Soooo....is it just me or is Fallout steampunk just in a different era?

OK friend, there is steam punk, diesel punk, atom punk, and solar punk
They all have different aesthetics, it all is just different ways to power fantastical technology.
So to put it frankly, you are wrong. But that's OK, I love you just the way you are and everyone makes mistakes.

It's definitely handwaved, but the only way nuclear is a power source is by harnessing the heat that they emit and transforming that into some other kind of energy. Unless you're positing that it's some kind of ultra efficient thermo-electrical compound that's making this transition, it's heat>mechanical>electric, and the absolute best way to do that is with steam.

That is what I'm positing, because there doesn't appear to be anything else going on. I just don't see how there could possibly be room for any kind of mechanical turbine inside one of these, least of all something powered by steam.

it'd probably be in the mechanisms that they power, otherwise, you could easily fit something like that in there.

It's not, the batteries are specifically referred to as miniature nuclear reactors. More importantly, most of the stuff they power has no room to fit a turbine or dynamo.

The batteries themselves are only a few inches long, and only about an inch or two across. Exploding when you burn them is compelling evidence for them being filled with water to a certain amount, but I just don't think a mechanical steam dynamo could output the energy these things do at that scale.

The microprocessor was never invented, while nuclear fusion was, and was used much more extensively.

Throw some radiation in and that's literally all there is to it.

radioactive coolant cycles out after extracting moisture from the air.

>Settings are definitely a Veeky Forums topic.

We'll see about that.

>but I just don't think a mechanical steam dynamo could output the energy these things do at that scale.
In fairness, we can't really go too much on realism because radioactive material doesn't get spent that way.

You can use the photons from radioactive decay to operate photovoltaics. There are already patents for these sorts of devices for use in satellites.

That's stupidly inefficient...like amazingly stupidly inefficient to the point of never being a viable method.

Based on what exactly?

Actually no. It's not. It obviates the entire middle step of the process, which is what your entire troll thread is predicated upon. I think your problem with all of this (setting aside for a moment that you acknowledged the hand waving), is that you didn't get the kind of response you were hoping for and are just now being contrary to make it seem less stupid and sad than you actually are. Eliminating mechanical transfer actually increases efficiency because you aren't losing any energy to work or thermal dissipation, dumb ass.

atompunk is a pretty small part of the fallout setting though, at least until bethesda took it and went full mong with it

imo, the top 3 influences in fallout 1 and 2 were:

1. 80's and 90's pop culture like cyberpunk and mad max (see: the world is mainly desert, weapons are often movie inspired like the .223 pistol and the sawn off, various pop culture refrences)
2. cold war jingoism and propaganda (vault boy, enclave, geck, etc.)
3. atompunk (the occasional old timey songs, some robot designs, nuclear stuff)

i think tim cain explained that he had the funny idea of making a world that's thematically based on the silly "duck and cover" cartoons of the 50's, but in the actual design process he and his team had a bunch of 80's and 90's movies playing on tv in the background as the main source of inspiration. like they would just watch mad max 2 on repeat and then a guy would say "holy shit we should put mel brooks' leather jacket into the game"

Yeah I would say so. But atompunk is its own genre. I guess at this point it's just quibbling over semantics.

Not to derail your thread OP but I actually like Steampunk. After listening to the Rush Clockwork Angels album I've been inspired to run a steampunk fantasy game and it's been going quite well. It blends "swords and sorcery" and "guns and machines" which I've always considered two separate spheres of action-story-ness. But I understand why most people hate it.

Personally I am not a fan of fallout, I prefer lower-tech post apocalypse. But that's just me.

>Actually no. It's not. It obviates the entire middle step of the process, which is what your entire troll thread is predicated upon. I think your problem with all of this (setting aside for a moment that you acknowledged the hand waving), is that you didn't get the kind of response you were hoping for and are just now being contrary to make it seem less stupid and sad than you actually are. Eliminating mechanical transfer actually increases efficiency because you aren't losing any energy to work or thermal dissipation, dumb ass.
I really don't care that people disagree. I thought it was an interesting response, but to actually address you and >5
But first, I'll say you're a piece of shit human being who has a terrible worldview.
Pv is, by its very nature extremely inefficient (as in under ideal conditions you can get almost 30% efficiency) and barring a literal unobtanium showing up that operates on wholly different chemistries, it won't get much more efficient. Using Pv near something radioactive is additionally a bad idea because efficiencies drop like a stone as temperatures rise.

I'm not going to bother going down the rabbit hole of dealing with the radiation itself (which is a long, complicated one that I doubt you can begin to understand because you're not even aware of how dead-end photovoltaic technology is or why it's dead ended). However, I will point out that you're just changing the middle process, not "obviating" it. And you're changing it to a less efficient one.

Derail away friend. These kinds of threads are best when they end up going off rails.

