Fallout Tech Evaluations

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Avrjoe
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Fallout Tech Evaluations

Post by Avrjoe »

I was reading a crossover fic and it made me wonder what the scale was of the Zetan mothership. I'm having trouble figuring out what size it is I think I could load up the game and give a measuring it a shot but thought I'd check and see if anyone has already done this.

I saw several attempts to model how powerful the Death Ray was from the cutscene where it is fired at Canada. the figures I've seen vary from 20,000 Megatons* to some wildly different numbers on Space Battles. I have always found better laid out and explained calculations out here.

My interest grew so I braced myself for dealing with severe annoyance and watched several Youtube articles calculating the power of Fallout energy weapons. They seem to focus too much on the outliers like that lasers can ash a subject on a critical hit verses the more constant performance of the weapons. Like here https://nerdist.com/fallout-4s-laser-we ... ing-bolts/ and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUBEYl1l5E0.

*The guy who calculated 20,000 is here https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/commen ... ship_zeta/
I used to be Median but life has made me Mean.
Avrjoe
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Re: Fallout Tech Evaluations

Post by Avrjoe »

I did some measurements and I think I have the ships size now I used this image to determine a portion of the ship that could be seen during the space walk EVA and from another picture of he whole ship.
https://imgur.com/cwtSr6u
The reinforcement on that structure seems to be about 2 meters. Measuring that on the larger picture using a friend's photoshop compared to the overall length.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/fal ... 0902144924
I come out with about 530 Meters wide at the middle disk by about 200 meters tall.

Small for a Star Wars ship but respectable for a Star Trek one. It takes 3 solid hits from the main gun to kill a ship of the same type in the end of the game so it's defense is not great compared to it's offense.
I used to be Median but life has made me Mean.
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Sea Skimmer
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Re: Fallout Tech Evaluations

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Avrjoe wrote: 2018-12-18 09:51pm Small for a Star Wars ship but respectable for a Star Trek one. It takes 3 solid hits from the main gun to kill a ship of the same type in the end of the game so it's defense is not great compared to it's offense.
Well it's not too unreasonable for a ship not to be protected against it's own main weapon if its only armed with a single main weapon. Kinda like how a destroyer in WW2 probably wouldn't survive one of it's own torpedoes, and certainly would not survive three of them.

No actual logic says even a very advanced civilization has gotta have a good defense against it's own high power weapons, fired at point blank range no less. This probably means these Aliens would expect to fight at extremely long ranges were hit probabilities and accuracy becomes a major factor.

The problem with the big surface explosion is it doesn't behave like an explosion should, it's more of a death radius. A 20 gigaton blast for example would blow a lot of obvious stuff into orbit, this doesn't, so figuring out how much energy is required is a lot more complicated. The weapon is operating on some kind of non linear mechanism that lets it emmit directed energy on impact.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
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GrosseAdmiralFox
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Re: Fallout Tech Evaluations

Post by GrosseAdmiralFox »

I'll have to dig it out but there was a thread on SB about evaluating FO!US's military capabilities... and I was a major contributor...
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