TL;DR: I'm an unemployed anthropologist. Fallout is not a realistic simulator of real life and that's why it sucks. also sci-fi novels dont reflect hard scientific principles so should be burned or some s#*!. Tricky: I've had these sort of conversations before, and they didn't end productively. So I'm going to flat-out begin by telling you that you are completely wrong in everything you have said in the last post. You are defending the indefensible, but it's not actually your idea that you're defending. Our whole lives, we deal with writers who either one make a buck, or writers who want to make a point, but it is very rare that we meet a writer who wants to tell things accurately who has an eye for detail who thinks very thoroughly about how things are constructed and how they work and what human beings are actually like. In other words we get polemicists, but we never get anthropologists. And whatever my merits as a writer, I am an anthropologist at heart. When you do have a writer who wants to tell things right, they have an incomplete sense of what is right, and often they're not very good storytellers. Take Arthur C Clarke: he's actually quite a good writer, when he gets around to it. But in trying to tell things accurately of what may come, he turns his works from stories of the human experience into tech porn. That's why hard sciences generally not liked and it generally doesn't sell very well outside of specific niche audiences. Bridging this gap is something that I as a budding writer have thought very long and very hard about. What this means for our conversation, is that you and most other people have been dealing with horrible conventions for so long that you call the tropes instead of sloppy writing outright lies and bulls***. The fact of the matter is, despite what anyone will tell you, the Fallout universe works on the same principles as ours. It has to: the development team hasn't thought enough about the ramifications of what they're telling us. You see, in any properly written work, (and make no mistake there is a right way to write and many wrong ways to write, and aesthetics and styling are not subjective to the point where anything goes) everything is subject to logic and reason and purpose. It is one of the most immoral things you can do short of hurting another person to say I may do as I will. You may never do as you will; you must do what is right. And here, when someone says 'I know this is an actually impossible, but I'm having it done anyway because it looks cool' what they're telling you is that they're telling a lie with style. It's not okay that 50s pulp had a poor understanding of science, but it is unforgivable, absolutely unforgivable, to run with those bad notions and call it a stylistic choice. Truth is the only thing that remotely matters is the only thing that is beautiful, and it is the duty of us to tell the truth in all things as we understand them. I'm all for the so called Rule of Cool, but the Rule must be marked as an exception. The Rule of Cool only applies to the implausible, not the impossible. That's why Die Hard is such a good movie: all of it is implausible, but all of it is also possible. In this case it's not simply that the ghoul should show up in 1945, it's that if you want to take the basic premise of the series sia different natural law, you shift back not from the Divergence, but to the beginning of time to the Big Bang, to things before the Big Bang. Then you have to reconstruct the entire universe from that point with these new 'cool' stipulations in biochemistry and physics. That would be an interesting story, but it's not likely that you would ever get anywhere close to man you may not actually get to multicellular life. No no no, what they're actually saying is the rules of the real world are applied only when and where we choose. That's not stylistic choice, that's just poor unresearched, sloppy writing. I have very personal reasons to hate it when an author knows nothing about this material about which he is about to write and write anyway thinking it's cool. Ask any gay man who does not act in a camp style, what he thinks of old-time homosexual fiction in which every homosexual man inevitably acts like either a drag queen or Truman Capote. It's not a pleasant thing to discuss. What's more is that they have real consequences. I'm not gay nor am I a man, but the point is, I've seen the real consequences of such flippancy, and sometimes it can be deadly. Even when the lie is small at the onset. Now, in constructing a story all things except for the genre are determined from the premise. Genre is determined by the characters. It let me explain: the Aliens universe has a couple of movies in it and each one of them is a different genre although the rules and paradigms and histories are exactly the same: Alien is a classic haunted house movie, Aliens is an action movie, Alien III is largely a suspense piece albeit while a violent one, and alien Resurrection is a dark comedy mostly because it's so bad. Why are these changes possible? Because of how the ensemble cast and all casts are ensembles react to what is going on around them. Let us use this in deconstructing the premise of Fallout: The premise of fallout is not particularly the world of tomorrow, that's a backdrop. The premise is World War III. For this discussion we will assume that it was always intended that World War III had been in its 11th year when the nuclear bombs up and launched and this was the case of Fallout 1 although I really don't believe that. In this case, the premise is that in 2077 after a long and bitter struggle the United States and the People's Republic of China with their associated allies destroyed human civilization through, a complex and nearly byzantine exchange of traditional bio weapons mutagenic bio weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, radiological weapons and conventional munitions. In other words, everything in the Fallout universe except for the genre of the specific story is defined on October 23, 2077. Everything that happens before then is justification for October 23, anything that comes after are the ramifications of October 23. We then run into the most pressing problem, which is the Black Rain. The Black Rain is my term for the radioactive worldwide thunderstorm that supposedly occurred around Halloween of 2077, lasted for four days