Where Did Fallout 3's Bombs Actually Hit?

#fallout3 #fallout
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[@any_austin]

Still playing Fallout 3, still enjoying it. I think next I’ll play GTA IV, or maybe something like Animal Well as a little breather. Support me on Patreon to help me continue taking the time to make this kind of content: www.patreon.com/any_austin

[@Okiesmokes]

Omg im playing thru gta 4 for the first time and its so great, looking forward to watching dis one austin!

[@dadthighs]

strange & unremarkable places is GTA IV????

[@SomeoneYouDontKnowOfficial]

Oh gosh Animal Well, I'm getting flashbacks. Just "beat" it WITH a guide after 19 hours so good luck

[@damianwarner4876]

I for one would be more than happy if you had Fallout content more often. Fallout and Pokemon together is a unique niche that you'd excel in I believe!

[@mitch3503]

try kenshi

[@KevMcc-c2b]

Came here to spread the word, there's a lower intestine in a toilet in the enclave base in the broken steel dlc right before the very end of the dlc implying an enclave member shit out so hard they disemboweled themselves. Noone talks about this and it's a crime. Kudos Bethesda.

[@arthurdent6256]

Todd Howard when Starfield didn't place at the game awards.

[@HoboHunterRik]

Classic. Me and my brother would always take the time and laugh at it when we saw it

[@SeanHH1986]

rectum!? damn near killed em!

[@GunsAndAmmo3]

What did Bethesda mean by this?

[@sweetpepino1907]

Something something taco bell

[@sappholopod4829]

I remember hearing an anecdote that the dev team for Fallout 3 actually tried running simulations to determine what the infrastructure of D.C. would look like following a nuclear blast. According to the simulations, there would be absolutely nothing left. So yeah, the assessment that most of the decor in the game is just set dressing to _imply_ nuclear annihilation rather than accurately portray it is pretty much exactly correct.

[@placer7412]

maybe as corny as it sounds but I don't think I understood the magnitude of nuclear explosions until i modded them into factorio and had to fly at the maximum speed for 5 minutes straight in one direction to not instantly be vaporized so yeah

[@satagaming9144]

Even with scaled-up map sizes, a few 400kt warheads would be enough to flatten most of 3, 4, and NV. With in-game sizes just one warhead would level the whole map, and a lot of the outlying areas too. With surface strikes (counter-force) instead of air bursts (counter-value), you'd still only need a few. Maybe the Chinese had some doctrine about using surface strikes instead, most of the lore and game locations would line up better with that. Air bursts don't create fallout, and surface detonations would leave some radioactive material behind, though not for 200+ years. Then again ghouls and cold fusion also exist, so maybe we should just run with it.

[@ArtoriusBravo]

Another way of thinking about the scale of a nuclear explosion in a modern major city is to think about the Beirut explosion. That thing was 1 kiloton. A lot of the crater damage in Fallout could be caused by even smaller explosions. A proper nuclear bomb would have left almost nothing, let alone 96 bombs.

[@baldrian22]

@@satagaming9144 i think maybe some type of nuclear cluster missiles with 100+ small bombs the sice of or maybe 10-50x the strength of the mininukes used by the fatman. and if also using some bombs that makes the area realy radioacctive you would have some devestating bombs that makes the area completly or mostly impossible to live in for a long time but wont destroy everything completly

[@polly_pasta]

Although I do enjoy the game map in Fallout 3 and get that this is what they wanted to go for, it would also be very interesting to have a story where everything is gone in DC but there are stories about what was there. It would be very surreal to be walking around where certain things used to be but which are simply dust now or only have scant evidence of their existence. Ozymandian as hell!

[@Barlakopofai]

I just wanted to point out something, and that's the fact that mini-nukes exist in the fallout universe. So yes, the area was probably carpet bombed with hundreds of nukes. It just so happens some of them are the size of a football and had an effective range of 20m. Those small puddles at the end can actually be mininuke craters, because mininukes are a thing. And when you got to 18:46. You can just straight up see that world war 1 or 2 photo you showed. That is a bunch of dunes from a carpet bombing, exactly like you saw in that picture, which confirms, very small nukes are real.

[@JakeB-Real]

Some of those puddles look too small to even be a mini nuke. Either way perhaps it was a mini nuke, or just a regular bomb of sorts.

[@Brams2777]

They also exist IRL, look up the Davy Crockett nuke.

[@DisinformationAgent]

In the art book that was included in the special editon of Fallout 3 one of the first things they state is that the first thing they did was look at what would actually be left from a nuclear blast which turned out to be not much at all, so they took a liberty with how the bombs worked to keep the areas engaging.

[@kite2036]

It's a bit of a stretch but these impact craters still could have been a very low airburst, a low yield warhead, or both. It's more advantageous to fit more smaller and lighter reentry vehicles into a nose cone than a few large bombs. It's why we aren't producing Tsar Bombas.

[@Northraider123]

Ya I've seen a fair few pictures from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they were just FLAT with a handful of ruins scattered about....a good portion of that is likely because those cities were largely made of wood but there was still NOTHING left over

[@nova3752]

Do you get such little attention that you answer questions nobody asked? Sit down manchild

[@chompythebeast]

Yeah the Capital Wasteland looks more like post-war Germany than post-war Japan. At least Washington finally got its due in-game...

[@notchs0son]

@@kite2036very possible not every bomb reacted the way they were designed. I mean some didn’t go off at all. So the idea some of the airburst activated later than was intended would make sense to argue

[@Forkuh]

My guy went into the nuke map and tested exactly what size bomb he’d need to flatten the white house. My brother, you are on so many lists.

[@NowThatsPeng]

FBI be visiting him real soon.

[@NowThatsPeng]

FBI be visiting him real soon.

[@eagles2249]

Its a preset selection on nukemap. Its not that deep

[@j-skullz]

I refuse to believe that's not the first thing most people do when they go on that website

[@naaga7932]

​@@j-skullz our teacher did that for us in class like 8 years ago lol 100%

[@Darth_Niki4]

8:18 Oh man, you missed an actual lake, formed by a nuclear explosion! It's called Chagan and located in Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan.

[@o.o-vt1rc]

Yeah, I figured somebody beat me to comment that, also figures I wouldn't find it until after I posted, lol

[@social_ghost]

One neat detail I always liked comes from the Germantown police station that really explains all the "radiation clean up" signs and ruined vehicles, toxic waste drums, etc sitting in craters. Its just a short series of passages about how society struggled on for a few months after the war before collapsing entirely. One can imagine some attempt was made by whatever government was left to try and start some sort of clean up (by putting up signs and dumping irradiated material into areas too contaminated to be cleaned themselves) before everything really broke down and fell apart for good. Its subtle but its cool.

[@baron3904]

There's a ton of military checkpoints but by the looks of things a majority never made it "months" more like a couple weeks if not a few days

[@social_ghost]

@@baron3904 That's a good point, I was basing months on the typical time it takes for radiation poisoning to kill a person (which is several months), but weeks is probably more accurate than months for most people. At least at Germantown it seems like society held together long enough for a lot of people to die from radiation poisoning as opposed to other causes. Also yeah the military checkpoints are another good piece of subtle storytelling.

[@blazeofficial3885]

@@social_ghost That would also explain the radiation warning signs outside of Vault 87.

