Fallout 4 Nonsense - Leather Armors energy resistance.

[Moksha8088]

I think sometime after the Great War that brahmin and radstags gained a great deal of radiation resistance and that perhaps is reflected in post-apocalyptic leather having a degree of energy resistance.

 

Other than that, the simplest approach to such problems is to suspend your disbelief during video games.

[HeyYou]

Keep in mind, energy weapons are exactly that. Directed energy. Metal armors may absorb more of that energy, but, they have to dissipate it somewhere. Generally, that's in the form of heat. A laser heats its target. Metal will absorb the heat, and then radiate it in every direction. Including back at the wearer...... Sure, a laser may 'burn thru' leather faster, but, then its just a bit of a whole, while metal armor will scorch a significantly larger area of skin. And all of this totally ignores laser trauma. After all, a laser thru flesh will flash boil any fluids it encounters, with devastating affect. (considering the human body is about 98% water...... you can see how this could be a problem.)

[zanity]

"energy weapons"- SIGH. There is no such thing in reality (and NO, lasers are not what most SF literature means by 'energy weapons', even in fiction). So in the FICTION of SF, it is reasonable to assign FICTIONAL properties to fictional fabrications- especially for PLOT reasons.

 

The people behind Fallout (Clue: they are NOT Bethesda) presumably wanted different armours to have different advantages, since good games need 'rock, scissor and paper' mechanisms. To use the excuse that metal conducts (and thus may allow electical effects to pass thru) but specially treated 'leather' might 'block' a 'field' is more than OK in the concept of SF.

 

PS for those who might say that the US government does have energy weapons (which in this context means hand held 'guns' using an 'energy' principle), well this just isn't true- unless you cosider the UN-illegal BLINDING hand held lasers that the US army has illegally developed but not yet deployed in battle. Indeed most of what ill-informed people think of as 'real' (hand held) energy weapons bear zero resemblance to what we see in SF. Most of America's illegal weapons (including sonic and microwave) are designed to murder or seriously incapacitate large crowds of 'enemy' civilians (like people resisting or protesting future American invasions). These illegal weapons are designed to be fitted to armoured trucks with massive electrical batteries to power them.

 

To defeat the effect of sonic weapons, sound dampening and/or ear canal blocking would be useful- both 'lo-tech'. Illegal American microwave weapons are designed to have various effects on the body- the US press delighted in informing readers that "excrutiating harmless pain" would result, until the press realised they were promoting the same form of crime against humanity that the use of chemical weapons are deemed to represent. But to defeat a US microwave weapon, presumably any form of wearable faraday cage or microwave absorbing material might do. It's not too implausible to imagine that leather could not be treated in some way to do this.

 

Fallout envisages a VERY sick pre and post apocalyptic world. Fallout is very much a morbid fantasy- the type of fantasy that appeals to many of us for some reason. The SF tropes it relies on are not, for the most part, 'hard' SF. It is NOT clever to spot scientific 'mistakes' in non-hard SF. Non-hard SF is supposed to be a semi-plausible FANTASY, which is INTERNALLY CONSISTENT in a way that relates to the general principles of the scientific method. So the fantasy can, and should (where narratively advantageous) deviate from the known science facts of the real world.

 

PS, traditional pulp SF hand held weapons were really about plasma, acid, radiation, and electrical effects, NOT laser beams. Lasers are a VERY silly idea for hand held weapons that are for anything other than BLINDING the opponent. And we all know how the eyes are protected against stray lasers, since this is a real world problem.

 

Pulp SF liked leather since at the time leather was being treated with all kinds of chemical processes that gave it all kinds of useful new properties. And leather implied a form of protection that would still be relatively practical to wear.

[DanteRedfield]

Because everyone knows ranged armor has better magic def Edited November 18, 2018 by DanteRedfield

[Moraelin]

Err... Zanity? I don't know about what game you're talking, but I'm pretty damn sure that laser counted as energy ever since Fallout 1. Also the ONLY energy weapons it had were laser, plasma or the alien blaster. I dunno what game you've seen where "energy" meant sonic weapons or electrical or acid weapons or such, but Fallout was not it.

 

Reference: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_weapons

 

Basically, while I admire the ability to talk out the ass at such length, and in so many messages lately, but history or game lore are not something you can just make up. If you want to talk about what the designers meant it to be, then talk about THAT, not about whatever nonsense you can pull out of your own rear end.

 

And generally, you can't just make up the premises for any argument, without it ending up logically unsound.

[Moksha8088]

I think sometime after the Great War that brahmin and radstags gained a great deal of radiation resistance and that perhaps is reflected in post-apocalyptic leather having a degree of energy resistance.

 

This energy resistance may have been the source of the 2250's New Vegas song, Don't Step on my Molerat Shoes.

[Undeadbob666]

Sadly the real reason they use leather is two fold, it looks cool and they are too lazy to research.