It's just you.

>like they would just watch mad max 2 on repeat and then a guy would say "holy shit we should put mel brooks' leather jacket into the game"
>mel brooks
>End of the World, Part I

Top kike user.

>And the first couple of fallouts were as Veeky Forums as computer games get.
So...they weren't Veeky Forums at all

Why is that man trying to shoot someone with a trumpet?

That is not how you play in a brass band. You can't even use your lips I'm that helmet

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>I'm not going to bother going down the rabbit hole of dealing with the radiation itself (which is a long, complicated one that I doubt you can begin to understand because you're not even aware of how dead-end photovoltaic technology is or why it's dead ended).

No, don't stop user. I want to hear about radiation from somebody that doesn't understand that the Shockley-Queisser limit is for solar cells, not photovoltaic devices, or that doesn't understand a portable energy source doesn't have to be more efficient than a building full of multi-ton machines to be practical.

>for solar cells, not photovoltaic devices

Wait, what? Wikipedia on photovoltaics:

>A typical photovoltaic system employs solar panels, each comprising a number of solar cells, which generate electrical power.

Explain yourself, user.

Yes, it's called Atomicpunk

Fool

All solar cells are photovoltaics. Not all photovoltaics are solar cells.

>Explain yourself, user.
He thinks that there are more efficient photovoltaic systems that are possible when the science just doesn't back that up.

Ah, okay. Thanks for clearing that up.

I see.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

ffs user. The limit for solar cell efficiency is specifically for singe junction devices using the solar spectrum. That is not the only type of photovoltaic device and not the only source of photons that can be used. For example, you can have multi-junction devices or be absorbing from something like a laser which can give efficiency higher than the ~30% of you see stated for solar cells.

And none of that is applicable to a microFUSION battery.

>I don't read my own sources
Atomic batteries usually have an efficiency of 0.1–5%. High efficiency betavoltaics have 6–8%.

steam boy

also there are a bunch of scifi books written during the industrial revolution and influenced by it, some of them are pretty good

i am pretty sure you can fit in all that shit with kraut space magic

Easily. The biggest problem would be dealing with waste heat.

gets redirected for more effeiciency

Yeah, just throw a couple Maxwell demons in there and all your power and efficiency problems are taken care of!

YOU BOYS WANT TO TALK ABOUT SOME TABBY TOP GAMES?

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Yeah, that's why started this thread...hoping to spark a conversation about settings and how they can evolve.

Instead, I have some persant shill for Pv tech that basically can't exist weighing us down.

Well screw all this nerd talk then! What were you thinking about it? I can see what you mean with the steampunk thing, it being a fetishization of technology and all, but what can we apply this to in terms of the setting?

I was actually hoping that someone either more creative or smarter than I would try to extend things even further.

>Instead, I have some persant shill for Pv tech that basically can't exist weighing us down.

Now I'm having Khyber flashbacks. But no, if it was him he'd have at least claimed some kind of doctorate or something by now.

>my amazing LED tech could save millions from starving, but fuck 'em, I'm not sharing

Where would you set your Fallout adventure?

why are people using "punk" ?

Alternate History sounds less cancerous.

anyway. Fallout is a mix of 50s Sci-fi and apocalyptic movies & comics from the 80s. And it works pretty well.

youtube.com/watch?v=4NkHQs7ann4

Toronto probably. There's bound to be a shitload of military stuff there because it's probably a beach-head for the Annexation of Canada. Also I live there so I know a lot about it.

That or Seattle.

Either way, nuclear winter.

...WEEEEELL, technically speaking, nuclear fission reactors create power through producing steam, but Fallout's Aesthetic is a mix of Dieselpunk and Raygun Gothic, with occasional references to the 80s and 90s.

Being far shorter and catchy counts for a lot, plus even Veeky Forums isn't spergy enough to give a shit about how "cancerous" something sounds, as if that even has any meaning.

I want a adventure that brings a group of Adventurers from west- to east coast.

There are a few places and factions mentioned in the games. Like the "80s" a gang that occupies the I-80 and uses Motorbikes.

Or maybe across the South. mutated rad-gators and ghoulified vodoo-priests..

the problem with "punk" is it gets automatically associated with fat-goth chicks and their shitty costumes in that style.

Is that what you think of? When I see punk the first thing that comes to mind are either japanese delinquents with duckbill pomps or the stereotypical pink mohawk shadowrunner.

>he can't tell the difference between goth and punk

im talking about steam&cyberpunk. and how it gets abused by attentionwhores.

But steampunk and cyberpunk both have two very different styles, despite being generally labelled punk. One focuses mainly on brass and noble victorian clothing, the other focuses on shiny lights and 80s and 90s clothing.

You know that there's more to both than just the look, right?

And that other user is talking about what the punk genre is automatically associated with. What more than the look causes automatic associations?

