Forums » Fallout

Practicality in Reality

    • 152 posts
    November 6, 2017 10:59 PM EST

     Do ya ever wonder about the severe lack of logic behind carrying around a giant quad-barrel missile launcher as your primary damage dealer in the post-apocalypse? Or perhaps feel your very own real life back bones just ache with pain as you look upon your own in-game character trek miles across the wasteland in a full-metal armor suit? Fallout is a game focused on going out and making the wasteland your own and surviving by any means you see fit. This is great, but if Fallout were real (Thank God its not, I doubt any one of us would last more than a day [oooo potential forum topic]) then clearly there would be a much different approach to handling our survival. My question is this: if Fallout were real, what would be the most PRACTICAL loadout to carry and why. Think about things such as weight, heat(who walks around an irradiated desert in a traveling fur coat?), gun practicality, and necessities that would need to be carried. Explain how you would accomplish traveling with these items and any other specific tactics you'd think would be important for surviving.

     

    I'll leave my own thoughts out of this for now because I'm curious if there's a pretty generic/universal answer that we would all find to be considered "the most practical". Try and put your answer down before peeking at anyone else's! 

     


    This post was edited by MaddMannatee at November 6, 2017 11:01 PM EST
    • 1467 posts
    November 7, 2017 5:26 AM EST

    It changes from game to game, but I'll just look at it using the logic of Fallout 4 (it's armour, the way Power Armour works, etc.) 

    I think...I'm fucked really. Logically speaking I'd bring along a melee weapon (something like a pipe which is metal and fairly easy to find, but a Machete would be just as good), a small gun since I just don't have the ability to shoot anything that's going to have a shit tonne of recoil...or at least not accurately. Other then that, probably tinned food or army rations if I could find them, luckily most Fallout food seems to be made for the Apocolypse (packaged, relatively light and easy to cook) so I rarely see food being that much of an issue. Water on the other hand, well that's going to be a lot harder, I suppose I'd just have to drink irradiated water and hope that it doesn't kill me because logically I don't see a way to bring around enough water to survive.

    Leather Armour would be my go to, it isn't particularly heavy but from what I can see in-game, it's probably thick enough to give you at least a tiny bit of protection from animals. Not sure if anything except Combat Armour is really going to protect me from a Bullet (because let's be honest, Raider Armor is terrible, and practically, I'm just going to cut myself on it and die from the diseases it would give me) and I certainly wouldn't be able to, easily find Power Armour, find the Fusion Cores required to use it, and then actually function in it. Clothing is relatively simple, get something long and something short depending on where I am and the temperature. 

    Hmm, what else is there really. Oh yeah, I'm fucked if I ever fight the following list of enemies.

    Raiders, Super Mutants, any of the Factions, Synths, Deathclaws, Mirelurks, Robots, any other human enemies, any of the stronger Feral Ghouls, uhh...whatever the Bears are called (can't remember their names), really any larger animal based monstrosity...So I'd be fine really against Radroaches, weak Feral Ghouls and Mole Rats, and just need to hope I find some way to a major settlement without running into anything that can kill me.

    • 627 posts
    November 7, 2017 6:35 AM EST

    DB, I think you'd be fine with water whether it was in real life or in the fallout universe. In reality I think you'd only have to worry about the smaller inland water sources being heavily irradiated as if the videos I've watched are correct we've never had enough nukes in the world to completely irradiate the ocean and if we did there would be no life on the planet. As for in the fallout world, all you'd need to do is boil the water and it would be free of radiation, just like how applying heat removes it from the food.

  • November 7, 2017 7:19 AM EST

    If we are going to use Fallout logic, and by that, I mean to use its weapons and armor.

    I would be well off. I already know how to purify water and food free from radiation, I have taken survival classes so I am resourceful, and I have been around weapons my whole life in a sense and have been trained in the likes of CQC and Tactical Gun defense. For weapons, I would bring a Combat Knife and use for stealth/CQC, a .44 Magnum as you could make the bullets as "heavy" as you want or as "light" you want and it still be effective up to about 100 yards or so, and finally I would carry either the Hunting Rifle, since .308 is a great caliber to use or the Lever-Action Rifle. since it is a 45-70 which one hell of a bullet. As for food, I wouldn't carry a lot of my diet would severely change so I would carry some sort of Jerky, canned food, or MREs. Again like I said above I know how to purify water so I would have clean water, and also if you find a water pump or a well the water will radiation free due to filtration through the ground.

    I would start out using Leather Armor but later switch to Combat Armor for better protection against bullets, lasers, and animals. As for clothing a flannel shirt and pants will be okay for me or even the Army Fatigues.

