Post Apocalyptic Wars - Practical?

[peadar1987]

I always thought it was because fallout landed on Nellis from bombs that detonated nearby, making it radioactive. It doesn't really make sense otherwise.

 

Of course, the radiation the Survivalist mentions could be from "dirty bombs" and other area denial weapons, which don't need to be high-yield to cause massive fallout.

[charwo]

I tend to ignore Fallout cannon where it gets insane and keep with real science.

 

More plausible explanations for Fallout phenomena:

1. Ghouls and mutated insects are pre-war Chinese biological warfare fallout. As in those big insects couldn't exist without directed gene engineering. Probably introduced during World War III on or after 2072 as agriculture and logistics disruptor, equivalent to American mole-rats. This allows for them to have more efficient digestive processes and structures that don't violate the usual insect cube/square relations. I mean by that insects are limited by their vascular systems and oxygen intakes from getting much bigger than they do. Super high oxygen levels could get radscorpion size insects, but not the car sized ants and Giant Rads.

 

Ghouls are infected with a latent virus that is designed to cause zombification of corpse, much like the spore-carriers, only mutated and not as infected. This is within the terror warfare parameters of later World War III reports. Causing panic after the bombs is the chief priority. The stuff remains latent though, and this means as generations go by the semi-symbiotic relationship of healthy humans and the latent virus gives them a reproductive edge. This is why such a high percentage of Searchlight went feral.

 

2. Prime normals are transhuman. Or at least optimized humans. Normal humans aren't mutates, they have all of the defective genetic quirks we do. This is why FEV doesn't work well with non-prime normals, which would only exist in advanced societies that could purge defective genes out of each generation. Normal humans have too many redundant, defective and non standard gene arrangement and expressions for the FEV to fully compensate for. This is also a factor in ghoulficiation. It has to be or the Fallout universe would have seen its first ghouls in 1945, which alone moves up the divergence from 1947-48 to before the close of World War II.

 

3. Ignore the dead earth tropes. It's garbage, all of it. Normal animals are everywhere. Cats are not extinct. The Black Rain was two weeks long, and though it didn't heavily mutate the wildlife, it did kill most of the people. It did kill large sections of forest like the Red Forest in Ukraine, causing massive worldwide wildfires, but the fallout from that over by 2080. Cats still exist, so do deer and fish and pandas and Asia is not one vast desert. Look at Pripiyat today. That's what the 'Wasteland' looks like. Yes, I'm saying the Word of God in Fallout is so utterly illogical, the artistic vision of the creators is wrong and should be ignored for the good of the series. Also, shameless plug for Vurt's Recovering Wasteland and BA_Wasteland Restoration. They rock!

 

4. Those nuke explosions in Lonesome Road are mostly dirty bomb explosions. Had they been properly maintained, they would be megaton city busters.

 

5. The Chinese and Americans broke the pre-war arms limitations but in secret and thus limited number. The Chinese, having lost the war (the Yangtze was taken and Beijing completely surrounded, which means the Americans has ZERO reason to first strike) launched their bombs everywhere, dragging in everyone into nuclear war so that no one could prey on China while it recovered. A leveled playing field of the worst sort. The petty bombs you see were in ultra light and fast Chinese bombers that managed to get through American air and ballistic defenses. This is why the craters are MUCH bigger on the West Coast (many bigger than all the Capital Region)

 

6. All residual radiation damage isn't from the nukes, but Ragnarok proofed automated power plants. America built a bunker to last for 700 years in Hidden Valley then abandoned it as obsolete. Due to advanced technologies they were building a 'permanent society' using Leave it to Beaver (and not the 1950s) as a template. The vast employment decreases due to automation are probably the only real reason for the pre-war vision of women as stay at home moms. But those damaged and unmangaed plants are bleeding waste and crap into the soil, making it radioactive. Or in Nevada's case, mass nuclear waste.

 

7. As an addendum to 6, all that nuclear waste was probably in a chain of reuse where it was slated to be reused as power sources/ Sorta like Bill Gat's Terra Power project with spent fuel rods.

