I posted this on another board, but it makes sense to bring it up here where Bethesda can actually see it.

One thing I do think Bethesda needs to really look at it how ridiculous things are getting in terms of major cities not really being destroyed. Between Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas we've seen the following major cities:

LA - pretty much destroyed as presented in Fallout 1
San Francisco - not destroyed according to Fallout 2
Reno - not destroyed according to Fallout 2
Chicago - apparently not destroyed based on the cutscene at the beginning of Tactics
St. Louis - mostly destroyed according to Tactics
Denver - damaged but not destroyed according to design documents for Fallout3/Van Buren (not necessarily canon)
Washington DC - damaged but not destroyed considering major buildings and monuments are mostly still standing 200 years later in Fallout 3
Pittsburgh - damaged but not destroyed in Fallout 3/The Pitt DLC
Vegas - somehow the nukes avoided this place as well as we see in Fallout New Vegas

It's honestly a bit ridiculous. Especially when you consider that if you talk to House about it in New Vegas he claims that city was targeted by some absurd number of nukes (77!) that he mostly dealt with. Makes me think nukes in the Fallout universe are all suitcase-sized equivalents.

Mini-Nukes :shrug:

It is a game though. It would be pretty boring if we were just walking around in an empty landscape with nothing to look at.

Nukes aren't as devastating as you would conceive it to be. 1 Megaton nuke in the heart of London will destroy only 10% of the city and maybe 15% of the population.. Most of the Nukes smaller countries have are as small as 10-50 kilotons which would have 10 times less damage than a 1 Megaton nuke(rough estimate)

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_101.html

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_102.html

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_103.html


The whole 1 nuke = 1 city destroyed thing is just scare mongering ...

If you read these three articles entirely then you would understand why "duck and cover" really works and was promoted during the cold war era..

You're talking about a vastly scaled-down game world.


Even -one- nuclear bomb crater would take up so much of the landscape that it would be PROHIBITIVE. Would you really enjoy the game if you spent half of it skirting around the edge of a damn 50-mile wide crater smoldering with radiation?

It would be boring. Damn boring.

As it is, they've chosen to only show those cities which have either been terribly damaged... or utterly wiped out and built over by new settlements... and that's just fine with me. Reno? Its a shell of its former self. Vegas? Only the STRIP is really intact. The rest of the city is entirely gone! Half the map ought to be Vegas... but as you can see... there's not a whole lot left. It's mostly burned out slums, or entirely abandoned ruins.

[edit]:


Just to clarify, I'm talking Chinese nuclear weaponry here. They have a fairly equivalent yield, as far as I last heard, to our current arsenal. It would, of course, entirely depend upon the mass of the bombs used in Fallout-Universe logic and all that jazz.

The game story itself tells not a lotta damage was done to Vegas, and the strip is all was Vegas was shown rest is just not shown.. around 70 something nukes where launched on Vegas and the large proportion of them got destroyed by Mr House i believe.. The answer is in my above post..lol

Hey, take a look at the map. That area with all the rubble and buildings and crap labeled something like 'South Vegas Blah Blah Blah'...

... yeah... that's also Vegas.


Mr. House talks a lot about the bombs falling, and how he could have saved more of Vegas if he had gotten the Platinum Chip sooner. This would lead me to guess that he is speaking of the massive chunk of land surrounding the strip which, before the war, would have been the many other streets and neighborhoods of Las Vegas, Nevada.

It is, after all, a fairly large city.

You see all of -two- streets in the game which remain intact.

I,ve seen that..but place is rather Barren for a metropolitan city of the size of Vegas, Not many destroyed buildings around. Mr House says minimal damage was done to Vegas. Comparing to D.C in fallout 3 the representation of Las Vegas is a joke...

I'm not calling for craters, but at least in Fallout 1 there was no attempt to suggest that any LA area landmarks were still around. It was called the Boneyard, after all. The key communities in that game were either post-war creations or built on the minimal remnants of what had been smaller towns to begin with. Fallout 2 made it seem like San Francisco being largely intact was a lucky break. But then in subsequent games it seems like lots of cities got "lucky breaks." Any nuke dropped on DC is at least going to wipe out the US Capitol building and Washington Monument. That stretched reality to have ruins around the mall but it was still that intact. And then you go to the ruins of Pittsburgh, but hey, look at all these tall building still around! And now we get Vegas, where "only" six of 77 targeted bombs hit the place and yet part of the strip is still intact, so is part of the Freeside area, and so on. If Vegas got 77 bombs aimed at it, what does that say for DC or San Francisco or other more important cities?