    The enemies would somewhat be a problem, but I think most of them I would do well against.

    Raiders and Super Mutants use no real strategy and are dumb so just out think them and you will be fine. The BoS would be the only faction that would give me problems, I mean it would be one man vs a freakin Army. Synths and Robots wouldn't be much of a problem as the Synth body are exposed and easy to hit, and since I have some background in Robotics I could "hack" the robots. Ghouls would be hard mainly on swarms, but other than that pretty easy. Roaches are meh, Bloatflies are meh, Stingwings take pop shots, and Radscorpions well good luck on those. The same for Mirelurks, and Yao Guai would be somewhat challenging, but I have hunted bear before so I would know what to do, the same goes for Radstags. As for Deathclaws...fuck them I am running for my life.

    • 1467 posts
    November 7, 2017 7:37 AM EST

    DB, I think you'd be fine with water whether it was in real life or in the fallout universe. In reality I think you'd only have to worry about the smaller inland water sources being heavily irradiated as if the videos I've watched are correct we've never had enough nukes in the world to completely irradiate the ocean and if we did there would be no life on the planet. As for in the fallout world, all you'd need to do is boil the water and it would be free of radiation, just like how applying heat removes it from the food.

    See, there's where I'm fucked :P If I thought of half of that I'd be about 3x better off. 

    Raiders and Super Mutants use no real strategy and are dumb so just out think them and you will be fine. The BoS would be the only faction that would give me problems, I mean it would be one man vs a freakin Army. Synths and Robots wouldn't be much of a problem as the Synth body are exposed and easy to hit, and since I have some background in Robotics I could "hack" the robots. Ghouls would be hard mainly on swarms, but other than that pretty easy. Roaches are meh, Bloatflies are meh, Stingwings take pop shots, and Radscorpions well good luck on those. The same for Mirelurks, and Yao Guai would be somewhat challenging, but I have hunted bear before so I would know what to do, the same goes for Radstags. As for Deathclaws...fuck them I am running for my life.

    Hmm, honestly I've got no idea how to quantify how powerful Super Mutants and Synths would realistically be...I mean, in-game the Synths are significantly more powerful than other humanoid enemies, and Super Mutants are a lot more durable. I don't know if realistically you could say they might be able to survive a couple of bullets, mostly because they're still flesh and blood and I'm no expert on the effects of long-term radiation (and I think other scientific experiments...dunno, it's hard to keep track of Fallout Canon because Bethesda has a weirdly inconsistent set of rules for the games) on a human.

    Man...I just had to pause and wonder if Super Mutants procreate or if they're just a single generation of Super Mutants...like, are they only created by experiments/radiation...Fuck, alright focusing.

    Anyway, yeah, I'd consider Synths at the very least to be a little bit harder to defeat, if not significantly harder than anything other than the larger enemies (Mirelurks, Ya Guai and Deathclaws). Oh, and obviously the Super Mutant Behemoth would fuck everything up, saw one of them fight off four Deathclaws without even losing 1/8th of their health. Dunno, it depends on whether you manage to avoid the larger groups of enemies, three Super Mutants seems fairly doable but I don't really see a single person ever taking out 8 or more Super Mutants plus their Hounds.

     

    After thinking about it, I think Fallout New Vegas would be much easier to survive in, you've got much more powerful factions their that are human and not crazy so it's a lot easier to negotiate with them rather than Fallout 4's hoard of Super Mutants and Ghouls. I could see that being plausible even for me :)

    • 627 posts
    November 7, 2017 7:57 AM EST

    Dragonborn1921 said:

    Man...I just had to pause and wonder if Super Mutants procreate or if they're just a single generation of Super Mutants...like, are they only created by experiments/radiation...Fuck, alright focusing.

    Simple answer is that they are sterile, part of their mutation is a much stronger ability to heal then a normal human. This healing is so powerful that it sees the incomplete dna in sperm and eggs and "fixes" it making so that they can't reproduce (this healing also makes it so they can live forever so long as they aren't killed by something or someone). The way that super mutants in most places outside of the Commonwealth increase their numbers is by capturing humans and dunking them into vats of the virus that creates them (it's also how they created centaurs in the previous games). In the Commonwealth the spread of super mutants is the result of the Institute doing tests on the virus and then releasing the failed results onto the surface. Fun fact, the original group of super mutants created by the very first game's antagonist were just as smart as humans (one of which you can meet in New Vegas).

