Project Purity:Scientists that are trying to make water drinkable by filtering it through a huge complicated filter.

A Much Easier Solution: "Filtering through earth removes essentially all of the fallout particles and more of the dissolved radioactive material than does boiling-water distillation, a generally impractical purification method that does not eliminate dangerous radioactive iodines. Earth filters are also more effective in removing radioactive iodines than are ordinary ion-exchange water softeners or charcoal filters. In areas of heavy fallout, about 99% of the radioactivity in water could be removed by filtering it through ordinary earth." Nuclear War Survival Skills Handbook http://www.oism.org/nwss/s73p919.htm go to 'Removing Fallout Particles...' to see more.

Question Time
Did Bethesda do enough research for the main questline, do you think? Or, did they assume that fallout was extremely hard to filter out of water?

Opinion Time
I think that Bethesda got kind of lazy with their research (I still love Fallout 3); I thought before I read that handbook that their wasn't a simple solution either, but it was easy enough to find out.

but isn't the wasteland dirt pretty much jacked up with radioactive thingys too?

The fallout series has always played VERY loosely with how a post nuclear war world would be. This is no exception.

I think this has been known for awhile, and Proj Purity is just a horse for the plot to ride. Not very imaginative or accurate, but the game was going to sell based on how the armor looks and flying body parts, so I think that's where the emphasis was placed.

Is it said in the game that Project Purity boils the water to purify it?

No, but it also doesn't tell us whether is uses Ionisation either, someones come up with a good point. don't give them a 1 line 'No you're wrong'

I think Project Purity was simply a representation of the public's grasp on radiation, and how one would go about filtering the resultant fallout. Impractical, but still more of a visual representation.

Yeah, but radiation in Fallout is only ever as realistic as it needs to be to serve the story. I've read through that manual in my own research as well (and it's a pretty interesting read, as well.) The level of radiation we see in Fallout is pretty unrealistic to begin with (and this is something that applies to all the Fallout games, not just #3.)

I mean, it also doesn't turn people into ghouls, or lead to the sort of rapid cohesive mutations that you see in the Fallout universe, either. (That radiation might cause a mutation that leads to two heads in a cow or two - it's unlikely you'd see every single cow have two heads in the course of just a couple hundred years. Radiation might cause the mutation of a few scorpions to grow larger than usual, etc. But the sort of homogenization you see, where you have entire species conforming to specific mutations, takes a lot longer than 200 years, even if you factor in the effects of radiation.)

Basically, Fallout qualifies as "soft" sci-fi, as opposed to "hard" sci-fi - the Science! elements are only ever as realistic as it needs to be to serve the story.

I've said this in a previous post. Flowing water creates erosion. Rivers flow, erosion stirs up radioactive particles suspending them in the flowing water. Hence radioactive, mildly, rivers. Now where a river enters a large body of water it creates turbulence which further keeps these radioactive particles suspended. Now as for the still pools of water, dust storms. Dust storms are constantly stirring up radioactive material depositing it in the pools of water, hence radioactive pools of water.

As for filtering it through earth, sure, earth filters out the radioactive particles but.....do you have a big enough bin of earth to filter all this water through for everyone? Eventually the soil will be too contaminated to filter more water so you'll have to dump it somewhere and get more earth. Do you have the resources to carry this out? Or maybe, just maybe, the G.E.C.K. for project purity has some sort of nanotechnology that cleans the water.

We'll never know unless we ourselves live through a nuclear war. Who wants to go first?

Indeed, much of FO3 is 'technically' incorrect. But if it wasn't for all of the mutations and oversized creatures we wouldn't have ourselves a story now would we?

I'm not really sure where you're getting the boiled water/carbon filter/water softener idea. It never gets explained fully, but the fact that they needed the http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_Creation_Kit seems to imply that they are using either purified earth as a filter or using the G.E.C.K. directly to clean the water rather than technically filter it through some sort of medium.

I was asking in earnest. No need to get so dramatic. The point is we don't know how it works so to speculate "this could work better then what project purity is doing!" is pointless.



Also I think its definitely a budget and technology limitation. I'm sure if they could feasibly make a whole bunch of different mutated creatures so that it would be more realistic they would but it just doesn't make sense fiscally or in relation to development time.

I think the real problem lies in the lack of buildup. Even if Project Purity looks unnecessary by real world standards, with proper buildup they could have made it look like the Capital Wasteland urgently needed it.

Think about it. Nobody in the wasteland complains about the water except for a few hobos. In over a dozen locations, you don't see anyone suffering from any ill effects from having been drinking irradiated water for the past 200 years. The only bit of foreshadowing that the game offers is in Megaton and is easily missed. Billy Creel directs you to Walter, and Walter says that "the water purifier's about to go." Megaton has been getting clean water for the better part of the past two centuries, but now that it's about to break, I'm guessing that it's supposed to make the player feel just how necessary Project Purity is going to be. Despite the fact that you can go for months in the game and the purifier never actually does break. And even then, they can always just build a new one!