[@pitioti]

I love when such cool lore details are sprinkled in the world

[@crunchysalmons]

crazy subtext. so ppl were in the middle of a chaotic collapsing society, and most ppl who got radiation poisoning were largely wiped out. Randal Clark was safe cuz he was in zion and similarly Raul was safe cuz he was far enough from Mexico City but still did suffer ghoulification from returning to the city. The weeks following the bombs were prob a turbulent storm followed by a dead calm

[@jillianvalderama6443]

I'd like to clarify that the object at 4:15 that Austin identifies as an airplane with an unexploded nuclear bomb is actually a Delta IX rocket fitted with a nuclear warhead. You can see the original model intended for spaceflight, before the cockpit and its instruments were replaced with a nuclear warhead, in the Museum of Technology.

[@gordonohallmhurain]

This makes me wonder about Vault Tec tipping the first domino and launching the bombs themselves -- it's a US Space Administration and REPCONN spacecraft adapted to carry a warhead. It's American technology being deployed on targets in DC. Makes you wonder where that particular warhead was launched from, and by whom?

[@jillianvalderama6443]

@@gordonohallmhurain the bomb in megaton is modelled off an early american atomic bomb too

[@rclipse1985]

@@gordonohallmhurain Could just be it had a technical failure and crashed, too, though. Fallout (the death ash, not the game) is supposed to cause electronic issues if I recall.

[@stitchfinger7678]

@@rclipse1985 Idk about the actual fallout, but the blast from a nuke creates an EMP

[@anteshell]

@@rclipse1985 Fallout? Not really. The electromagnetic pulse, however, will fritz anything not sufficiently protected.

[@InfiniteEscuro]

I always liked the timescale in Skyrim for helping me personally understand a little more about how big the world is in comparison to the game. For example, running with Irileth and her guards to the western watchtower takes only about a minute, but that's in-world between 30-40 minutes, due to an in-world minute passing every couple seconds. So while you can look and see it not far off in the game, in-world that watchtower is a half hour away at a steady jogging pace. It's probably a couple miles away at least, even though you can sprint there in under a minute in the video game itself.

[@Liquid_Rigel]

Trying to shoot a dragon out of the sky for ten minutes is actually an hours-long epic duel

[@houndofculann1793]

Isn't one real life second directly one Tamriel minute ever since Morrowind?

[@InfiniteEscuro]

@@houndofculann1793 Couldn't tell you what Morrowind uses for the time scale. But as far as I can remember, Skyrim's is roughly 1-2 seconds = 1 minute, so that's how I view it.

[@TheActualSeth]

So the bombs in the fallout universe are much smaller than real world ones to increase the “fallout” and radiation, so a lot of bombs are considered smaller than our real world ones Thank you all, I’m literally working on a video to show you what the game itself says the size of the bombs are and if Bethesda retconned it Source: VDSG Pg 1-7 "The megaton class weapons have been largely retired, being replaced with much small yield warheads."

[@canadiancupcake2443]

I imagine the thermonuke idea caught on less so than in our timeline and they stuck to calling basically every moderately-high-yield explosive device that causes fallout part of the "nuke" family. So lots and lots of smaller, dirtier bombs. I also wouldn't be surprised if they had some other chemical component as well.

[@johnderat2652]

Edit: turns out i was misremembering and it was 750 *kilotons* , not megatons. Mandela effect lol Well not really, idk if its all the bombs or just one from Fallout 4, but it was said that at least one nuke was over 750 megatons (fyi the strongest nuke irl is the tsar bomba which could've been 100 megatons but was limited to 50 by fear of destroying the planet lol)

[@cookechris28]

​@@johnderat2652 The Vault Dweller's Survival Guide states that the average nuke in Fallout is between 200-750 *kilotons*. Not megatons. An order of magnitude weaker than our modern hydrogen bombs. The Glowing Sea in Fallout 4 indicates some nuclear weapons delivery system was capable of causing long-term radioactive inhospitable wasteland, when combined with meteorological phenomena. Like Jupiter's Red Spot storm in a way. We aren't certain one huge bomb is what caused the Glowing Sea to exist. So instead of having a few hundred very powerful nukes, the Fallout universe relies on many low-yield nukes.

[@jamesduffy7549]

​@johnderat2652 if they were that high yield there wouldn't be much, well, fallout

[@screamingcactus1753]

@@cookechris28 From what I understand, the glowing sea wasn't the direct result of a bomb, but instead of a nuclear power plant in the area being damaged and melting down, resulting in more long term, lingering radiation than a bomb would cause.

[@bel3961]

You know I think I realized one of the things that makes your videos so naturally real is that they arise naturally. You aren't hunting for content, almost always your videos come about because you're literally in the midst of the playing the game at the moment and then have a feeling or realization. And that really comes across in the end results.

[@kg7219]

Or they’re so well executed that u are made to feel as if they came abt naturally. The best work in media is invisible ;). But ur prolly right and I agree lol

[@any_austin]

I’m glad that comes across

[@Hahauhavaids]

meat rider

[@cowboyanxiety]

​@@Hahauhavaids there's this crazy phenomenon called "enjoying content" that can sometimes compel someone to compliment the creator of that content. i know, its wild. researchers are baffled. can you believe it.

[@EvdogMusic]

​@@Hahauhavaids"Fellas, is it gay to like internet videos?"

[@TheWinters63]

7:56 is pretty clearly supposed to be a quarry. The road leading down to the pit, the different levels. Hell even it filling with water like that is something you see in abandoned quarries all the time. The location near it having rock breaker in the name i think is also a hint to it being a quarry.

[@just-there]

I’ve seen quarries that look just like that

[@PaggleWaggIe]

yaaah agreed!

[@PhattyBolger]

Regarding scale. In the lore, Skyrim is supposed to be about the size of Poland, but in reality it's about the size of Lebanon, a country around 30 times smaller. That's why the "cities" feel like villages and there's like 100 houses in the entire country despite thousands of NPCs living there.

[@whocares435-z9v]

It's much much much much smaller than Lebanon. It's smaller than almost any country except micro-states

[@Sefk76]

Can you imagine how boring it would be if it were actually that big 😂

[@creatorsfreedom6734]

sadly most or these game's are limited do too the size and a artist's imagination , even though we are in a era of Tera Byte hard drive's

[@JackalopeMurph]

@@creatorsfreedom6734 well fast travel is a similar problem but i think its scaled because a 20 minute walk from Riverwood to Whiterun would be "boring" or "slow" maybe from morrowind critiques

[@stratospherica]

@@Sefk76 Yeah, if you want to see how a game with a scale closer to 1:1 looks, look at Dragon Age Inquisition. Lots of empty space.

[@courier6960]

A few aspects to also remember about fallout 3’s wasteland: there are many portions of the city area that aren’t directly accessible to the player, the way we navigate the city of DC is just by accessing little pockets of the area via the metros and through some of the buildings that are stable enough to walk through. That, and we also only get a small corner of the city of DC, the rest extends past the bottom right corner of the map.

[@Mrniceguy-xv7ib]

Yeah I always assumed that the rest of DC was just nuclear craters and the parts we can explore are all that is leftover.

[@Noobie2k7]

I honestly still think it's an absolutely genuis way of map design. Like we still get the feeling of the city being huge even though we can only actively navigate a tiny portion of it. It makes it feel almost as big as the rest of the wasteland combined as the way you navigate the city is by by going down and through the metro tunnels and through sections of ruined buildings. Makes you feel like you're traveling much further than you actually are.

[@dakotawomble5556]

​@@Noobie2k7 Same here, when i was younger i hated going into DC. Even though it was maybe 25% of the overall map (if that) it still felt large

[@Noobie2k7]

@@dakotawomble5556 Same. Though I think it was mostly also due to the Super Mutants. I'll always be a FO3 > NV guy even if it does put me in the minority. I just think the FO3 map is better designed and also the main quest progression is a lot better as it encourages a lot more exploration while NV main quest pushes you along a very set linear path around the map. The FO3 main quest has you go back and forth all over the map meaning you explore more of it naturally and see more places you'll want to sidetrack yourself with. Its one of the main things I really like about FO4's design also. The map itself is incredibly well designed.

