Where Did Fallout 3's Bombs Actually Hit?

I'm standing here in the post-apocalyptic streets of the hit 2008 video game Fallout 3 and I have a question does this look like a place ravaged by hundreds of nuclear explosions to you now obviously the answer to that is yes but while playing Fallout 3 for the first time over these past couple of weeks I started to get curious where exactly did all of these nuclear bombs drop and I mean where exactly did they drop down to the square foot because I feel like I remember seeing some obvious nuclear craters while playing through the game but not that many did I just miss them well I'm going to figure it out and you're coming with me if you want to we're going to be scouring the capital Wasteland looking for signs of nuclear Armageddon including radioactive craters knocked over electrical infrastructure and in some cases literal nuclear bombs anything that might be able to help us pinpoint where this nuclear Fiesta actually occurred and how many bombs actually hit the ground in other words we want to know how Bethesda chose to fake the past in a place that doesn't really have one the types of places that we're going to be looking at today really come in two categories some of them are spots that are very obviously sites of nuclear explosions you know places that were put there by the developer with the intention that the player would stumble upon them and go oh a nuclear bomb exploded here maybe it has references in the lore or maybe it's just really obviously a radioactive crater the second type of place we're going to look at are places with the telltale signs of a nuclear strike but no explicit recognition by the game through conversations or audio logs or whatever places that we really have to pay attention to the environment rather than just being told by the game and then technically there's also a third type I guess which is places with uh literal nuclear bombs in them that just didn't explode so obviously this is a pretty easy one this is the city of Megaton and you can tell that a giant bomb fell here on account of the Giant Bomb that's here now this first one technically wasn't an explosion so we'll use a little unexploded icon on the map here you're welcome now I know there's some debate in the lore about whether this bomb actually like fell here or if it was brought here I'm sorry but these malnourished post-apocalyptic weirdos would not be able to drag a bomb there and if they did why would they set it up so that it looks like it crashed nose first into the ground and made some kind of impact crater we'll probably talk more later about what the uh lower communicates about the gamespace versus what the environment communicates about the gamespace uh but that is too boring for the first half of a YouTube video we have nuclear bombs to find and for those you saying that a nuclear bomb never could have fallen from an airplane and impacted the ground without exploding guess what yes it could have it happened in North Carolina once twice I guess technically here's a picture of it in the little crater that it created another place where there has obviously been a gigantic nuclear explosion is right here the White House now I know what you're thinking wow it looks just like the photographs with one small difference this gigantic hole in the ground big hole in the ground plus radioactivity equals probably it was was bombed by a nuclear explosion device out of curiosity I went to that um nuclear bomb simulator website in order to try and figure out what size bomb actually fell on the White House it looks like it was most likely a 300 ton bomb which is currently the smallest bomb in the United States Arsenal Jesus Christ if I had a 300 ton nuclear bomb and I had to pick a target for it you know what I would pick a very large empty field with nothing in it in the middle of a desert but if I was in The Fallout Universe I would probably pick a military base which is why the next place we're going is Fort Banister the first thing that you notice when you come here is all of these tiny little craters dotting the landscape almost like a bunch of little nuclear weapons exploded all around but then there's also this large crater and actually with this big crater you can see it if you look on the pit boy map that's how big it is a little further west of Fort Banister is a place called vault 87 this is an underground Vault outside of which a nuclear bomb exploded you can't get within 100 ft of the place without dying of radiation poisoning so that's good enough for me Mark it down aside from all those the only other place that is an obvious candidate for this is a gigantic crater in downtown DC this gigantic crater is radioactive and in the bottom of it there looks to be some sort of missile sounds promising but upon closer inspection it's not a missile it's an airplane with an unexploded nuclear bomb on it so it's an interesting site for sure but it's more in line with what we saw in Megaton uh than an actual nuclear crater so we use this icon again and and that's really it for places in the game that seem to have been made with the intention of a player stumbling upon them and thinking that they are a nuclear bomb site so what we need to