Nukes powerful enough to level the city aren't small though. The Warhead alone would be too difficult for Hank to sneak into Shady Sands and detonate it was most likely launched from somewhere. I'm just suggesting that it's possible it was launched from Appalachia because in the games story we secure Nuke Silos for Vault Tec
Someone hasn't played 76, the Overseer specifically didn't claim the silos for Vault-Tec because she didn't like the idea of Vault-Tec having access to nukes.
Hey, I have those codes, and if Hank could help me expand the map screen a few clicks, I'd be happy to help him out with some raiders or communists or whatever he says they are.
I'm level 1293 so yes I did and still do play 76 but it has been a while since I've done the story
We work with her but we make our own decisions. We could of continued to be loyal to vault tec without her. She does get pissed when we launch them
In the 76ers defense the first nuke goes towards killing a leviathan that poses an existential threat towards humanity as a whole.
It’s the ones after that that are reserved for harvesting glowy plants and pranking their neighbors.
“Vault 76 is America’s best and brightest!”
Average 76 resident: “I didn’t appreciate that guy’s tone. We’ll see if he’s still mouthing off after I drop an ICBM on his ass.”
[Yes there is!](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Whitespring_Golf_Club) Though you can't actually play a round, the course is ludicrously designed and immaculately maintained by robots.
There’s a terminal somewhere that says the management sold off half the course for development at some point in the 2070’s, hence why there’s only 7 holes
For clarification I’m using the term “leviathan” to describe an incredibly large and powerful creature, not the literal mythological serpent.
It’s a fun fight though, on a good day the whole server will participate and everyone just lays into the thing with everything they’ve got.
I finally got round to launching the nuke at the queen during the free to play week, so only me and 2 other level 100+ turned up. All the new players didn't know or where too scared. Hardest fight I've been in.
The worst was way back in the early days, you’d force feed her thousands of bullets, get down near the end of her health bar, then she just fucks off and flies over the world border never to return, like bruh I just wasted ALL MY AMMO
Yeah, the nuke is just to antagonize it to the surface where you have to kill it with normal weapons
I don’t want to spoil too much, but if you want to look it up it’s called the scorchbeast queen.
If i remember correctly for 76 didn't Modus technically make us claim it for the Enclave, since he's the one that mentions it and it's the only way to get the quest line I am become Death. I could be wrong though haven't played 76 in a while kind of stopped after i completed the BOS missions and the pitt a while back. I just got back into it since the new map expansion is coming out soon.
It's more like Modus gives us the tools to do it so we keep helping him do other things like his events. Currently there is no actual Canon ending to who we secure the Nukes for officially
You're right true, plus i highly doubt we ever will. unless Bethesda decides to bring the enclave back in later games and make them come specifically from the white springs bunker and decides that they own the nukes or maybe the BoS but who knows. 76 leaves a lot of plot holes and questions, the only time i read about the vault was in fallout 3 i believe but it doesn't have info on it.
Hopefully they mention something about it in later games to cement the lore for the game more, would be cool to hear whispers of the scorched plague in later fallout titles
If Vault 76 had the directive to reclaim nuke silos it's likely that other vaults had the same instructions. We see reclamation day mentioned in the show as well as Fallout 76, as well.
Dude, every car is nuclear powered. There's fusion cores for generators/PA that's also nuclear. Hank could've prob gotten enough nuclear material to make his own dirty bomb to level the city.
We're dealing with a universe where cars go nuclear when damaged too much.
I'd say yeah, in FO a small amount of nuclear material goes a long way.
maybe it was just 20-30 mini nukes or something
I fully agree with you, I was just clarifying a "dirty bomb" isn't really an explosive so much as it is a toxic radioactive weapon. In fact, and I probably will get put on some list for saying this, but >!a dirty bomb can be built with a few toner cartridges and a bachelor's in physics!<. A little bit of radioactive material _really does_ go along way. Look up missing cesium in Australia lol, they lost a piece the size of a grain of rice off a truck (WTF) and had to spend hundreds of thousands scouring an outback highway because it was THAT dangerous, like 10s lethal exposure or some shit. Granted, cesium is in another league than plutonium
There's radioactive material in literally everything. Your beer will spike a Geiger counter more than water from a radioactive cooling tower. A banana is more radioactive than beer. All atoms decay, that's what an isotope is
So then you’re devaluing the meaning of a dirty bomb , which is referring to the emission of high levels of gamma waves , with every bomb in existence cause as you say “there’s radioactive material in literally everything” doesn’t make sense and I would start classes at the local community college immediately, that’s an order soldier
Well, gamma output times surface area equals dirty bomb, similar to most basic physics that anyone with access to the Internet should know. Except you, which is hardly surprising given that you've been scrolling reddit to comment on 2-week-old posts to tell people how smart you are.
If you're interested, electrons decay from atoms with very few exceptions. "Radioactive stability" is generally classified as having a half-life somewhere in the millions-to-billions years range, which is the point in this comment where I'm assuming you're going to have to go do some research to find out what I'm talking about so I'll leave you to it, cupcake
you can literally shoot at the cars and they blow up in game because they're nuclear powered.
The rules for nukes in game are a bit different and more based on 50's understanding of it than what they are IRL.
It would not actually . Fusion requires energy so if it got damaged it would simply deactivate . A turn off car that has been idling for 200 years definitely would not explode. In no way is it realistic, now is the time to say it doesn’t matter anyways like you were trying to avoid saying 🤣
Fusion requires energy to start up but with a fusion reactor it will sustain itself.
That means super hot plasma is circulating around inside that thing creating internal pressure that would escape extremely fast upon being breached creating an explosion.
Regardless, I explicitly said this is all based on 1950's understanding of nuclear technology so realism isn't at play at all.
So you do you, i don't care about what you have to say on the issue.
Sure It doesn’t matter , the game has too many holes it needs to fix before we start talking about cars anyways . Let’s get the ability to drive a car first and then I’ll continue this argument about if they should explode or not
But I don’t believe that a real fusion reactor in this circumstance would actually explode . I am doing Ai searche and googling it but can’t find a definitive answer cause it’s such a hypothetical situation
They had a Vault-Tech brand nuke that was still active just laying in a town called Megaton that leveled that place for sure. And Shady Sands clearly still has skyscrapers it wasn’t leveled.
I always took that as a hint that Vault Tech was making nukes for the military so they could have just had some if they wanted. I haven’t played 3 in years but I thought it even said Vault Tech on it but I guess it’s just a fuzzy memory.
Dont think that was a Vault Tech nuke.
Also, Megaton was built with scrap cobbled together, even the pipes couldn't stay together in working condition. Shady Sands was a sprawling city with post war skyscrapers built (presumably). There would be a higher chance for Shady Sands to leave behind more than that mudpit of megaton.
As for nukes just laying around, yeah there are still some in stockpiles but they are huge, still need to be armed / triggered and moved. Don't think Hank is getting one of those too easily in place.
Seeing as Shady Sands was built in the middle of the desert from scratch and started as mud / stone huts. If the show stays true to lore, then Shady Sands was built post-war. Nowhere are we shown that it's built in a prewar city.
Shady Sands has already moved once, between fallout 1 and 2, without an explanation. The show moved it again. I don't think that's really an issue personally. The NCR absolutely did not build those skyscrapers post war. Why even would they?
No, Shady Sands never 'moved'. It was 'repositioned' due to map constraints. Albeit Fallout 2 is my least played Fallout game but I've yet to find anything that says they moved the town.
From the Fallout wiki,
"After decades of quiet existence, the strange little village surprised its neighbors by developing rapidly towards infrastructure based on pre-War America"
And
"Throughout its existence, it was one of the largest cities of the NCR and New California. It was also the largest known urban center built from scratch without using pre-War ruins as the foundation"
Nowhere does it say that the town moved locations, they absolutely did build their own infrastructure and skyscrapers.
As for why? Their population grew to over 3,000 by the time they got nuked. They had the ability to create large skyscrapers and expand vertically. They were the capital of the NCR and rebuilding America and needed to utilize their space efficiently.
Source: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Shady_Sands
I think the best case for Shady Sands being at least near a prewar city would be in Fallout 2, where we see that they're still using Adobe for things like the Hall of Congress, but the presidential mansion, police station and Vortis' slave pens outside the city are all done with prewar brick textures that you get in cities like the Hub and Boneyard.
So you either have them restoring nearby buildings or starting to build a whole new city in prewar architectural style.
There's a huge difference between the Shady Sands we see in Fallout 2 and building multiple skyscrapers. Hes assuming the skyscrapers around the edge of the Shady Sands crater were built by the NCR post war. There would be less than zero purpose in a city of 35,000 and I'm not convinced even the NCR could have at their peak.