    But this isn't the discussion for that :P


    This post was edited by Golden Fool at November 7, 2017 8:00 AM EST
  • November 7, 2017 8:28 AM EST

    Dragonborn1921 said:

    Raiders and Super Mutants use no real strategy and are dumb so just out think them and you will be fine. The BoS would be the only faction that would give me problems, I mean it would be one man vs a freakin Army. Synths and Robots wouldn't be much of a problem as the Synth body are exposed and easy to hit, and since I have some background in Robotics I could "hack" the robots. Ghouls would be hard mainly on swarms, but other than that pretty easy. Roaches are meh, Bloatflies are meh, Stingwings take pop shots, and Radscorpions well good luck on those. The same for Mirelurks, and Yao Guai would be somewhat challenging, but I have hunted bear before so I would know what to do, the same goes for Radstags. As for Deathclaws...fuck them I am running for my life.

    Hmm, honestly I've got no idea how to quantify how powerful Super Mutants and Synths would realistically be...I mean, in-game the Synths are significantly more powerful than other humanoid enemies, and Super Mutants are a lot more durable. I don't know if realistically you could say they might be able to survive a couple of bullets, mostly because they're still flesh and blood and I'm no expert on the effects of long-term radiation (and I think other scientific experiments...dunno, it's hard to keep track of Fallout Canon because Bethesda has a weirdly inconsistent set of rules for the games) on a human.

    Man...I just had to pause and wonder if Super Mutants procreate or if they're just a single generation of Super Mutants...like, are they only created by experiments/radiation...Fuck, alright focusing.

    Anyway, yeah, I'd consider Synths at the very least to be a little bit harder to defeat, if not significantly harder than anything other than the larger enemies (Mirelurks, Ya Guai and Deathclaws). Oh, and obviously the Super Mutant Behemoth would fuck everything up, saw one of them fight off four Deathclaws without even losing 1/8th of their health. Dunno, it depends on whether you manage to avoid the larger groups of enemies, three Super Mutants seems fairly doable but I don't really see a single person ever taking out 8 or more Super Mutants plus their Hounds.

    After thinking about it, I think Fallout New Vegas would be much easier to survive in, you've got much more powerful factions their that are human and not crazy so it's a lot easier to negotiate with them rather than Fallout 4's hoard of Super Mutants and Ghouls. I could see that being plausible even for me :)

    Again, Super mutants are basically humans who have reverted back to Animal Mind, you know. As for the Behemoth just like with the Deathclaw I would just run away. Also, Fallout Lore is more streamline than Elder Scrolls Lore and Beth has pretty left Fallout Lore alone except for like three retcons in Fallout 4, but that is a rant for another day. Also, for Synths you could make a homemade EMP, which is quite simple to make, that could disable them and Synths are made from I could guess be consider a hard plastic which a .308 bullet would go through with no problem.

    If we were talking about New Vegas this would be completely mainly because Jacobstown and any sentient ghoul would be killed off, but that is a whole different discussion.

    As for the Super Mutants, I believe it was mentioned in one of the earlier Fallout games, actually, I think it is the first one, that they are sterile and can't reproduce and as such, they steal people and dip them into the FEV Virus themselves.

    • 1467 posts
    November 7, 2017 8:37 AM EST

    Simple answer is that they are sterile, part of their mutation is a much stronger ability to heal then a normal human. This healing is so powerful that it sees the incomplete dna in sperm and eggs and "fixes" it making so that they can't reproduce (this healing also makes it so they can live forever so long as they aren't killed by something or someone). The way that super mutants in most places outside of the Commonwealth increase their numbers is by capturing humans and dunking them into vats of the virus that creates them (it's also how they created centaurs in the previous games). In the Commonwealth the spread of super mutants is the result of the Institute doing tests on the virus and then releasing the failed results onto the surface. Fun fact, the original group of super mutants created by the very first game's antagonist were just as smart as humans (one of which you can meet in New Vegas).

    I knew a little bit about their enhanced intelligence in previous games, was watching a Review of Fallout 4 recently (one of those fun, 3-4 hour reviews :P) that went into a fair bit of depth on how different Fallout 1 and 2 were in terms of Lore. But thanks for clearing that up, so really there should be a set number of Super Mutants in the Commonwealth? At the very least they should be highly limited unless they've got literal lakes full of the FEV virus laying about.

    Anyway, I'm gonna leave it there, not going to delve into any Fallout Lore discussions because, well my knowledge is limited (obviously)

    • 295 posts
    November 7, 2017 9:27 AM EST

    Scenario A Well, I'd walk into the Museum of Freedom and negotiate a truce between the Raiders and the Minutemen. Then we would become the Raider's slaves, growing their food and stuff. After all, the raiders need to eat something, right? All the while, I would be secretely organizing a coup with Preston, Sturges, and one or two of the raiders that could betray their leader. The coup is pulled off, we died, because I suck at surviving and preston is using a silly, silly weapon, and Sturges can't hack a computer and neither can I. Marcy Long is passed around as the Raider's toy and Mama Murphy is probably eaten. End of Liss in real fallout. 

