One of my favorite things to do in FO3 was to free the Behemoth at Evergreen Mills by sniping the generator on it's cage from the cliffs...then when it got out and began to fight the raiders MIRVed the Behemoth. It never failed to take out the Behemoth and all of the raiders fighting it...usually 5-8 of them....in one volley.

If that's the logic then they should have cut it.......anything hit by that thing should die.

"Nuclear" doesn't apply to the power of the explosive though. "Nuclear weapon" simply refers to a weapon that utilizes the energy released by atoms either through fission (utilizing highly radioactive metals such as uranium or plutonium), or through fusion (utilizing hydrogen atoms being blasted into one another and forced to form into helium atoms) in order to create an explosion.

Sure, the blast is nowhere close to what a nuclear device, even of it's size would do, but that doesn't mean it isn't nuclear. The name "mini-nuke" and "fat man", along with the iconic mushroom cloud, and the little boy modification kit stress that it's a nuclear weapon in a post-nuclear apocalypse game. It was brought in as both a humorous and awesome weapon.

You know it just occurred to me that modern nuclear weapons generate the nuclear reaction by first having high explosives detonate around the nuclear material.

So it's both high explosive and nuclear.

To kill Papa Khan I had to place 2-3 bricks of C-4 in his pants for a 1 shot assassination.... even with sneak attack crit. (On Very Hard/hardcoe)

It's pretty much the same for an high explosive to be ignited by a low explosive detonator.

On topic: I won't be saddened by the fact they'd completely left out the fatman because I think it's a ridiculous weapon.

Yeah that's true. Despite the Fat Man being ridiculous though, it was a fun weapon to use. However it was too effective for it's own good, just like the Nuka Cola Grenade. I always carried the thing around with me but I never used it because I was holding out for a more dangerous enemy. In the end (after playing Fallout 3 for 500+ hours) I probably only used the weapon a total of ten times.

The mini nuke isn't very big, C4 is a very powerful. End of story.

/thread.

lol, same here.. the first time I dragged that stupid thing everywhere with me because I thought it could come in handy any time now. After that I only used it when I felt a silly creative berserker itch because I got bored, MIRV-ing Megaton in my own way frequently blowing myself up in the process.

I usually never used the weapon because I'm more of a gun nut. The overkill of the Fat Man never appealed to me. Besides, Fallout 3 was mind-numbingly easy anyway. Why would I need a super weapon to make it easier?

because someone hit their head and then decided that only having 9 or 10 nukes in the game wasnt enough nerfing

Really the Fat Man is a terrible weapon now. I barely used it for F3 but it was nice being able to use it if I needed a back up plan. Now it's not even worth the amount of caps you can sell it for. They made mini nukes very rare AND messed up the damage, there's no point in even having it in the game.

If the mini nuke was realistic what radius would the explosion be ?like 300 meters lol? i aint good with measurement lol

No conventional explosive comes remotely close to matching atomic explosives in power.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MOAB_bomb.jpg is a MOAB, the Massive Ordnance Air Burst weapon. It's one the largest and most powerful conventional bombs ever made. It weighs 10 tons, and has a destructive power equal to about 11 tons of TNT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fat_man.jpg is the original Fat Man bomb. It is a weak, small, and desperately obsolete design. It weighs 4.6 tons, and has a destructive power equal to 21,000 tons of TNT.

Let's run those numbers again.

The atomic weapon is less than half the weight, and 2000 times more powerful. Need that underlined? 2000 times more powerful. For less weight. And that's a really crappy atomic bomb. New ones are far more efficient.

So for anybody who is tempted to say "Yeah, well, C4 is really powerful" please don't even bother. C4 is a birthday candle next to a flamethrower, if you bring nukes into the picture.

When will you all stop arguing in favor of realism in a series that contains so much pure fantasy as Fallout? The Fat Man had a purpose once, to inflict overwhelming damage on everything you came across. Now it is precisely as useful as throwing two frag grenades. Why? So guns can be the One True Skill. What a waste.

so momaw in human terms what radius would you think a mini nuke would have realistic?if possible like foot ball fields/type of measurement

Well. If you assume the mini-nuke has an implausibly low yield to go with its tiny size, say, 3 or 4 tons.... I'll guess "Instantly smeared across the landscape" (you are small pieces) radius 50 meters, deadly (you die instantly) radius 200 meters, casualty radius (significant injuries, shrapnel, probably lingering death) 600 meters.

(A football field is close enough to a hundred meters for the visual)

momaw i love your brain X D/then it seems the fat man is utterly full of bramin ****

What makes you think the mini-nuke doesn't just contain a very small near-critical tritium mass that undergoes fusion to create that explosion?

thats the thing if what momaw is true then the bang in the mini nuke is what u would coonsider dirty bomb material if u base on realism

When the first Fallout developer created the laser pistol this game became totally divorced from reality.

Eh, it's barely even a bomb if you want to be honest. It weighs 5 units, while a brick of C4 weighs 0.5 unit. The C4 explodes for 250 damage. Even if you assume that half the Mini "nuke" is just the casing, it should be packed with 2.5 weight of high explosive, e.g. 1250 damage. (The Fallout 3 version has a damage of 1600...) Even the far less effective Dynamite explodes for 75 damage per 0.5 weight, which should mean a Boom of at least 375 damage, which is more than twice what it actually does in New Vegas.

In other words: If you ducktaped 5 sticks of dynamite together and threw them as one package, it would do more damage, for less money and less weight than the Fatman.

And no, the radius of the explosion isn't even worth considering in this case. All the huge radius does is mildly annoy a lot of people instead of thoroughly kill the one you lobbed the bomb at.

lol laser pistol is almost guaranteed to happen given enuf time 100 years i expect will have laser rifles

We'll have man-portable microwave collimators as weapons long before we have anything that makes visible light or magnetically jacketed particle streams something you can carry around in your hand, and even then they'll be one-shot cannons that require a total recharge every time you fire them.

dylexic typer ftl -_-