Here's a tough one: you know how skeletons last forever? Like the skeletons of people who died in the war 200 years ago remain frozen everywhere in the exact position they died in?
Where are the skeletons of all the thousands of raiders I killed, HUH?!
Hey, those pre-war folk where eating so much infinitely preservable foodstuffs it preserved them too.
This is a great idea. You just need to believe now that the fusion cells are being loaded off-screen by the other hand.
Oh, and I believe the Laser Muskets' stocks and foregrips were crafted from the prop muskets stored in the museum in Concord, which were held by the Revolutionary War mannequins. Another good reason for their namesake.
Then again why do laser weapons have recoil
Laser weapons do not have physical recoil but your character gets scared and dazzled by the intense light and awesomeness of having a portable deadly laser gun that somehow functions with minimal lenses. The combined awe and bright lights causes the shooter to jerk the gun back a bit.
First part, somewhat backed by science. Fallout laser rifles are substantially more powerful than lasers that we posses today. And even though photons have no mass, they still have momentum. And because of Newton's third law, they still would impart kind of recoil when fired out of a laser rifle.
If you take a bullet and a laser with the same amount of kinetic energy, and do some napkin math to figure out their impluse, you actually get similar values. Because while the laser has a lot less momentum, it's felt over a much shorter time.
This guy goes over it pretty well:
For comparison, the momentum (p=mv) of a .22 bullet is .83 kg*m/s. The momentum of a laser gun is 2 million times less than the momentum of a .22. But is momentum all we should consider? I suspect the 'kick' we feel on the recoil is directly related to the force that the gun exerts on the holder. This means that instead of momentum we need to consider impulse, momentum per time. We estimate the time it takes to fire a .22 is ~.1s, so the force delivered 8.3 N.
Let's estimate the time it takes a laser gun to fire. Unfortunately, not having a laser gun to fire (feel free to send me one, dear readers), we're more or less going to have to guess at the firing time. Most movies with laser guns show pulses of light (which, incidentally would move so fast we wouldn't see them) on the order of a meter or two long. Given the speed of light, this would give a firing time of ~30 nanoseconds. This would give a force delivered of 15 N. This is close to what we estimated or a .22. So, if movies are to be believed (and really, why wouldn't we believe them?), it seems like laser guns may well have recoil.
The Virtuosi
Second part, entirely headcannon and based of my own shitty physics knowledge. When the laser rifle is fired, and the laser leaves the 'barrel', it transitions from the vacuum sealed interior of the weapon and into the gas dense atmosphere. As you can imagine, the gasses of the atmosphere don't really appreciate being suddenly bombarded with a shitton of photons, and it causes them to form a mini plasma explosion at the 'muzzle' of the rifle.
This also explains why the 'lasers' are visible from the side, even with there's no particles in the air the reflect the lasers. It's because the laser beam continuously ionizes the atmosphere in its path, but just at a greatly reduced energy level compared to when it leaves the weapon.
And an extra little third part. We don't really know the mechanism that causes laser rifles to fire, but we do know that they don't have any moving parts (or at least very few). If it uses any significant amount of magnetism, then some of the recoil can possibly be explained using things like Faraday's law or Lenz's law.
Impulse is a change in momentum, not momentum per unit time (which would just be force). Beyond a certain point, applying an impulse in a shorter time period will increase the peak instantaneous force experienced by a gun, but not its holder, as the gun's mass has a low-pass effect (smooths out the force transient).
.22 long has a mass of 1.9g and can achieve muzzle velocity of 330 m/s. This has around 103 J of kinetic energy and applies a momentous impulse of ~0.63 kgm/s on the gun.
A 103 J pulse of red light will provide a momentous impulse of 103 / c or 3.4 * 10^-7 kgm/s. (E = hf, p = h/lambda, c = f lambda => p = E/c)
So by my (admittedly rusty) maths, this isn't even close, and won't be unless your projectile is travelling at relativistic speeds.
I don't really want to get into a napkin math discussion about it because, in the end, it's about Fallout. This thread is more about filling logical holes than it is finding scientific backing for everything in the canon. If it were, we'd all have to quit our day jobs to figure everything out.
I realize the blog post I posted probably had some incorrect math or incorrect conclusions, but I really posted it more as a conceptual reasoning for why there might be recoil on laser rifles, not as a scientific backing for why there is. And frankly, I like my own thoughts about sudden ionization and combustion of air in front of the rifle more, since it explains more things than just whatever slight amount of recoil might come from the actual laser.
Yeah I like the thermal expansion + ionisation a lot more we also shouldn't write off the possibility of a large moving part inside, like a gas grill clicker on steroids.
The blog post is pretty much nonsense though, the first comment nailed it:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/238785/32547c5f-1420-4ed9-8483-622bade089ac/image.png
Yeah, I fucked up skimming through it. That blog is pretty trash.
But as far as a mechanical component, I thought the same thing, but the Fallout Wiki keeps saying "However, their lack of moving parts (aside from the microfusion cell holding latch and trigger mechanism) means they are resilient against extended use.", but I can't find a reference. I always kinda assumed there was some kind of solenoid or armature that moved a component inside the gun in and out of position while firing (e.g. moving the actual source laser in battery to fire, and out of battery to recharge capacitors/cool off) kind of like a bolt carrier group in an actual firearm.
But I guess not.
Has someone answered X-01 power armor in Fallout 76?
I'm the last person to be a stickler for lore, especially in a game like Fallout, but that is like... pretty clear-cut.
Since X-01 will be in Fallout 76 the loading screen tip that says it was made postwar by US Army remnants does not mean the Enclave. X-01 means that the concept for APA was around for over a century
before the Enclave made APA in 2220.