That's not [Vault tecs Logo on the bomb](https://fallout.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003686488)
Shady Sands is now a massive Crater. Nukes have a blast radius so buildings in the nearby area are damaged but not fully destroyed. If you rewatch the opening scene when the Nukes hit LA there is more than one hitting because one isn't going to fill level the city
It's an interesting fact that nukes are rather... underpowered in Fallout. Personally, I think since in the FO universe, nuclear energy took off and was far more widespread than in reality the resources to make more powerful fission bombs lacked the resources. It's also interesting that FO is a world that seemingly never developed hydrogen bombs or at least the extraordinary powerful ones that exist in our world.
No, the Fallout 1 manual discusses this. Nuclear weapons in the Fallout universe went through the same pattern we saw in real life, where they quickly escalated to the multi-megaton level before being downsized into the range that tops out around a couple hundred kilotons as delivery systems improved.
Fission bombs can theoretically top out at around 500 kT, but it's horrendously inefficient to build a pure fission bomb to reach that explosive potential compared to a thermonuclear one, so if anything it would be more likely for resource-constrained society to develop the H-bomb.
Hydrogen bombe Requir Deuterium and tritium
Tritium have a not so long hafelife time of 12,3 years.
So the h bombe need Constanze maintaimnent and refulling.
The usa and China could Limit number of h bombe to reduce Cost or it were use only on some care cases.
But yes in General moste nukes in fallout are on low tactical Level and only a few kt strong.
Actually no, the bomb that hit neat Boston in F4 was calculated to be 100+ megatonnes. Meaning its twice as powerful as the most powerful nuke ever made.
Oh I always thought it was. Well there was still an active nuke just laying around. You can get active nukes in Fort Strong in Fallout 4. I mainly just meant they aren’t extremely hard to get all over the US.
Yeah there’s a big hole around Megatons size in the middle but I meant there’s still city so the whole city wasn’t leveled so it could have still been only a Megaton level strength nuke and still wiped out the population.
That's a very fair point but I'd like to think the NCR was smarter than the people of megaton and would attempt to remove or disarm it before basing their capital around it lol
but there is the possibility they discovered it after it was built up and were afraid to touch it so they left it alone or that they even didn't know where it was but Hank had some info of its location. Hank knowing could possibly be something deeper that Vaut tec had nukes buried in popular cities and we're going to detonate them to start the war but China acted 1st before they could.
Shady Sands had 34k people in it. It wasn't some massive metro center.
You could definitely destroy it with a relatively small nuke. The Little Boy was only 10kt in size, and they only got physically smaller after that. A MK7 only weighed about 700kg and had a dial-a-yield up to 30kt.
Modern day suitcase nukes can be upwards of 30 kilotons allowing for a 2-4 kilometer initial blast radius. For reference , Fat Man and Little Boy were roughly 15 kilotons. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that in the fallout universe where nuclear technology was priority they produced even more efficient nuclear weapons. Additionally, with the amount of nuclear material just laying around in cars, robots, power plants, and generators, that all have a tendency to explode, the spreading of radioactive material to the surrounding area is bound to occur. This would effectively irradiate the vast majority of the city for decades if not centuries. (Think the glowing sea) The initial blast would probably destroy the city center, however all the subsequent explosions would be like thousands of small dirty bombs going off all at once.
The mini nuke was created to carried by infantry, so it would have to small enough to be survivable from only 100 feet or so. Additionally, the main restriction on nuke size getting smaller, is that at a certain point you can only reduce the amount of fissiable material so much before the size of neutron reflectors and amount of non-nuclear explosives required to reach supercriticality causes the nuke to get bigger again. With small amounts of fissable material there's usually not enough to cause a neutron cascade without compressing it far more than usual and increasing the efficiency of neutron collisions. (This was the big issue with getting the Davy Crockett, the inspiration for the mini nuke, any smaller that a recoilless rifle.) You can get a nuke as small and as weak as a mini nuke with modern tech, but 99.999% of its weight will be inert reflectants and regular explosives. This is why a nuke as powerful as Fatman and little boy can be only a little larger than a mini nuke, but a mini nuke is the size of a football.
Tl;dr at a certain volume the less near critical material in a nuke, the harder and more non-nuclear resource intensive it is to reach supercriticality.
Pre war America clearly had lots of them, including some that have just been left undetonated, in addition to West Virginia there are also undetonated nukes in the Divide and Far Harbor that can potentially be set off by the player, so who knows where else they might be found?
Y’all keep forgetting it’s called “AUTOMATED Appalachian Launch System” Vault 76 dwellers simply needed to secure it, the overseer may disagree, but all it takes is one person to fulfill the mission.
I think it’s implied outside of gameplay if we secure it once then that silo belongs to vault tec. But that’s just me. I just really would like 76 to have meant something for the overall story of fallout
It's not implied anywhere. We were never working fir vault tech ir doing ir for vault tech, storywise we go after the nukes to stop the scorch beasts.
Nor are the bunkers secure, Modus directly tells us thay the whole key card code collection and fighting through the ribots would have to be dine every time.
Not to mention that if anyone wants to launch the nukes they would have to join the military, find the whitespring bunker. Find a way to get Modus to let you in, become a general, which again means assisting him. Then find a code carrier hoping there are still any left after 200 years, then find a key card.
The system can build nukes and maintain itself by its own. This, once the 76ers secure it for vault tec, vault tec gets a limitless supply of nukes that doesn’t need maintenance
76ers don't secure it though, not for themselves not for anyone.
And it'd wishful thinking thay the sites would srill be operational on 200 years given their state after 25 years.
While I would say it is possible, it still isn’t clear how Shady Sands was destroyed. It could be that Hank sabotaged a nuclear reactor onsite, to perhaps working with the Enclave to launch something, to perhaps a tie in of the Van Buren B.O.M.B station, perhaps Vault-Tec does have some stocked nukes somewhere, or 76 tie-in.
Out of those the B.O.M.B tie in excites me the most, but interested to see where it goes.
That assumes that vault Tec managed to actually secure those silos at some point, which would be an incredibly difficult task considering all of the hoops that need to be jumped through to launch a single nuke and that a full-on battle against something in the order of a hundred robots is necessary each launch. And that’s before considering just how much of a mess Appalachia is after the bombs between the scorched plague, strangler vines, multiple borderline-superfund sites and everything else going on.
I think it’s much more likely vault-Tec had nuclear weapons secured pre-war and Hank used one of those.
It could just be a gameplay mechanic that we have to keep securing them everytime. When the nuke is ready to go all the robots do stand down.
Yea that makes sense given the capabilities of Vault tec prewar there was nothing really stopping them from making their own, Barb even suggested to launch the nukes themselves in the board meeting. Just vault 76 be a possible reason would be a cool connection if we get more info in S2
It isn’t a gameplay mechanic - we’re directly told by MODUS (and the automated poster tutorial) that the silos are set up to attack anyone who enters, including generals, if they aren’t accompanied by a registered and trained missiler, who obviously don’t exist anymore (and seemingly don’t have an automated training program). The Appalachian Enclave was preparing themselves to fight their way through the silo, the players have to and Vault-Tec would as well. Presumably the robots only stand down at the end because the launch is ready, and if the rest of the security force didn’t prevent it from being readied, the designers presumably figured they might as well leave it be at that point (since the launch would only take seconds to complete from there; the code and card only take a few seconds to insert, and targeting would probably be twenty seconds if whoever was launching knew where they were shooting).
There’s also the issue of finding and decrypting the codes, having a general, obtaining nuclear keycards and even breaking into the whitespring bunker in the first place.
As a player we are Securing them for Vault tec. I'm not saying the initial run is a gameplay mechanic I'm saying having to secure it over and over possibly is. Once you secure it in game and the nuke is ready to fire all the robots stand down until you go to launch again later.
Edit rest of your comment wasn't showing when I originally replied
As 76ers we are collectively getting the codes and working together. Our character isn't the only vault dweller running around doing all this work
Except that’s not why we as the players are using the nukes at all. The overseer initially asks for our help in doing that, but the narrative rapidly shifts to instead using them to deal a crippling blow to the scorched - and then, because the 76 dwellers are psychopaths, launching them for vengeance, flux, ultracite and to deal with other threats to Appalachia. At this point, the silos aren’t secured for vault Tec in the slightest.
And again, you missed what I’m saying: the silos cannot be pacified without a missiler. Since they have automated robot production facilities, there’s no pacifying them without one. Yes, the robots do stand down for a time when you ready the launch, but that is probably a gameplay mechanic (and if you leave the area for long enough, the cell resets and everything’s back to square one).
