So im playing Fallout 2 again these days and came by these two craters on the F2 map just southwest of Redding.

One of them is gigantic ! Impossible to predict what yield that was. Must have been way above the 57 megatons of the Tsar bomb.

I always wondered about them and so i became curious and looked the area up on google earth but it seems that there is absolutely nothing important there. At least in our world.
Or is there something that would be worth such a pounding which i didnt saw ?

http://fallout.warparadise.com/images/map2.jpg You have to zoom in a bit.

I'm going to say meteor impact.

I'm suprised Silicon Valley isnt a crater...or Seattle....or Portland...wtf?!

The only towns Southwest of Redding are Platina and Happy Valley...neither of which have any tactical significance...

That looks like a meteor, not sure though, but if it was a nuke, why waste it on Red Bluff? (The area it hit.)

Maybe they said something bad about China ?

As that term only came into use in the 1970's, and semiconductors don't seem to exist, the term Silicon Valley was probably never coined.

Theres a chance it could have still been farmland pre war.

If you remove the forest cover, you'd find a ton of geological craters from 100 million years of vulcanism. Large craters like that aren't really that unusual around there.

The nearest real target is a couple hundred miles to the North East--the OTH-B radar site. Other than that, this would be one of the safes places in the world during a large scale nuclear conflict (assuming cold war like arsenals).

I always wondered where the craters were in Fallout 3.

Oh there are several ones in F3 but they are all very tiny.

There is one on the parking lot next to Fort Constantine , several scattered over Fort Bannister with a huge one next to it which looks a bit strange as someone seems to have dug two ramps into it.
Propably to enable people to walk down there.


The White house seems to be a crater aswell although its inexplainable why there are almost untouched buildings right next to it. This is one of the things which bug me so much that i sometimes would like to remodel several areas as some sort of "A bit more realism Mod" but this whole GECK is too complex for me to work into before i would loose patience with it.

The White House could have been blown up from the inside. There were Chinese soldiers in DC at the time the bombs fell, who says they didn't have someone in the White House?

Nah, i dont think so.

In that case , the buildings around would still be blown away. The crater is still highly radioactive so it must had been a nuke that destroyed it.

And why should chinese spec-ops blow up the white house ?

Not that this building has any importance except that it houses the president who ,according to the Fallout Bible, was not even there when the bombs fell. (The president along with the enclave relocated to secret safehouses when the threat of nuclear exchange became clearer, full six months before the bombs fell)


It was propably just used as reference point for hitting the city center.

At least for a few streets surrounding the white house crater all buildings should be leveled or lack everything above the first floor. Instead these are some of the most intact streets in entire DC. Illogical even for game.

Anybody else ever noticed the Caution: Radiation signs scattered about the FO3 wasteland? Outside of the White House, outside of Vault 87...seems like with humanity nearly extinguished, who would put up those signs and why?

so im not alone with those thoughts.



some shell-shocked insane survivor? the ones at the white house could be explained as been put up by those BOS fellows who atre stationed there but the others out in the middle of nowhere?

Keep in mind, humanity didn't spontaneously go into 'scavenge ruins and eat people' mode. Immediately after the bombs hit, you still have police and military units trying desperately to restore public order and survey the damage.

yeah but still, why waste resources to drive around and put up radiaton signs all over the place?

and according to the logs it all broke down into savagery pretty quick (a few weeks?) in the aftermath.

Because... they don't want other survivors to wander into irradiated areas and die horribly? Y'know, something like that? I guess they could've left a voice mail.

Seriously, though. Yes, low on resources, low on manpower, you still had a handful of people desperate to keep any more casualties from happening where there had already been a lot of death. If all you can do is leave a sign that says 'don't go there', you at least did /something/.

The same reason why the British tried to torch it once, and the Nazi's targeted Buckingham Palace (Ok slightly different as the Royal family were there, but they didnt really run the militart)

Citizen Morale... Nothin helps demoralise the people like blowing up their national symbols.

Most likely, soon after the government officials re-located to their safe-houses Chinese Spec-ops basically took-over major positions like the White house, The Capital building, etc... and Attempted to break American Morale by completely destroying these locations, With the omission of Capital Building..

Maybe the Brotherhood set them up ? Could be that they've found a stash of them somewhere and decided to mark some of the most dangerous areas with them.



To those craters in F2:

Ive checked wikipedia and it seems that there is indeed something important there. The area where the craters are is Sacramento Valley which is the northern part of the bigger Central Valley.
It may look like a flat area full of nothing but it isnt.

In fact, Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions ! It makes up 8 percent of the USA's agricultural output. So creating a massive amount of Fallout there would contaminate untold masses of farmland making it useless.

It is also a major hub for the Union Pacific Railroad system and a few important highways like the Interstate 5 go through it. Destroying the area would propably mean crippling the backbone of the west coast's transportation infrastructure. So its indeed a strategic target.