It's back on the first page, but to clarify, the FEV-ghoul debate isn't about FEV itself directly creating ghouls, it's that FEV exposure, period, basically enables one to become a ghoul. When the bombs went off, the West-Tek lab in LA was directly hit, shattering the massive stores of
FEV there and introducing it to the atmosphere, where it was heavily mutated by radiation and entered the rain and groundwater. So, anyone who breathes the open air, or drinks the water out in the wasteland, has that mutated, 'inert' strain of FEV in their system. This is why certain super-mutants become dum-dums and others become titanic geniuses-- prior exposure to the mutated FEV fucks up the process horrendously. This is also why Harold became a "unique" ghoul-- he was exposed to 'vanilla' FEV at Mariposa, then heavily irradiated shortly after.
Getting mutated FEV in your system, and then heavily irradiated, creates ghouls. This is why some people (mostly Vault Dwellers) just die from rads, whereas others become ghouls. It's also a dice roll ontop of that. The reason that Vault 12 (necropolis) were all ghoulified was they were just down the road from the West-Tek facility that was the source of the mutated FEV-- therefore they got a strong-ass dose of the stuff and radiation when the Vault's door and ventilation systems didn't seal properly.
This was the original Post-Fallout-2 explanation for ghouls (and also most mutants in the wasteland) and I think it stands up the best to scrutiny rather than just "Rads embiggen, lol", because it relies on a science-fiction macguffin nobody can really scrutinize the workings of, 'cos its workings are unknown. You can't say what FEV really does mechanically, you just know it has results, like how nobody knows what Estus really is, they just know it heals, you know?
The FEV has no part in the creation of ghouls. The reason the Master needs radiation free subjects is because high levels of radiation causes the DNA to corrupt and creates shitty mutants like centaurs, he tells you this when you talk to him. Harold is not a ghoul, he mentions this in Fallout 2 and there's no mention of him being a ghoul in the original game he just says he fell into a vat and passed out and when he woke up he looked all fucked up.
Everything about the FEV having anything to do with ghouls is fanwank which was only ever mentioned in the Fallout Bible, which is not canon.
Quick headcanon for recoil on laser weapons:
Its a useful side effect of a venting system.
To generate a laser beam that can do significant damage in one "burst" it needs to be be able to convert all that energy in the micro fusion batteries into heat, as a consequence of this change, some of that energy is left behind in the gun in the form of heat and it needs to rapidly cool because if it doesn't, after a few shots it's going to turn your own body and everyone within 500ft into superheated ash
With every trigger pull, the "receiver" forces all excess heat downwards, out of the gun.
This was done for two reasons.
First, it's generally the safer direction to vent (left or right would cause your aim to be off, and might cause harm to allies standing nearby, and venting up could also be hazardous, especially in CQC situations.
The second reason is that the quick vent intentionally mimics the recoil of ballistic firearms, which is great for the soldiers who have to go through training.
Start your soldiers off with cheap ballistic weapons for training, practice or whatever, then once they become professional soldiers they can upgrade to a more powerful weapon the USA actually wanted to implement which means they wouldn't need to "unlearn" how to handle recoil.
This also effects the civilian population, in the event of filthy communist China ever setting foot on the GOOD OL' USA the civilians with knowledge of common ballistic firearms can pick up the laser weaponry in defence of THIS GREAT NATION and still have some knowledge of how to effectively use it.
It's not just fanwank, it was one of two competing views of things within Black Isle's writing team. The Lieutenant in Fallout 1 has the view that the FEV is messing up their mutants and tells you how he and the Master disagree on the subject. I don't think it's mentioned anywhere in the game that FEV could play a part in the creation of ghouls, though. It was one avenue things could've gone down when canon was still being decided.
Also centaurs aren't created from humans that are too radioactive, they're made when they just throw a bunch of crap into the vats to see what happens. They're the hot dogs of the fallout beastiary.
Yeah centaurs are like amalgamations of multiple organisms spliced together with FEV. The centaurs in fallout 1 actually have two heads, with the hound head occasionally snapping at the human one.
I fucking love that kind of body horror weirdness.
Todd howard said how west virginia is actually the place where military secrets and stuff are kept OTL so maybe he went with that and the X-01s are prototypes for the APA. Not exactly a stretch when there’s a Presidential bunker and other form of important military stuff there.
The Minutemen weren't a standing army like the NCR. The vast majority of Minutemen were just settlers who agreed to come to the defence of their neighbours. Once the Minutemen fell they just became regular settlers. The only city the Minutemen controlled was Quincy, which was sacked by the Gunners and then taken over. All the surviving, dedicated Minutemen died on the journey from Quincy to Concord.
Afaik the 3 major Minutemen outposts were the Castle, Diamond City, and Quincy. The Castle was invaded by Mirelurks, Quincy was invaded by Gunners, and I guess the remnants in Diamond City had faded away by that time.
I don't think Quincy was a permanent Minutemen stronghold, though. The ones that were there were just responding to Sturges's call for support, spurred by Mama Murphy's vision of an oncoming attack. It does seem kind of strange that there's not a singular outpost of any kind, though. Colonel Hollis and Preston seemed to be dedicated Minutemen (meaning they weren't farmers who also fought or anything), and I doubt they were the only ones in Hollis's company. Other than Hollis's group, though, the only ones I can think of are the surviving Minutemen force who moved in to Libertalia and turned raider. It's probable that the Minutemen who weren't in Hollis group either returned to being "settlers," joined the Gunners, or became raiders. There's also a fair amount of small outposts and ruined farms dotting the map that may have belonged to or been protected by the Minutemen prior to their fall.
The one's in Diamond probably ended up forming the basis for the guards and when Mayor McDonutSynth took charge he probably used his influence to slowly remove them.
Even then isn't the the timeline for when they defended there like 100 years ago?
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