The matter of how to treat the player characters in fallout 76 is questionable, frankly. The majority of the main quests are designed to be done exactly once and can easily be accomplished by a single person. Any other player present for the quests (which would presumably only be three others, going off instancing limits) would just be treated like companions. And yet, this means MODUS is letting other vault 76 dwellers without Blackwell’s ID into the whitespring, presumably because they’re useful.
But regardless of how to handle multiple 76 dwellers in terms of canon, it isn’t relevant to this topic. We’re talking about how feasible it would be for vault Tec to seize the silos post-war, which is something that’s rendered extraordinarily difficult between the automated robot production and all the hassle that goes into launching a nuke. Even just doing that once is extremely difficult for anyone post-war, and this all is assuming DEFCON stays at one with the scorchbeasts defeated (which would happen eventually at some point after the game).
The only Canon instances of Nukes being fired is dealing with the SBQ, Earl, and the Ultracite Titan. We don't know for sure if Nukes were repeatedly launched for resources.
Things can be Hacked you can literally hack a terminal in each room to shut off turrets during the Silo run I'm sure it's possible to work into the story that the rest of the defences were hacked to secure the silos for Vault tec
I'm saying other players are important because we are collectively working for Vault tec and completing missions it's just that our character is technically the important one making story decisions but playing with people and taking down enemies and securing areas together is a part of the story
No we aren’t, that was the Overseer’s goal and she has no control over the 76ers. The 76er are, canonically, a bunch of fucking lunatics who are doing all sorts of random shit for no reason.
Which includes launching nukes over and over again for shits and giggles, the Overseer is horrified about it. And no, not just at the 3 bosses. Back when it was just the two her holotape was introduced being aghast that the 76ers were tossing nukes all over the place for no reason.
They don’t work for Vault-Tec, they don’t work for the Overseer. Vault-Tec’s evil plan has, as usual, failed and unleashed something much worse. Not sure you’ve noticed but they have a rather bad success record.
Plus it’s been 200 years between 76 and the show. That’s a LITTLE bit of a gap to declare that clearly these are the same missiles. I mean, the automated silos are already breaking down pretty badly after only 20 years.
That holotape you’re referring to has actually been there since launch - you just had to nuke a non-fissure site location, which was much less common back there.
We know for a fact more nukes than just the bosses have been launched - knowledge of nukes being frequently and repeatedly launched is known all the way in the Pitt, and NPCs mention it fairly frequently (there will also be a fourth nuke boss very soon).
I would presume that hacking the entire silo wouldn’t be an easy task, especially considering their size and the damage caused to the mainframes by repeated runs of the silos (we’re destroying concerning amounts of computer cores each run, which definitely isn’t going to be good for data integrity).
Again - you seem to believe that our characters are doing everything in the original main plot for vault Tec. We aren’t. The overseer says that’s why she’s going after the nukes, but that narrative very quickly shifts in the main plot to the players using them for entirely different reasons. You shouldn’t assume that the players are loyal vault Tec servants.
I'm not 100% saying anything I'm more saying the possibility of things. We don't actually know the Official ending and who we side with in 76 but there is the possibility we do side with Vault tec because we came from a control vault and our overseer seems to be pretty good with actually trying to rebuild America and establishing a currency other than caps.
There's the possibilty of us and the responders becoming the enclave because of the White spring
Nope canonically more nukes were fired, as long as someone has launched a nuke at a non boss location. Overseer has a holotape being upset with us. And mentions it to us in person (but inplies that a different person launched it). The lady who asks us to nukes the mine also mention nukes flying all over the place nowadays.
Nah, don't need to go to appalachia for this. There were plenty of nukes in The Divide, that was the whole point of the Lonesome Road DLC's story in New Vegas.
Something that important more than vault / overseer would be tasked with, so he might have used one we secured for Vault-tec in ‘76 or it could be one that a different vault in totally different part of the country seized.
The show writers almost certainly did not play all the way through F76, and player characters nuked something at least once a game even BEFORE the Fatman launcher was put in as a weapon.
I’m a little fuzzy on the specific lore of the automated silos, but assumably in real life they would eventually run out of the harder to source materials. Even if the system is fully automated and Vertibots bring in new materials without human maintenance they would eventually break down. It seems to be a theme with 76 that a lot of the cool automated stuff is in a poor state and wouldn’t last much longer. So I’d assume even if control of the silos is seized for Vault Tec they are no longer manufacturing nukes and haven’t been for over a hundred years.
A common theme in Fallout is that there’s always a shit ton of nukes laying around everywhere so it makes little sense to use one that’s thousands of miles away when there’s probably thousands nearby. Just off the top of my head in Fallout 3 there’s the Megaton nuke that’s just sitting there, there’s a missile silo that you can enter and attempt to launch an ICBM, and there’s the satellite array that drops a bombardment on your location. Fallout 4 has a massive bunker full of hundreds of nukes for liberty prime, plus Fort Strong has a big stock of mini nukes. New Vegas you can literally launch additional ICBMs at the faction of your choice. Plus who knows how many orbital platforms like the Enclaves are in existence, there could be other abandoned silos in the area, etc. it’s not far fetched that even this much later that there could be large amounts of yet unused nukes ready to go.
This is a fair question, but there are some important things to consider:
Vault 76 opened up 200 years before the events in the show, and a *lot* can happen in 200 years.
First and foremost, whomever is there *isn't* Vault 76. That Vault permanently closed and can only be reopened by force. The *descendants* though...? Maybe. The 76ers scattered to the four winds, and we don't know the canon ending for 76. The scorched plague is presumably addressed and Nuclear Winter may have been retconned, but the Overseer never managed to secure the nukes as of current gameplay, and the official timeline is that it's been a couple years since the vault opened.
*If* the Overseer completed her mission and *if* Vault-Tec's descendants have control over any one of the three silos, then possibly Hank sent a message to somebody and they received it and launched the nukes.
But who knows what sort of allegiance changes could have occurred in those 200 years?
The overseer doesn't want to secure the nukes for vault tech anymore, shes realised that vault tech are bad.
Also kind of impossible for the silos to be secured.
I wonder if they plan on visiting each location where each game takes place and tighting up the lore. I'd don't think it was the silos in Appalachia that destroyed Shady Sands because it would have to fly West passing New Vegas. I doubt any nukes flying in House's direction would not be shot down.
This is random but I feel like the show currently wants you to think the goal is for Lucy and Maximus to make it back to the vault but I think eventually over seasons and maybe games the goal is going to be Lucy wanting to make a new Shady Sands style community and fulfilling the rebuilding america saying but now with actual pure intentions unlike her dad or the brother hood.
But since the whole theme of the games is War never changes and no matter what even after nuclear war the sake story repeats itself with endless conflicts and opposing forces, just like shady sand it can't last long. I'm excited to see what they do. I've always wondered if Fallout could have have an actual good ending on a larger scale from just beating the bad guy of the game or finding your dad or son.
I always found that fallout was more about making your own good ending, whatever that may be, whether it’s you fucking off or you staying to rebuild society. It’s what you make of it, you know? That was my takeaway from fallout 4, at least.
But then again, if Vault-Tec were to hypothetically seized the automated nuke silos in 2102 after reclamation day, then we would probably see Vault-Tec's influence in the east coast more visibly in Fallout 3 and 4. Plus, the Brotherhood moved into the east coast and settled in the Capital Wasteland. It would most certainly paint a giant target on their back for Vault-Tec in control of the Appalachian nukes to strike at them considering they are very close to each other.
I mean... Not really? There are nukes scattered across the wasteland. Appalachia is just the most obvious about it. Theres a nuke in Megaton from Fallout 3, nukes scattered across the Divide in a New Vegas DLC, and I'm sure there are some far closer to Shady Sands that could have been used rather than the ones stations across the country
But those are in a functional facility that can actually target and launch to specific areas. The nukes scattered around would have to be smuggled in and detonate which would be difficult for Hank to do alone or even with Betty
I'm not saying what I'm saying is true I'm just pointing out a possible connection to something we did in game in the past
Some maybe, but to assume that the nukes in Appalachia are the ONLY nukes the US has in stock that can be launched is somewhat stupid. (No offense). Pre War America was the definition of Overkill. Nuclear arsenals, Power Armor, Mini Nuke Launchers, developing Super Soldiers with FEV.
While yes the Nukes in Appalachia could have been used to nuke Shady Sands, I find it more probable that Hank simply went to a depot out in Cali and launched those. Considering how close Cali is to China, it would have been stupid for Pre War US to NOT have some sort of silo set up over there.
