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Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?

Guy Mann posted:

In Fallout 3 the DC wastes had only just started being settled because radiation storms kept the place too dangerous to live until then and then the supermutants started showing up almost immediately and causing havoc, so it at least has a story excuse for why everything is largely untouched and the settlements are so ramshackle. New Vegas mostly just roled with the assets from 3 as a base which is why despite ostensibly a story and setting that is supposed to be post-post-apocalyptic everything is still dust motes and empty whisky bottles.

On top of that, in the New Vegas region, most people try to avoid the more rundown buildings, and the tribals actively avoid going into them because they think they're cursed. Take a look at most of the houses in outer vegas, and the ones people live in are the ones that aren't on the verge of collapse or boarded up. And their interiors are pretty clean, all things considered. The same can't be said about Freeside because it's a shithole, and the NCR's base at McCarran is a giant airport terminal.

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turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Cythereal posted:

This kind of stuff is why Fallout's bored me to tears for the last several outings. They're still retreading the same setting and the same ideas, and not doing anything really new or imaginative with it. I know what the Fallout setting is, what it looks like, what the factions are like, and what the story's going to be like. Show me something new with it all, please.

The Fallout 4 setting and premise is actually pretty cool, but it's in the hands of Bethesda so uh...

Like, the lore makes it sound like the Commonwealth is pretty populated with a bunch of different towns and cities with the minutemen acting as a regional army. The Institute and the Minutemen have been fighting for a century as the Institute uses its armies of Synths to raid the surface for whatever resources they need, but with the Minutemen collapsing and the Commonwealth fragmenting lots of raiders have moved in and its infrastructure really breaks down. With the Brotherhood showing up you have the potential of having a pretty cool plot about the player deciding what direction the post-war society will develop in, pretty much exactly like New Vegas. The Minutemen are trying to recreate the past, the Brotherhood are trying to control it, and the Institute seems to be focused on making their own way into the future.

Naturally, almost none of this comes up in the game and the plot is fantastically retarded.

Furia
Jul 26, 2015

Grimey Drawer

turn off the TV posted:

The Fallout 4 setting and premise is actually pretty cool, but it's in the hands of Bethesda so uh...

Like, the lore makes it sound like the Commonwealth is pretty populated with a bunch of different towns and cities with the minutemen acting as a regional army. The Institute and the Minutemen have been fighting for a century as the Institute uses its armies of Synths to raid the surface for whatever resources they need, but with the Minutemen collapsing and the Commonwealth fragmenting lots of raiders have moved in and its infrastructure really breaks down. With the Brotherhood showing up you have the potential of having a pretty cool plot about the player deciding what direction the post-war society will develop in, pretty much exactly like New Vegas. The Minutemen are trying to recreate the past, the Brotherhood are trying to control it, and the Institute seems to be focused on making their own way into the future.

Naturally, almost none of this comes up in the game and the plot is fantastically retarded.

I haven't played 4 and I am glad I had the stupid plot twist spoiled for me before because holy poo poo it was dumb.

And you're absolutely right, but that introduces the whole problem of plot continuity vs. player action validation, which is what causes Bethesda to absolutely refuse to provide sequels and instead opt to move the setting to a different region of the US each time.

There's, what, like 36 possibilities for the fallout timeline based on mayor events (the destruction of the enclave mobile base vs. the BOS pentagon, the winner at the battle of Hoover dam, the nuking or not of Colorado and/or California) before Fallout 4? Yet somehow no one has ever heard of this elsewhere in the broad US wasteland and all the interesting implications will never be talked about ever again.

I would love it if either Bethesda picked a timeline of events, or maybe even if Fallout 5 were set in post apocalyptic China instead of America for a change (kudos for diversity and representation), but that would be interesting and fun and require effort so it's not gonna happen.

aniviron
Sep 11, 2014

Regardless of the debate about whether people would live in trash or not, the real reason is because in FO3/NV/4 it's very very easy to use trash to make an area look visually interesting without investing almost any work in doing so. It's also helpful for covering up transitions between meshes, reducing instances of sharp corners, and trimming. In FO4 this is especially easy to see if you use scrap everything or spring cleaning- if you take the time to sperg out and scrap most of the trash in Bunker Hill it looks really empty and weird. Yes, you could absolutely make it not look empty & weird and also have no trash, but it would be a lot more level design work than just using some trash clutter brushes. This was done in all three modern fallout games because it works and because making a world as huge as any of the games are takes a lot of time.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Furia posted:

I haven't played 4 and I am glad I had the stupid plot twist spoiled for me before because holy poo poo it was dumb.