and killed almost everyone. bulls***! radiological weapons do not work like that, and nuclear weapons don't work like that. Nuclear winter is a very real possibility but a worldwide torrents of black water that destroys everything? Mutates life beyond reckoning and makes the water radioactive for hundreds of years and makes the oceans glow green? Don't insult my intelligence, or at least have Randal Clark's diary mention that green sky was a familiar sight in any incident of above ground nuclear testing, radioactive waste disposal sights, etc, etc. They do some things right: the EMP blasts, that most people survived the initial exchange and died in the chaos and deprivation afterwords, the realistic effects of high doses of radiation in the wake of nuclear bombardment without adequate supplies of Rad-A-Way. They also are on the fringe but still within scientific accuracy to state that the fallout effects were noticeable and deadly for three months after the exchange. This is actually possible, hoever it's not possible everywhere but it would be possible in about 80 to 90% of the country. What makes the disintegration of the United States possible though, is the cowardly abscondment of the Enclave. If the Enclave had stayed, government coordination with state intact and with de facto facilities they could've saved at least a great portion of the US population. Now were going to go into a specific deconstruction and has never made any sense and is simply inexcusable. The Enclave being on the Poseidon oil rig was an ingenious move. It's not considered to be a military target it, out the middle of nowhere and you can put defenses on that nobody's really going to notice. But let's assume this hunker down and abandon the people modus operandi of the Enclave until the radiation becomes localized in February of 2078. What's going to happen? There's a couple of things: Well, the People's Republic of China, being on its last legs, is going to miss substantial chunks of the U.S. Navy. This is because Cheng had to be a monster to order that strike. He was taking the world with him. As such, the Navy took a back seat to civilian targets. Nuclear war as genocide. The US had no reason to wipe out the Chinese people because they had already won by conventional means. The entirety of the Yangtze and the Gobi, as well as Beijing were under US control as the missiles were launched. By implication this means Manchuria and Korea were to, and it's likely like in World War II, amphibious operations had been launched from an nearby island, like say Japan and Taiwan. I want you to think about this for a minute. This would be as though Hitler had launched nuclear weapons that a nuclear armed United States on April 30, 1945 in that 5 min. before he put a cyanide in Blondie and capped his own ass. Everyone knows who's responsible: the Chinese launched at the United States because the United States had no reason at all to launch their nuclear weapons up what remained of China. China was beaded, the United States had one in conventional warfare. Everything sharing had done, and Chang began every atrocity cycle in the Third World war: the bio weapons were used first by China, the chem weapons were used first by China, and though we may have introduced the mole rats to China before the giant insects became a problem, the biological warfare escalation began in 2072 with China, and we can see this in the accelerated development of the Pan Immunity Virion project which became FEV. We can also see this in the food riots because only biological warfare would create those kinds of food scarcities in the United States. So the US has a big problem or rather the enclave has a big problem: most of their intact military assets are going to be in Chinese cities. All of those T-51 B and 45-D and the Air Force models are going to be in China. Why? Because they were pressing to the gates of Beijing and what's more it was the only front really left after the liberation of Alaska which was probably played out fairly accurately in Anchorage because it was about a Pyrrhic victory. By 2077 Alaska had ceased to matter except on a political level. Sort of like the continuation war between German forces trying to hold on to Finland from Norway after the battle about Vapurii in 1944 were the Finns bowed out of the war. In any case, Cheng would not launch missiles at his own cities, although it is possible the United States launched missiles at the cities under its own occupation as a policy of 'we will destroy you no matter what'. It would not have been beneath the US government to promote such a policy. However, you have military assets all over the Pacific Rim some of which are bound to be intact because of friendly fire issues. Even if the entirety of the US surface fleet was destroyed, and we know from the existence of Rivet City it wasn't, you still have a very large boomer fleet, a very large attack sub fleet, you have a great deal of Merchant Marine people who are still alive and what's more is that they're going to know the fallout procedures. An exchange like this is going to generate a lot of fallout and and with Civil Defense trainers, they will be prepared, and a have a week to watch them again if they weren't otherwise. They can actually go below decks and write out this rainstorm for the most part. They're going to survive because they got the provisions of survive, because that's the nature of ship travel. And what is the Enclave supposedly do? set on the oil rig for a century and a half. Ha! You're not thinking fourth dimensionally Marty! The Enclave needs an industrial base, a recruitment center, and a place that's free and away from me pain-and-suffering of the irradiated mainland. All of this so they can retake the mainland. And that place is our 50th state: Hawaii. Even if the dead world concept were in any way possible, and it's not, Hawaii is the perfect place to rebuild. If the Enclave took the threat of nuclear annihilation seriously, and it did at least for themselves, would it not make sense to keep 5 or 10 GECKS on hand to reach your form Hawaii as a base project? After all the technology necessary to create a GECK is monumental, but the Enclave most assuredly have that technology. Between the subs, and the merchant marine fleet, the U.S. Navy assets to pull together something of a sizable fleet of bombard the ruins of Honolulu