do now is look for places that have indications that they were probably hit by one of these nuclear bombs even if it's not explicitly stated by the game now obviously I could just personally walk around this whole map for days at a time in order to find these spots but I figured there's probably an easier way which is to go on Google and find old Fallout fan forums and see if anyone has uh asked this question before which lo and behold they have so I perused all of these threads and collected any places that people brought up frequently that we didn't already cover the first one of those places is a place called the German Town Police Headquarters this came up on a couple of different forums that I read I don't remember there being any explicit evidence of a nuclear detonation here but let's take a closer look and see what we can't find out that's the police headquarters there you see behind it all of these wooden buildings now the thing with nuclear bombs is that they are quite warm so they do tend to burn things up so the existence of these wood buildings does kind of indicate that if there was a nuclear explosion around here it either wasn't directly on the ground or was a little bit further away we do have the whole backside of the building totally torn off and a large chunk of it literally pushed in this way you do have a train that was blown completely off its tracks going that way so if we were to draw two lines from both of those points in the opposite direction that the force was applied you would end up with something kind of like this so I do think there is a possibility that there was an airburst nuclear explosion right here quite a long time ago and if I had to pinpoint the spot I'd say it was probably right about there now two other places that were referenced on a lot of these fan forums were number one on the top of 10 peny Tower apparently if you look South you will see a nuclear crater and then number two a couple different people referenced there being an explosion in Vernon Square now upon further investigation I think the Vernon Square One was actually just people misremembering where that uh crashed airplane was so that one's out but if you go to the top of 10 peny Tower and you look South look at that looks an awful lot like a nuclear crater to me this crater is off the uh bottom of the map once again you can see it on the pit boy but if you get close enough you'll also notice that the trees surrounding it are knocked away uh in the direction that the blast would have come from so as far as I'm concern it's good enough mark it down now this is where things get a little bit trickier cuz as of now we've marked off every place that is uh obvious we've marked off all the places that aren't obvious that people have mentioned which really only leaves all the places that aren't obvious that people haven't mentioned and so far we only have five actual possible locations of an explosion uh which doesn't seem like very many it's definitely a far cry from the hundreds that allegedly fell on this area so now what well I pretended a moment ago that I wasn't going to just wander around the DC Wasteland and look for craters myself but that's exactly what I'm going to do the question is did I find anything yes I did take a look so one candidate that I located was just a little bit Northwest of rock Breakers last gas and it is this big pit with this hole there's actually kind of a faint almost crater like look to this whole area could it just be kind of an eroded old mine definitely one of the things I do like about this as an option is it reminds me of something that craters do in real life on planet name of Earth uh which is they form Lakes sometimes Crater Lake in Oregon is probably the most famous example of this at least in the United States but there's also this one in Estonia that kind of reminds me of things that you might see in Fallout so that's pretty cool none of the ones in real life were made by nuclear devices of course they were all uh created by asteroids or volcanic eruptions but still aside from that I was also wandering around the I I it was the jury Street Metro Station and I stumbled across this this is a large empty open field almost no trees and the trees that are there are all knocked over in a suspicious Direction it's subtle but the details are there you can also see this little cut in the ground here with this rock up here I almost wonder if something maybe exploded and forced this rock to wedge itself up there also up kind of near Fort Banister and this Metro station is this spot it's things like this that really Tickle My Fancy because on one hand you can see this and think to yourself wow what detail they really put the work in to have evidence of a nuclear explosion in the past but on the other hand I would any of this even actually survive a nuclear bomb like I'm not even sure if a steel pylon would survive 200 years not being affected by a nuclear device much less having been exploded by one but I kind of think that's cool they put details like this in the game to communicate to us that this is postnuclear apocalyptic even though the detail itself isn't realistically postnuclear apocalyptic you know it kind of reminds me of how when