And you're absolutely right, but that introduces the whole problem of plot continuity vs. player action validation, which is what causes Bethesda to absolutely refuse to provide sequels and instead opt to move the setting to a different region of the US each time.

There's, what, like 36 possibilities for the fallout timeline based on mayor events (the destruction of the enclave mobile base vs. the BOS pentagon, the winner at the battle of Hoover dam, the nuking or not of Colorado and/or California) before Fallout 4? Yet somehow no one has ever heard of this elsewhere in the broad US wasteland and all the interesting implications will never be talked about ever again.

I would love it if either Bethesda picked a timeline of events, or maybe even if Fallout 5 were set in post apocalyptic China instead of America for a change (kudos for diversity and representation), but that would be interesting and fun and require effort so it's not gonna happen.

Eh. I'm kinda hoping for a post-apocalyptic Miami area next. Go for a mutated Everglades, sea monsters, city on the sea, etc.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Cythereal posted:

Eh. I'm kinda hoping for a post-apocalyptic Miami area next. Go for a mutated Everglades, sea monsters, city on the sea, etc.

If they did a Fallout: Miami, then despite the whole setting existing in a kind of eternal 50's, Miami would still somehow be in the 80's.

Coolguye
Jul 6, 2011

Required by his programming!

The Cheshire Cat posted:

So I'm pretty sure the developers know that it's not at all realistic that people are still living in houses with giant holes in the walls and dirt and dead leaves all over the floor 200 years after the war, but it's what people expect the game to look like so that's what they do.
i have absolutely no such faith and i'm really not clear on why you do, esp considering the Vault building DLC they released that finally gave you the ability to build something that didn't look like corrugated butthole (it was prefab shelters instead).

aniviron posted:

Regardless of the debate about whether people would live in trash or not, the real reason is because in FO3/NV/4 it's very very easy to use trash to make an area look visually interesting without investing almost any work in doing so.
one of the primary complaints about both FO3 and 4 is that they are not visually interesting enough actually



also, this was not simply limited to fallout. it's a take your pick of any game tagged 'post apocalyptic' on steam. the stalker games are totally guilty of it, the only places with even remotely passable shelter are the super-sensitive double-invulnerable NPCs and everyone else sleeps in the rain. metro 2033 does it, yes i get that space is at a premium in the underground but otherwise normal people who are stuck in one station forever are sleeping in sewage-caked cubbyholes while there's plenty of wood and dead-end track around to pop up simple domiciles. that dumb judgement game does it like CRAZY, expecting you to pop up random tin structures and stay put in the face of demon attacks. you'd better believe literally everything The Walking Dead does it, if someone hasn't just picked up some random structure from before zombie mania hit they're living underneath a trash heap. i could go on but who honestly cares, it is an insanely nerdy point about an insanely nerdy subtopic in the insanely nerdy hobby of playing many, many video games.

The Iron Rose
May 12, 2012

:minnie: Cat Army :minnie:

Coolguye posted:

i could go on but who honestly cares, it is an insanely nerdy point about an insanely nerdy subtopic in the insanely nerdy hobby of playing many, many video games.

you're posting in games my friend

Guy Mann
Mar 28, 2016

by Lowtax

Cythereal posted:

This kind of stuff is why Fallout's bored me to tears for the last several outings. They're still retreading the same setting and the same ideas, and not doing anything really new or imaginative with it. I know what the Fallout setting is, what it looks like, what the factions are like, and what the story's going to be like. Show me something new with it all, please.

