The wasted GECK

[babyeatingdingo]

where exactly did the nukes HIT?

 

 

the whole city of DC has some crumbling and a few collapsed buildings, but like 70% of the city is still standing.

 

 

 

which begs the question, A) Why wasnt the capital nuked off the face of the Earth, and B) what exactly caused the damage to DC? because it sure as hell wasnt a nuke. if hydrogen bombs had hit in the city, or even a mile from the city, there wouldnt be ANY structures still standing.

 

 

 

its like the whole DC area was hit by a nuclear shockwave, but theres no ground zero.

 

 

 

and also, why is it that NONE of the military installations were nuked? especially the Pentagon? neither were the SATCOM relays, not even the ICBM launch facility was nuked.

 

 

 

the city looks less like it was nuked 200 years ago than it does like it was bombed by conventional bombs a week ago.

[gsmanners]

So, Fort Bannister doesn't count as a military installation?

 

Nobody said the game was realistic or even intended to be realistic. This has all been covered many times before, and you can do yourself a huge favor by reading this article:

 

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence

[evilneko]

Because flattened and glassed DC is a lot less visually interesting than bombed-out DC that maybe was hit with some "dirty bombs" and such. That's why. ;)

[3rdtryguy]

I have two guesses about this.

 

1- the chinese missles weren't all that accurate. The western wasteland is where all the real radiation zones are, along with not a whole lot of anything else, so I think maybe they missed a bit.

2- a shockwave will follow the path of least resistance. When you cluster a whole bunch of buildings together, they effectively shield each other. Big enough blocks of steel & concrete buildings could possibly resist total knockdown long enough for the wave to pass.

 

Just a guess.

[MarkoDash]

my theory is the Chinese believed their best hope was to screw quality and concentrate on quantity, so they built lots and lots of small inefficient dirty warheads.

maybe with no limits on weapons development and a hundred years time they found some material to jacket the warhead with that would increase both the intensity of the radiation and its half-life, 200 years for example.

 

so you have tons of very radioactive but extremely weak nuclear warheads.

 

now add to this that DC was probably the most heavily defended city in the country, if not the entire world, ringed by dozens of ABM lasers and missile systems.

 

to keep the entire attack from being prevented by such systems the missiles most likely had a deadman's switch, so that if the outer casing started to fail the device would set off the warhead, sparing DC from most of the heat and shockwave but bathing it in radiation. only at the targets where multiple weapons were aimed, like say the white house, would one or two get low enough to cause more destruction.

 

or i could just be rambling incoherently.

[3rdtryguy]

Sounds good to me.

[babyeatingdingo]

definitely better than the total lack of explanation from Bethesda. i read the wiki, it doesnt have any expalnation for the extremely minor damage to the "nuked" city,

[JA stu]

Perhaps he just didn't want to blow up when he could have set it off.