[@DIEGhostfish]

@@Noobie2k7 Are you only thinking about the chip chase? Because once you throw in the trips to Redrock, Nellis, The Fort, major NCR installations etc you've been sent almost everywhere.

[@thisswanwearssocks]

As an astrophysicist who as also watched this video in it's entirety, It is my duty to tell you an extremely cool fact. Impact craters on the moon are actually explosion craters. When asteroids hit the moon (or anything, really) they are traveling so fast that the kinetic energy of the impact is greater than the molecular binding energy of the asteroid. They effectively detonate on impact where all the chemical binding energy is overcome and released as an explosion. This is way all impact craters are round despite the asteroids coming in from "side angles".

[@TheJamesLykins]

I hope you’ve learned cooler facts by now. Pretty sure we learned this in 8th grade

[@renaigh]

New York, Pennsylvania and My god is where the bombs dropped.

[@siegebreakeriii]

But are those confirmed reports, I repeat confirmed reports?

[@joshuatealeaves]

S tier comments 🤌🏻

[@renaigh]

@@siegebreakeriii they were further southwest.

[@wolfie5135]

i Think when he said oh god he meant Boston that would explain his reaction

[@restitvtor439]

@@wolfie5135 lmfao

[@krissybaglin9206]

Shalebridge is a quarry. This can be deduced by the fact it's literally named after ROCK, has a ram into the bottom, and distinctive ridges and layers around the supposed crater. A common thing quarries have are lake beds forming at the bottom as the hard ground and shade provide minimal escape for the rain water caught in the funnel like shape

[@DIEGhostfish]

And it's ROCKBREAKER'S last gas. As in a gas station used by people who break rocks. In a quarry, because that's where they're employed, breaking rocks.

[@utoobisgarbage5210]

Agreed, first thing I thought was "That's a quarry bud"

[@Dreamprism]

I read this comment before getting to that part of the video and was still surprised at how quarry-like that quarry looked & he didn't seem to notice at all.

[@minedude33]

@@DIEGhostfish Unrelated, but there's a word for your type of comment or speech where you reiterate the main idea of the conversation multiple times in a sarcastic/satirical manner and I genuinely forgot what its called. I remember it was done in Spongebob too in the "they're bombs" scene.

[@TheEpicplushgod]

I was going to comment something like this, but saw yours first

[@gregorymckenna2727]

12:25 so something I noticed when you overlayed the Fallout map onto the DC map there, is that the Fallout map doesn't cover the whole of the DC area, just that little fifth of it. So to get a rough estimate on the number of bombs that struck the region, you could take the number you gave at the end and multiply it by 5. Which works out to around 480 warheads.

[@MadMango_69]

3:33 I think the reason you see all these tiny craters everywhere is because in fallout the cars are nuclear powered and will explode in a small mushroom cloud, they could have most likely exploded while in the vicinity of the larger bombs, doing like chain reactions.

[@HeterosexuaI]

while it's true that in fallout 4 we see nuclear powered cars, it's important to mention that this is NOT the case in older games. The fusion cells we see in fallout 4 are a direct byproduct of the development of power armor for the sino-american war, and were only developed about ten years before the great war and distinctively never reached full adoption before the bombs dropped. there were plenty of gas powered cars in the fallout universe prior to fallout 4, as the entire point of the sino-american war was that america still had large oil reserves and china wanted them. another sidebar is that "fusion cells" werent a thing until fallout 4. power armor used to just have a fusion reactor built into them that would work for hundreds of years without additional fuel.

[@tigrecito48]

why would someone put a radiation sign down after the apocalypse? doesnt make sense

[@MadMango_69]

@@tigrecito48 A Deathclaw did it.

[@cainballer9745]

Remnants of the US army before the collapse ​@@tigrecito48

[@Ascendant7Justice]

It could have also been a MIRV or something else with multiple warheads.

[@GabesRamblings]

If you talk to the grandma lady in megaton (the one married to the enclave patriot guy, forget their names) they reveal the megaton bomb wasn’t dropped or brought there a plane crashed there and the original walls of the town was from the plane, they just didn’t know how to scrap the bomb, this also explains why the bombs at one fort have the same model both where US bombs.

[@thatoneguy2023]

somehow i missed this, i thought she meant planes crashed around the dropped bomb lol. yours makes more sense cause she said they scrapped an entire airport later also I find her story a funny tongue-in-cheek explanation from the devs as to why there are no commercial airports in the area!

[@alegsb3943]

well that plane was an l-1011 tristar which only had a military refueling variant and was not a good candidate to turn into a bomber considering it was a normal civilian airliner

[@alegsb3943]

well maybe they really cut it up and that’s where the rest of the scrap metal came from and the l1011 was another thing they found so idk

[@thatoneguy2023]

@@alegsb3943 yeah im pretty sure thats what happened, manya said they scrapped an entire airport which is why you houses made out of those luggage vehicle things

[@crunchysalmons]

was addressed in the first 5 mins of the vid

[@emilianozamora399]

The weirdest part is that in 4 it’s kind of implied that only 1 nuke actually went off and it was an airburst that created the glowing sea, and in new Vegas it’s directly stated that only 2 bombs went actually hit, but it wouldn’t be the first time that the games are inconsistent about these things

[@its_uh_bella]

The inconsistencies almost work for Fallout a lot of the time. Of course there's going to be disparate histories from these different settlements and communities. I don't really think it's on purpose but the setting just helps it make more sense. It makes less sense that there's inconsistent history I elder scrolls though

[@ashleyneku5432]

House states he destroyed most of the bombs through his defence system, no?

[@skookyskellingtons]

@@ashleyneku5432 Which makes sense if we take the show as canon. Since he was one of the guys orchestrating the nuclear armageddon, he'd been prepared for the retaliation. He even went against the original plan to let it ride for Vault-Tec's sake in order to hopefully seize power the moment the radioactive dust had settled, which is very in-character.

[@arcanedoughnut2016]

The nuke you see go off in 4 is the one downtown. Presumably the rest of them hit while you were underground in the vault

[@thebluehat6814]

@@arcanedoughnut2016 if you look precisely where the mushroom cloud is in the cutscene, it's about 100-200m to the left from the epicenter pictured in the glowing sea. the downtown looks the way it is because of the tremors caused by the detonation. I wouldn't put it past bethesda to just straight up forget where the detonation was supposed to be seeing that emil "wrote" the game.

[@FreddieWoolly]

Fallout 3 is also just the northwest corner of DC and the suburbs so there might be 4x the amount actually fired at the city

[@BladedEdge]

Fallout 3's terrain is actually mostly accurate to real life, except that obviously it's been scaled down. There are a couple weird things. For example, Rockville, MD and especially Jermantown, MD should be way further north, off the top of the map

[@snonsig2688]

​@@BladedEdge yes it's accurate, but most of the City isn't included on the map, only a small part of it

[@Adam-ajb]

So with his estimate of 96 that would be 384 for the whole city.

[@nohandle117]

@@BladedEdge The problem is that the Capital Wasteland isn't meant to even be a scaled version of the real DC area, but like Austin mentioned: an artistic impression of a larger region. The most glaring example is Raven Rock: the in-game version of Raven Rock would place it in Virginia, just north of Leesburg at a latitude not dissimilar to Germantown; however, canonically and IRL Raven Rock is the real-life Raven Rock Mountain Complex, a military installation in Pennsylvania about 50 miles north of Germantown.