Fallout is a setting that is literally built on repurposing 1950s iconography and modern pop culture goofs in the context of a post-apocalyptic nuclear setting, retreading is kind of the basis of its DNA. Granted after 5 games of that it might have lost its novelty to some people but at this point it's kind of reaching the level of people complaining about Star Wars movies not having enough hard sci-fi in them or Marvel movies not being different enough where you're asking for an ongoing series with a huge fanbase to do something that it's obviously not about.

Cythereal posted:

Eh. I'm kinda hoping for a post-apocalyptic Miami area next. Go for a mutated Everglades, sea monsters, city on the sea, etc.

You just described the original sequel to Wasteland, Fountain of Dreams. I kind of wish Brian Fargo had decided to make a follow-up to that concept instead of making a clunkier, humorless version of Fallout with Wasteland 2.



Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Guy Mann posted:

Fallout is a setting that is literally built on repurposing 1950s iconography and modern pop culture goofs in the context of a post-apocalyptic nuclear setting, retreading is kind of the basis of its DNA. Granted after 5 games of that it might have lost its novelty to some people but at this point it's kind of reaching the level of people complaining about Star Wars movies not having enough hard sci-fi in them or Marvel movies not being different enough where you're asking for an ongoing series with a huge fanbase to do something that it's obviously not about.

Perhaps. But the last Fallout game I actually bought and played was 2. Everything the series has done since then has, in my opinion, been retreading the same ground and telling the same stories the same way in the same setting. Maybe other people haven't gotten bored of it, but I certainly have. I'm ready for something different.

Hell, put Fallout in space, on a L5 colony or Moon base after the bombs fell on Earth. There's a lot that you could do with the post-apocalyptic faux-1950s that isn't the same old Fallout formula.

Max Wilco
Jan 23, 2012

I'm just trying to go through life without looking stupid.

It's not working out too well...

Coolguye posted:

one of the primary complaints about both FO3 and 4 is that they are not visually interesting enough actually

I feel like Fallout 1 & 2 suffer from that issue as well. The series as a whole suffers from not having the best visuals.


Guy Mann posted:

You just described the original sequel to Wasteland, Fountain of Dreams. I kind of wish Brian Fargo had decided to make a follow-up to that concept instead of making a clunkier, humorless version of Fallout with Wasteland 2.



Fountain of Dreams is pretty dumb, though: http://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-fountain-of-dreams/

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong

Cythereal posted:

This kind of stuff is why Fallout's bored me to tears for the last several outings. They're still retreading the same setting and the same ideas, and not doing anything really new or imaginative with it. I know what the Fallout setting is, what it looks like, what the factions are like, and what the story's going to be like. Show me something new with it all, please.

Fallout Tactics is sitting right there for you to play, then.

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy
Dying man: Help, I can't stop the bleeding
Nerd: HERE ARE THE PROBLEMS I HAVE WITH MY LEAST FAVORITE FALLOUT GAMES

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/25652/



Have a random sexy Deathclaw woman or something, Jesus.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Midnight Voyager posted:

Dying man: Help, I can't stop the bleeding
Nerd: HERE ARE THE PROBLEMS I HAVE WITH MY LEAST FAVORITE FALLOUT GAMES

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/25652/



Have a random sexy Deathclaw woman or something, Jesus.

Before clicking the link I just saw the image and thought "That's not too bad. Obviously a silly outfit but pretty tame by Nexus standards". Then I looked at the mod page and discovered that it's supposed to be a "Deathclaw girl". At least that other "sexy deathclaw" mod actually made them look ROUGHLY like a Deathclaw. They weren't even trying with this one.

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Before clicking the link I just saw the image and thought "That's not too bad. Obviously a silly outfit but pretty tame by Nexus standards". Then I looked at the mod page and discovered that it's supposed to be a "Deathclaw girl". At least that other "sexy deathclaw" mod actually made them look ROUGHLY like a Deathclaw. They weren't even trying with this one.

Add horns, add thong that has no front, add tattoos on face. :effort:

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

fishmech posted:

Fallout Tactics is sitting right there for you to play, then.

Show me something new that's also a good game. Sorry, should have specified.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?