people saw the movie Apollo 13 they said this is ridiculous this is just a bunch of Hollywood mumbo jumbo trash even though it was all very accurate or sort of like how Spotify had to program their Shuffle not to actually randomly Shuffle the songs cuz when it did people didn't think it was randomly shuffling the songs so they had to program it to not actually randomly Shuffle the songs so people would think it was randomly shuffling the songs now I think there's another argument to be made that maybe things like this is just sort of dumbing us down in a way Bethesda is just using like the bottom of the barrel lowest common denominator way to communicate this particular aesthetic and maybe it would be cooler if they were more thoughtful about what life in a post-apocalypse might look like maybe we would get more interesting human stories which is why Fallout New Vegas is good but that the sort of constant argument uh between three versus New Vegas I think people do Totally Miss what things three has that New Vegas doesn't because they're so preoccupied with what New Vegas has the three doesn't that's just my opinion and I didn't play Fallout 3 when I was young this is not a Nostalgia problem so don't you try and throw that against me you New Vegas heads even though you are completely right obviously anyway where were we show me the map all right perfect there's also an unmarked spot on the map east of WTI station that has a gigantic radioactive crater so it's kind of funny that that a doesn't have its own map marker but B nobody online mentioned it cuz it's seems very obviously a candidate for this and I actually do kind of love that there's not a map marker for it I think that's kind of neat games now have too many map markers too many we need to restrict fast travel it's a whole other video so at this point we have found eight Nuclear Strike sites and two unexploded nuclear bombs the lore of Fallout 3 implies that DC was hit by hundreds of nuclear bombs so what gives well first of all I'm pretty sure we can actually find a few more uh potential Nuclear Strike sites we'll get to that in a minute but secondly there actually might be a pretty good explanation for this and it has to do with scale I feel like I recall reading a quote from Todd Howard or maybe somebody else at Bethesda where they were talking about how the Elder Scrolls uh isn't necessarily meant to be a literal fa simile of the world of Tamriel that Skyrim is really more more of an artist's rendition of the world with kind of like a wonky sense of scale some flexibility with the specifics of the lore and a very loose grasp of realistic unemployment numbers I couldn't actually find the quote so if somebody knows it please uh post it down below so I can find it and if it's not a real quote if I just made it up well post it down below anyway so people don't know but if we were to take the size scale of Fallout 3 meaning the way that it compares to the real size of that area in Washington DC on Earth and apply that scale to the number of nule clear strikes that we found where would that put us the only problem is there's a lot of debate online as to the exact scale of Fallout 3 you know we don't know exactly how big stuff is we don't know exactly how fast player characters are walking and it's also a real mishmash of locations rather than being an exact scale model of a part of DC but the best discussion of the topic I could find was on a forum called No mutants allowed back in 2009 and they also could not agree at all but using all the information that they provided on that forum as well as spending some time drawing squares on Google Maps I feel pretty comfortable saying that the game is roughly a 1 to8 scale of the area that it represents so if we take that scale and apply it to the number of uh Nuclear Strike sites that we found so far you end up with I'm going to tell you in a minute because I have one more idea about how we might be able to find some more places that bombs have dropped see I've already looked in the lore I've already read the wikis the forums I've already uh used my own mind but the one set of people that I haven't talked to are the smartest people in the world you guys I put the call out on my Community page a few days ago asking if any of you knew of some potential places that we could investigate and lo and behold you came through so here's everything that you guys came up with number one Isabella proud's Camp behind the Tacoma Industrial Park this is first of all just an awesome place if you've never been here I wish I could uh tell you how to get here without giving it away but it's just a really great location and it's also very likely that this is the site of a nuclear strike you have a giant crater it's filled with water there's radioactive ghouls that's a shoe in as far as I'm concerned the next place I saw somebody bring up was the Arlington National Cemetery and if you go there you won't immediately see any signs of nuclear destruction but head just a little bit north of it and this is what you find this one looks a lot like the ones that we found in Fort Banister so I feel very comfortable counting it somebody else brought up the uh Pennsylvania Avenue to Georgetown Metro