An interesting addition not yet explored by anyone!

[jaywalke]

I've finally decided to open my yap after a year of wandering the wastes through several times playing through; although only finishing the game once before Broken Steel turned around a rather dismal ending into something more appealing. Now, I'm a kid in a candy store of new MODS, tending to crash a game halfway played to try something new. Except for the Vault scenes which have also been Modded, Fallout 3 keeps evolving for the better, abeit sometimes to the absurd. There are even sex and drugs which seem to drive the Aussies insane for whatever reasoning prevails?

It came to me from day one what was missing from the Fallout landscape and no one appears to have expanded upon this topic before. I would, however, I am not a modder; couldn't piece together a rock in GECK if my life depended on it but. . .In the Fallout Universe there are trucks, subways, cars, etc., etc. Nuclear blasts destroyed the subways. EMP bursts would have knocked the cars and other similar vehicles flat on their butts. Power lines are down everywhere yet power is available almost everywhere including remove locations with generators running on a fuel source which has, as yet, not been named.

I have found no tractors or other farm implements, no bulldozers or earth movers of any shape or style whatsoever. Why not? At the heart of every military base, the engineering corps love these behemouth machines which sit about in abundance with tanks which are also not in Fallout. Let's get real. A tractor can sit in the field for fifty years in the real world and still start after fuel is added. Bulldozers and earth movers would not have affected by Nuke EMPs and should fire up without hesitation. Can you imagine the raiders at the Grisly Diner seeing fifty tons of dozer flattening the place? HA! LOL!

Some would say this machinery wouldn't match the "lore" of the game, however, the lore of the game is already mis-matched by the mere absence of these artifacts. If the great War was set in a Fifties setting, these machines were as plentiful as automobiles. Yet, in the current fallout, all labor is accomplish by hand? My question is why? If there is fuel, there are machines to burn it! Someone want to take this bull by the horns and bring a new element into a game which is chock full of futuristic lasers and plasma rifles and not one damn tractor???? It may be just a game but it lacks this part of realism that should be there.

 

Jaywalke

[Bobferd]

That's a great observation! Bulldozers and tanks would be great to assault raider bases with. I've also noticed a glaring omition from the Fallout landscape: Bowling Alleys. Bowling was huge in the 50's (the time frame most of the game is themed from). I am also not a modder so I can't do much about it. If a modder in the community could create a bowling alley I think that would be really cool. Could maybe even use pins as weapons or design a schematic for a bowling ball cannon. Just a thought...

[Elsarian]

WOW! I have never thought of something like that and you my friend are completely and one-hundred percent right. Now that I think about it, and thanks to you, I am not going to be able to walk around the wasteland without saying," Alright, wheres the damn tractors," I mean you have really shed some new light on this game for me man. Hell, maybe someone will consider this and make a mod out of it.This is a very good idea. Something I would have never though about in my life for this game. I mean I have questioned where the energy source for the lights and generators come from, but not go so far as to what you have haha. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

 

-Elsarian

[jaywalke]

Thanks for reading my dribble. In the sixties my Dad bought a large farm. The back five acres of that farm was exactly like the fallout landscape. Farmers never throw anything away and our back five was the repository for every bus, truck, automobile and every farm implement made since the inception of the plow. It was communal to scavange that wasteland for parts to avoid paying dealer prices for derelict equipment which might farm ten more acres for one more season. Although forbidden to do so, I spent a lot of time in that junkyard which closely resemble what I see on the screen when playing Fallout. Today, I own two Ford 8N tractors that are fifty years old and each starts better than my luxury car and works twice as hard. In five years the car will be junk and the tractors will easily endure to pass on to another generation. That's my lore and I was tickled that someone else read my post. Bobferd was also on-topic. Bowling was the order of the day, as was roller skating car-hops and a montage of other nuances which comprised the fifties. However, even an old war horse like myself probably couldn't choke down poached roach in Nuka-Sauce, even if served by one of those roller skating beauties in a Type 3, HD body hanging the tray on my body armor? :yucky:

[Elsarian]

Haha wow man. Good one.

[ColonelTannanbaum]

Bowling.

 

A bowling alley.

 

Someone, somewhere, really needs to make one of these for Fallout. Or at least the parts. Hell, if someone could get me some meshes and textures set up for 'pins'... I would happily go through the effort of building a nice big bowling alley somewhere.

 

As for the rest of this post:

 

 

I agree wholeheartedly. There are a -lot- of things missing from the Fallout 3 landscape, really. Small things, that one can overlook for a while before the realization seeps into their minds. Bowling alleys. Construction and Farming machinery. Heavy military armor.

 

I mean seriously, there's a BILLBOARD for a bowling alley -in the game-!

 

And it's Washington D.C.

