Rule of cool, its fun and fit with the crazy setting

to get gasoline to explode you need to have vapor typical spill on hot pavement, an engine will not explode at least not in an way who affect anything outside the engine compartment.

An nuclear reactor would not explode, exception if over-pressure steam.

Probably my largest disappointment of NV was lack of exploding cars.

Fun are raiders hiding behind them.

Thats like asking to get blown up just to make me having harder times collecting loots, really.

Mutants are somewhat smarter, and stand in front of them, usually.

But i am definitely carrying HEAVY bulks of grenades of various type, ranging from normal frag ones to plasma ones, plus few impulse ones (learnt the hard way at mass fusion hahaha) and synth relay/vertibird ones as well.

Well with out actually playing it and getting a screen shot if I can't really do that other than my word. I know I read about it somewhere in one of the game. Pretty sure it was 3 as the was my first fallout game. When I saw that I was like oh cool and went around blowing up cars just for the heck of it. If you search cars in fallout games it will show info about the engines which they say are nuclear. Now in a real world situation yeah it shouldn't blow up if shot. Though after 200 years of sitting around the reactors have become unstable. Coolant all but gone, ready for melt down just needs a push and the bullets do it. Besides its cool.

You know those wheeled hover boards people ride around on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL58Zsixz-s

Do you own a smart phone? Do you hold it next to your head?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCEBkKakCs0

Specifically the section from 2:09

EDIT - Video with that clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-xPHopebiE

It doesn't need to be nuclear to become dangerous in adverse conditions.

Also, these cars are 200 years old. Likely their power plants are highly unstable.

I did find exactly one exploding car in FNV. I believe it was at Bonnie Springs.

Can't beat laying a mine next to a car and luring something into it.

Reality doesn't really matter here, but in reality a fission reactor cannot explode. Cannot. Ever. No matter what. They can leak contaminants. They can melt down. They can create acute, hugely radioactive areas of gamma or neutron flux. But they cannot achieve the uncontrolled fission reaction necessary for a nuclear explosion.

But then Mini-nukes are impossible as well, and that doesn't matter either. Cars explode because it's fun for them to do so, AND it fits with the 1950's pop-science (mis)understanding that conflated nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

On second thought, I don't think cars are supposed to be a nuclear explosion anyway. Maybe coolant is very flammable and vulnerable to a pedestrian chemical explosion, and the rads you get in the area afterward are because the car's reactor is now physically disrupted and unshielded?

There is one component of a reactor that is combustible, the fuel. Although, it would take higher temperatures to ignite than what is available in a tracer round.

Having said that, it has already been established that the Fallout universe does not operate on the laws of science. It operates on the laws of Science! Don't believe me? Go to Diamond City. They don't have a Science Center, they have a Science! Center.

Yes, they also have misunderstood the rules for baseball somewhat, talk to Moe about it he is the expert

Sorry, but nobody under the age of 50 will get hat reference.

I kind of liked the Corvair (and Unsafe at Any Speed always sounded like an awesome Heavy Metal band name).

I use cars to kill friendlies without agro-ing their faction so i can take their stuff. Sorry holmes, finger slipped.

It is a mini-nuke. All those cars are fission powered (or is it fusion). That's why the explosion is so big and why there's a burst of rads when they detonate. This is consistent with the 1950's B-movie version of physics that the game operates under.

I have a completely opposite opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtlwVIBmJdQ in game should be much larger, cars not a lot bigger but somewhat, mini-nukes should be more destructive than a an exploding tractor trailer.

At 76 pounds, the warhead on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device%29 is inifinitely more massive than the "mini-nukes" in game (which weigh "zero"). But mini-nukes appear to be ~roughly~ of the same size (perhaps 3 times smaller? Wiki says the W54 warhead was 31" by 11") as the W-54 warhead and are clearly modeled on it aesthetically.

It may even be that some nuclear artillery rounds are smaller than the W-54 warhead used in the Davy Crockett, I'm not sure.