    Scenario B, I'd stay in the damn vault and use that as my base of operations. It has shelter, water, beds, food for a while (radroach yummy) and some ammo and in my logic, if you see a bed, you can sleep in it. It's on a small hill so you can actually see enemies approaching if you construct a small outpost or simply use that sign as a vantage point. I'd ditch the blue suit and hide the pipboy as soon as I can, so nobody knows I'm from a vault or can access them. Fire for cooking and water for drinking are top priorities. 

    Machetes and combat knives will get you far from both a combat and practical standpoint (machetes are great rudamentary cutting tools, until you get a saw) and you can find both nearbye in Concord without engaging a single enemy if you don't want to. Like Postman, I'd probably stick to a small gun and then a rifle, though damn if I know how to shoot. We'll pretend that I do. :D  At least on a basic level. To be honest, I would spend most of my time hunting and scavenging in the northwestern part of the map and avoid most other encounters, save to get food. I'd learn how to dry and preserve the meat and yes, growing some sort of vegetable product would be top. I'd actually head a bit south and go to the Abernathy's. There is game along that area. Maybe strike up an alliance with them for access to Clarabell's milk and their tatos. Tell them about the Vault and offer its protection should they need it after they've earned my trust. 

    Gah, who am I kidding? I'd die. Totally, either of starvation because I'm too chicken to leave the Vault, or some radroach will kill me. Probably the ones in the Vault. 

  • November 7, 2017 5:56 PM EST

    Also, in theory, if you didn't have access tot he Vaults then you would either die from the Nukes or if you are lucky enough you would become a Ghoul.

    • 152 posts
    November 8, 2017 7:55 PM EST

    Well folks, after finally getting to read all of these I've cocluded the following:

    1: Holy shit the Vault Dweller or whatever you want to call our main protagonist is a complete badass, like any one of us would probs just die in a one on one with a raider (c'mon guys, lets be real: video games haven't made us any better suited for a gun fight) whereas our characters just runs around killing thousands of God awful things with a few pulls of a trigger XD

    2: As far as weapons and armor go, we'd likely be better off going fairly minimal on armor (not gonna offer much protection in the end) and fairly simple with firearms(we just need something that shoots straight and won't be a pain in the ass to carry, any enemies that'll withstand more than a few body shots probably wouldn't be worth fighting in the first place) and we all see value in keeping a melee weapon on hand

    3: Radiation has really screwed up any chance of getting proper, safe hydration unless you are capable of doing any of the survival tricks previously mentioned for decontaminating it

    4: Postman is a fucking hillbilly and we'd all better hope we don't run into him in the post-apocalypse XD

    5: Liss is both honest about her survival capabilities and incredibly clever for she has brought up a great point: Stay in the vault! and your points on linking with Abernathy farm and doing some scavenging in the Northwest region (which is fairly tame across the board) are just very genius ways of keeping travel and therefore risk at a minimum. Might be a lil lonely though

     

    I love the thoughts guys! 

  • November 8, 2017 8:13 PM EST

    MaddMannatee said:

    Well folks, after finally getting to read all of these I've cocluded the following:

    1: Holy shit the Vault Dweller or whatever you want to call our main protagonist is a complete badass, like any one of us would probs just die in a one on one with a raider (c'mon guys, lets be real: video games haven't made us any better suited for a gun fight) whereas our characters just runs around killing thousands of God awful things with a few pulls of a trigger XD

    2: As far as weapons and armor go, we'd likely be better off going fairly minimal on armor (not gonna offer much protection in the end) and fairly simple with firearms(we just need something that shoots straight and won't be a pain in the ass to carry, any enemies that'll withstand more than a few body shots probably wouldn't be worth fighting in the first place) and we all see value in keeping a melee weapon on hand

    3: Radiation has really screwed up any chance of getting proper, safe hydration unless you are capable of doing any of the survival tricks previously mentioned for decontaminating it

    4: Postman is a fucking hillbilly and we'd all better hope we don't run into him in the post-apocalypse XD

    5: Liss is both honest about her survival capabilities and incredibly clever for she has brought up a great point: Stay in the vault! and your points on linking with Abernathy farm and doing some scavenging in the Northwest region (which is fairly tame across the board) are just very genius ways of keeping travel and therefore risk at a minimum. Might be a lil lonely though

     

    I love the thoughts guys! 

    Number 4 made me laugh more than it should have, but sad to say I am no hillbilly.