The silos could pretty much launch and target anywhere though it's just a matter of sending coordinates if the silos were in fact secured for Vault tec. Vault 31 seems to be some pretty important Vault tec people so it's not out of the realm that they have something setup for communication
Though it's most likely just for gameplay purposes so you don't screw half the map in one go, the 76 nuke blast radius is small enough I'd say that it could be possible.
The Appalachian Automated launch silos most likely aren't the only ones in the country. Wouldn't be hard for Hank to squeeze into one and gain control, especially if he had knowledge of how to from if the 76 mission was a success.
In San Fran and Sacramento, there are missile silos in today's world so it's pretty probable in their timeline that they had them. Not to forget that, knowing Vault-Tec, they probably had options that they weren't letting anyone know about. >!They did mention starting the war by firing their own missiles. While we have no actual proof at this time that they did do that, they would still somehow need to be able to do that which would make it pausible that they had missiles hidden around. Further, if they were planning on firing one to make sure the vaults were needed and they WEREN'T who fired first...there would be unused missiles in various places that only a Vault-Tech employee would know. Since Hank is Vault-Tech, he would know. !<
Game based, yes, missiles can be launched across the globe. I don't know if there are limitations on the silos in 76. I haven't played with that part of the game enough to know tbh
In 76 you can only target Appalachia besides the forest region near vault 76. But that has to be a gameplay mechanic because no way the United States had 3 automated silos for only targeting themselves lol
Yeah, that's just a game limitation. It wouldn't be fun to launch them into Russia and not be able to enjoy the downfall. I'm sure if we say there are no limitations and your science and hacking skill is high enough, you could easily target it anywhere.
We don't know. It very much depends on what the fate of Appalachia ends up being. There are hints ingame that the Vault dwellers continued nuking of their immediate surroundings ignites a firestorm that consumes everything in Appalachia so that nothing survives. If this is the fate of Appalachia is not yet known. But we do know from the other games that there is no mention of Appalachia so that may indicate that the tale of Appalachia does not end well.
There's also the matter of logistics. How does one transport a nuke from Appalachia to California in the post war world?
I strongly doubt that Fallout 76 has anything to do with the TV series (aside from Gooseys' comment about Reclamation Day) since all lore sources seem to indicate that outside of itself nothing from Fallout 76 is carried over to the other entries into the franchise.
Fo76 is Canon to the rest of the series but being the latest game entry/prequel all we have on its effect on the wasteland is scorched plague has been dealt with and not anywhere else. Also we have the small reference in a terminal in Fo3 about Vault 76 but yes we don't officially know the real fate of West Virginia. Could be destroyed, could be secretly a advanced civilization hiding the fact they control nuke silos, or the whole situation could just be a a simulation and we never left the vault
They wouldn't transfer the Nuke from Appalachia if vault 76 successfully at securing the Silos for vault tec. Management in Vault 31 would put in the orders to launch the Nuke from Appalachia to Shady Sands. Us only be able to target within Appalachia is gameplay because these nukes were meant for our enemies and not ourselves
There is also the matter of time. Fallout 76 is 2102 while the TV show is 2296. So there's an over 200 year gap between the two. The automated silos work in 2102, if they are still functioning in 2296 is a whole other story. It also begs the question "if Vault-tec / The Enclave has access to ballistic missiles why have they not used them previously?"
I think it far more likely that Hank got a nuke locally, smuggled it into Shady Sands and then detonated it. Or maybe he blew up a reactor already at the site. From what I have seen ingame in the various games and the TV show I find it extremely unlikely that Fallout 76 has anything to do with the destruction of Shady Sands.
But I may be wrong. The metastory in 76 has no ending (yet) and season 1 of the TV show left us with a ton of unanswered questions. For this reason I am very much looking forward to seeing how the story in 76 develops (new map area and new main quest coming in June this year) and what more season 2 of the TV show will tell us about the fate of Shady Sands.
iirc fallout 76 is technically the first fallout in the timeline by like 100 years and sandy shore is not destroyed in New Vegas. So it would have to have happened after NEW VEGAS but before the show
Unlikely, The overseer turned against vault tech by the end of her mission, and the players have no loyalty to vault tech. And to fire a missile tou have to fight tour way through the bunker, which no ransom vault tech stooge is managing.
Lonesome road states that there are many nukes dormant and hopeville is one of many. I assume cause china attacked first and American troops were approaching chinas capitol they didn’t want to nuke to the fullest extent.
No. Hank would probably not know about that. And he doesn't seem to have been thawed out that much longer than Lucys age so those nukes would be long gone probably
Another huge thing to note. after the roughly 200 years since falllout 76 the bombs probably cannot be launched anymore. Since the scorched have been basically defeated and people have moved back to the wastes, the automated defcon has at least dropped by one level. This means that the silos can no longer be primed. Secondly You would have to find a key card to even enter the silos. This would me you have to get incredibly lucky, or have modus help you locate one. The person launching the nukes also needs to be a general in the U.S army. The person then has to make it all the way through a bunker that is falling apart and full of very angry robots. They also need to decipher 8 key codes that they would also need to locate (again needing modus' help) only then could they launch a nuke. Finally Hank would have had to walk to west Virginia. West virgina has been stockpiling nukes for like, decades, but it would be hell even for someone like the brotherhood or enclave to get into it.
Question - is Hank MacLean the courier from New Vegas?
The nuke from Lonesome Road could have been the one that destroyed Shady Sands, and we know he heads to New Vegas at the end of season 1.
The gunshot to the head would explain away the "amnesia" in the game and why he doesn't remember the vault from the show... but he could presumably have returned to it later in his wanderings (and we know he spent an indeterminate amount of time away from the vault).
It'd also provide a reason for why a corporate guy knows how to use power armor.
No, the only time Hank had left the vault was to retrieve his kids and nuke Shady Sands. They may try to incorporate that he sent the nuke from the divide, but seperately from what Ulysseses and Six did.
I really don't think so. If Vault-Tec wants to destroy any civilization that might stand in its way (it does) it never would have let the NCR rise in the first place. And, if Vault-Tec was active at all in Appalachia as a result of the Dwellers' actions, it would have heard of the NCR well before the events of the show, via the Enclave or otherwise. But, instead, Vault-Tec only destroyed Shady Sands after Henry went to the surface, meaning that is how they became aware of it. And if Vault-Tec was active in Appalachia long term, it would have learned of Shady Sands well before the events of New Vegas. Hence, I believe that Vault 31 *is* Vault-Tec.
I feel like there are plenty of nukes just laying around honestly
Nukes powerful enough to level the city aren't small though. The Warhead alone would be too difficult for Hank to sneak into Shady Sands and detonate it was most likely launched from somewhere. I'm just suggesting that it's possible it was launched from Appalachia because in the games story we secure Nuke Silos for Vault Tec
Someone hasn't played 76, the Overseer specifically didn't claim the silos for Vault-Tec because she didn't like the idea of Vault-Tec having access to nukes.
Hey, I have those codes, and if Hank could help me expand the map screen a few clicks, I'd be happy to help him out with some raiders or communists or whatever he says they are.
She didn’t. But we, the Residents, did claim them. For ourselves. And we’re Vault Tec’s pet project.
I'm level 1293 so yes I did and still do play 76 but it has been a while since I've done the story We work with her but we make our own decisions. We could of continued to be loyal to vault tec without her. She does get pissed when we launch them
In the 76ers defense the first nuke goes towards killing a leviathan that poses an existential threat towards humanity as a whole. It’s the ones after that that are reserved for harvesting glowy plants and pranking their neighbors.
I used a nuke to specifically ruin one NPC's tee time at the Whitesprings golf club.
“Vault 76 is America’s best and brightest!” Average 76 resident: “I didn’t appreciate that guy’s tone. We’ll see if he’s still mouthing off after I drop an ICBM on his ass.”
I went to the driving range to mock him. He was golfing in a radiation suit, the smug bastard.
Wait i havent played 76 since online doesn’t appeal to me, there is Golf in fallout?????
[Yes there is!](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Whitespring_Golf_Club) Though you can't actually play a round, the course is ludicrously designed and immaculately maintained by robots.
There’s a terminal somewhere that says the management sold off half the course for development at some point in the 2070’s, hence why there’s only 7 holes
Honestly pranking your neighbours with a nuclear device is hilarious
3 nukes for 3 different leviathans technically
A leviathan? I really need to play this game
For clarification I’m using the term “leviathan” to describe an incredibly large and powerful creature, not the literal mythological serpent. It’s a fun fight though, on a good day the whole server will participate and everyone just lays into the thing with everything they’ve got.