 

8. Stimpack syringes probably have latent nano particles that process broc and xander into stim material. Broc and Xander are certainly not mutates but bio-engineered species grown for stimpack manufacture.

 

9. Brahmin, while not the eclsuive bovine left, is most certainly a heavily modified, pre-war gene engineered cow, possibly made during a craze for beef tongue, but the most genetically hardy bovines, and thus the most likely to survive.

 

10. Deathclaws as well as all other mutate fauna, probably have alternate digestive systems from standard ones, either being more efficient and/or photosynthetic/radiophagic as nutritional supplements. You don't even need to change the DNA to get these effects, just the boitic symbiotes in the gut and possibly some mitochondrial augmentations in friendly organisms in the blood stream. Fun fact: 2/3 of your weight isn't you. Its the creepy crawlies that live embedded in your every organ system. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-humans-carry-more-bacterial-cells-than-human-ones

 

Sweet Dreams!

[peadar1987]

I tend to ignore Fallout cannon where it gets insane and keep with real science.

 

More plausible explanations for Fallout phenomena:

1. Ghouls and mutated insects are pre-war Chinese biological warfare fallout. As in those big insects couldn't exist without directed gene engineering. Probably introduced during World War III on or after 2072 as agriculture and logistics disruptor, equivalent to American mole-rats. This allows for them to have more efficient digestive processes and structures that don't violate the usual insect cube/square relations. I mean by that insects are limited by their vascular systems and oxygen intakes from getting much bigger than they do. Super high oxygen levels could get radscorpion size insects, but not the car sized ants and Giant Rads.

 

Ghouls are infected with a latent virus that is designed to cause zombification of corpse, much like the spore-carriers, only mutated and not as infected. This is within the terror warfare parameters of later World War III reports. Causing panic after the bombs is the chief priority. The stuff remains latent though, and this means as generations go by the semi-symbiotic relationship of healthy humans and the latent virus gives them a reproductive edge. This is why such a high percentage of Searchlight went feral.

 

2. Prime normals are transhuman. Or at least optimized humans. Normal humans aren't mutates, they have all of the defective genetic quirks we do. This is why FEV doesn't work well with non-prime normals, which would only exist in advanced societies that could purge defective genes out of each generation. Normal humans have too many redundant, defective and non standard gene arrangement and expressions for the FEV to fully compensate for. This is also a factor in ghoulficiation. It has to be or the Fallout universe would have seen its first ghouls in 1945, which alone moves up the divergence from 1947-48 to before the close of World War II.

 

3. Ignore the dead earth tropes. It's garbage, all of it. Normal animals are everywhere. Cats are not extinct. The Black Rain was two weeks long, and though it didn't heavily mutate the wildlife, it did kill most of the people. It did kill large sections of forest like the Red Forest in Ukraine, causing massive worldwide wildfires, but the fallout from that over by 2080. Cats still exist, so do deer and fish and pandas and Asia is not one vast desert. Look at Pripiyat today. That's what the 'Wasteland' looks like. Yes, I'm saying the Word of God in Fallout is so utterly illogical, the artistic vision of the creators is wrong and should be ignored for the good of the series. Also, shameless plug for Vurt's Recovering Wasteland and BA_Wasteland Restoration. They rock!

 

4. Those nuke explosions in Lonesome Road are mostly dirty bomb explosions. Had they been properly maintained, they would be megaton city busters.

 

5. The Chinese and Americans broke the pre-war arms limitations but in secret and thus limited number. The Chinese, having lost the war (the Yangtze was taken and Beijing completely surrounded, which means the Americans has ZERO reason to first strike) launched their bombs everywhere, dragging in everyone into nuclear war so that no one could prey on China while it recovered. A leveled playing field of the worst sort. The petty bombs you see were in ultra light and fast Chinese bombers that managed to get through American air and ballistic defenses. This is why the craters are MUCH bigger on the West Coast (many bigger than all the Capital Region)

 

6. All residual radiation damage isn't from the nukes, but Ragnarok proofed automated power plants. America built a bunker to last for 700 years in Hidden Valley then abandoned it as obsolete. Due to advanced technologies they were building a 'permanent society' using Leave it to Beaver (and not the 1950s) as a template. The vast employment decreases due to automation are probably the only real reason for the pre-war vision of women as stay at home moms. But those damaged and unmangaed plants are bleeding waste and crap into the soil, making it radioactive. Or in Nevada's case, mass nuclear waste.