The Cheshire Cat posted:

If they did a Fallout: Miami, then despite the whole setting existing in a kind of eternal 50's, Miami would still somehow be in the 80's.

Wouldn't be the first time the 70s and 80s have crept into the Fallout universe. The main point of convergence is that Fallout's timeline never moved beyond vaccum tubes to transistors, and radio remained more popular than television. The 80s still happened to an extent, only with a heaping of 50s laid over it. So bits and pieces of other decades do pop in from time to time.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

The vacuum tube is the lore reason, but I think you can explain most of Fallout as "what if Amazing Stories was non fiction?" with 80s references for the sake of having 80s references.

E: Seriously, here's the Fallout 4 Assault Rifle.

turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jul 23, 2017

Kokoro Wish
Jul 23, 2007

Post? What post? Oh wow.
I had nothing to do with THAT.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Before clicking the link I just saw the image and thought "That's not too bad. Obviously a silly outfit but pretty tame by Nexus standards". Then I looked at the mod page and discovered that it's supposed to be a "Deathclaw girl". At least that other "sexy deathclaw" mod actually made them look ROUGHLY like a Deathclaw. They weren't even trying with this one.

That one's coming eventually:



I think it's actually being console playtested.

Kokoro Wish fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jul 23, 2017

Munchables
Feb 8, 2015

Ask/tell me about legal cannibalism

Aren't there female deathclaws already and they look like every other deathclaw except bigger?

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Munchables posted:

Aren't there female deathclaws already and they look like every other deathclaw except bigger?

Is it really a female if it doesn't have huge knockers?

Psycho Landlord
Oct 10, 2012

What are you gonna do, dance with me?

Munchables posted:

Aren't there female deathclaws already and they look like every other deathclaw except bigger?


Remember what thread you're posting in, friend.


turn off the TV posted:

Is it really a female if it doesn't have huge knockers?

Fargin Icehole
Feb 19, 2011

Pet me.
Sexy Deathclaw should not be a thing. And yet it is.

Jagged Jim
Sep 26, 2013

I... I can only look though the window...

Midnight Voyager posted:

Add horns, add thong that has no front, add tattoos on face. :effort:

add look of silent pleading for a merciful death.

Jagged Jim fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jul 23, 2017

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

The Cheshire Cat posted:

If they did a Fallout: Miami, then despite the whole setting existing in a kind of eternal 50's, Miami would still somehow be in the 80's.

YESSSSSS

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

The Cheshire Cat posted:

The thing is basically that people have certain expectations about what "post-apocalyptic" looks like, and most of those expectations are calibrated to "immediately after the bombs fell". So I'm pretty sure the developers know that it's not at all realistic that people are still living in houses with giant holes in the walls and dirt and dead leaves all over the floor 200 years after the war, but it's what people expect the game to look like so that's what they do.

This would actually be a fantastic idea, with poo poo either decaying rapidly from a downward spiral of damage, neglect, limited resources, or overuse by survivors or rebuilding and seeing some improvement. I've had thought experiments about the longevity of canned and packaged foods and how long any of that would last in a post-apocalyptic situation. For the most part, you have two years to redevelop agriculture before a lot of the canned food goes bad. If you don't, then it's cannibalism time.

Furia posted:

There's, what, like 36 possibilities for the fallout timeline based on mayor events (the destruction of the enclave mobile base vs. the BOS pentagon, the winner at the battle of Hoover dam, the nuking or not of Colorado and/or California) before Fallout 4? Yet somehow no one has ever heard of this elsewhere in the broad US wasteland and all the interesting implications will never be talked about ever again.

Considering that one of the elements of Bethesda's Fallout series is listening to the radio, you think you'd hear transmissions from other parts of the continent, if not the globe, especially at night thanks to the skywave effect and there being no one to regulate broadcast power. A station in the NCR broadcasting at 50 kiloWatts (which was the broadcast power of WLW Cincinatti, the first station to hit the max allowed for AM stations) could be clearly listened to as far as Colorado. Still using WLW as an example of 50kW, they could be heard by 38 states after sundown and once got a call in 1985 to their overnight host from Hawaii. I mean, the NCR wouldn't be above throwing even a megawatt power source behind a radio station and drowning out Three-Dog in the Capitol Wastes, just to get the word out there's a new stable force out there.