[@crunchysalmons]

interesting, thank you

[@philipjohansson3949]

A length scale of 1:8 would mean an area scale of 1:64, giving a total of 14*64=896 bombs. Now that sounds a lot more like "hundreds" to me!

[@godemperormeow8591]

Hundreds of bombs going off at once seems ridiculous. The sky would turn black. You would go blind from all the shiny lights going off at once. They should’ve said a “shitload” as opposed to hundreds.

[@pancakemafiaboss839]

@@godemperormeow8591 IDK. Between the existence of MIRVs, the sheer state of the pre-war world, and the importance of DC I think it is quite reasonable. The USSR alone had around 40,000 to 45,000 nuclear weapons at its peak. So it’s possible that by 2077 (and after a decade of war) the Chinese would have enough nuclear weapons to do such a thing.

[@louisvaught2495]

@@godemperormeow8591 The hundreds of bombs is a real thing, although scaled up a bit too much. The reason the US and Russia have thousands of missiles is to task enough of them to get through probable air defenses that could be tasked to protect any specific target. So if nuclear war *did* break out, the capitol would probably be hit with absurd, maximum overkill to make sure it couldn't be protected.

[@curlyfordoge4366]

@@godemperormeow8591 I mean, is there any reason that's a dealbreaker? The bombs went off like 200 years ago, it doesn't matter if the majority of the population died/went blind.

[@TheTSense]

@@godemperormeow8591 Sky turning black and all surface survivors going blind? Sounds correct to me

[@phoenix_gaming463]

those small nuclear "puddles" could have been made by dirty bombs, meaning conventional explosives making small craters and not blowing away surrounding stuff, while still spreading nuclear material.

[@sobutto5698]

There's a fairly popular fan theory that a lot of Fallout 3's development was undertaken with the idea that the game was going to be set 20-30 years after the bombs fell, but that Bethesda changed their minds later on and moved it forward to 200 years so that they could include familiar factions from the classic Fallout games, (the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave), without messing up the original timeline. That would explain why the devastation is so fresh and that features like the broken electricity pylons were still standing, as well as things like there still being ruined supermarkets with salvageable tinned food, (which might be realistic after 20 years, but probably not after 200). Bethesda have never confirmed officially but there are some fairly detailed videos out there on KZbin that lay out all the circumstantial evidence.

[@Helperbot-2000]

"without messing up the original timeline." lmfao

[@pedromello7835]

The capital is literally a warzone between a bunch of factions, of course the destruction is fresh is like happening right in front of your eyes!

[@violacola]

This is interesting to me. Could you link to one of these theory videos? I tried searching but I didn't find anything.

[@earthbadger5198]

@@violacola I think its "Was Fallout 3 Meant to Take Place Much Earlier?" by RadKing theyre talking about.

[@tOGGLEwAFFLES]

​@pedromello7835 yeah, it's still a warzone, but only in certain areas and they aren't slinging icbms. And that doesn't explain why people don't know the basics of wasteland survival (Wasteland Survival Guide quest), or how there's still food in stores, or how structures that should have rotted away in two centuries are still standing.

[@RiposteBK]

After spending the last month binging Fallout lore, I am so ready to be angry about lore inaccuracies in this, like a true Fallout fan should be👍

[@theace8502]

Don’t forget name calling and accusations against people who don’t agree with you of them not being real fans! You’re not a real fan if you don’t do that

[@janterpstra9438]

Yeah, like vault 87 being a nuclear waste diposal site instead of being bombed. There’s a reason why there are pre-war signs warning for the radiation.

[@Shadest]

a real fallout fan would already be insulting austin for making a video on fallout 3 instead of new vegas, you're slacking off

[@lmno567]

​@@theace8502To be fair, the same could be said for all fandoms.

[@Starkweather133]

A month? Rookie number. You must not be real fan…

[@CaleTucker]

I swear I recall a place across the first bridge into the major DC area, where you find a small merchantr.... pass them, keep going stride, where you fight centaurs. There's an irradiated crater with centaurs

[@robbertom]

A 1:8 scale, in 2 dimensions, means you should multiply the 12 bombs by 64 to cover the square area of the map, giving us 768 bombs!

[@ferntheyoutuber9960]

Yup I was just about to post this

[@whocares435-z9v]

Woah😮

[@Postoronniy]

Maybe he already meant that the game area is 1/8 of the IRL area.

[@adonysus]

they did say hundreds of bombs

[@InvagPrune]

I would include the 2 duds because they were dropped originally with the intention of exploding, so 14 x 8

[@worldjustshrugs]

Your deadpan mindfulness over the years has completely changed how I experience gaming now. You are a master class in just existing. Thanks, man.

[@PiquesandCreeks]

Well said. "Deadpan mindfulness" is so accurate.

[@Gaardieen]

What @social_Ghost was saying earlier. There was a clean up attempt, but in 2104 the Capital Wasteland was officially abandoned. Paige, former head of the Washington DC Construction Labor Union, left from Union Station in 2104. "The only green we saw was the poison lingering in the air of the Capital, when we left on the last train out of Union Station." Where they went to PIttsburgh, then left for West Virginia shortly after. It seems the people of Washington D.C. did try to salvage the Capital, but gave up when they realized it was impossible to rebuild there due to people not wanting to start families and such.

[@peadrianlastname]

In an actual nuclear war very few craters would exist. Airburts are much more effective at taking out communications etc. Over a large area so you would use almost all airbursts with very few ground impacts near high value targets such as the white house, capitol promenade, the pentagon, etc.

[@SamBole]

air bursts will still make craters, just shallower than ones that detonate on the ground, you can look at NukeMap and choose to display crater info and see that some substantial craters would still happen, they wouldn't be as small as the ones in FO3 though

[@skeletononcrystals5608]

In fallout lore, the bombs were mainly low yield ground bursts to cause as much nuclear fallout as possible

[@Rukushin]

yeah except in all the fallout footage theyre not airbursts are they?

[@tlv8555]

Airburt & Airernie

[@Tarkonomist]

Buddy don’t tell,me about the logic of my game with giant scorpions, talking zombies and laser guns

[@falloutbunker]

I think the reason why DC wasn't a huuuuuge priority for the bombing when the war happened was because they were somewhat aware that the president wasn't there. It was public knowledge that he hadn't been in town for a few months at that point (when the FEV scandal broke) so they probably didn't bother throwing as much there as they would've had he been in the white house. Also the white house being a crater was a last minute decision which I find hilarious. They were starting to wrap up the world building stuff and realized they hadn't done anything with it yet. With fuck-all time on the clock they just decided to make it a hole in the ground.

[@BierBart12]

Vegas could've probably used some more bombs, though. Considering they probably knew that the greatest weapons/robotics manufacturer of their enemy was based there Or it simply didn't matter, since mutually assured destruction was at hand anyways

[@HelghastStalker]

@@BierBart12 Don't forget that Vegas survived largely intact because House disarmed and shot down most of the incoming warheads.

[@stylesrj]

@@HelghastStalker And he would have shot them all down if he had the Platinum Chip... but thanks to a shipping error the chip was delayed...

[@SahiPie]

@@BierBart12Already explained by the lore

[@diney7085]

I think the simplest explanation is that yes, of course DC was a main target of the war, but it was also the most well-guarded against nuclear missiles. Don't forget that any missile would also first have to travel across the Pacific then the entire continental US to hit DC.

[@pmackni]

Fun video! Also, a side note on the Spotify algorithm: It wasn't that true random doesn't feel random, but that true random can put the same song back to back or repeat the same song through the shuffle multiple times and other songs just never get picked. It feels random, but it's not what we want from a random shuffle on a playlist we made.