 

7. As an addendum to 6, all that nuclear waste was probably in a chain of reuse where it was slated to be reused as power sources/ Sorta like Bill Gat's Terra Power project with spent fuel rods.

 

8. Stimpack syringes probably have latent nano particles that process broc and xander into stim material. Broc and Xander are certainly not mutates but bio-engineered species grown for stimpack manufacture.

 

9. Brahmin, while not the eclsuive bovine left, is most certainly a heavily modified, pre-war gene engineered cow, possibly made during a craze for beef tongue, but the most genetically hardy bovines, and thus the most likely to survive.

 

10. Deathclaws as well as all other mutate fauna, probably have alternate digestive systems from standard ones, either being more efficient and/or photosynthetic/radiophagic as nutritional supplements. You don't even need to change the DNA to get these effects, just the boitic symbiotes in the gut and possibly some mitochondrial augmentations in friendly organisms in the blood stream. Fun fact: 2/3 of your weight isn't you. Its the creepy crawlies that live embedded in your every organ system. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-humans-carry-more-bacterial-cells-than-human-ones

 

Sweet Dreams!

 

1. Some post-war organisms are heavily implied to be this as well. Mole rats are supposedly a genetically engineered anti-infrastructure weapon. That said, the Fallout universe doesn't work on standard science, it works on SCIENCE! where radiation is basically magic, the way it was thought of in the 1950s. Also, FEV exposure is heavily implicated in many of the mutations, especially ghoulification

 

2. Prime normals are those who haven't already been exposed to small doses of FEV, and have no immunity to it.

 

3. It's completely within the realms of possibility that nuclear weapons were engineered to produce long-lasting fallout. Cobalt jackets, and core design to produce the appropriate neutron flux to produce long-lived fission products, leaving high radiation in the impact zones for decades. I also always imagined that the animals made extinct were made so more by competition than by the initial nuclear strikes. Maybe mountain lions and such did survive, but died out when deathclaws ate all their food. Or Brahmin were simply more hardy than buffalo, and displaced them from their feeding grounds.

 

4. There's no need for them to have initially been multi-megaton devices, although your suggestion does make perfect sense. Tritium used for many fusion stages has a short half-life, and so would have decayed by the time Lonesome Road happens, meaning that only the fission primary would have been in serviceable order.

 

5. The only canon result of the Yangtze campaign is the capture of Shanghai, any references to Beijing are non-canon (this also makes sense in the context of the T-51b turning the tide of the campaign. In open warfare, tanks and air superiority are still going to be far more important. However, in urban warfare, fighting building to building, powered armour is going to be a huge advantage).

 

6. That's what I always thought as well. It's the only sensible reason for entire radioactive rivers.

 

7. I think it's stated that low Uranium reserves were one of the reasons for the Resource Wars, and also, there is loads of waste dumped everywhere, in caves and basements, so I don't think that squares that well with the existence of waste-burning reactors. The main reason we don't have any large-scale ones today is because they're less useful for producing weapons-grade material, therefore other designs were followed. I can see this being evven more likely to be the case in the Fallout universe.

 

8. Does functional Nanotech exist in the fallout universe? You're right though, it's strange that random plants can have so much of an effect on someone's health otherwise.

 

9. I always imagined Brahmin as some sort of "siamese twin" mutation, where two foetuses fused together.

 

10. I like the idea of symbiotic bacteria, it does make a lot of sense, as any organism using them would have an automatic advantage over its competitors. However, humans are are only actually 1-3% bacteria by mass, as bacterial cells weigh far less than the average human cell. From wikipedia: "It is estimated that 500 to 1,000 species of bacteria live in the human gut^[5][6] Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are at least ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body (approximately 10¹⁴ versus 10¹³).^[7][8] The mass of microorganisms are estimated to account for 1-3% total body mass.^[9] Though members of the flora are found on all surfaces exposed to the environment (on the skin and eyes, in the mouth, nose, small intestine), the vast majority of bacteria live in the large intestine."

