Lesson learned: The Fallout world is much less realistic than ours.

Honestly i think you guys are getting a little too serous on the logic here. This is VIDEO GAMES we are talking about here! One of the most popular video game ever contains a Fat plumber that finds a world of living mushrooms and goes and fights Giant turtles for a frigid princess! And you all are complaining about a game that has explosive radiative cars? WHICH MIGHT HAPPEN SOMEDAY! (note i dont have a link but it was something about nanobots that made decaying radiation into electricity or some such)

WHAT KIND OF GAMERS ARE YOU

I can definitely see where they are coming from, we just have different views on the internal logic of the game. They view it as, "Our world, but with more nuclear energy, and having been destroyed by nuclear war." I view it as an alternate universe based on the 50's view of the future, where they thought everything would be nuclear powered. Which it is, you just have to understand that it's nuclear powered even if it doesn't make sense to us, because it made sense to them.

The video posted sure as hell wasn't made in the eighties. And I never called it ramblings either. Unless you have a bomb-proof forcefield (and the enemy isn't using forcefield proof bombs), it's still the best thing you can do, and if you actually survived long enough to do it, it will raise your chances of surviving everything that follows.

Have you ever actually driven to another city? There are always fringe areas and outlying towns. There are going to be plenty of people in the zone where this may be effective(17-53 km in the case of 20 MT bombs, by the looks of it). I mean, what? Just because the nuke is so devastating at and in the areas close to its hypocentre we shouldn't be prepared for the rest of the effects? It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. And hell, in the chance that you do survive, this will probably reduce the severity of burns to your face and torso.

You're also assuming 100% success on the enemy's part to give them full coverage.

SO THAT FALLOUT 3 GAME IS GOING TO BE TOTALLY SWEET/COMPLETELY CRAP (choose appropriate)

I think that's what it was intended as, but it is pretty easy to forget that sort of thing.

It's funny really, this talk of ducking and covering not working, because people are forgetting another aspect of nukes (hint; it's in the title of this thread). If you didn't die from the initial heat blast, or didn't die from the shockwave that just rippled out and destroyed everything further afield, then the fallout will probably do the job anyway, especially if the wind is blowing you way. That shit can travel even further than the shockwave itself, and there isn't any ducking and covering from that.

No, Hawk. It'll just turn you into a super mutant.

Everything will be totally ok.

I'd just like to point out that there are things called Nuclear Batteries that work on natural radioactive decay and do not need all that much shielding as long as you stick with low energy beta decay or alpha decay. In fact beta decay requires no shielding at all really. With a combination of super high efficiency thermoelectric cells and direct to electricity from radiation cells one could effectively power a car. Now if one would call natural fission as opposed to induced fission nuclear power that's a whole other story.

Edit: They also wouldn't explode when shot either.

I find your scientific knowledge questionable, let me tell you.

And that would be ICBM, DFM. Intercontinental ballistic missile. :p


And yeah, nuclear cars (in the induced fission sense, anyway) are completely ludicrous.

The actual numbers depend on if you're Russia or you are being attacked by Russia. Mostly because we built bigger bombs but they built more of them. Generally speaking though if you're in range of the building destroying shockwave you are in range or the super hot thermal flash. The flash actually travels much further than the blast wave itself, unless you happen to have a mountain in the way. As such you're getting burned pretty badly unless you happen to be somewhere the superheated air can't get. Even then anything flammable outside the physical blast radius and inside the thermal blast is going to ignite. You'll get 2nd degree burns out to about 30 miles and its going to heat up everything which means everything around you his going to be hot enough to cause severe burns. About the only thing duck and covering does for that is prolong the agony of dieing from burn infections.

The point being is that if you were anywhere in the physical blast radius, the only place duck and cover does anything appreciable in prolonging you're life, you're getting trapped in rubble. Assuming you magically survive that you have burning to death to look forward to from the fires set by the super heated air that will be hanging around. Assuming you magically survive that you are well within the range of the fall out which was carried at least to your location by the shockwave that destroyed your building. Most of today's larger bombs give you complete destruction out to 5 miles and severe destruction to 7 miles. There will be second degree burns and fires out to 30 miles which is well into the suburbs. Basically you're best bet is getting into a basement which I guess could be considered ducking and covering but anywhere above ground within 30 miles is going to get you burned bad enough to die.

A paragraph of me blabbering and you zone right in on the one typo. Also I don't know if you were joking or what about scientific knowledge so I'm just gonna let it go since you know, you're TDK I mean come on.

ALSO HEY BITVYPER, DUDE YOU ARE KIND OF A JERK AND ALSO:

Ducking and Covering is only marginally better than just standing there. I know it seems like it's at least safer than doing nothing, but it's really not. If the building you're in isn't torn to pieces by a nuclear blast and/or you're not thrown against a wall hard enough to fracture your bones then you've probably survived the concussive phase of the bomb fairly well. If you're in a radius that's close enough to cause severe burns but far enough away that you and your clothes don't just catch on fire, covering up will do a pretty good job of protecting your skin. But if you're close enough to the blast where you're getting severe burns, you've got way bigger problems than, you know, severe burns.