[@Unknown_Genius]

Small correction: It doesn't only do that, but it can also keep you in a loop where it feels like you're listening to a non-shuffled version (e.g. you got a playlist with 14 songs but they get played to an almost entirely identical degree for a while). I had that a few years back with a playlist of mine that's non spotify, I literally thought that shuffle would be bugged out at first and be non-functional until it started repeating the same 3 songs and then went more random. And that's precisely the issue with true randomness and why it doesn't feel random to people.

[@Mostbee]

KZbin playlists (before youtube music launched) had a problem where, if you activated shuffling with a playlist with 200+ songs, sometime after hearing the songs, it would loop you into the same 3-4 videos on the same order back to back. I remember thinking it was just funny (un)luck with the randomness, I started skipping foward baffling myself each time it went back to an specific song while I wasnt paying attention that the other 2 where also repeating. Eventually I figured it out, i dont even know if thats documented somewhere or patched (highly doubt, very specific to recreate)

[@FlacidRob]

Now it just feels like it plays the same 20 or so songs every time, just in a different order

[@T0ac47]

One thing to note is that a good chunk of the city part of Washington D.C. is out of bounds so any missing bombs and craters could be within that area.

[@grimtermite191]

In fallout 3 large parts of the DC city are inaccessible, due to the destruction. I think it resonable to assume that these areas were the worst hit parts and there would be dozens of craters there in areas that we simply cant get to

[@bowl-of-chicken-soup7107]

I’m fairly sure rockbreaker mine was simply a pre war mine for either minerals or just stone. If you look at most abandoned stone or coal mines around the US, they simply look like craters with roads leading from the bottom up, and many are filled with water after being abandoned

[@stylesrj]

Mythbusters even used an abandoned quarry lake for testing explosions in water because there isn't any wildlife there. Or at least there isn't any wildlife that had always been there.

[@AntonioZL]

2:34 this happened actually a few dozen times, maybe even hundreds. Many nuclear soviet and american bombers during the cold war carrying live warheads ready for preemptive strikes crashed, dropping their warheads in the process. Some of these bombs were never recovered, and are still out there somewhere lol

[@Sam-lr9oi]

I was gonna mention it if nobody else had, it's one of those cold war things that is kinda terrifying but also funny that the response after they can't find it for a bit is "well, shit happens"

[@hedgehog3180]

That was exclusively an American practice in response to the Soviet lead in ICBM technology. Though the Soviets did still loose nuclear warheads just through different means. That being said there's no way we're anywhere close to losing hundreds, we're talking a few dozen lost warheads at most.

[@klayman2]

yeah they have failsafes implemented in them and as long as those don't malfunction it's not an immediate threat and could be recovered potentially, if i recall in the carolina crash one of the bombs stopped on its 2nd failsafe, the one before it would go off

[@AntonioZL]

@@hedgehog3180 indeed, my bad! By hundreds I meant the crashes and other accidents involving nuclear warheads (which probably do not exceed more than a hundred or so), not hundreds of lost warheads!

[@SilverDart214]

isn't there a downed Chinese pilot you can find in a random encounter that could be evidence that Chinese aircraft were present in the D.C. area during the war and why there is a nuclear bomb in Megaton

[@crimsonharvest]

I really like how 3 emphasizes isolated wasteland traveling with its place, its not really swinging in the same fight as Vegas which is clearly about the people more than the place.

[@MrSpotface]

Two different kinds of story telling and i would argue bethesda has always been better with enviroment storytelling. I love NV but its map is pretty boring compared to 3 or 4. Bethesda is just better at crafting open worlds, which makes sense since theyve been doing it wayyyy longer.

[@ThriveSkateboards]

I got introduced to FO when FO3 launched and loved how lonesome and empty it felt. No other FO has given that vibe... the other games are great in other aspects, but 3 will always feel the most post apocalyptic to me

[@MultiKbarry]

It is still very underwhelming that they don’t really have any native overarching factions. Only the slavers and traders really exist outside of one settlement. I wouldn’t really consider them proper factions.

[@fleetwoodcraic4235]

New Vegas in a lot of ways is pretty optimistic on our chances in the future. There’s a proper society in the west of the US, but 3 is pretty pessimistic in that regard. I feel like I could get by in the Mojave or in the NCR, in the Capital wasteland? That seems like absolute hell

[@KeyUSeeCZ]

⁠@@MultiKbarry I mean half of the slavers are Pitters (The Pitt citizens), so there is at least one big and new overaching faction ingame.

[@OFSheep]

4:00 you can get to the outer door of Vault 87, which as advertised survived a direct nuclear strike, if you get to 85 radiation resistance and consume rad-away at a comically high pace.

[@James-vw9yy]

Hey! Crater lake is not an actual crater. It is formed by a collapse of a volcano there about 100,000 years ago. I would also like to add that since the scale of the world is down, I don't really see how they could implement nuclear craters without just making huge areas of just crater. Edit: Alas, was I too full of hasty ambition to see the future of this video -to see Austin himself bring these items forward like a fish at market. I have shown myself a fool and must apologize therein, for my fool-hardy mistake.

[@littlerigby5245]

This is probably one of the funniest comments I've ever read

[@delskif1425]

This has pawn from DG2 energy

[@dxb338]

i mean volcanos do explode. probably the closest natural event in power to a nuclear blast. mt saint helens has a huge crater but its full of ice because its cold up there. Crater lake is the result of the same process.

[@slizzysluzzer]

@@dxb338 Calderas (of which Crater Lake is the result of one) aren't formed through direct explosive force. They're in fact giant sinkholes formed through the draining of the magma chamber after an eruption and the subsequent collapse of the earth's weight above the emptied magma chamber. Mt. St. Helens on the other hand effectively had its north face 'fractured' into a landslide set off by a comparatively minor earthquake which then triggered the major eruption itself that launched into a pyroclastic surge. It's certainly a crater but it's not a crater like you'd consider from nuclear detonations owning to the significant differences in eruptive pressure, trajectory, and flow. And it's quite different to a caldera like Mt. Mazama/Crater Lake or Lake Taupo in New Zealand.

[@kaymojil7669]

I really like that your uniform is hairclippies

[@ThisUserNameWasNotTaken]

Is that what's on his head

[@kaymojil7669]

@@ThisUserNameWasNotTakenyeah, some kind of alligator clips like the kind you part and cut hair with

[@tobiasklevig6971]

I spend way too much time wondering why he does it

[@erikgilson1687]

@tobiasklevig6971 because it looks funny

[@korok2619]

this is absolutely amazing indeed

[@FindTheFun]

My dad grew up in Olney MD, veary near the power plant. When he saw me playing one day he read the mission description and goes "This game is based in Olney Maryland? Why the hell would anyone base their game there?" I had to explain to him it was really based in DC but I was on the outskirts of the map. The fact that he technically lived right where I was playing at that moment blew his (and my) mind. I came here from your recent power lines video so the coincidence feels doubly so now.

[@Astroplatypus]

Reasoning based on scale factors implies there were 768 explosions, not 96 Since the 1:8 scale map is 1/64th the area of the real map, the scale factor for the number of bombs should've been 64 I don't know if this number is more realistic, though since I haven't played the game and am not a bomb expert or anything. Maybe they targeted important locations, and those were also more likely to be included in the game, so 768 is a bit inflated

[@Makapaa]

Scale itself might be wrong but numbers make sense.