Also, it reminds me of a bit from that '80s movie Warriors Of The Wasteland a.k.a. Battletruck, where John Ratzenberger is excitedly telling Michael Beck that he can pick up the call to prayer from New Mecca on occasion from his shortwave. If there's people broadcasting radio signals, people are going to hear them.

Furia posted:

I would love it if either Bethesda picked a timeline of events, or maybe even if Fallout 5 were set in post apocalyptic China instead of America for a change (kudos for diversity and representation), but that would be interesting and fun and require effort so it's not gonna happen.

Post-apocalyptic Beijing would like more like the Metro series than Fallout. Supposedly, the whole city was built as a giant bomb shelter and with the rise in housing prices, people have moved in and started living in them.

turn off the TV posted:

The vacuum tube is the lore reason, but I think you can explain most of Fallout as "what if Amazing Stories was non fiction?" with 80s references for the sake of having 80s references.

E: Seriously, here's the Fallout 4 Assault Rifle.



You mean like Fallout and Fallout 2? Fallout 2 especially has the stuff that could only exist from an alternate timeline branching from the '80s and '90s like the P90, the G11, and the XL70E3 (i.e. the "good" L85).

I keep telling people that the first two Fallout games, the '50s stuff was largely fluff, most of it doesn't even show up in the game past the loading screens. Bethesda is the ones who especially ran with it to the point it seems that Fallout 4 had a nuclear war in the 1930s.

I will go ahead and say that a true alternate '50s/'60s post-apocalypse would be interesting, largely because of the policy of mutual assured destruction hadn't taken precedence yet, civil defense was being funded, and nuclear delivery was largely the matter of bombers, which could be taken out by SAMs and jet interceptors, even not nuclear-armed (which they were, since they could take out whole squadrons with a single missile). I recall something I read about that MST3K experiment The Starfighters is that nuclear war at the time was expected to be less of the "a nuclear holocaust in 30 minutes or less" affair that we're familiar with since the 80s but week-long bombing campaigns where bombers were believed to bomb Russia, return to base, rearm, then go out again.

Using the Cuban Missile Crisis as starting point for such a concept would be good: at most, Cuba had 42 single warhead missiles with targets mostly concentrated in the American South, with probably a couple attempts at scoring a hit on Washington or New York. A chunk of the U.S. is gone, but most of the country is still around; the government might collapse immediately following a successful hit on D.C., or a martial law government takes over following Kennedy, Johnson, the Cabinet and Congress getting vaporized, or a mix of both. Meanwhile, Russia and most of Europe are super-hosed thanks to the still unbalanced arsenals of the U.S. versus Russia (at the time, U.S. fielded about 5,000 warheads, the Russians only had 300-400) and the Russians investing heavily into intermediate range weapons.

Also, regarding post-apocalyptic Miami with '80s references...

Young Freud fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Jul 23, 2017

Orv
May 4, 2011

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy
If only there was a thread for endlessly talking about the flaws and foibles of Fallout games in long, boring paragraphs. IE: Why I stopped reading the Fallout 4 thread right after I tried to ask about a bug there and got essays instead of answers.

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/24719/

Here, customize a sexy robot or something. All :nws:

http://i.imgur.com/X5Sxggs.jpg

Real girls have seams.

http://i.imgur.com/q5EJQtW.jpg

DIMA just isn't fuckable enough.

http://i.imgur.com/MqlIpSH.jpg

Chainmail borg, maybe?

http://i.imgur.com/LbuhoB6.jpg

I want to gently caress a robot and a zombie at once.

http://i.imgur.com/03LfS9d.jpg

Sexy robopredator?