Even the Lone Wanderer can drink himself silly with irradiated water, but a quick shot from the Doctor removes all the rads. So I'm guessing these people have complete mastery over radiation. Or is that just supposed to be a gameplay effect that's not to be considered canon? Whatever it is, it undermines the threat of irradiated water in my eyes.

In other words, water is never shown as posing a threat to anyone for the entire course of the game. I get the feeling that if Project Purity got up and running the first time without , the people's reaction would be ""Oh? Well...jolly good then, I guess." And when people started getting killed over it, I could only shake my head at how shallow the main conflict was.

I'm all for suspension of belief. But the writers have to earn it through good storytelling. I think that should extend beyond "Here's Project Purity. It's reeealllyyy important."

This plays loosely with Fallout 1...

I agree with most of what you said but think about it this way, project purity isn't just supposed to benefit people so that they can drink clean water they also need it to start rebuilding civilization by making food more readily available (being able to grow it with the purified water).

^THIS!

Something I had not thought of, you would certainly be right. Since it appears in game that the weather pattern has changed to having very little to no rain, water would need to be used to grow crops. Much more than could be purified by using soil filtration methods. Since the water still carries radioactive particles, watering plants with this water would most likely do more harm than good to the plant growth. First you'd have to scraqe off a large amount of surface soil to reduce contamination which would be negated by watering with water containing radioactive particles. Brilliant!

Ah. Well, thanks for giving me another perspective on that. But likewise, I don't think that was properly built up either.

To be sure it wasn't. The whole main quest felt a bit rushed, but was off set by the sheer amount of other stuff to do. Perhaps in Broken Steel there will be a resolution or at least an expansion on the whole project purity situation.

The Fallout series doesn't use real science, it uses '50s "World Of Tomorrow" Hollywood science. They tell you this up front.

Also, water is an issue in Megaton. Several settlers will say, "I came here for water, but they only let residents have it."

The main quest does have a lot of hurry-hurry-hurry to it once you get Dad out of Leave-it-to-Betty-Land, which is kind of annoying. I've left Sarah sitting in the Citadel wondering where I've run off to. I still haven't done half the things that are out there.

Plus, I want to get lucky .

*cough*it's a game*cough*

Maybe somebody should design a mod that builds up the water contamination problem and talks about total habitat restoration and the worsening of the desertification of the planet unless somebody does something about it.

There is definitely a lot of open space for modders to fill in.

I'm not playing the 'end of argument' game here, but the simple fact is that if there is enough latent radiation around in one form or another to give you a dose of radiation sickness just wandering around the wastes, you aren't going to last too well over the long term.

This is a game, it's no where near realistic, so using scientific explanations for a lot of what is in the game is giving an awful lot of credence to development considerations which I doubt actually took place.

Simple fact:

Particulate radiation gets washed away with the elements - wind, rain, etc.

Breathe in a little bit of it, and I mean one little speck, too small to even make you sneeze, and you WILL suffer, and probably die...not immediately, but sometime in the future.

Radioactive elements settle in various parts of the body, and there is NO way to remove them. There is no such thing as RadX, or RadAway.

If the ocean is radioactive, it doesn't matter how much effort you put into taking the radiation out of it...surface water from the land around will carry irradiated particles into your water supply...or the wind will blow it in.

The best you can hope for is that the heavier elements, the real nasty stuff, leaches away to make the task of living somwhat more surviveable. It will NOT deteriorate - the half lives are too long for that, but the quantity in the environment may reduce to the point that makes living for any length of time possible. But life won't be too flash, and it will be short. And, unlike the Fallout world, there will be a massive incidence of mutations - mostly unsurvivable ones.

No matter how the game attempts to make Project Purity a way to save the world, in the end it is largely inconsequential. All it does, is purify the Tidal Basin and hence 'save' the Capital Wasteland, which is a tiny chunk of the US.

One would need to build thousands of purifiers all over, and frankly such a thing would be impossible by an 'independent' party like James & his posse - only the Enclave would be able to do that, so why is joining them so bad? Colonel Autumn isn't the homicidal maniac Eden is.

Anyway, if putting up purifiers constitutes to saving the world, it would be much more cost-effective to have Tinker Joe build 1 million Mr Handy's that float all over and hand out purified water to everyone.

In a 'game' world, everyone would have RadX, RadAway and a condensation purifier. You wouldn't die from rad sickness, but disease would take you down...if not the big C, then anyone of the hundreds of diseases that we have more or less under control in this modern world.

Keep in mind, in the real world, in 5 million + years of evolution, we have only defeated one disease - smallpox. And there's even fears that it's still out there, waiting for someone to come in contact with some defrosting corpse from the 1950's, or some other vector.

I always just assumed that radiation wasn't the only contaminant in the water. I remember reading somewhere in-game that FEV was leaked into the environment, and I'm positive that the doctor in Rivet City says it is also contaminated by heavy metals.

Or, since waters from the ocean constantly mix with the waters of the tidal basin, as the project purity device keeps working it continues to clean the waters. However, I don't think this was meant as a "saving the world" type thing. More as salvation to people around the capitol wasteland and perhaps somewhat beyond. Once something like this is done and proven, more "stations" like these could be set up in other parts of the world.