[@sigmamaverick9215]

given teh absurdity of fallout and how hilariously cartoonish the world powers were. Huh...That sounds about right

[@yoshilovesyoshi]

And not to mention, the plans for Nuclear strikes in the event of total nuclear war include dud statistics, the US's being something like 25% and the Soviets around 50%, so if the brass wanted to hit a place with 100 bombs, accounting for their dud stats, they'd hit the place with 135 to 200 bombs, so 800 bombs on a place like DC seems fitting.

[@iskierka8399]

@@Makapaa The peak of nuclear stockpiles IRL was around 60,000 warheads on each side. Current day numbers are around 6,000. Fallout claims that there was never a de-escalation, so we can probably assume well over 100k per side. Less 1% for the highest priority target is not a particularly wild claim, IMO

[@Awesomeevrydy]

considering the fact that entire world was in an constant state of cold war for an extra 86 years past 1991 I'd assume they kept on making more and more bombs until their may have been hundreds of thousands

[@poromafia]

It's worth noting that ingame DC's skyline is very "flat" and usually the taller buildings seem to be broken, almost like top half of the structure has flown away.

[@pinkcupcake4717]

The actual DC skyline is very flat, too. It's not a very "tall" city the way New York or Chicago are.

[@Kitti_Toes]

I think this detail kind of strengthens my theory that a lot of the bombs detonated further up midair in the sky so that they would leave less of a physical crater in the ground, but more of outwards, destruction and force

[@MAXDITUDE]

That's pretty much exactly how the DC skyline looks right now actually. Buildings can't be taller than the Washington monument.

[@louisvaught2495]

@@MAXDITUDE Fun fact, that's a common but incorrect myth - there are other variants of it like "no taller than the capitol" The actual reason is way more random: they restricted height for safety and fire code reasons in the late 1800's and then never really updated it.

[@RingworldTyrant]

​​@@louisvaught2495They maintain the code for purposes of aesthetic and historical congruency now, giving DC a unique appearance. However, given the age of some of the buildings, it may still be an applicable fire code to restrict potential airdrift of fires if something were to catch fire.

[@keegan112099]

15:20 that spot also has a noticeable dip on water level along the river. Docks sit 10 feet out of the water showing the river used to be higher up the shoreline.

[@W4iteFlame]

Realistically fallout 3 wasteland should be probably either very green or completely ash grey

[@BladedEdge]

Especially 200 years after the bombs fell. The entire capital wasteland should be capital overgrown green plains. I enjoyed fallout 3 more by just pretending it's actually been thirty years.

[@W4iteFlame]

@@BladedEdge make sense. How many years you will give Fallout 4?

[@hedgehog3180]

@@W4iteFlame Supposedly Fallout 4 just happens to take place in fall and early winter so the trees aren't actually dead. That being said it still looks way too desolate for me.

[@Cahleeeb]

This is why Fellout is a must install Give me my green trees and blue sky back

[@Bowowze]

​@@BladedEdge it actually was supposed to be just as you say funny enough. they changed the date range of the game to be more in line with being a "sequel" though iirc but i dont remember the exacts. youre near spot on about your assessment however.

[@irgendwer3610]

9:32 also similar to how reallisitc post-apocalyptic nuclear scenarios would be lush with forests and greenery everywhere and animals would not be abominations

[@louisvaught2495]

Many plants actually respond positively to radiation - it's one of the ways we do selective breeding of fruit. Just hit 'em with the gamma rays.

[@hedgehog3180]

Mind you the mutations in Fallout are mostly caused by the Forced Evolutionary Virus the American government intentionally released on its population to combat a Chinese bioweapon. The FEV interacts with nuclear radiation in weird ways, which is how you get Ghouls, but really it's mostly the FEV.

[@Blakbox92]

I'm all for the fun of nuclear mutant animals, but give me the lush overgrown ruins type of apocalypse. And give me a damn bicycle too, I'll take the "no horses" thing, I'll deal with the lack of cars ...but you're telling me everyone has entirely forgotten how efficient and fast cycling is in comparison with travelling on foot?

[@theblah12]

A real post-apocalyptic world would probably look closer to The Last of Us than anything else, after about a decade or so. And go forward 200+ years like the Fallout series does and a lot of remnants of the old world would have largely decayed away, completely taken over by nature.

[@browncoat697]

@@Blakbox92 Well, the Horizon series is more or less what you're asking for I guess? Also as far as cycling goes, one, it's pretty hard to cycle over the horrible terrain you see in Fallout (it's not just dirt paths, that would be an improvement over the jagged, cracked, pot-holed, overall fucked up roads after the war), and getting the rubber and seals for pneumatic bicycle tires would be a real pain in the ass.

[@The_Haruspex]

Serious props to the plane crew that manage to drop their bomb directly on the white house. I mean the President was likely LONG evacuated along with most of the staff, but damn. What a hit.

[@Ruben-ef2sg]

The "airplane" in downtown DC is actually a Delta IX rocket, there's another one on display at the Museum of Technology. It was also used for moon missions!

[@SomeoneYouDontKnowOfficial]

That's crazy that at vault 87 they predicted that a nuclear bomb would strike there and they put up signs in advance warning about there being radiation from the bombs that would eventually drop

[@arduousJester]

Germantown HQ explains that the national guard was active in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, trying their best to keep people alive. It's likely that they sent people out to put up signs telling survivors to stay away from areas like the white house and vault 87.

[@hoosierhell7456]

The National Guard was still active shortly after the war, they set up the warning signs as well as some of the military checkpoints you can find around the Wasteland

[@monikasommerfelt7514]

Jokes aside, it could've been a robot or scavengers that put the signs there because of how deadly the area is.

[@NemesisOgreKing]

Those were put there either by the Super Mutants or to hide the Vault in pre-war Virginia.

[@ParagonFury]

The military, police and some emergency services were still active for some weeks/months after the war in most places, so people tried to actually follow procedure, do disaster rescue, recovery and containment etc. Its just that radiation, illness, violence and lack of resources got to them all before anything significant or meaningful could be accomplished.

[@GameMaster136]

When you mentioned limiting fast travel in games you'd probably love looking at the methods of travel in TESIII: Morrowind. Morrowind has a nice balance of having options for quickly traveling around thanks to people who have transport services like silt striders, boats, or teleportion. Makes getting around the map easier for a small cost which might incentivize traveling by foot. And seeing at those services only take you to settlements you're forced to travel to other places on foot like dungeons and whatnot.

[@PresAlexWhit]

12:17 KZbinr and Geographer Tunnelsnakesfool is making a realistic world map of the Fallout Games. Maybe she'd be able to approximate the scale. She has said that due to the artistic rendition, it may be impossible to actually guess, but still.

[@brynstarre]

The Bethesda maps (3 & 4) were heavily altered from real-world geography, where as Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas use actual survey data and New Vegas is the closest in the recent games to being able to be described as a 1:25, or whatever, rendition.

[@famitory]

10:00 cluster bias. basically humans expect "random" to be sort of evenly distributed when true randomness tends to form little 'clumps' in probability space

[@Ginisher]

8:18 There are actually a few lakes that were formed by using nuclear devices in real life: "Shagan" in Kazakhstan, made by a test nuclear detonation, and "Yadernoye" ("Ядерное", literally means "Nuclear") in Russia

[@brickingle3984]

North Carolina mentioned🎉 there’s a bomb still in the swamp somewhere we’ve never recovered. That actually happened a lot in the early days of the Cold War. A couple are off the coast of Portigal somewhere because a plane broke apart in the sky

[@kyuofcosmic]

I think a cow was the only causality in the NC Broken Arrow accident.

[@EarthPoweredHippie]

It's nothing to worry about tho, they way in wich they s0lit the atom is a precise explosion from my understanding, as long as the main charge don't fire at 100% there's small chance of it actually going off

[@EarthPoweredHippie]

​@kyuofcosmic lmfao if ur serious this is even more funny than satire.