station I don't know if I see it obviously the train tunnels are all collapsed which I think is what the person was thinking the idea that well how would they have collapsed if not for a nuclear strike but this metro line is really close to the White House so I feel like it's probably a result of that same uh Nuclear Strike so I'm not going to count that one then someone else told me that if I went to Oasis and looked East off the edge of the map I would see some kind of nuclear crater I looked all the way from east to west and I was not able to see it then there were two more places and these two places might be my favorite of them all first up you have a place that's north of spring Vil but south of the bomac river when you come here you won't actually notice it right away but pay close attention and what do you see this little section of the river looks an awful lot like a a sort of decayed nuclear crater like something that was caused by a nuclear explosion a long time ago but has since eroded just a little bit so the details are a little subtler there's some good signs of Destruction all around it as well and then the other place is just south of Fort Banister now obviously this is pretty close to fortan canister so whatever this is was probably caused by the same bombardment bombardment but it's far enough away that I want to count it as a separate place and I also just want to point out how relatively subtle the details of this one are there's an electrical pylon a little ways away that got blown away in the direction of the blast there's also a mound in the middle of the crater here which does happen sometimes if like an asteroid smashes into the Earth really hard sometimes it can hit it so hard that it actually bounces a little bit back up and pulls some of the land up with it which can cause these little Islands to form and some of these lakes that are made of craters like we talked about earlier now I know that a lot of these details are probably an accident and that Bethesda probably didn't really think about each individual piece of rebar kind of like how they probably didn't really think about the fact that in Skyrim these generating waterfalls could be explained by something uh hydrologically uh realistic but I do think it's neat how this combination of intended lore and uh Happy accident environmental design can cause you the player to almost generate these little mini stories about what may have gone on in these places so those are all great cand Cates and I really feel like it helps flesh out the map that we've put together so far but one thing that kept bugging me was that even with all these marks down it just seems weird that there's not that many craters everywhere you know this was a nuclear war this was everybody uh shooting off every single bomb they had you would think that the land would just be a waste land of craters like um if you ever see that footage of Old World War I battlefields it's just like pounded with artillery but also there is a little bit of a scientific explanation or whatever you want to say a lot of people brought this up when I posted about Fallout 3 they said most of the bombs were Air Bursts which means they don't create craters necessarily and air burst explosions also spread the damage out which kind of explains how there's just like a general destruction across the whole landscape rather than like these specific points of Destruction there's great arguments going either way you could just say artistic license you can say it's an air burst whatever you want to do I'm interested in what the game environment is actually communicating to us which is why for good measure I did one final lap around the whole map and I didn't see anything else well kind of probably one more thing that might be worth considering is that all of these little nuclear puddles around could be signs of smaller uh nuclear bombs hitting the Wasteland but most of these places where you find these uh nuclear puddles and whatnot don't have a ton of other environmental evidence going for them so I don't believe that's the case you can make that argument if you want but I'm not doing it that's not for me that means that the actual for real face value total of nuclear explosions in Fallout 3 is 12 and also the two Duds obviously now the neat thing is if we take that amount and we apply that uh 1 to8 scale that we know Fallout 3 is probably built at we do get 96 nuclear strikes which you know it's a far cry from hundreds but it's definitely enough you know it's definitely sufficient to level an entire metropolitan area the only slightly amusing thing about that is that we know for a fact that Las Vegas was targeted by 77 nuclear bombs so this would sort of imply that they saw the capital of the United States as only a marginally more important Target than Sin City but you know maybe they were worried about what Mr House was up to I you don't I can't blame him he's a conniving freak okay that's it if you support me on patreon you're one of the greatest people I know we'll see you in the next video h

Channel: Any Austin

Views: 581,827

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Id: QVqvv-BbhmU

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2024