I'm just saying that every city cannot just be somewhat damaged.

As far as I know, St. Louis was almost entirely annihilated. Very little, even in the way of remains, were left over from there.

Chicago, although a complete loss, is more akin to the LA Boneyard than anything you'll ever see in Washington D.C.

San Fran was a lucky break, D.C. was a mixture of 'Stylistic Choice' and the hundreds of defense systems we have installed to defend the city in the event of a nuclear war (which wouldn't really work, but shhh...) so what does that leave? Reno?

Who would waste a bomb on Reno?

I'd sooner drop a Bomb on Des Moines, Iowa... or hell... Elk City, Idaho!

Reno is like... the slummy version of Vegas. It'd almost be doing America a -favor- to nuke the place.


But I do get what you mean, it'd be nice to have a few more places more akin to the Glow, if you ask me... >.>

This piqued my curiosity.

I always thought that if one bomb could destroy Hiroshima, then the bombs we have now could be capable of much, much more.

Entire Hiroshima was not destroyed, Immediately after Hiroshima around 30k to 40k got killed .. The Millions of Deaths was the aftermath of that because of Radiation disease etc..

This is from wiki
"The radius of total destruction was about one mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11 km2)"

"Some of the reinforced concrete buildings in Hiroshima had been very strongly constructed because of the earthquake danger in Japan,and their framework did not collapse even though they were fairly close to the blast center"

"Eizo Nomura (野村 英三 Nomura Eizō?) was the closest known survivor, who was in the basemant of a reinforced concrete building (it remained as the Rest House after the war) only 170 m (560 ft) from ground zero"

With high Construction standards of todays buildings of steel and reinforced concrete we should not be expecting major damage to the city itself but lots of causalities

EDIT: Wiki says 60% of Hiroshima was destroyed, but thats because of the resulting fires and poor construction quality of most buildings...

I have to agree there. Games need to sacrifice realism for the sake of being enjoyable in some cases, and in the case of keeping some prewar cities still intact enough that you can tell there was a city there, I'd say that this is one of those cases. I find that exploring in games is usually much more enjoyable if there are recognizable landmarks, and looking at Fallout 3 or New Vegas, I can't see those games having much in the way of interesting landmarks if all the buildings in them were destroyed. Now for Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, due to the way that traveling was set up in them, they could get away with having large expanses of nothing in between points of interests, but with the gameworlds of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, they just can't have that.

So yeah, I'd say Bethesda doesn't need to change anything in this regard.

Yikes, 50-mile wide crater? That's a good solid Gigaton bomb there.

The destruction as presented in the Fallout games isn't too far fetched. Based on the number of bombs that targeted Vegas, they seem to be operating under a "quantity over quality" design, so individual bombs aren't going to be too destructive. There aren't a whole lot of craters in the games as most of the bombs are probably set to air-burst to widen the damage radius. This lowers the actual damage done to individual structures, so much remain more or less intact. The craters we do see like The Glow and the White House are the result of a direct "bunker buster" type hit.

Now, why Vegas of all places was targeted by so many bombs is beyond me. I guess China saw it as the pinnacle of American decadence, and wanted to scour it from the face of the planet.

Pittsburgh wasn't even targeted by nukes, that was the whole point of it's story. All the destruction you see was the fault of age and radiation coming from the rivers surrounding it.

For the record, I give you, 1950s las vegas.
http://photos.lasvegassun.com/media/img/photos/2008/04/21/scaled.0899_the_strip_1985.jpeg_t653x653.jpg?345c8960c5484952b4411b83c62d17f0ae245bc0

Taking into account that the game world has been scaled down a LOT. We are talking about 70 miles of I-15 being shrunk so it is walkable in like 20-30 minutes where it would actually take over a day. That means a lot of space constraints. So it makes perfect sense why a large portion of New Vegas is still intact.

Nuclear bombs in the Fallout Universe closely resemble Neutron Bombs, which focused on high radiation output rather than high blast and raw power. Powerful, but not as strong as real world bombs.



Las Vegas is a major economic and population center. A few dozen may seem like a lot of nukes, but that may have been just a fraction of the Chinese arsenal. REPCONN facilities that were near Las Vegas at the time also constructed rockets for the US Government, Hoover Dam housed biological weapons research laboratories (which the Chinese discovered), and the Helios One array is located at Vegas.

Vegas wasn't destroyed?

"The Strip" of New Vegas consists of four casinos, an embassy, a monorail line, a hotel, and a workshop. Compare that to Pre-War Strip, which boasted more then 30 hotels and casinos.