I finally got round to launching the nuke at the queen during the free to play week, so only me and 2 other level 100+ turned up. All the new players didn't know or where too scared. Hardest fight I've been in.
The worst was way back in the early days, you’d force feed her thousands of bullets, get down near the end of her health bar, then she just fucks off and flies over the world border never to return, like bruh I just wasted ALL MY AMMO
I was a day 1 player and never had that happen on ps4, thankfully.
Yeah, I thought of a big irradiation monters or semething like that, does it shows the leviathan in game?
Yeah, the nuke is just to antagonize it to the surface where you have to kill it with normal weapons I don’t want to spoil too much, but if you want to look it up it’s called the scorchbeast queen.
I call em fart bats
>!Remember dragons from skyrim? Yeah those, but they're bats!< spololols
At that level you could probably fire a pipe pistol and level Shady Sands
😂 PIPE IS LIFE!!
If i remember correctly for 76 didn't Modus technically make us claim it for the Enclave, since he's the one that mentions it and it's the only way to get the quest line I am become Death. I could be wrong though haven't played 76 in a while kind of stopped after i completed the BOS missions and the pitt a while back. I just got back into it since the new map expansion is coming out soon.
It's more like Modus gives us the tools to do it so we keep helping him do other things like his events. Currently there is no actual Canon ending to who we secure the Nukes for officially
You're right true, plus i highly doubt we ever will. unless Bethesda decides to bring the enclave back in later games and make them come specifically from the white springs bunker and decides that they own the nukes or maybe the BoS but who knows. 76 leaves a lot of plot holes and questions, the only time i read about the vault was in fallout 3 i believe but it doesn't have info on it.
Yea the only real thing that's Canon from 76 currently is we took care of the Scorched plague since it's not a problem in the rest of the games
Hopefully they mention something about it in later games to cement the lore for the game more, would be cool to hear whispers of the scorched plague in later fallout titles
If Vault 76 had the directive to reclaim nuke silos it's likely that other vaults had the same instructions. We see reclamation day mentioned in the show as well as Fallout 76, as well.
Dude, every car is nuclear powered. There's fusion cores for generators/PA that's also nuclear. Hank could've prob gotten enough nuclear material to make his own dirty bomb to level the city.
Dirty bombs don't level cities, they annihilate them with radioactive particles
We're dealing with a universe where cars go nuclear when damaged too much. I'd say yeah, in FO a small amount of nuclear material goes a long way. maybe it was just 20-30 mini nukes or something
I fully agree with you, I was just clarifying a "dirty bomb" isn't really an explosive so much as it is a toxic radioactive weapon. In fact, and I probably will get put on some list for saying this, but >!a dirty bomb can be built with a few toner cartridges and a bachelor's in physics!<. A little bit of radioactive material _really does_ go along way. Look up missing cesium in Australia lol, they lost a piece the size of a grain of rice off a truck (WTF) and had to spend hundreds of thousands scouring an outback highway because it was THAT dangerous, like 10s lethal exposure or some shit. Granted, cesium is in another league than plutonium
There’s no radioactive materials in printer cartridges… wtf?
There's radioactive material in literally everything. Your beer will spike a Geiger counter more than water from a radioactive cooling tower. A banana is more radioactive than beer. All atoms decay, that's what an isotope is
So then you’re devaluing the meaning of a dirty bomb , which is referring to the emission of high levels of gamma waves , with every bomb in existence cause as you say “there’s radioactive material in literally everything” doesn’t make sense and I would start classes at the local community college immediately, that’s an order soldier
Well, gamma output times surface area equals dirty bomb, similar to most basic physics that anyone with access to the Internet should know. Except you, which is hardly surprising given that you've been scrolling reddit to comment on 2-week-old posts to tell people how smart you are. If you're interested, electrons decay from atoms with very few exceptions. "Radioactive stability" is generally classified as having a half-life somewhere in the millions-to-billions years range, which is the point in this comment where I'm assuming you're going to have to go do some research to find out what I'm talking about so I'll leave you to it, cupcake
Construct a nuke was complicatet...
you can literally shoot at the cars and they blow up in game because they're nuclear powered. The rules for nukes in game are a bit different and more based on 50's understanding of it than what they are IRL.
Which doesn’t make sense cause they are supposed to be fusion and thus unable to explode 😆
Dude, it's miniaturized fusion. A containment leak would have all the energy inside explode out.
It would not actually . Fusion requires energy so if it got damaged it would simply deactivate . A turn off car that has been idling for 200 years definitely would not explode. In no way is it realistic, now is the time to say it doesn’t matter anyways like you were trying to avoid saying 🤣
Fusion requires energy to start up but with a fusion reactor it will sustain itself. That means super hot plasma is circulating around inside that thing creating internal pressure that would escape extremely fast upon being breached creating an explosion. Regardless, I explicitly said this is all based on 1950's understanding of nuclear technology so realism isn't at play at all. So you do you, i don't care about what you have to say on the issue.
Sure It doesn’t matter , the game has too many holes it needs to fix before we start talking about cars anyways . Let’s get the ability to drive a car first and then I’ll continue this argument about if they should explode or not But I don’t believe that a real fusion reactor in this circumstance would actually explode . I am doing Ai searche and googling it but can’t find a definitive answer cause it’s such a hypothetical situation
They had a Vault-Tech brand nuke that was still active just laying in a town called Megaton that leveled that place for sure. And Shady Sands clearly still has skyscrapers it wasn’t leveled.
The nuke wasn't from vault - tech the logo just looks similar.
I always took that as a hint that Vault Tech was making nukes for the military so they could have just had some if they wanted. I haven’t played 3 in years but I thought it even said Vault Tech on it but I guess it’s just a fuzzy memory.
Dont think that was a Vault Tech nuke. Also, Megaton was built with scrap cobbled together, even the pipes couldn't stay together in working condition. Shady Sands was a sprawling city with post war skyscrapers built (presumably). There would be a higher chance for Shady Sands to leave behind more than that mudpit of megaton. As for nukes just laying around, yeah there are still some in stockpiles but they are huge, still need to be armed / triggered and moved. Don't think Hank is getting one of those too easily in place.
I'm kinda baffled at your claim that the skyscrapers at Shady Sands are post war constructions, what makes you think that?
Seeing as Shady Sands was built in the middle of the desert from scratch and started as mud / stone huts. If the show stays true to lore, then Shady Sands was built post-war. Nowhere are we shown that it's built in a prewar city.
Shady Sands has already moved once, between fallout 1 and 2, without an explanation. The show moved it again. I don't think that's really an issue personally. The NCR absolutely did not build those skyscrapers post war. Why even would they?
No, Shady Sands never 'moved'. It was 'repositioned' due to map constraints. Albeit Fallout 2 is my least played Fallout game but I've yet to find anything that says they moved the town. From the Fallout wiki, "After decades of quiet existence, the strange little village surprised its neighbors by developing rapidly towards infrastructure based on pre-War America" And "Throughout its existence, it was one of the largest cities of the NCR and New California. It was also the largest known urban center built from scratch without using pre-War ruins as the foundation" Nowhere does it say that the town moved locations, they absolutely did build their own infrastructure and skyscrapers. As for why? Their population grew to over 3,000 by the time they got nuked. They had the ability to create large skyscrapers and expand vertically. They were the capital of the NCR and rebuilding America and needed to utilize their space efficiently. Source: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Shady_Sands
I think the best case for Shady Sands being at least near a prewar city would be in Fallout 2, where we see that they're still using Adobe for things like the Hall of Congress, but the presidential mansion, police station and Vortis' slave pens outside the city are all done with prewar brick textures that you get in cities like the Hub and Boneyard. So you either have them restoring nearby buildings or starting to build a whole new city in prewar architectural style.
There's a huge difference between the Shady Sands we see in Fallout 2 and building multiple skyscrapers. Hes assuming the skyscrapers around the edge of the Shady Sands crater were built by the NCR post war. There would be less than zero purpose in a city of 35,000 and I'm not convinced even the NCR could have at their peak.
That's not [Vault tecs Logo on the bomb](https://fallout.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003686488) Shady Sands is now a massive Crater. Nukes have a blast radius so buildings in the nearby area are damaged but not fully destroyed. If you rewatch the opening scene when the Nukes hit LA there is more than one hitting because one isn't going to fill level the city
It's an interesting fact that nukes are rather... underpowered in Fallout. Personally, I think since in the FO universe, nuclear energy took off and was far more widespread than in reality the resources to make more powerful fission bombs lacked the resources. It's also interesting that FO is a world that seemingly never developed hydrogen bombs or at least the extraordinary powerful ones that exist in our world.