Midnight Voyager fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Jul 23, 2017

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying


If the game's timeline states that microchips were never invented then the timeline diverges by at least the early 1940s. Just treat it like Strangereal. Also, mutually assured destruction through nuclear exchanges were present in apocalyptic fiction as early as 1914, and I'm aware of at least one story dealing with ICBMs mounted with atomic weapons being used for MAD prior to 1945. My senior thesis was about the depiction of atomic power prior to 1945, and rest assured that people realized that things were about to get hosed before the term science fiction had even been coined.

e: I'd also say to take a look at the pre-war junk that's present in Fallout 1 and 2. Nearly all of the civilian vehicles and structures are really styled like the 1950, it's just you don't see much of them in those games because people on the west coast actually decided to build their own structures 200 years later.

turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jul 23, 2017

fishmech
Jul 16, 2006

by VideoGames
Salad Prong
I mean I thought part of the story in Fallout 3/NV/4 was that there was also a specific trend of 50s revivalism going on at the time just before the war happened that had been going on for some time, which made things more 50s just before all the bombs dropped.


Young Freud posted:


Considering that one of the elements of Bethesda's Fallout series is listening to the radio, you think you'd hear transmissions from other parts of the continent, if not the globe, especially at night thanks to the skywave effect and there being no one to regulate broadcast power. A station in the NCR broadcasting at 50 kiloWatts (which was the broadcast power of WLW Cincinatti, the first station to hit the max allowed for AM stations) could be clearly listened to as far as Colorado. Still using WLW as an example of 50kW, they could be heard by 38 states after sundown and once got a call in 1985 to their overnight host from Hawaii. I mean, the NCR wouldn't be above throwing even a megawatt power source behind a radio station and drowning out Three-Dog in the Capitol Wastes, just to get the word out there's a new stable force out there.


But Fallout world also has all kinds of weird technology and poo poo being blown up. There could be all sorts of pre-war hardened broadcasting towers or other such things that swamp out signals between regions. Or some sort of issues actually sourcing the necessary components for high-wattage AM and shortwave radio broadcasts, especially in a "transistors and solid state never really took off" setting - the tubes we still use to this day for some of those stations are some gnarly things to manufacture and keep running.

Like here's some of the 5 foot total height vacuum tubes that the transmitter equipment at WLW Cincinnati used up until the 80s in active service, and into the early 2000s for emergency backup service:


Those very tubes might have been in use for that 1985 broadcast that reached Hawaii, but they'd have a hell of a time getting remanufactured after a bomb wipes out Cincinnati and only the residents of Vault 345: This Time They're Required To Die Their Hair Pink come out into the Cinci wastes to rebuild.

Also those big metal things they're installed in include a complex water cooling system so the tubes don't explode from the heat, and I think they had more attached when in active service condition?

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

fishmech posted:

I mean I thought part of the story in Fallout 3/NV/4 was that there was also a specific trend of 50s revivalism going on at the time just before the war happened that had been going on for some time, which made things more 50s just before all the bombs dropped.

Nope.

quote:

Hey, Rob - the basic theme of the Fallout games is that the world of 2077 had a retro-50s feel when the nukes dropped - sort of a "what people in the 50s imagined the future (and post-holocaust future) would be like." This theme translates into the "look" and the actual physics of the world (Torg-style, if you've ever played Torg) - so anyway, you get giant radioactive monsters, pulp science with lasers, blasters, vacuum tubes, big expensive cars with fins, Art Deco architecture, robots with brains in domes atop their heads, lots of tape reel computer machines, the whole "atomic horror" feel, and it explains the artistic style of the interface.

History Comes Inside!
Nov 20, 2004




Midnight Voyager posted:

If only there was a thread for endlessly talking about the flaws and foibles of Fallout games in long, boring paragraphs. IE: Why I stopped reading the Fallout 4 thread right after I tried to ask about a bug there and got essays instead of answers.

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/24719/

Here, customize a sexy robot or something.

A bunch of untagged nsfw images

Cmon man leave the monster titties on the Nexus end some of us have jobs.

Drake_263
Mar 31, 2010

fishmech posted:

I mean I thought part of the story in Fallout 3/NV/4 was that there was also a specific trend of 50s revivalism going on at the time just before the war happened that had been going on for some time, which made things more 50s just before all the bombs dropped.