I was referring to the aesthetics. If you ask most people what "Steampunk" is they will think off the style of clothing.

exactly. And it is kinda sad.

All of the ones listed under "thermal converters" work based on a temperature differential, which would work assuming you are generating heat with your microFUSION. Feel free to keep moving the goal post though.

Percent level efficiency of nuclear reactions is still more energy than can be extracted from most chemical reactions. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are what get launched into space for the same reasons you would carry an RTG based power supply instead of chemical batteries or a steam powered electric generator.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley–Queisser_limit

You literally don't understand how photovoltaics work if you don't understand why the Shockley–Queisser limit only applies for solar cells and not for general opto-electronic device design. A photo-diode detector for a fiber-optic line is going to be a fuck-ton more efficient at converting the operating wavelength than some shitty poly-Si you wave at the sun, but they both operate using the photovoltaic effect in a semi-conductor.

Denim jackets and the sex pistols come to mind, honestly

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Tokyo

Texas
The cowboy stuff worked in New Vegas and I'd like more of it

>We have 500 warheads
>Lets nuke Boise

>We have 2000 warheads lets nuke Cheyenne to oblivion but ignore Boise

I am sure there's a reason for that but still funny.

It's nice to know that my home state (West Virginia) warrants more nukes than New York.

>Raygun Gothic aesthetic, set in the 50s. Or rather, the 50s idea of the future.
So FO3 was your first Fallout?

>That map

You're telling me that if a nuclear power had 500 warheads to launch at America, they'd fire one at fucking Springfield, Missouri? Is that really a high priority target? I guess it would hurt our national meth production...

It's a state capital - they're obviously trying to destabilize any form of government the US could reform itself from.

>>mel brooks
>>End of the World, Part I

I'd watch the fuck out of that.

That would be Jefferson City.

How would you go about statting the Fallout armour?

They're almost definitely passive collectors. Atomic batteries are already a thing.

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>linked post has been removed

kek.

Yeah no, it is, I saw some kekhold trying to act like discussing 40k vidya wasn't \tg\ either. Someone drop the Commander Keen meme on the newfriends?

>5436▶
>
>>And the first couple of fallouts were as Veeky Forums as computer games get.
>So...they weren't Veeky Forums at all
Oh my god it's this cuck.

Can't tell if they're too old and crotchety and never accepted the Commander Keen Meme Dream OR are a newfag policing what "is Veeky Forums," either way hilarious.

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Go back to eating your big pink cookies gaben.

>The microprocessor was never invented
untrue, it was invented, but late, and it was kept locked down by the US Government, used only in military applications until only a short time before the war when robotics companies were authorized to use it in the creation of consumer grade robots.

There are vast underground Federal facilities throughout Missouri. It's why that area around Kansas City gets like 6 nukes.

Seattle, Vancover Island, Norfolk, Hawaii, Guam, Yucatan peninsula, Cuba, Aspen Robotics Center. Or to realty take a leap, Shady Sands circa 2300, adding in a few more parts cyberpunk to fallout's formula.

The huge numbers of warheads aimed at nowheresville, USA in the 2k warhead scenario are strikes at the ICBM silos and the associated command infrastructures, which are hardened and would take several warheads to bust each individual site. With only 500 warheads you can't take the entire network out even if every bomb lands dead on target, so its not worth wasting strikes on. When you have 4 times as many though, you can hope to destroy the silos while a military significant number of ICBMs are still in the ground, so its worth giving up tertiary targets like Boise to get enough warheads aimed at the silos to bust them.

you cant really redirect heat, it radiates, you can move it once its there kind-of, but thats just called cooling.

That... that's not...

Ah, fuck it

Cool. Are they nuclear weapon sites, or what?

If it's different era, usually based on victorian themes and use of steam then it's not steampunk - but yes, Fallout is retro sci-fi, explained as world evolving technologically a bit different - transistors somehow weren't invented till very far future (2067) and people advanced in other areas while having to work around this limitation (that's why on one hand you have personal-scale plasma guns and AI, on the other average computers are shit, worse than average smartphone IRL). Generally, Fallout is kind of parody of future (at least the sci-fi and technological aspects of it are) as seen by population from around middle of last century - together with some other, social influences from that period.

>you cant really redirect heat
Different materials have different thermal conductivity and capacity. You can definitely make more thermal energy flow to one direction of a heated object if you contact it with metal on one side and polymer+glass on the other.

So now you're talking about a cooling module similar to what you'd find in a laptop. Those things are pretty big and only deal with 50-70 degrees centigrade y'know.

Thermal conduction is proportional to the thermal gradient. The hotter one end is relative to the colder end the more energy it transfers. Just because your laptop has a shitty little cooler doesn't mean more sophisticated designs wouldn't also work.

Strategic bomber wings are based there