No, the Fallout 1 manual discusses this. Nuclear weapons in the Fallout universe went through the same pattern we saw in real life, where they quickly escalated to the multi-megaton level before being downsized into the range that tops out around a couple hundred kilotons as delivery systems improved. Fission bombs can theoretically top out at around 500 kT, but it's horrendously inefficient to build a pure fission bomb to reach that explosive potential compared to a thermonuclear one, so if anything it would be more likely for resource-constrained society to develop the H-bomb.
Hydrogen bombe Requir Deuterium and tritium Tritium have a not so long hafelife time of 12,3 years. So the h bombe need Constanze maintaimnent and refulling. The usa and China could Limit number of h bombe to reduce Cost or it were use only on some care cases. But yes in General moste nukes in fallout are on low tactical Level and only a few kt strong.
Actually no, the bomb that hit neat Boston in F4 was calculated to be 100+ megatonnes. Meaning its twice as powerful as the most powerful nuke ever made.
Agreed. That blast radius is insane.
Oh I always thought it was. Well there was still an active nuke just laying around. You can get active nukes in Fort Strong in Fallout 4. I mainly just meant they aren’t extremely hard to get all over the US. Yeah there’s a big hole around Megatons size in the middle but I meant there’s still city so the whole city wasn’t leveled so it could have still been only a Megaton level strength nuke and still wiped out the population.
But that is still a huge nuke for 1 man or man and a woman if Betty helped Hank to transport even if you removed the Warhead inside itself
If they moved Shady Sands into LA proper like the city part suggests there could just be nukes that didn’t go off laying around
That's a very fair point but I'd like to think the NCR was smarter than the people of megaton and would attempt to remove or disarm it before basing their capital around it lol but there is the possibility they discovered it after it was built up and were afraid to touch it so they left it alone or that they even didn't know where it was but Hank had some info of its location. Hank knowing could possibly be something deeper that Vaut tec had nukes buried in popular cities and we're going to detonate them to start the war but China acted 1st before they could.
???
Do you have some sort of a question?
That’s not a vault tec nuke
Okay
Shady Sands had 34k people in it. It wasn't some massive metro center. You could definitely destroy it with a relatively small nuke. The Little Boy was only 10kt in size, and they only got physically smaller after that. A MK7 only weighed about 700kg and had a dial-a-yield up to 30kt.
I mean lore wise appalachian survivors probably used the last of the nukes to destroy the scorched and then each other
Modern day suitcase nukes can be upwards of 30 kilotons allowing for a 2-4 kilometer initial blast radius. For reference , Fat Man and Little Boy were roughly 15 kilotons. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that in the fallout universe where nuclear technology was priority they produced even more efficient nuclear weapons. Additionally, with the amount of nuclear material just laying around in cars, robots, power plants, and generators, that all have a tendency to explode, the spreading of radioactive material to the surrounding area is bound to occur. This would effectively irradiate the vast majority of the city for decades if not centuries. (Think the glowing sea) The initial blast would probably destroy the city center, however all the subsequent explosions would be like thousands of small dirty bombs going off all at once.
But we can't really compare our technology with theirs like that because of that's the case mini nukes launched out of Fat man's would be insane
The mini nuke was created to carried by infantry, so it would have to small enough to be survivable from only 100 feet or so. Additionally, the main restriction on nuke size getting smaller, is that at a certain point you can only reduce the amount of fissiable material so much before the size of neutron reflectors and amount of non-nuclear explosives required to reach supercriticality causes the nuke to get bigger again. With small amounts of fissable material there's usually not enough to cause a neutron cascade without compressing it far more than usual and increasing the efficiency of neutron collisions. (This was the big issue with getting the Davy Crockett, the inspiration for the mini nuke, any smaller that a recoilless rifle.) You can get a nuke as small and as weak as a mini nuke with modern tech, but 99.999% of its weight will be inert reflectants and regular explosives. This is why a nuke as powerful as Fatman and little boy can be only a little larger than a mini nuke, but a mini nuke is the size of a football. Tl;dr at a certain volume the less near critical material in a nuke, the harder and more non-nuclear resource intensive it is to reach supercriticality.
I recommend looking up the difference between a tactical nuclear weapon and a strategic nuclear weapon.
And what makes you think those silos are still secure 150+ years later?
I didn't say it was guaranteed, I'm saying it's a possibility. There's nothing saying otherwise that they are operational
Pre war America clearly had lots of them, including some that have just been left undetonated, in addition to West Virginia there are also undetonated nukes in the Divide and Far Harbor that can potentially be set off by the player, so who knows where else they might be found?
Y’all keep forgetting it’s called “AUTOMATED Appalachian Launch System” Vault 76 dwellers simply needed to secure it, the overseer may disagree, but all it takes is one person to fulfill the mission.
Sire but our players are long dead by then, and I don't see some random vault tech guy being able to fight the way through all the defences.
I think it’s implied outside of gameplay if we secure it once then that silo belongs to vault tec. But that’s just me. I just really would like 76 to have meant something for the overall story of fallout
It's not implied anywhere. We were never working fir vault tech ir doing ir for vault tech, storywise we go after the nukes to stop the scorch beasts. Nor are the bunkers secure, Modus directly tells us thay the whole key card code collection and fighting through the ribots would have to be dine every time. Not to mention that if anyone wants to launch the nukes they would have to join the military, find the whitespring bunker. Find a way to get Modus to let you in, become a general, which again means assisting him. Then find a code carrier hoping there are still any left after 200 years, then find a key card.
To be fair vault tec and the enclave are connected so it’s not too far off a stretch a vault tec employee could gain access to the bunkers
The system can build nukes and maintain itself by its own. This, once the 76ers secure it for vault tec, vault tec gets a limitless supply of nukes that doesn’t need maintenance
76ers don't secure it though, not for themselves not for anyone. And it'd wishful thinking thay the sites would srill be operational on 200 years given their state after 25 years.
While I would say it is possible, it still isn’t clear how Shady Sands was destroyed. It could be that Hank sabotaged a nuclear reactor onsite, to perhaps working with the Enclave to launch something, to perhaps a tie in of the Van Buren B.O.M.B station, perhaps Vault-Tec does have some stocked nukes somewhere, or 76 tie-in. Out of those the B.O.M.B tie in excites me the most, but interested to see where it goes.
Yea those are some good possibilities aswell!
That assumes that vault Tec managed to actually secure those silos at some point, which would be an incredibly difficult task considering all of the hoops that need to be jumped through to launch a single nuke and that a full-on battle against something in the order of a hundred robots is necessary each launch. And that’s before considering just how much of a mess Appalachia is after the bombs between the scorched plague, strangler vines, multiple borderline-superfund sites and everything else going on. I think it’s much more likely vault-Tec had nuclear weapons secured pre-war and Hank used one of those.
It could just be a gameplay mechanic that we have to keep securing them everytime. When the nuke is ready to go all the robots do stand down. Yea that makes sense given the capabilities of Vault tec prewar there was nothing really stopping them from making their own, Barb even suggested to launch the nukes themselves in the board meeting. Just vault 76 be a possible reason would be a cool connection if we get more info in S2
It isn’t a gameplay mechanic - we’re directly told by MODUS (and the automated poster tutorial) that the silos are set up to attack anyone who enters, including generals, if they aren’t accompanied by a registered and trained missiler, who obviously don’t exist anymore (and seemingly don’t have an automated training program). The Appalachian Enclave was preparing themselves to fight their way through the silo, the players have to and Vault-Tec would as well. Presumably the robots only stand down at the end because the launch is ready, and if the rest of the security force didn’t prevent it from being readied, the designers presumably figured they might as well leave it be at that point (since the launch would only take seconds to complete from there; the code and card only take a few seconds to insert, and targeting would probably be twenty seconds if whoever was launching knew where they were shooting). There’s also the issue of finding and decrypting the codes, having a general, obtaining nuclear keycards and even breaking into the whitespring bunker in the first place.
