Megaton and Mr Burke's Request

[Cyvanhoe]

Actually, all vehicles in Fallout are nuclear powered. In the Fallout universe, miniaturized nuclear reactors were perfected by the time the Great War occurred. Portable nuclear generators are the reason anybody still has electricity; you'll see them lying around next time you go exploring. Cars used a variant on that same technology, which is why your Geiger counter has a hissy fit every time one blows up nearby. Nuclear technology progressed far enough that even some of the game's energy weapons (specifically the plasma and laser rifles) are powered by micro[i[fusion[/i] cells. It makes sense; we've known since Fallout 2 that the world ran out of exploitable oil reserves some decades before the Great War happened (indeed, conflict over resources was one of the major causes behind the War).

 

Although I believe you were just guessing those technical details... they seem totally correct and logical. There are Mini Nukes, highly advanced radiation medicine, fusion cells... so, in fact the cars ARE driving on nuclear stuff. Damn.

 

And taking the car from Fallout 2 into mind... that one also was fueled with fusion cells, obviously a rather common thing to do.

 

Then I guess it is right, the Megaton Bomb is a Nuke.

 

And as the Fallout world just before the bombs fell seemed highly advanced my guess is that they developed other nuclear bombs with less drastical after-effects (read Blastwave and Fallout for example).

 

Oh, come to think about it... if all the cars already drove with nuclear energy... whats with all the fuel trucks and Gas Stations ? :blink:

[Armadous]

It does bother me though that you can set the cars off with 3 or 4 10mm shots.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

The "fuel" trucks may not be carrying fuel; tankers are used to transport everything from milk to grain (though I don't think anybody would want to be the one to find a 200 year old milk truck...euugh). The Red Rocket stations are somewhat more obvious; rather than dispensing petroleum products, they'd dispense hydrogen for fusion (I'm assuming it would be hydrogen, since fusion is mentioned and Uranium is sufficiently difficult to refine that it would be impractical for such wide-scale use... Plutonium likewise, since it is an artificial element to begin with) and dispose of waste.

 

This is from the art book, by the way, not speculation- the illustrations of cars and trucks are in several places captioned "atomic" this and "nuclear" that- there are even a few sketches of the Red Rocket fuel stations and the apparatus they would have used to refuel cars.

 

From the "Hardware" section of the art book which ships with the collector's edition lunchbox-

 

"Inspired by the futuristic 1957 Ford Nucleon concept car, the idea of everyday vehicles powered by a micro nuclear reactor in the trunk is fully realized in the Fallout universe. Of course, hundreds of years after the war the country is full of automobiles with unstable reactors that are way overdue for service and replacement, but this makes for the entertaining blowing-up of what would otherwise be unremarkable background art."

 

As for the ease with which they can be blown up, I would suggest (and this is speculation) that any damage to a 200-year-old cooling system in poor working order could potentially lead to a micro-scale version of what happened at Chernobyl. That is, it it is possible for a reactor to keep operating for hundreds of years, which it generally isn't. We just need to suspend our disbelief a little bit to allow for the Science! that makes all of these things possible to begin with.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

*snip*

 

Y'know, it really sucks when forum glitches cause double postings. :/

[Cyvanhoe]

This is from the art book, by the way, not speculation- the illustrations of cars and trucks are in several places captioned "atomic" this and "nuclear" that- there are even a few sketches of the Red Rocket fuel stations and the apparatus they would have used to refuel cars.

 

From the "Hardware" section of the art book which ships with the collector's edition lunchbox-

 

"Inspired by the futuristic 1957 Ford Nucleon concept car, the idea of everyday vehicles powered by a micro nuclear reactor in the trunk is fully realized in the Fallout universe. Of course, hundreds of years after the war the country is full of automobiles with unstable reactors that are way overdue for service and replacement, but this makes for the entertaining blowing-up of what would otherwise be unremarkable background art."

 

Ah, my bad, I don't own a collectors edition, only the standard one. Well, you're right again then, there could really be anything in those trucks besides fuel. Come to think of it, this also might be the reason the actual cargo container never blows up. :biggrin:

[Armadous]

Should the cars even be exploding in the first place? If you were to shoot out the coolant system shouldn't that just cause a melt down? Also, relying on liquid cooling to maintain hundreds of millions of cars running on fusion reactions sounds like a bad idea. Maybe we can pretend the discovered cold fusion?

[WrathOfDeadguy]

A meltdown can easily cause an explosion- meltdowns being so named because a runaway fission reaction can actually heat the fuel rods enough to make them literally melt, the coolant bath in which the reactor components are submerged would exceed its boiling point. After that happens (once there is anything in its gaseous form in the containment vessel), any further increase in temperature means in increase in pressure as well, and once the containment vessel exceeds its pressure tolerances... pop! But no, the reactor itself doesn't explode- and there are several reactor designs now that change the basic layout of the reactor in such a way as to make meltdowns vanishingly unlikely.

 

Of course, if the cars are powered by fusion, then the "meltdown" (though it really isn't one) happens in a completely different way. One type of fusion reactor uses an array of lasers to compress a pellet of deuterium or tritium (hydrogen isotopes with one and two neutrons, respectively) until it fuses into helium. The other type, called a Tokamak, uses intense electromagnetic fields to direct superheated hydrogen (again, deuterium and/or tritium) around a torus-shaped reaction chamber; collisions between particles result in fusion. Either way, even a catastrophic failure isn't going to be as dirty as the results of the same thing happening to a conventional fission reactor, nor is it going to leave lasting radioactive debris as both the fuel and the wast product are lighter-than-air gasses. However, a large release of hydrogen plus an ignition source can result in an explosion.

 

This is why I think that the cars are fusion-based, not fission; for a fission reactor to have a catastrophic meltdown, the reactor has to be able to sustain a chain reaction of sufficient magnitude to heat the fuel rods to their melting point, and that just isn't gonna happen after 200 years (the lifespan of a fuel rod is measured in a few years, ten at the outside). Hydrogen, however... as long as the reactor containment vessel isn't breached, that stuff is gonna be around until somebody comes past and does something to release it. When that happens, if somebody provides an ignition source (gunfire, for instance), that hydrogen is going to get very busy making water with the oxygen in the air- hence the big explosion. Hydrogen burns clear, so you wouldn't see the fireball from that, but you would see all of the other chemical goodies cooking off- hence the big gouts of flame.

 

Now, I don't know whether or not there should still be trace amounts of radiation, but it dissipates quickly enough to be believable if there were (after all, the radioactives would be primarily tritium and helium-3, neither of which is going to leave behind any heavier-than-air particulates or debris that would linger in the area).

[Armadous]

To continue the further derailment of this topic, what about the itty-bitty mushroom cloud. That's just not something your going to see from such a small detonation.

[Guest]

Being in a crater, wouldn't a bulk of the explosion be directed upwards into the air, exxagerating the height of the 'shroom cloud and minimizing spread? Plus the bomb may have been designed and intended for air burst mode, then it malfunctioned (obviously), hit the ground undetonated, causing the eventual blast to be even less effective.

[Guest]

Also, as a side note, Tritium and Helium3 are practically harmless to humans unless they are ingested. In fact, they are undetectable without a specific type of probe (alpha detector), and you have to be looking for them specifically.