HEY


KRYLO

I'm gonna forgive your stance on the whole nuclear car thing since you've never played the games and probably don't immerse yourself in universe fluff but no aspect of nuclear energy in Fallout works like actual nuclear energy unless you count the fact that bombs blow up. They also give off radiation but radiation is more likely to mutate you into a giant monster or a crazy zombie ghoul than kill you. The only internal consistancy Fallout's ever, ever had with nuclear power is that it's is an amazing silver bullet wonder magic that can power your cars and your talking dolls and did. Fallout is like the Jetsons nuked themselves into oblivion.

Odjn said it perfectly well in less words.

To be fair, they did show that bottlecap bomb, so it's not like explosives are hard to come by. There are also sure to be grenades and rocket launchers later.

It's just, randomly shooting up a wrecked hulk, that doesn't even use explosive fuel in the traditional sense, is a far cry from shooting at a gas tank. Of course, shooting a gas tank (or randomly shooting a car, in some games) to cause it to explode isn't exactly realistically plausible in real life, but at least gasoline does explode if you set fire to it in a enclosed space. Uranium (or other fissionable material) isn't going to blow up just because it's on fire, enclosed space or no.

It's semantics, surely. I mean, I'll play Fallout 3 whether it has unrealistically explosive hulks of scrap metal or no. It's just the suspension of disbelief is stretched a lot there.

So, like, do you get your own nuclear powered car? And since these things obviously still have fuel, can you scavenge it from said hulks?

Edit: I should've read the rest of the thread before I made that reply.

I completely forgot about this.

People in the 50's had totally realistic conceptions about how nuclear energy and stuff worked.

I hope in Fallout 3 you can go to a school and see a bunch of skeletons ducking and covering beneath desks that are perfectly fine.

Yeah, but if you're far enough away that the thermal radiation doesn't kill you outright, then the duck and cover thing might actually save you (whether surviving with horrible burns and possibly radiation poisoning is worthwhile, I guess you'll have to decide on the spot). Those videos, while cheesy as hell, aren't intended for people sitting at ground zero; they just choose to avoid mentioning that you're completely fucked if that happens to be where you are.

If you're lucky enough to be really far away, you still might get killed in the resulting gale-force winds. Again; that's the kind of place where those strategies can improve your chances.

If you're close enough to the blast to make this stuff inapplicable, there's a good chance the "flash" killed you anyway.

If you're in a city that's under nuclear attack you're fucked and no matter where you are or what you're doing you're dead unless you're thirty feet underground. Cities important enough to warrent a being a nuclear target don't get hit with one ICMB. Depending on the size and importance of the city you're looking at anywhere from five to forty. Manhatten would be glass. If you're within a fifty square mile radius of a single one megaton air detonation the building you're in is going to be either flying through the air in a zillion pieces or crashing down on top of you and both cases has it and everything around it on fire.

Duck and cover won't do shit besides maybe stop you from being shredded to little pieces by flying glass before you're killed by flying rubble.

It's an accepted suspension that gas powered cars blow up from being shot in the tank. I mean, it's not particularly likely, but one can logic it away and it's been done enough in every movie and video game ever. Not really, because they were explained with a wonder chemical that acts as a super retro-virus to rewrite your genetic code on the basic level. In other words it was explained in a way close enough to science. It was also the entire premise of the game. Also: Arguing that a game mechanic that allows your character to do things he should be able to do anyway is unrealistic is like arguing that having to take a step forward, and duck before doing a shoryuken is unrealistic. They aren't really pausing time, they're pausing the game for the player to input commands to the game so that the game can play out as it should. But there's an entire stat for radiation killing you... I mean, I don't know. I got an ok distance into Fallout 1 before the bugs in my copy started getting far too bad, but it looked like Radiation was totally 99% likely to kill you. It also talked about how it killed you pretty quick in the manual, even in the parts that were pure fluff... and described an entirely accurate nuclear explosion.

I mean, yeah, mutate you and stuff--but that's another thing that's kind of an accepted bit of silliness in pretty much every genre ever. I haven't seen it used lately, but right up to the mid-nineties, at least, nuclear radiation was giving heroes super powers and turning ants into giant city destroying monsters.

Yeah, it's silly, but even then it's just taking things that can actually happen--the degeneration of your genetic code through contact with radioactive materials--and putting a new spin on it. I mean it's not like scientists haven't actually USED radiation to mutate things. I'm not sure why they BOTHER considering we can do ACTUAL genetics now, but whatever they wanna do, I guess.

Beyond what Bitvyper said about those videos being meant to save people who are pretty far away from the blast... and the fact that most schools in that time were basically above ground bomb shelters:

They were meant to make people FEEL better. It's not that anyone who actually knew anything about any of their nuclear science believed them. They were meant to make kids, in a scary time, when adults were talking 'the bomb' and how the red threat might drop it on us, FEEL better. It was propaganda designed to calm and control the masses.

Yeah, Manhatten would be. But nearby towns wouldn't necessarily be. This was safety for like, if a missile fucked up and landed outside your city, or just one fired before it was somehow stopped or whatever best case scenario--and that was all second to calming kids down and making them think they aren't all going to die if the commies drop the bomb.

Also: Note that people in the Fifties KNEW all this and HAD underground shelters.

That doesn't particularly contradict anything I said. Just because there are a lot of bombs doesn't mean the explosion won't still have all those outlying areas.

Also: It's WWII era, not the modern day. One nuke is probably exactly what you will get.

Duck and Cover was taught in schools until the nineteen eighties, it's not quite the arcane ramblings of generations long gone.

And yeah, it's first and foremost something to make you feel better about your life and your entire world hanging by someone else's thread. I'm just saying if you're far enough away from a nuclear blast that ducking and covering saves your life, you probably weren't going to be killed anyway.

Edit: The "outlying areas" are going to be the country side.