[JoKelly]

did you know, that in 1984 the USSR the Soviet Premier and his staff panicked because of an exercise that NATO was conducting , during this exercise the order was given to use a nuclear weapon at that point despite their top spy in NATO telling them this was an exercise and no NATO troops were moving, etc etc the Soviet premiere gave the order to launch believing that NATO was actually going to launch a surprise nuclear attack. One Soviet officer the final man in the chain, refused to push the button and launch. so practical or not, the world came with in minutes of all out nuclear war.

 

I should add that in typical Soviet fashion, the officer, when his opinion and the spies were proven right, was not executed but sent to command a critical guard position in Siberia as a reward.

 

things like that happened more than once, but that was the closest we came.

[kingwilfre16]

did you know, that in 1984 the USSR the Soviet Premier and his staff panicked because of an exercise that NATO was conducting , during this exercise the order was given to use a nuclear weapon at that point despite their top spy in NATO telling them this was an exercise and no NATO troops were moving, etc etc the Soviet premiere gave the order to launch believing that NATO was actually going to launch a surprise nuclear attack. One Soviet officer the final man in the chain, refused to push the button and launch. so practical or not, the world came with in minutes of all out nuclear war.

 

I should add that in typical Soviet fashion, the officer, when his opinion and the spies were proven right, was not executed but sent to command a critical guard position in Siberia as a reward.

 

things like that happened more than once, but that was the closest we came.

He should have got the order of Lenin, and been paraded around as a soviet hero

[MarchUntoTorment]

did you know, that in 1984 the USSR the Soviet Premier and his staff panicked because of an exercise that NATO was conducting , during this exercise the order was given to use a nuclear weapon at that point despite their top spy in NATO telling them this was an exercise and no NATO troops were moving, etc etc the Soviet premiere gave the order to launch believing that NATO was actually going to launch a surprise nuclear attack. One Soviet officer the final man in the chain, refused to push the button and launch. so practical or not, the world came with in minutes of all out nuclear war.

 

I should add that in typical Soviet fashion, the officer, when his opinion and the spies were proven right, was not executed but sent to command a critical guard position in Siberia as a reward.

 

things like that happened more than once, but that was the closest we came.

 

Correction - it was a computer error in the automatic nuclear detection system.

 

NATO was conducting exercises when suddenly, a facility in East Germany started detecting nuclear detonations all over the place. An officer, disbelieving this (due to the bombs being detonated in the middle of no-where for no apparent reason), headed downstairs and discovered that it was actually a computer error.

 

Anyway, the Soviet premier never issued the order to launch. They didn't even know about the issue until after the fact. Also, the man in question was later issued numerous awards after the fall of the regime (although not before - all records of the incident were buried until the fall of the Soviet Union).

 

You might have this confused with the Able Archer incident the following year, but the order to launch was never issued there. They simply readied the silos and had their finger on the button so that the second launches were detected, they could open fire.

[Stronglav]

What do you know about Caribian crysis?And Oleg Penkovski.

[Relios]

Practicality was thrown out the window when a pack of tribals using spears and rusted scraps as weapons while wearing plastic sports equipment and cooking utensils as combat armor became one of the two most powerful factions in the Wasteland.

Edited September 29, 2014 by Relios

[greenknightfury]

Asking if war is sane or likely due to hazardous conditions and/or hostile wildlife in a post-apoc setting is like asking if it was sane or likely in any time period before the industrial period. All your arguements match the beginning of humanity as a species as well, if not better, than they do a post apoc setting, yet here we are all over the planet.

[JoshBadWriter]

I would strongly argue Pre-Apocalypse wars are impractical. But then again, it is human nature to want to kill each other.