D.C. wasn't destroyed?

That entire game world was once densely urbanized. And while much of D.C. proper seems to have survived, you still have to go underground to get around due to all the rubble and debris up top.

"somehow"?

Mr House has shot down all the missiles in the area, the rest of the houses must've degraded over time. what is strange to me is that the colorado river isn't contaminated. i mean, nukes didn't hit at NV, but surely there were nukes further along the river.

He built Anti-Air/Bomb systems on top of the lucky 38, Seeing the technology they have post-war still, You can't assume thats the only technology they had, It could have been more advanced things but were mostly destroyed or fell apart.
Besides, It makes sense for the things BUILT to destroy nukes falling to actually WORK.

*Nods* It also goes into the same ...*put this politely* category as people that believed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN-4kH7fpTg&feature=related would save you from a nuclear blast.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT81Rkon7xg&feature=related*

As mentioned nukes are bad, but the devastation doesn't become "Massive" until you start entering into the 20 to 70 megaton range. Even then you aren't going to see this just "unholy" explosion that will incinerate 1/3 the state of Florida. Here's an example of the most powerful nuclear bomb *built by the Russians* called the Tsar Bomb. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tsar_Bomba_Paris.png gives an idea of what a 50 megaton bomb would do to the city of Paris.

When "Duck and Cover" was first proposed, it was thought that the biggest problem from a nuke for those not vaporised was going to be from rapidly moving debris, and on this basis, it does work. We understood the longer lasting effects of radiation later on (although still talked about ducking and covering to make people feel safe).

Just a reminder though that a nuke doesnt mean wiped off the face of the earth. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still populated today with over million and a half people between them. (although to be fair, 69& of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed).

If you look at numerous impact craters, it is quite obvious bombs are quite smaller, yet still nuclear. For example, the bomb that hit black mountain must have been quite small, as the impact crater is only around 50-100 metres in diameter.

It is really quite simple, really. a High altitude explosion would kill most people on the ground, but most stronger structures and buildings would be relatively intact. It is explained in the Vault dweller's survival guide that the nations in fallout switched from megatons to kilotons as the time went by. This would mean smaller explosions, and overall, much less damage to buildings. As well, you have to remember. Most of the intact cities were given a good amount of warning, as they were further away from the West coast. The LA boneyard was on the west coast, and had very little warning. D.C is most likely intact due to the warning, the fact that Fort bannister could have shot a few planes down, and the fact that it's the capital, so there is bound to be a large amount of defense systems defending it.

And it's not like EVERYTHING in D.C. is left. Did you try going to the White House? (I assume that was the result of a special nuke meant to obliterate any basemant bunker the President may be hiding in) Where's the Supreme Court? If Congress wasn't in session and nukes are smaller-scale devices, why waste on the Capitol when you could be blowing up military institutions? Also, notice how many Chinese weapons are in D.C., this probably means they scaled back a bit because they were counting on an insurgency to take over.

But I do find it hard to believe that the steel manufacturing HQ of the nation (Pittsburgh) wasn't blown to bits.

From what I can gather, the nuke on D.C was oh I'd say about 8-10 kilotons and was dropped on the white house. That's not enough to even scratch the Capitol building. Of course it could be the regular nuclear yield of 400 kilotons but that still wouldn't be enough to demolish the entire city. The point of a nuclear bomb isn't total destruction but the radiation and massive shock waves that follow it.

There's only 1 nuke that was dropped on D.C successfully as the White House is the only place that's a crater. Obviously there were more as shown by the Megaton bomb.

About Mr. House stopping 77 nukes...well obviously they were missile based nukes. And it's not really hard to disable 77 nukes if you're a super smart man inside a place where you have full control of everything in Vegas. And yes, you can disable nukes in mid flight if you have the correct codes.

One last thing. The reason why humans die off so fast when hit by a nuke isn't the blast or the fallout but the lack of infrastructure. Take America. With the infrastructure(clean water, food, electricity, medical care) can support obviously about 200-300 million people(or more depending on what the population was in 2077). But without the infrastructure, America will struggle to feed 40 million people. The total death from fallout and the blast alone is about 60 million, a little less than the total death toll of WWII. But because of the loss of infrastructure and obviously the mutants, would be staggering. Over a 100 million people would die from that.

Well, a game like Fallout 3, they pointed out the reason that DC is mainly intact is that it'd not be fun to explore a flat irradiated crater.


Las Vegas is the only thing with a real reason for standing, and even then, it was logically written in.