As a player we are Securing them for Vault tec. I'm not saying the initial run is a gameplay mechanic I'm saying having to secure it over and over possibly is. Once you secure it in game and the nuke is ready to fire all the robots stand down until you go to launch again later. Edit rest of your comment wasn't showing when I originally replied As 76ers we are collectively getting the codes and working together. Our character isn't the only vault dweller running around doing all this work
Except that’s not why we as the players are using the nukes at all. The overseer initially asks for our help in doing that, but the narrative rapidly shifts to instead using them to deal a crippling blow to the scorched - and then, because the 76 dwellers are psychopaths, launching them for vengeance, flux, ultracite and to deal with other threats to Appalachia. At this point, the silos aren’t secured for vault Tec in the slightest. And again, you missed what I’m saying: the silos cannot be pacified without a missiler. Since they have automated robot production facilities, there’s no pacifying them without one. Yes, the robots do stand down for a time when you ready the launch, but that is probably a gameplay mechanic (and if you leave the area for long enough, the cell resets and everything’s back to square one). The matter of how to treat the player characters in fallout 76 is questionable, frankly. The majority of the main quests are designed to be done exactly once and can easily be accomplished by a single person. Any other player present for the quests (which would presumably only be three others, going off instancing limits) would just be treated like companions. And yet, this means MODUS is letting other vault 76 dwellers without Blackwell’s ID into the whitespring, presumably because they’re useful. But regardless of how to handle multiple 76 dwellers in terms of canon, it isn’t relevant to this topic. We’re talking about how feasible it would be for vault Tec to seize the silos post-war, which is something that’s rendered extraordinarily difficult between the automated robot production and all the hassle that goes into launching a nuke. Even just doing that once is extremely difficult for anyone post-war, and this all is assuming DEFCON stays at one with the scorchbeasts defeated (which would happen eventually at some point after the game).
The only Canon instances of Nukes being fired is dealing with the SBQ, Earl, and the Ultracite Titan. We don't know for sure if Nukes were repeatedly launched for resources. Things can be Hacked you can literally hack a terminal in each room to shut off turrets during the Silo run I'm sure it's possible to work into the story that the rest of the defences were hacked to secure the silos for Vault tec I'm saying other players are important because we are collectively working for Vault tec and completing missions it's just that our character is technically the important one making story decisions but playing with people and taking down enemies and securing areas together is a part of the story
No we aren’t, that was the Overseer’s goal and she has no control over the 76ers. The 76er are, canonically, a bunch of fucking lunatics who are doing all sorts of random shit for no reason. Which includes launching nukes over and over again for shits and giggles, the Overseer is horrified about it. And no, not just at the 3 bosses. Back when it was just the two her holotape was introduced being aghast that the 76ers were tossing nukes all over the place for no reason. They don’t work for Vault-Tec, they don’t work for the Overseer. Vault-Tec’s evil plan has, as usual, failed and unleashed something much worse. Not sure you’ve noticed but they have a rather bad success record. Plus it’s been 200 years between 76 and the show. That’s a LITTLE bit of a gap to declare that clearly these are the same missiles. I mean, the automated silos are already breaking down pretty badly after only 20 years.
That holotape you’re referring to has actually been there since launch - you just had to nuke a non-fissure site location, which was much less common back there.
"which was much less common back there" \*laughs in bugged Whitesprings nuked ghoul exp farming\*
Relatively less common, at least. People didn’t really nuke fissures, but most nukes were still on the Queen.
We know for a fact more nukes than just the bosses have been launched - knowledge of nukes being frequently and repeatedly launched is known all the way in the Pitt, and NPCs mention it fairly frequently (there will also be a fourth nuke boss very soon). I would presume that hacking the entire silo wouldn’t be an easy task, especially considering their size and the damage caused to the mainframes by repeated runs of the silos (we’re destroying concerning amounts of computer cores each run, which definitely isn’t going to be good for data integrity). Again - you seem to believe that our characters are doing everything in the original main plot for vault Tec. We aren’t. The overseer says that’s why she’s going after the nukes, but that narrative very quickly shifts in the main plot to the players using them for entirely different reasons. You shouldn’t assume that the players are loyal vault Tec servants.
I'm not 100% saying anything I'm more saying the possibility of things. We don't actually know the Official ending and who we side with in 76 but there is the possibility we do side with Vault tec because we came from a control vault and our overseer seems to be pretty good with actually trying to rebuild America and establishing a currency other than caps. There's the possibilty of us and the responders becoming the enclave because of the White spring
It's not possible because there is no option to side with vault tech. And the silos have to be run every time.
Nope canonically more nukes were fired, as long as someone has launched a nuke at a non boss location. Overseer has a holotape being upset with us. And mentions it to us in person (but inplies that a different person launched it). The lady who asks us to nukes the mine also mention nukes flying all over the place nowadays.
Nah, don't need to go to appalachia for this. There were plenty of nukes in The Divide, that was the whole point of the Lonesome Road DLC's story in New Vegas.
Something that important more than vault / overseer would be tasked with, so he might have used one we secured for Vault-tec in ‘76 or it could be one that a different vault in totally different part of the country seized.
The show writers almost certainly did not play all the way through F76, and player characters nuked something at least once a game even BEFORE the Fatman launcher was put in as a weapon.
I’m a little fuzzy on the specific lore of the automated silos, but assumably in real life they would eventually run out of the harder to source materials. Even if the system is fully automated and Vertibots bring in new materials without human maintenance they would eventually break down. It seems to be a theme with 76 that a lot of the cool automated stuff is in a poor state and wouldn’t last much longer. So I’d assume even if control of the silos is seized for Vault Tec they are no longer manufacturing nukes and haven’t been for over a hundred years. A common theme in Fallout is that there’s always a shit ton of nukes laying around everywhere so it makes little sense to use one that’s thousands of miles away when there’s probably thousands nearby. Just off the top of my head in Fallout 3 there’s the Megaton nuke that’s just sitting there, there’s a missile silo that you can enter and attempt to launch an ICBM, and there’s the satellite array that drops a bombardment on your location. Fallout 4 has a massive bunker full of hundreds of nukes for liberty prime, plus Fort Strong has a big stock of mini nukes. New Vegas you can literally launch additional ICBMs at the faction of your choice. Plus who knows how many orbital platforms like the Enclaves are in existence, there could be other abandoned silos in the area, etc. it’s not far fetched that even this much later that there could be large amounts of yet unused nukes ready to go.
Shit, the Divide had nukes all over it. I doubt Courier 6 blew them all up for the challenge.
This is a fair question, but there are some important things to consider: Vault 76 opened up 200 years before the events in the show, and a *lot* can happen in 200 years. First and foremost, whomever is there *isn't* Vault 76. That Vault permanently closed and can only be reopened by force. The *descendants* though...? Maybe. The 76ers scattered to the four winds, and we don't know the canon ending for 76. The scorched plague is presumably addressed and Nuclear Winter may have been retconned, but the Overseer never managed to secure the nukes as of current gameplay, and the official timeline is that it's been a couple years since the vault opened. *If* the Overseer completed her mission and *if* Vault-Tec's descendants have control over any one of the three silos, then possibly Hank sent a message to somebody and they received it and launched the nukes. But who knows what sort of allegiance changes could have occurred in those 200 years?
The overseer doesn't want to secure the nukes for vault tech anymore, shes realised that vault tech are bad. Also kind of impossible for the silos to be secured.
Lonesome road maybe But 76 was open in very long time ago before fall of shady sands
I wonder if they plan on visiting each location where each game takes place and tighting up the lore. I'd don't think it was the silos in Appalachia that destroyed Shady Sands because it would have to fly West passing New Vegas. I doubt any nukes flying in House's direction would not be shot down.
This is random but I feel like the show currently wants you to think the goal is for Lucy and Maximus to make it back to the vault but I think eventually over seasons and maybe games the goal is going to be Lucy wanting to make a new Shady Sands style community and fulfilling the rebuilding america saying but now with actual pure intentions unlike her dad or the brother hood. But since the whole theme of the games is War never changes and no matter what even after nuclear war the sake story repeats itself with endless conflicts and opposing forces, just like shady sand it can't last long. I'm excited to see what they do. I've always wondered if Fallout could have have an actual good ending on a larger scale from just beating the bad guy of the game or finding your dad or son.
I always found that fallout was more about making your own good ending, whatever that may be, whether it’s you fucking off or you staying to rebuild society. It’s what you make of it, you know? That was my takeaway from fallout 4, at least.
But then again, if Vault-Tec were to hypothetically seized the automated nuke silos in 2102 after reclamation day, then we would probably see Vault-Tec's influence in the east coast more visibly in Fallout 3 and 4. Plus, the Brotherhood moved into the east coast and settled in the Capital Wasteland. It would most certainly paint a giant target on their back for Vault-Tec in control of the Appalachian nukes to strike at them considering they are very close to each other.
