It's my understanding that http://www.detecting.org.uk/html/Metal_Detectors_The_Treasure_Act.html is one of the most lenient pieces of metal detecting legislation in existence, and favors amateurs more than laws here in the states when it comes to antiquities. The Act specifically covers England and Wales, so the laws in Scotland may differ...but I'm sure there are similarities.
It's just a thought. There are many amateurs here who visit the UK for the very purpose of detecting, and the laws are likely more stringent for 'yankees'. heh heh.

Also @electricRubber, the link to the Ship breaking yards in Bangledesh was very interesting.

If anyone uses GoogleEarth, there are great swaths of ghettos to be found in places like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as well as New Delhi, India....not exactly wastelands...just ghettos.
I find them interesting viewed in GoogleEarth. Also the current images in Haiti show the tragic tent camps from the earthquake there. What a mess those people have experienced.

That looks a lot like my back yard.

I would actually like to visit these two cities in Russia because these photos looks so strongly like the world of Fallout. (Hope there is no background radiation anymore)

http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2006/09/13/lost-city-of-chernobyl/

http://abandonedplaces.livejournal.com/1651741.html

http://hem.bredband.net/b572399/Tjernobyl/pripjat5.htm (Several sides of pictures, you can go back and forth at the bottom, I linked you to somewhere in the middle of the site)

New Jersey, as a whole.............j/k

I don't know what's sadder
that video, or the comments the racist bigots are making beneath the video :shakehead:

in all seriousness though it is quite sad to see how dilapidated Detroit has become, it was such a massive boom town during most of the 20th century

and now it's that. ^

wastelands I know of? We frequently travel out to the Mojave and Joshua Tree Deserts. There're abandoned mines, ghost-towns and sweeping empty barreness all over the place. Looks like something out of Fallout sometimes.

Subsequently on the way up to Santa Rosa where some of my extended family lives it's a pretty bleak wasteland for most of that trip too, though not as sparce since most of it just endless endless farmland.

Northwest Missouri after a decent snowstorm is a wasteland. Literally, nobody leaves their houses because the road crews are so bad here.

Same here in Raleigh. Horrible storm.... but I was at the mall

Yeah, in the woods near me there was an abandoned bleachworks, long since demolished, but the concrete floor, several thousand sq ft, and sections of brick wall and iron fencing still survive. There used to be a lot of burnt out and rusted cars down there, broken machinery and stuff, but most of that was taken away and it's now used as a place to dump earth from building sites.

There's rural areas in East Texas that look pretty desolate. Dallas also has some pretty rundown areas, mostly downtown. Also, I was in Las Vegas over the weekend, and outside of The Strip, there's a lot of that city that just looks horrible.

Haven't found anything interesting around here except a abandoned still in a hole in the ground surrounded by barbed wire.

Reminds me more of STALKER than Fallout .

On a serious note, I was just reading today that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was opened to tourists earlier this year. There are still pockets of radiation, but the guides keep you away from them.

STREEELOK!

You gotta give the devs credit, STALKER feels really authentic compared to pictures of some of the sites in the exlusion zone. Some of those pics look just like the bloodsvcker village from SHOC.

Camden NJ in particular... no kidding. And now with added raiders and only half the cops! -They had to sack the other half, no money.. yay... progress :shakehead:

Thanks for that info guys - much appreciated. May look into it a bit further. I admit I don't know much about it, just remember reading a report a while back where a farmer discovered a stash of dubloons or some such and had to pass em over to Queenie. His bloomin land too. Grr..

But I didn't even say anything useful - I would be horrified if I was inadvertently knowledgeable!

Talking of wastelands, I forgot to mention Harlow in Essix, much scarier than anything you'd find in Stalker!

One of my friends said when he was back home, as a kid, he had to shovel dead bodies onto trucks. Wasteland business, I guess?

It's really easy to find semi-industrial wastelands. Just look for small towns that depend on a single factory or plant for their livelihoods. When the plant closes down, the town will slowly die, pretty much. I'd understand if there was some resistance to making them easy to find, given that criminals tend to love abandon buildings. (Place to set up shop with no identification requirements to move in.)

Google images of El Paso Desert

http://www.biyokulule.com/sawiro/sawirada_waaweyn/Child%20Soldier3.jpg


http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jpziDp4SSuY/TViltaW7mdI/AAAAAAAAAJM/tNmQBZsMGTY/s400/child+cocoa+slavery.jpeg

South Australia quite simply, and for two reasons.

1. Mad Max was filmed here.

2. A quarter of our state was once a nuclear something-or-other (cant quite remember but it had something to do with radiation)