 

One doesn't have to go very far to find a tank in D.C. Pretty much any history museum, War Museum, and Military Resource Center in the place has one.

 

How strange that it took me reading this to realize all of that.

 

I guess with all of my mods, it takes a little outside perspective, too.

[slyguy3129]

 

 

I guess with all of my mods, it takes a little outside perspective, too.

 

Nothing in the world better than having a "different" perspective. Having what you have in mind you see the complete picture even if it isn't fully realized. But having someone else look or critique it lets you know what you are missing. It can help a whole lot.

 

Back to the topic I have also never thought about it. But then again I do not know the "full" extent to how the Fallout Universe differs from our own. Perhaps Armored Warfare did not progress past what WW2 turned out? I've always seen the power armor as the modern retro-futuristic "tank" its even named like a tank T-84 or something along those lines? I can't be certain though since the only Fallout I have played is 3. Do you see tanks as we know them in other Fallouts? Man it would be nice to jump into some "retro-futuristic" Abrams and run around the Waste popping people. Perhaps in the 200 years since the war they have all been scavenged by BoS and Enclave? Good ideas all around!

[Rossum]

Some half-hearted attempts to explain why there are no tractors or tanks in the game:

 

Tractors:

This is Washington DC and its been a few hundred years after the nuclear war. Alot of the tractors were still functioning after the blast, but the actual American farmlands are elsewhere. In the years after the blast there was heavy priority given to reclaiming the actual productive land to supply food to the survivors. Point Lookout looks like it managed to survive without much of a problem and there is still green plants there so there could well be functioning farmland elsewhere.

 

Basically, the people with actual farmland used all their tractors to produce food (which made them rich as kings in the post-Apocalypse world) and started buying up all the tractors, heavy equipment, or anything else that could help them maintain their farms. Thus, all the tractors (or possibly tanks) in the Capital Wasteland had long ago been driven off, hijacked, or scavenged for parts and sold to the farmers for lots of food.

 

If there was a bulldozer in the Capital Wasteland, someone would probably fill up its tank and drive off towards the Corn Belt before they did something like try running over a gang of Raiders. After all, if you were a wastelander who's family is living in a hut made out of aluminum siding and you came across a tractor, would you use it to run over some raiders and risk them blowing it up with a grenade or would you find out where there are people with a workable farm and just drive the thing out of the wasteland and start a new life?

 

Those families that tried to head to the Corn Belt and failed (due to getting shot by bandits or something) would have all their possessions and of course their tractor looted. Motorcycles and cars may litter the streets after all this time (though alot of them look like gutted husks with all the engine parts removed) but a friggin tractor would be to valuable to leave laying around, even a flat tractor tire would be snagged by a scavenger and carried off... a few patches here and there and it just might be valuable enough to a farmer to land you enough fresh vegetables to eat like a king in the Wasteland.

 

 

Tanks:

Any functional tanks were probably driven off by anyone with brains to use them... actually, same thing could be said for any functional vehicle. If it moves then get it out of the Capital Wasteland and head for better places. Not sure, but the military did develop those Power Armor suits which could conceivably be used as a replacement for tanks (depending on the cost of resources vs energy and technology then the military might have melted down their tanks to make dozens of suits of Power Armor instead). Though it could just as well be that they sent all the tanks elsewhere either before or after the bombs hit and the sheer ease at which raiders can get ahold of land mines made bringing tanks back into the city sound like a bad idea.

 

Again, if you had a tank, would you send it after Raiders or Super Mutants or send it somewhere where it could be useful or stored for later use? Raiders could toss a bunch of frag mines all over the place and potentially mess up the treads on your vehicle.

[Teratoid]

That comment about the power still being available despite the EMPs that were probably caused by the nuclear firestorm: you're right, it should've shot anything electrical in the world. The thing is, physics in the Fallout world don't seem to work like the do in the real world... Take ghouls for example. If anyone is exposed to as much radiations as ghouls are, they'd die within 14 days, rather than simply gain pickled skin and immortality.

 

And correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't Tanks replaced with power armour infantry? The whole power armour project was to make walking tanks... the T51b was the result of the project, which could level an entire base without taking damage... Even the T-45d was very effective in an anti-infantry role. At least that's what the Fallout bible says. So in the face of something that powerful, the military probably decommissioned their tanks. Though how they managed it in a short period of time, I'll never know. Tanks were probably useless in their world anyway. Look at the Chimera tanks.

 

Bulldozers... maybe the government had them outside the city. Or in Canada, and they didn't have enough money to build new ones. Or they all exploded. Or Bethesda simply forgot. :dry:

[jaywalke]

To Everyone so far:

Superb! I've been watching and reading so far and I can not believe the amount of sheer speculation and productive thought which I hoped my post would inspire. Keep it coming. This can only get better!

 

Thanks,

Jaywalke :D