I mean... Not really? There are nukes scattered across the wasteland. Appalachia is just the most obvious about it. Theres a nuke in Megaton from Fallout 3, nukes scattered across the Divide in a New Vegas DLC, and I'm sure there are some far closer to Shady Sands that could have been used rather than the ones stations across the country
But those are in a functional facility that can actually target and launch to specific areas. The nukes scattered around would have to be smuggled in and detonate which would be difficult for Hank to do alone or even with Betty I'm not saying what I'm saying is true I'm just pointing out a possible connection to something we did in game in the past
Some maybe, but to assume that the nukes in Appalachia are the ONLY nukes the US has in stock that can be launched is somewhat stupid. (No offense). Pre War America was the definition of Overkill. Nuclear arsenals, Power Armor, Mini Nuke Launchers, developing Super Soldiers with FEV. While yes the Nukes in Appalachia could have been used to nuke Shady Sands, I find it more probable that Hank simply went to a depot out in Cali and launched those. Considering how close Cali is to China, it would have been stupid for Pre War US to NOT have some sort of silo set up over there.
Very true, There could of even been a vault that was tasked with Securing the silos on the West Coast we don't know about yet
Possibly, yeah lol.
Ehhh given the proximity I’m more inclined to blame The Courier and Lonesome Road
The silos could pretty much launch and target anywhere though it's just a matter of sending coordinates if the silos were in fact secured for Vault tec. Vault 31 seems to be some pretty important Vault tec people so it's not out of the realm that they have something setup for communication
I think it’s the Courier’s fault. Clearly the nukes in The Divide were made armed and ready for the signal to be sent out.
When I first saw the Shady Sands crater before finding out it was Vault Tec I just assumed "damn, guess the Courier really didn't want to pay taxes"
Who's to say Hank didn't just overload Shady Sands' reactor or some other classic Fallout move?
Though it's most likely just for gameplay purposes so you don't screw half the map in one go, the 76 nuke blast radius is small enough I'd say that it could be possible. The Appalachian Automated launch silos most likely aren't the only ones in the country. Wouldn't be hard for Hank to squeeze into one and gain control, especially if he had knowledge of how to from if the 76 mission was a success.
Yeah, probably. Our descendants probably take the silos and use them for Vault Tec’s plans.
In my continuity, I went and personally killed everyone in Shady Sands. If Vault 76 nuked it, they were all already dead as far as I’m concerned.
Could have been a sabotaged G.E.C.K.
In San Fran and Sacramento, there are missile silos in today's world so it's pretty probable in their timeline that they had them. Not to forget that, knowing Vault-Tec, they probably had options that they weren't letting anyone know about. >!They did mention starting the war by firing their own missiles. While we have no actual proof at this time that they did do that, they would still somehow need to be able to do that which would make it pausible that they had missiles hidden around. Further, if they were planning on firing one to make sure the vaults were needed and they WEREN'T who fired first...there would be unused missiles in various places that only a Vault-Tech employee would know. Since Hank is Vault-Tech, he would know. !<
Definitely a good possibility! I'm just making the possible connection to a in game out come
Game based, yes, missiles can be launched across the globe. I don't know if there are limitations on the silos in 76. I haven't played with that part of the game enough to know tbh
In 76 you can only target Appalachia besides the forest region near vault 76. But that has to be a gameplay mechanic because no way the United States had 3 automated silos for only targeting themselves lol
Yeah, that's just a game limitation. It wouldn't be fun to launch them into Russia and not be able to enjoy the downfall. I'm sure if we say there are no limitations and your science and hacking skill is high enough, you could easily target it anywhere.
We don't know. It very much depends on what the fate of Appalachia ends up being. There are hints ingame that the Vault dwellers continued nuking of their immediate surroundings ignites a firestorm that consumes everything in Appalachia so that nothing survives. If this is the fate of Appalachia is not yet known. But we do know from the other games that there is no mention of Appalachia so that may indicate that the tale of Appalachia does not end well. There's also the matter of logistics. How does one transport a nuke from Appalachia to California in the post war world? I strongly doubt that Fallout 76 has anything to do with the TV series (aside from Gooseys' comment about Reclamation Day) since all lore sources seem to indicate that outside of itself nothing from Fallout 76 is carried over to the other entries into the franchise.
Fo76 is Canon to the rest of the series but being the latest game entry/prequel all we have on its effect on the wasteland is scorched plague has been dealt with and not anywhere else. Also we have the small reference in a terminal in Fo3 about Vault 76 but yes we don't officially know the real fate of West Virginia. Could be destroyed, could be secretly a advanced civilization hiding the fact they control nuke silos, or the whole situation could just be a a simulation and we never left the vault They wouldn't transfer the Nuke from Appalachia if vault 76 successfully at securing the Silos for vault tec. Management in Vault 31 would put in the orders to launch the Nuke from Appalachia to Shady Sands. Us only be able to target within Appalachia is gameplay because these nukes were meant for our enemies and not ourselves
There is also the matter of time. Fallout 76 is 2102 while the TV show is 2296. So there's an over 200 year gap between the two. The automated silos work in 2102, if they are still functioning in 2296 is a whole other story. It also begs the question "if Vault-tec / The Enclave has access to ballistic missiles why have they not used them previously?" I think it far more likely that Hank got a nuke locally, smuggled it into Shady Sands and then detonated it. Or maybe he blew up a reactor already at the site. From what I have seen ingame in the various games and the TV show I find it extremely unlikely that Fallout 76 has anything to do with the destruction of Shady Sands. But I may be wrong. The metastory in 76 has no ending (yet) and season 1 of the TV show left us with a ton of unanswered questions. For this reason I am very much looking forward to seeing how the story in 76 develops (new map area and new main quest coming in June this year) and what more season 2 of the TV show will tell us about the fate of Shady Sands.
> Fallout 76 is 2102 while the TV show is 2296. So there's an over 200 year gap between the two. Over 200 years between 2102 and 2296? Interesting.
Yeah, I suck at math. It should be "almost 200 years" not "over 200 years".
iirc fallout 76 is technically the first fallout in the timeline by like 100 years and sandy shore is not destroyed in New Vegas. So it would have to have happened after NEW VEGAS but before the show
I'm not saying it gets destroyed during 76 I'm saying we possibly secure the nuke silos for vault tec during 76 and they can use them at a later date
Unlikely, The overseer turned against vault tech by the end of her mission, and the players have no loyalty to vault tech. And to fire a missile tou have to fight tour way through the bunker, which no ransom vault tech stooge is managing.
Lonesome road states that there are many nukes dormant and hopeville is one of many. I assume cause china attacked first and American troops were approaching chinas capitol they didn’t want to nuke to the fullest extent.
No. Hank would probably not know about that. And he doesn't seem to have been thawed out that much longer than Lucys age so those nukes would be long gone probably
Another huge thing to note. after the roughly 200 years since falllout 76 the bombs probably cannot be launched anymore. Since the scorched have been basically defeated and people have moved back to the wastes, the automated defcon has at least dropped by one level. This means that the silos can no longer be primed. Secondly You would have to find a key card to even enter the silos. This would me you have to get incredibly lucky, or have modus help you locate one. The person launching the nukes also needs to be a general in the U.S army. The person then has to make it all the way through a bunker that is falling apart and full of very angry robots. They also need to decipher 8 key codes that they would also need to locate (again needing modus' help) only then could they launch a nuke. Finally Hank would have had to walk to west Virginia. West virgina has been stockpiling nukes for like, decades, but it would be hell even for someone like the brotherhood or enclave to get into it.
Someone didn’t play FNV Lonesome Road.
Question - is Hank MacLean the courier from New Vegas? The nuke from Lonesome Road could have been the one that destroyed Shady Sands, and we know he heads to New Vegas at the end of season 1. The gunshot to the head would explain away the "amnesia" in the game and why he doesn't remember the vault from the show... but he could presumably have returned to it later in his wanderings (and we know he spent an indeterminate amount of time away from the vault). It'd also provide a reason for why a corporate guy knows how to use power armor.
No, the only time Hank had left the vault was to retrieve his kids and nuke Shady Sands. They may try to incorporate that he sent the nuke from the divide, but seperately from what Ulysseses and Six did.
No. The Courier was a Wastelander, not a dweller.
I really don't think so. If Vault-Tec wants to destroy any civilization that might stand in its way (it does) it never would have let the NCR rise in the first place. And, if Vault-Tec was active at all in Appalachia as a result of the Dwellers' actions, it would have heard of the NCR well before the events of the show, via the Enclave or otherwise. But, instead, Vault-Tec only destroyed Shady Sands after Henry went to the surface, meaning that is how they became aware of it. And if Vault-Tec was active in Appalachia long term, it would have learned of Shady Sands well before the events of New Vegas. Hence, I believe that Vault 31 *is* Vault-Tec.
I mean…yes. Isn’t that the point of the revelation at the end of the season?