Very interesting, thanks. Of course, radiation IS essentially magic in Fallout- ghouls are not created by FEV, they're created by radiation.
Also, the reason there may still be irradiated particles was that whenever they ran preliminary tests they didn't have a GECK.
Also, the reason there may still be irradiated particles was that whenever they ran preliminary tests they didn't have a GECK.
Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
You guys really should start posting to /r/fallout. Make good points, don't be too angry and keep the highground.
Oppen
FIXT n°1 fan
AFAIR, U235 produces Kr and Ba after fision. I have no idea what the by-products of Pu239 fision are, though. Where would the Ra and C14 come from?
(Note that where I don't state the mass number is simply because I don't remember which isotope is produced)
(Note that where I don't state the mass number is simply because I don't remember which isotope is produced)
PossibleCabbage
Vault 22 Survivor
Most commonly Kr89 and Ba144, FWIW for U235, and Zr100 plus Te134 for Pu239, but those are just the most likely byproducts of splitting a nucleus, it can happen in other ways too. The problem is that these things break down pretty quickly (a matter of seconds or minutes).
Carbon and Radium were just examples of things that had approximately the right half-lives to be relevant emitters in high enough concentration centuries after they were introduced into the environment. For the most part the byproducts of fission have half-lives <100 years (so they're mostly gone by the time Fallout 3 happens) or >150,000 years (so they break down pretty slowly.) If Bethesda wants to handwave "there are still radioactive byproducts of the fission events from the bombs around in certain locations" that's reasonable.
But regardless, the boiling point of Technetium is around 4200 C, the boiling point of Tin is around 2600 C, the boiling point of Selenium is around 600 C, the boling point of Zirconium is around 4400 C, the boiling point of Cesium is around 600 C, the boiling point of Palladium is around 2900 C, and the boiling point of iodine is about 200 C (those are the seven whose unstable isotopes are going to be left thousands of years later after a fission event), so all of these radioactive metals require much more energy to become vapor than does regular old H2O. So the same argument applies. A dehumidifier or just distillation through boiling is going to work (and really the environment should take care of this on its own, so collect rainwater) you don't need a GECK.
Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
Question: if, say, there are some off screen handwaving nuke plants upstream leaking into the Potomac, wouldn't the river remain irradiated?
Stone Cold Robert House
Mojave Rattlesnake
Fascinating stuff, thanks for posting this. Do you think the purifier plot could still be salvaged if it worked in a more sensible way (ie. no GECK involved, using more realistic procedures) or is it something that wouldn't have worked regardless as the backbone of the story?
PossibleCabbage
Vault 22 Survivor
If you wanted to run a "clean the river" plot, the most sensible way to do it would be to address the source of the contamination. If there's a particularly egregious source of contamination (say glowing barrels leaking upriver) then purifying it through normal means would be much more difficult. Plus the real reason you would want to clean the entire river is not so that everybody has enough to drink (aside from the handful of water beggars, nobody seems especially thirsty) but so that you could irrigate crops without irradiating them. Of course, nobody seems particularly hungry either so you would want to work on that too. I mean, the game doesn't really provide any good reason for anybody to live in the Capital Wasteland to begin with.
So I think if you were to rework the plot so that there's a major hazardous waste source leaking into the River further north, and that looking into it results in you uncovering some nefarious plot by the Enclave who have a base near there, and your father gives his life so that you can escape from the Enclave, you could probably make the Fallout 3 plot make significantly more sense. That would mean you couldn't put the purifier in the Jefferson Memorial and you'd probably have to do away with the stupid giant robot, but those aren't really losses. The endgame could probably just involve using the GECK in whatever waste dump is polluting the river.
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
They could've worked the plot so that the Capital Wasteland actually is suffering from a very recent (10 years?) and agressive Drought rather than them never ever having clean water and somehow surviving for 200 years. You could even make a lot of quests tied to that. Whitered crops, ding farms and such. There could be Towns with Water Tanks that would need constant defense, have people moving to the outskirts of the Potomac river and have that as the reason for there being so many raiders, they are taking advantage of the river for water and of the sudden peregrination to have fools to rob. The Super Mutants could even be thriving as a faction for that reason too, eing able to survive without much water could even attract some people to "join" them voluntarily. Hell a Drought would even give a good excuse for the underdeveloped feeling of the region.
Project Purity could even be something that is trying to create artificial rain rather than just purify running water that shouldn't even be irradiated at that point. Could even play with the SCIENCE! aspect of it all.
Project Purity could even be something that is trying to create artificial rain rather than just purify running water that shouldn't even be irradiated at that point. Could even play with the SCIENCE! aspect of it all.
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Yes, as much as I liked Fallout 3.
That bit just sucked.
Alot
I didn't have any emotional attachment to the Dad character at all.
Like he tells some bible quote, tells you to go to school to take a test, fucks off out the Vault, you rescue him and he fucks off again.
He then asks you to help him and then he dies.
If we had a scene before he left where it's the last day before he leaves and we get some emotional bonding.
Or Hell, you rescue him and we get a moment there, maybe a quick dialogue discussing the things you've seen in the Wastes and laughing about it.
Instead he acts like an asswhole and we're expected to care?
I also don't get why people say it's one of the most emotional parts of the game.
That bit just sucked.
Alot
I didn't have any emotional attachment to the Dad character at all.
Like he tells some bible quote, tells you to go to school to take a test, fucks off out the Vault, you rescue him and he fucks off again.
He then asks you to help him and then he dies.
If we had a scene before he left where it's the last day before he leaves and we get some emotional bonding.
Or Hell, you rescue him and we get a moment there, maybe a quick dialogue discussing the things you've seen in the Wastes and laughing about it.
Instead he acts like an asswhole and we're expected to care?
I also don't get why people say it's one of the most emotional parts of the game.
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
They could've also not forced you to "feel" anything for the character, write dad better and let the player decide wether they want to help him or not.