[@BigStrap]

Internet sleuths (who are always renowned for their unfailing accuracy) have deduced that it's likely somewhere near goldsboro. Saw a Google map pic of a perfect circle of trees near a highway around there that supposedly grows in the right kind of soil to match the incident reports- not something I've put a lot of stock into one way or another, but a fun read. Plus it's always fun to pretend you know where a unrecovered nuclear weapon is.

[@dynad00d15]

So North Carolina is a huge version of Megaton? :)

[@panzerfaus8459]

2:43 you say it happened twice, no it actually happened 32 times, that we know about, they are called broken arrow incidents

[@TheWatchfuleye1]

I believe at least one of those confirmed 32 BA incidents is still unrecovered too

[@panzerfaus8459]

@@TheWatchfuleye1 several, one in a field somewhere in the carolinas, a couple in the gulf coast, and i think one some where in Arkansas or Alabama

[@angelaolano6080]

In Spain the US "lost" a few

[@MyScorpion42]

nuclear bombs don't usually hit the ground. Little boy was detonated at approx. 1,968 feet and fatman at approx 1650 feet. so craters in the sense of large amounts of displaced dirt are not typical

[@sierranicholes6712]

i was at the location where fat man detonated and if i remember correctly there were signs saying the ground was a little lower around there. certainly not a giant crater of course but a few feet deeper than it was before if that counts

[@Gildhelm88]

I came here to post this! Air burst is gonna be more common for these blasts.

[@MyScorpion42]

@@sierranicholes6712 It counts! It is just to say that an obvious crater isn't necessary to diagnose a nuclear bombing site

[@aaa69200]

@@MyScorpion42 I mean, did you watch the video? 6 minutes in he theorizes that there was an airburst explosion which knocked the train off it's tracks and destroyed the police station but didn't leave an obvious crater.

[@evanbradley6169]

There's also the question of how long the crater would remain unfilled under natural conditions. Fallout 3 has very little vegetation, and the soil appears to be dry and lacking in organic matter, both of which increase the likelihood of dust storms (which the npc in Megaton says were common early after the war) I think it's likely that the craters in more open terrain without any protection from the wind could have become filled in by sandstorm in the 200 years before fallout 3

[@simulacrumdei6462]

The way you talk about games is just wonderful. I'm so glad i found this channel, so far each video of you has been a treat

[@michaelbeauregard5154]

One thing that I don't see mentioned by other commenters is MIRVs. MIRVs (Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) are mechanisms that allow multiple warheads to be attached to an individual ballistic missile. So even though there will be a big crater where one warhead detonated, there could be mini nukelet craters spread across in a radius from the initially targeted area.

[@Badusername2000]

something kinda funny when it comes to scale, with fallout new vegas, obsidian used a real map of the area to make the map, scaled down to 1/25th scale, but they had to change one thing, widen the colorado river, because when scaled down it was narrow enough to jump across

[@OmegaRC59]

Using a real geographical heightmap as its base really helps the look of the oob areas too, since they're literally just as geometrically detailed as the rest of the game at a distance. Funny hearing that about the river though lol. Doesn't surprise me too much though either. Wonder how much bigger it would be compared to the real thing if brought back to full scale, and just how much more water would flow through it

[@XeresKyle]

Fallout 3 was the game I played when I moved out of my mom's, it was a rough time, but man I have such great memories from this game and all its DLCs.

[@XeresKyle]

Fallout 3 is so great because it makes you fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Game designers are wise to use this method of storytelling because it gives room for open discussion and for fans to create theories and stories of their own. That's good game design.

[@343Films]

Fallout 3 and Halo 3 were my childhood. So many memories

[@sigmanation6957]

New Vegas doesn't have many signs of nuclear annihilation because it wasn't annihilated. House went to great lengths to intercept as many warheads as possible. Black Mountain is the most obvious example of one that got through though. As well as the Divide.

[@ruptakruptak439]

Unremarkable Places in Fallout 3 coming soon? Maybe? Much love to you, sir

[@LeonM4c]

So many nice areas to vibe in Fallout 3, would love that vid

[@WolfmanDude]

I think the whole city of megaton was built from a crashed bomber plane. They used the metal to build thair sheds and the huge wall. The bomb just remained in the center. You can see a bunch af airplane parts in the city

[@any_austin]

Where’d you learn that from Manya Vargas? You trust that old coot?

[@Thebuilderz]

​@@any_austin The very first time you visit the settlement the engine turbine turns on and a unique animation plays where the Megaton door opens for you as the robot greets you. Implying that the settlers rigged up the door controls to the plane's engine.

[@yetanother9127]

@@Thebuilderz It might just be the fan from the engine, not the whole engine--maybe they're using it as a flywheel to provide torque for the door mechanism.

[@MDE_never_dies]

Yes a bunch af

[@cellulanus]

They do mention that an airport was salvaged to make the town but it only looks like there was one plane used to make the town. The wings are the gate. The cockpit is one shop while the tail is on top of the Sheriffs house. A section of the fuselage is the towns armory. Engines can be seen integrated into infrastructure.

[@Skylancer727]

The nuke likely would leave remnants of old metal parts. The military did a test on this very idea with steel and tungsten spheres. They had them placed on telephone poles at specified distances and the result was even the closest survived, but the closer they were the more mass they lost to vaporization.

[@anonopossum]

a lot of the smaller craters could be from things like cars affected by distant nukes since vehicles are powered by nuclear fuel which in video game logic just makes them miniature nukes

[@OpDDay2001]

The "Micro Fusion Cells" in the Fallout universe is really just a really powerful RTGs (Radioisotope thermoelectric generator). Mass Fusion had an "inventive media campaign" for their products.

[@jktomas]

I've been to the crater in Estonia. Thank you for mentioning it. It's funny because there seems to be another almost exactly the same looking place in Lithuania, but no pieces of meteorite were found, I guess, so it's not considered to be a crater. It's just a random huge completely circular hole in the ground, that's all.

[@philadelphus3570]

To be fair, it can be surprisingly difficult to tell the difference between a crater caused by a space rock and a crater caused by volcanic action, especially when they've been worn away by erosion for a long time. One sure-fire identifying characteristic of impact craters is shocked quartz caused by the incredibly high pressure of impact; without that it's difficult to rule out geological processes.

[@jktomas]

@@philadelphus3570 That's true except that volcanic action is much less likely in Lithuania than a meteorite crater. The common explanation how the hole appeared is that there was a huge piece of ice bellow the ground, it melted after the ice age ended and the ground fell in. Or something like that. It doesn't explain to me why it's so circular and why it's no where else in the area where the same processes were happening after the ice age.

[@Cheezus]

I'm just glad there is someone out there willing to record this type of stuff. I find myself wandering around and thinking "I'm sure people wanna know about this"

[@cave1907]

I can't overstate how much I love and am inspired by your approach to interacting with video games and fictional spaces. I've started following rivers and waterfalls in open world games now thanks to you. Next I'll have to look for signs of atom bombs in Skyrim.

[@NemesisOgreKing]

There is a crater past the North out-of-bounds barrier similar to the one near TenPenny tower. It's in the center and you have to scale a specific cliff of rocks to see it, you were just kind of the wrong area. The "crater" adjacent to Fort Bannister (near Jury Street Metro) looks like it may be something exploding out of the big crater in the Fort. There's an overturned truck with Alien Energy Cells lying in the center of the crater. Maybe it wasn't a nuke, but an Alien escaping in the mayhem.

[@Ghoast.]