with...well...munition that would kill the rest of the civilian population in Oahu. Even leaving Oahu to it's fate, just take over Hawaii Island, and use that as a base. The survivors elsewhere in the state are disorganized and either slowly turning into ghouls or Raiders, so if you have power armor and naval vessels you can kill them at will and reestablish control of Enclave America in Hawaii by the end of 2078. Then you can use the GECKS to restore Hawaii to some amount of livability and really the island of Hawaii itself as well as anything outside of the range of 20 miles of Oahu is going to be habitable within months. You take your seed stocks, you take your preserved biological specimens (and rest assured this technology explicitly exists in Fallout, witness Vault 22 on a small, specialized scale) in that century and a half Hawaii could be rebuilt, and rebuilt to full pre war glory, with the Oil Rig as control center and Honolulu as the civilian capital, with a little rump congress in which people vote for representatives based in what state their family line (the father, of course as Father Knows Best!) With scavenged and full maintained vessels of the prewar era, ships like the Poseidon oil rig could be dispatched to various places around the Pacific Rim to do some heavy scavenging to find things that could not be acquired from internal production or at least not done so in a feasible time-production manner. Opportunity costs apply even more so into small groups than large ones. That way people would have seen the Enclave from early on. And the demon suits would have made sense as a way of scaring the locals away from salvaging operations. They look evil to intimidate the locals. Also, bear in mind, there are number of satellites that are still left in orbit, not of all of which can be accessed, but the ones that can be accessed to be absolutely vital in making maps discerning who can be a threat. Also expect a crack intelligence unit with operatives everywhere. The Enclave would logically do major trading with places that are not interested in exterminating right away, such as post-apocalyptic Australia or Indochina, which would likely survive most of the nuclear exchange is there really any strategic places there. And what of Indonesia? Even a small island that's completely intact such as Timor would attract thriving and ambitious post war survivors of the region. But let me ask you this: who in the hell is going to nuke anything in Papua New Guinea? Do you see where I'm going with this? From the premise flows everything but the genre. And here the political realities of the postwar world indicated is very different development of the Enclave. They don't have to be nicer, but they need to be far, far more numerous and well connected. They have a larger population set, they had intact cities they have trading they have ships and even if the military-industrial elites convince one of the paranoia of everyone else's a mutant now, and they still want to exterminate all the so-called mutants in North America to reclaim their birthright, They will not to have a problem treating with other so-called mutants along the Pacific Rim. While the developments of postwar geopolitical realities along the Pacific Rim are not the purview of a game like Fallout 2, it is something that needs to be considered in the background. A game like Fallout needs to consider geopolitical realities. Hell, any game of roleplaying and worlds unlike ours need to consider economics and demographics and geopolitics. And I'm not even getting into the point I wanted to get into, which is that you can achieve 90% of what you want in Fallout without the resort to the so-called Science! by which they mean patently wrong bulls*** that wraps itself up it in the guise of being an understanding of the universe. What I will say is that this world has to be the same as ours because the development team has not put enough effort into understanding what an alternate reality would look like other than 'wow it looks cool!' and what's more, if the Fallout universe did function differently than the outcomes should be different. If the prewar fallout America wasn't so badly out of sync with what the nature of the universe was, and that is your claim, they would've been far more successful in well not getting blown to s***. But that's the point: they said that the universe will must work the way that works for them and maybe universe laughed and United States and the entire world was engulfed in a giant atomic Firefox ball as punishment for their hubris. And, in order for a satire to be effective, it needs to be played as straight as possible, as close to the source to show the lengths and breadths of the folly. Fallout is not a fantasy universe with gas stations. That's World of Darkness and the main reason I will not have anything to do with that franchise. It is speculative fiction. Speculative fiction focuses on what is possible but probably improbable. Fantasy focuses on that which is impossible. But even in fantasy you can bring in logic, and deconstruct how people would actually react to such fantastic circumstances, and have a good laugh about it. I know this because I've read going postal which is part of the disc world series I carry Pratchett. Even when you're going to be fantastic, be sensible about it! But when you're dealing with our world, you have to play by the rules as we understand them, and then expand upon those rules and make a concerted effort of why these rules might be mistaken if you're going to violate them. That's why I don't *censored* about Fallout energy weapons: they make a concerted effort to explain how those weapons work, and the basic gist is that the energy weapons that exist in Fallout look and act the way they do not because that's how energy weapons would work in their basic design, but because aesthetics and ergonomics took precedence. Lasers are invisible unless we take the time to make them visible, and the beam from a laser gun is visible and red for the same reasons tracers glow-in-the-dark. So you can actually see where you're hitting down range and adjust your aim accordingly. You see? Pulp look, real world design considerations justifying it. And that's the way Fallout should've gone. Don't make me get started on how I think those overs you see actually worked, and what a 'pilot light' actually was and actually does.
