The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was an air burst at thousands of feet in air. The fallout carried in dust particles was the main source of radiation exposure.

And people live in Chernobyl just like people lived in New Orleans during Katrina. There, much of the ground is irradiated, but the reactor and it's debris were the largest sources, so they were filled with thousands of tons and buried under concrete.

Alan-

Thanks for that. Sometimes I don't look at the story as a whole as I've never played FO1 and 2. Plus, I never actually consider the scale of the NCR and the Legion. Their territories are indeed as big as most countries now that I think about it.

Considering that, I'm not surprised they would even bother to try to bring the USA back to a state much like it was before. I suppose being that the US was pretty much liquidated and then being isolated from it for as long as they have, there'd be no reason to actually attempt to form the USA again.

Good post, dude.

If a nuclear war on the scale of the one in Fallout were to occur right now, 200 years from now would be nothing like the one we see in the game. I think the only reason it's credible is presence of the vaults.

Without a stable shelter to preserve all of humanity's knowledge, I think it would take much longer for any kind of society like the ones depicted in Fallout to develop.

I'll use myself as an example. I know how something like a gun works. In assault rifles, for example, a cartridge is extracted by the bolt from a magazine feed. When the trigger is pulled, the firing pin inside the bolt strikes the back of the round which causes an impact sensitive chemical inside to ignite the powder, propelling the bullet out of the chamber down the barrel where it expands inside rifling grooves of the barrel, causing it to spin and stabilize it's flight plath to be accurate and far. The actually trajectory is an arced angle. In an M4, the point the bullet drops back to the same elevation of it's barrel is about 300 meters. In a gas operated system, there is a tube that catches some of the gas used to propel the bullet and reroutes it back to the bolt, causing it to be pushed back and extract another round from the magazine. In pistol systems, the tube is replaced by a rod that does the same thing but without actually blowing gas back into the chamber. In recoil operated systems, such as the M2 Browning .50 machine gun, the force of the cartridge being expended is enough to throw the bolt back.

Now, knowing this, I know nothing about the chemistry required for the primer and powder, the metal casting for the correct cartridge or bullet measurements, to say nothing of the fact the the actual parts of the .50 must be sized within an 1/1000 of an inch tolerance in order to work properly, or the assembly line to create such parts, or the metallurgy required to makes those parts strong enough to withstand the extreme pressures and still be light enough to carry.

And I think the same applies for most people. Everyone is knowledgeable in a particular craft or science, but the problem is that we are so interdependent upon each other's expertise to accomplish anything, that in a post-apocalyptic scenario, most people are dead. The writer may know how his pen works, or his paper is manufactured, but it doesn't necessarily mean he has the knowledge to make them.

By the way, has anyone seen the footage of the largest nuclear detonation in history? Something that causes third degree burns from 62 miles away is fucking scary.

God damn, that is spooky.

Still, there are a lot of The Kings sitting around doing jack-feck-all. Even more are just randomly wandering the streets. If I were in charge I'd be like - OI! Ye lazy cunts! Someone feck off out there and find me some damn curtains and a fecking broom like!

I think Sternn is becoming a parody of himself sometimes.

Like a human logic loop?

Anyone get the new DLC that just came out - Dead Money?

Did you?????

I did. Kinda kewl - a bit different from the main game. I don't want to spoil anything but a few things to note -

If you played the add-ons for Fallout 3 many of the same rules are in place -

1. You can't carry anything in with you, they strip you and you start from scratch

2. You can't leave until you finish the whole campaign

3. The make liberal use of many features to add new dimensions to the game

It's pretty kewl but like some of the add-ons previously it is more puzzle solving than combat. It reminds me of a cross between Bio-Shock and Silent Hill rather than Fallout.

So apparently Arcade and Veronica are both openly gay. Bethesda wins.