My man got placed on a watchlist for a video just by that radius around the WH search. Thank you for your service sir

[@RichardKushman]

To be fair we can see that DC itself stretches further and we really only can explore a portion of the city while the map is made up mostly of the surrounding areas so there could be and realistically would be plenty more scattered throughout further into the city out of bounds

[@phitsf5475]

oh no be careful don't stand there too long because monsters and radiation

[@manny7289]

Its okayvhe has radx

[@weaponized_toaster]

Boo

[@Konnor-LesleyOmijie]

Found your channel while suffering from the worst infection, thank you for helping me get through it, and keep up the good work!

[@aegidiusaurelius]

I'm so jazzed that Austin has gotten so many subscribers and is turning this extremely niche content into accessible and fun videos for all of us who love esoteric plausible information.

[@wholesomebaker5410]

0:32 thank you for asking for consent

[@justbethinking]

yeah it was my first time, glad he was gentle

[@niratsirackod1]

Even if he didn’t, I would be willing to come.

[@wyattmason3902]

Along with the scale issue you mentioned and the airburst nukes there's a decent chance that the area hit by the hundreds of nukes exceeds the map limit by quite a bit

[@WardyLion]

One designer remarked that “not much” would be left standing after such a bombing, so they had to take some liberties to avoid the map being barren and empty.

[@BigGamer2525]

18:18 it would actually be 768 bombs since your 1:8 scale factor is a measure of distance, while the bombs are distributed over the surface of the DMV area. So while distances are 1:8 areas are scaled by 1:64, so it would be 12 * 64 = 768 bombs

[@edentitycrisis]

Oregon AND Estonia mention!! As an Estonian living in Oregon I was delighted. As always, great video!

[@dantesque17]

Considering Fallout New Vegas, it makes sense to me that they would see Las Vegas as a prime target, since the bombs would cause mass casualties around Hoover Dam without explicitly targeting the dam. If their plan was to occupy the area after the bombs fell, they would have access to a powerful energy source and very little resistance when they got there. In my head canon, that's what China would have done had the US not immediately retaliated and destroyed China in mutually assured destruction.

[@matthewcron8842]

If I remember correctly, there were supposed to be bombs dropped on Vegas, but House did something to prevent it.

[@Zicrus]

18:12 If it's 1:8 scale, you should multiply by 8 squared, since the map is two-dimensional, which would give hundreds (768 to be exact).

[@Kenvie2000]

No it would still be multiplied by 8 because you are comparing area to area.

[@Zicrus]

@@Kenvie2000 I'm not completely sure if he was referring to length or area, but usually when you say a map is 1:8, you mean length.

[@Kenvie2000]

@@Zicrus He was referring to area because he was talking about the number of missile strikes in a set area.

[@grudgebearer1404]

Airburst of small nuclear devices is the most probable explanation. Most big devices got intercepted by defenses but the smaller ones got through. That's a real strategy known as saturation attack and is possible to observe in modern conflicts that make use of large scale drone attacks to saturate the enemy air defense.

[@jordanalves1127]

You mentioned the false sense of scale of the "videogame world". I remember GTA V story mode having a lot of this present in the dialogue which I always found fascinating when I was younger. Characters would reference it taking hours to get from the Sanora desert to Los Santos, or an all-day drive to the northen most town in the game. I always wondered if the Devs scaled their world to match how quick the time passes. It takes only 4 minutes on the highway to get from the city to the desert but a lot of ingame time goes by. Not to mentioned Los Santos being like 1/10th the size of the greater LA area. Just look at how far away Griffith Observatory is from downtown compared to the in-game equivalent.

[@CyranofromBergerac]

It's interesting the GTA thing. They measure distance by real life time instead of in game time. They said the drop off point for the high end cars was 8 miles away. If you drive the truck 60 miles an hour which is a mile a minute you will be there in 8 minutes. But due to the time being faster in game it takes hours.

[@skollrum]

I don't know about unintentional, but if someone was deciding which way to place an asset, they could be think "there a close crater, so I'll rotate it from there"

[@Bravo_Six_Ghost]

15:16 if a nuke had detonated by the bridge, the bridge and surrounding area would vaporized.

[@Radnugget]

There is a lake in Kazakhstan that was created by a nuclear blast. Its called Shagan.

[@GG_1318]

the nuclear bombardment is said to be so severe that the landscape was completely altered. mountains were sunk, new valleys were created as well as new mountains being formed

[@LizBlizzard]

Your videos are so enjoyable. It reminds me of sitting at recess talking to my best friend about how the forests of GTA are totally haunted, then inviting each other home after school to go wander around the map and record our findings. Except, you know, the college version of that lol

[@arachnoid2569]

That cut with the pushed rock, that is very impressive detail tbh

[@mathiasdownhouse2097]

Scaling is something that many seems to forget. Example from Riverwood to Whiterun is 180 km (112 miles) It would take days to travel that even with a horse in real life but of course in game it dosn´t. In game it´s not 7000 steps to High Hrothgar but in real life it might be so that´s why they say it´s 7000 steps. So I really like that you talked about scaling. If there was proof of hundreds (or even just a little bit hundred bombs), I don´t think it would be a good game. I wouldn´t mind to see a video where the whole subject is scaling in games, especially of course in Bethesda games. Also I like that I started to play Fallout 3 for the first time just couple weeks ago and then boom, you are making video about it. This is third time this kind of thing happens.

[@Xahnel]

"You can't get within 100 feet of the place without dying of radiation" Actually, you can! You need every drop of radiation resistance you can get and also you need to be just absolutely chugging Radaway, but Vault 87 has a landmark pip on the map, so I touched the door on a character.

[@TheHeroicFrog]

I love these videos, you bring such a unique perspective to level design! I even do professional QA for games, and I still look at games completely differently after one of your videos, please keep this up you're doing amazing!

[@goldwasp7222]

Dude it's been so long since YT recommended one of your videos to me. So happy your channel is picking up so much. I used to binge rewatch your eggbusters and VG wham videos all the time

[@firehedgehog1446]

Little suggestion for future videos if you intend to do New Vegas & Fallout 4: If you're playing on PC, use the Godmode command: TGM, To be able to explore highly irradiated areas without fear of death

[@Kelis98]

5:00 NMA, that place is about as toxic as a real radioactive crater

[@spacescienceguy]

Those signs at 3:55 for example are actually really interesting, because they look like they were made and placed around the time of the war. I mean they don't look like they were placed by the post-war wasteland society, their signs look very different. It looks like an official US Government sign. So what does that tell us about the immediate aftermath of the nukes falling? There must have been enough people surviving that civilisation didn't immediately collapse and someone had time to run radiation surveys and place these signs.

[@jerrell1169]

A terminal at Germantown Police HQ expounds upon this (and also indicates that a bomb could absolutely not have dropped above it). The terminal tells the story of a police captain of an all-female police force (because the men had gone off to war, presumably) hunkering down at the HQ with a detachment of the Maryland National Guard (or PA national guard? it says they drove a straight shot from PA). There was clearly some sort of entity still existent to send the NG to the HQ and to administer aid. Although, this entity was not able to continue supplying anti-radiation medicine which is why the refugees there died. Mr.Gutsy's and Protectrons at the army checkpoints where these signs can often be found also mention curfews, among other lines.

[@harrisonwalker3787]

This video came out a long time ago, but as someone who lives near where thise bombs dropped and didn't explode, it was actually in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, right outside of Florence, South Carolina. It pretty much landed in someone's backyard. I love this history tid bit as its very close to home :)

[@greenieboo]

this is now officially the first and only info i know about this game but it looks pretty cool