Also no I have never visited another city I live in a sunken pirate vessel on the ocean floor.

No I was completely serious.

And how do you get air at the bottom of the ocean?

I'm pretty sure we can stop arguing about what nukes do as the physics major totally owned that.

Also pointed out a way for nuclear cars to exist that more or less makes sense so even I'm happy with it now.

MOVING ON!

Edit: DFM has gills. He's a fish man. His name is Greg.

I DON'T KNOW IF I'M STILL ALLOWED TO INSULT TDK NOW THAT THE DISCUSSION HAS CHANGED.

EDIT: TDK YOU'RE DUMB NOBODY LIKES YOU.

I'm old greeeeeg!

So anyway, yeah, I think the VATS thing looks pretty sweet, how you can pause and make it turn-based-y anytime you want, although from the look of things there'll probably be some kind of limit on it. Otherwise it would pretty much be a win button since the enemy died pretty much every time it was used in the video.

Also, <3 Powerfist. Reminds me of the black power glove from The Boondocks.

Totally un-related to the topic, but what if I was 35 miles away? Or 40? I'd still see the flash I assume, prompting the duck-and-cover, but the whole "Everything is burning oh gawwwd" thing wouldn't be in effect, would it? I don't really know much about the A-bomb.

Also, I hope that this game will be what I've been looking for. I mean, balancing thirst and radioactivity levels? Huzzah!

I plan on looting every single person/place/thing that I meet, and it will be righteous.

The limit is your action points, I don't know how fast they recharge.

You see the flash get a really bad sunburn and maybe still die of radiation poisoning depending on wind direction. Duck and cover does very little in any case because the thermal flash travels at the speed of light. In short if you saw the flash you got hit by the thermal flash. Even if you duck in cover in time you just get slightly less severe burns.

I'm so getting this game and look forward to making it my bitch like every other RPG I have ever touched.

Fun fact: Duck and Cover was made before they clearly identified the bombs had radioactive fallout. Apparently they didn't look at/didn't care about those Japanese cities they dropped the bombs on.

All in all, Duck And Cover was of a more psychological benefit than anything else. Yes, it made you aware of nuclear death, but it also gave you a glimmer of hope of survival.

If you can actually see the flash, you're already subject to the effects of the bomb, and are quite likely being burned and hammered by concussive shockwaves.

Besides that, you're almost certainly blind. Permanently.

All of this is assuming you're outside of the immediate area in which nukes kill.

Any closer, and you're pretty much dead.

Duck and Cover assumes advance warning.

EDIT: While far from comprehensive, this is a fairly good overlook of the effects of a nuclear blast.

To be honest Oblivion + Guns + Some design fixes could be pretty fun, much as I hate Oblivion.

I am torn.

Between the hammer fist of doom or the teddy bear gun.

Not to mention the gun that shoots railroad spikes as it makes a cool train sound.

I heard the fastest part of a nuclear explosion reaches 1/200th of the speed of light, making it the third fastest thing there is. But I guess it could be wrong.

I know they are all so beautiful...SNiff...does anyone wonder how much shit you can make? because i hope its like thousands or something

That might be the neutrons though I could have sworn they were faster. In any case the thermal pulse is just light in the infrared range of the spectrum. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that being the same as visible light just with a lower frequency it gets to you at the same instant. That and the visible and UV light is more than intense enough on its own to cause sever damage. There are also no small amount of x-ray and gamma-rays but they tend to scatter more in the atmosphere and so their intensities fall off much quicker.

I think it's one of each weapon type.

Oh right, there is the electromagnetic radiation including infrared, it has the speed of light, though you need to be hit by it over a period of time for it to have any effect. I don't know, how much can it release in the first instant of explosion?

Assuming a 10 megaton warhead enough so that if you are within a 1 mile radius of the point on the ground that it explodes over the flash of light alone turns you into dust and permanently etches your shadow into whatever you where standing on or near. On average a 10 megaton blast releases about 83,860,000,000,000,000 joules of energy and roughly 40% of that or about 33,472,000,000,000,000 joules is pure thermal energy concentrated into a pulse of several seconds at least. Seeing as one joule is about enough energy to heat one gram of air but 1 degree Celsius. That's a crap ton of heat. In fact its about 31,725,334,651,127 btu. When they say you get second degree burns out to about 30 miles it means the thermal and other EM radiation is intense enough out to that point to cause second degree burns. In short, nuclear explosions are freaking huge.

Edit: Oh and just as a comparison the air in and empty two liter bottle is somewhere between 2 and 2.5 grams.

Didnt you guys ever learn about the nuke from WWII? It hit people in the mountains, on the other islands!