I agree that what we are shown in game, an object that has zero weight IS impossible. Even an object that is roughly that small but weighed 25 pounds might be "impossible" in terms of real life physics, I do not know. But "minaturized" nuclear weapons are a definite reality. God forbid if anyone like an IS ever get there hands on such a thing . . .

I love that conversation and some of the input the various companions make. Since it is repeatable you can cycle all your companions through it in one play through.

Minimum critical mass of a spherical shape of U-235 is around 30-31 lbs. But I just got curious enough to go and look, and I was wrong. Uranium is so dense that critical mass can be achieved with about 3 cups (3/4 liters). Add control electronics and shielding and a football-sized shape is still somewhat plausible. Of course, it would weigh 50+ lbs for sure, and the explosion would be A LOT bigger and dirtier, but I guess it's not the complete flight of fancy I thought it was.

Interesting! I don't know that stuff very well (the fissiles and what not). Aren't there some things that are even more "fissile" than uranium-235? At least theoretically? I seem to recall some stuff on elaborated Tables of the elements that had gigantic atomic numbers?

Physics lost me when they started talking about color and spin and all that crap. "Strings" I don't even get at all

I just remember this one astronomy prof teaching us about a neutron star. The rough anology I recall was "If a single 'teaspoon' of a neutron star were magically transported to a position near the Earth, it would cataclysmically pull every object nearby (including the earth) into it and realign the orbits of most of the objects in the solar system . . . I was just like "Whoa man! Grooovvy . . ."

ADDIT: and btw, are the cars FUSION powered anyway? Not even sure what difference that makes . . .

ADDIT^2: Ah here we go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239, only takes about 24 pounds!

I would guess that or a similar isotope must be the one they use in the actual "minaturized" nuclear bombs.

As an aside, I witnessed a shootout between some scavengers using a car as cover and a Mr Gutsy. When the car blew up, the Mr Gutsy said "That's how we do things in the US Army, hoo-rah!"

So think of cars as a combat aid instead of a combat hazard, glass half-full.

No. Explosions are supposed to be powerful in this game no different than real life.


If you feel they make the game too easy then simply don't use them but don't expect Bethesda to change them for everyone.

UNLESS, they make all the explosions even explodier, in which case: YES PLEASE!

That's what I do. My record so far was one car killing 3 super mutants (almost 4)

Not to mention that Deathclaws can flip cars now.

That ain't %$#&, there was a SM fort in FO3 where the entire curtain wall was made of vehicle wrecks. Jericho went charging in (the moron).

You could've seen/felt the results FROM THE MOON.

I know that, I understand why it was done, and I don't disagree with it. The main reason why I posted what I did was that other people were trying to invoke logic, claiming that a car explosion was OP. So I simply responded with logic.

As far as game-logic is concerned (as opposed to Real World logic), I feel like car explosions SHOULD be deadly, considering you get a warning, and so they are (usually) avoidable. The fun factor of them simply outweighs all logic.

The hoverboard (misleading title) is a case of improper product testing. True, things like that do happen, even with the occasional car, either through fraud or incompetence. But we're talking about a car, something that almost every person of moderate income or better owns, that has reviews and testing and inspections, and so on.

The cell phone thing is just ridiculous and I don't get how the narrator of that video can put it in the same category as a bullet, which only kills when it is used for its intended purpose (as opposed to the cell phone, which probably would not even kill, as shown in the video, by completely disassembling it, and sticking a knife through your cheek into the battery so that it explodes in the direction of your head (as opposed to away from your head, as is shown in that video). The narrator (or whoever wrote his script) treats his viewers as if they are stupid, because that would be the only way that you could take that video seriously.

Interesting. Hasn't happened to me.

For me, I have had situations when there were no bullets, but there was a frag mine hidden beneath the car.

This happened to me just outside of General Atomics Galeria. First the frag mine went off, and crippled my legs, then I hobbled as fast as I could away from the red "car-is-about-to-kill-you" symbol. Didn't make it.

I like the fact that cars explode like mini-nukes.

Can use them in Super Mutant situations to my advantage.