But Fallout world also has all kinds of weird technology and poo poo being blown up. There could be all sorts of pre-war hardened broadcasting towers or other such things that swamp out signals between regions. Or some sort of issues actually sourcing the necessary components for high-wattage AM and shortwave radio broadcasts, especially in a "transistors and solid state never really took off" setting - the tubes we still use to this day for some of those stations are some gnarly things to manufacture and keep running.

Like here's some of the 5 foot total height vacuum tubes that the transmitter equipment at WLW Cincinnati used up until the 80s in active service, and into the early 2000s for emergency backup service:


Those very tubes might have been in use for that 1985 broadcast that reached Hawaii, but they'd have a hell of a time getting remanufactured after a bomb wipes out Cincinnati and only the residents of Vault 345: This Time They're Required To Die Their Hair Pink come out into the Cinci wastes to rebuild.

Also those big metal things they're installed in include a complex water cooling system so the tubes don't explode from the heat, and I think they had more attached when in active service condition?

Yeah, thing about vacuum tubes is that they're big, bulky, and actually really drat fragile. I mean, obviously it's not impossible that somewhere out there is a bigass transmitter with an oildrum-sized pristine tube just waiting for a 3-Dog to stumble upon it - but most your average tube radios just won't have the oomph you need to punch through the radiation zones and poo poo.

There's also a good chance that when the war was going on, they'd have actively targeted any high-power radio sources - wouldn't have put it past them to specifically design a warhead that actively homed in on the strongest radio source it could find.

That said, you'd be surprised at the power you can crank out of even a small radio - I work as a ferry driver and the cute little intership radios the ferries come with actually have a limiter on them - 'cause when you have it hooked up to the ferry's power systems, take off the limiter and they can hear your hail all the way to freaking Moscow. From rural Finland.

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

History Comes Inside! posted:

Cmon man leave the monster titties on the Nexus end some of us have jobs.

poo poo, sorry, fixed it.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Midnight Voyager posted:

poo poo, sorry, fixed it.

:nws: stuff needs to be linked, not spoiler-tagged, because the forums load the images first.

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Neddy Seagoon posted:

:nws: stuff needs to be linked, not spoiler-tagged, because the forums load the images first.

EXTRA FIXED then

Thefluffy
Sep 7, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpLtjVtLq0g LAY EGG IS TRUE

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

fishmech posted:

But Fallout world also has all kinds of weird technology and poo poo being blown up. There could be all sorts of pre-war hardened broadcasting towers or other such things that swamp out signals between regions. Or some sort of issues actually sourcing the necessary components for high-wattage AM and shortwave radio broadcasts, especially in a "transistors and solid state never really took off" setting - the tubes we still use to this day for some of those stations are some gnarly things to manufacture and keep running.

Like here's some of the 5 foot total height vacuum tubes that the transmitter equipment at WLW Cincinnati used up until the 80s in active service, and into the early 2000s for emergency backup service:


Those very tubes might have been in use for that 1985 broadcast that reached Hawaii, but they'd have a hell of a time getting remanufactured after a bomb wipes out Cincinnati and only the residents of Vault 345: This Time They're Required To Die Their Hair Pink come out into the Cinci wastes to rebuild.

Also those big metal things they're installed in include a complex water cooling system so the tubes don't explode from the heat, and I think they had more attached when in active service condition?

The thing I was bringing up is it's an example of what could be done with at the NCR's level of technology, built using reverse-engineered surviving technologies over the last fifty years, incorporating places like Vault City, and adding with what was gained from stuff like Vault computers and the GECK's Library Of Congress-sized holodisks, not using surviving materials. I'm pretty sure that Guglielmo Marconi's research is in the Library Of Congress and could be used as the basis of some Vault City or Shady Sands engineer in the 2200s to build a megawatt transmitter.

Also, WLW still has the capability of being a 500 kW station, which it was during the early days of WW2 to broadcast nationwide reports. It only went back to 50 kW due to government discontinuing the license for that level. I think it had the moniker of being the "nation's station".

Orv
May 4, 2011

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Thefluffy
Sep 7, 2014
so when can we tell that we hit peak :goonsay:?

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