Dear Bethesda,
I figured it out. Your biggest mistake. The biggest
Failure, with fallout seventy sex... Seventy sex oh my god... *beep* your biggest failure with fallout 76.
Was it the nylon trash bags that you-*WHEEZE* I'm still laughing about fallout seventy sex *laughs*
Your biggest failure with fallout 76... was it the nylon trash bags that you claimed would be canvas when you charge people
$200 for the collector's edition, or was it when you thought only 500 Adams your custom game currency amounting to roughly
$5 (which was barely enough to buy anything at all on your e-shop) would somehow
Smooth this over, or maybe it was at one time
you accidentally doxxed a bunch of your own customers,
Or maybe it was all the weird things like including the Brotherhood of Steel in your game
even though they weren't supposed to be in the area for several decades yet, or the constant server crashes game crashes lost two saves t-poses,
The steep discounts after a month (week) of release?!
none of these things, EVERYTHING pales in comparison to the biggest, baddest, most
DEPRESSING mistake in the entire game... the trees
Get it? because of all the *stumbles over words*
Alright, let me explain. This is a question people have been asking me ever since they SAW the trailers for the game, Austin
Why are all the trees green?? heck even Matt himself asked me about this! This is kind of the reverse of the question
Why are all the trees dead in Fallout 4 when it's been 200 years since the bombs dropped, because Fallout 76 takes place only
25 years after the Great War, and I've been crunching the numbers on this and things are...
NOT good one might even say they're... Wait is... is Youtube nearby. Anybody... see youtube...
Anywhere. Ok, I think I think we're good. Ok. All right. *throat clear* one might even say they're GOD DA-
-FYING!
Alright first, let's go over the lore a bit more and lay the foundations for our
examination of this topic. On October 23rd 2077 in the Fallout universe, a big bad nuclear war broke out across the world known as the
Great war. I've covered this a few times here and there and every-which-where
Because the Fallout franchise is to me as five nights at Freddy's is to Matpat... sort of someday... I'll catch up
ANYWAY
There are these things called Vaults that were made to shelter people from the
Impending nuclear holocaust and a lot of them SUCKED, but if you want to know about that
You'll have to watch like... some other video than this one because this is about one of the few vaults that wasn't designed to be
A terrible, sadistic, cartoonishly evil human torture device and everyone that entered it in 2077
exited it when the vault opened 25 years later into the
abandoned wastes of West Virginia according to the Fallout 1 manual the bombs that were used primarily during the war were between
200 and
750 kilotons in yield several times stronger than the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
But by and large not the worst that we've tested on this planet, they were used primarily for two reasons one,
They're cheaper than bigger bombs, and two they create more
Localized fallout. The radioactive dust and payload aerosols that are dispersed when a nuclear weapon explodes, now to the trees
Radioactivity is really, REALLY bad for all organisms,
PERIOD. The argument though is that most radioactive fallout should have dispersed by 200 years after the war, but only
25?! Is that even possible?!
Well actually... Yes.
You may think of areas like Chernobyl or even Fukushima where nuclear power plant disasters called meltdowns happen,
Which is basically when the controlled fission used to generate power becomes
UNcontrolled and runaway chain reactions literally caused the uranium or plutonium
To melt through their containment units and cause steam
explosions, dispersing aerosolized radioactive materials everywhere, Chernobyl will remain
Uninhabitable for hundreds of years, IF NOT LONGER, and the clean-up Fukushima is making progress, but it still... ain't great
But the thing is that nuclear power plants are
Fundamentally different from nuclear bombs. They take advantage of the same nuclear physics, of course
but by design
nuclear power plants burn through their energy
Slowly while bombs burn through them very quickly, also bombs have a lot less radioactive
Components in them than a power plant, So there's generally less contamination when they explode now nuclear power plants being
Unmaintained due to the collapse of society and therefore melting down is a possibility for contamination,
but I checked all the power plants and fallout 76 and none of them are hot at all meaning there were no meltdowns here.
This isn't hugely surprising since just now and 2018
Modern nuclear power plants are designed in such a way that meltdowns are practically impossible, and I imagine in a much more nuclearized
society with more time to perfect things this
Technology would be much more progressed on top of that
If you look around the entire map, you will find no blast damage and no crater meaning that in this entire
29.7 square kilometer map, a distance I calculated by going to the Morgantown high school and running the length of the basketball court,
Which would be a regulation high school court at 84 feet or 25 point six meters getting my run speed
calculated at eleven point eight three feet or three point six meters per second and using this to determine the length is a markers you
Can place in game three point five feet or a little over a meter and then using that to measure the pixels of the map,
I... uhhhh...
Forgot where I was
Going with this but the square area will matter later. I promise. Oh, right
There's not a single bomb that was dropped in this entire region
all the damage is from random explosions from Raiders fighting looting and general infrastructure neglect seems a bit extreme for
25 years of inactivity when nobody's alive, but
Whatever, so it turns out that the trees being lush and green actually
Makes a lot of sense, right?
Wrong because we forgot to talk about one thing, one of the most important things on the entirety of planet Earth. Water.
Anybody who's been in the fallout wasteland knows that water is one of the most dangerous substances in the game.
And In fall at 76 a game where you have a health and thirst meter that needs tended to you also know that you have
no choice
But to interact with it just swimming in this stuff
Doses you with a whopping TEN rads per second. Now a minute of in-game time actually lasts three real-world seconds
So this isn't quite as bad as it seems but you're still getting dosed with a whopping half a rad per second in that case
while it doesn't seem like a lot you have to keep in mind that it only takes about
1,000 rads and about five in-game minutes of exposure to drop over dead which means that rads and fallout are
very similar in lethality to real-life rads where doses between 600 and
3,000 rads can kill you in minutes rads measure
Absorbed radiation. So they don't technically mean how much radiation is in the air
But how much you're actually getting hit with radiation comes in three primary forms alpha beta and gamma alpha radiation
Created by alpha decay is what's created when a heavy unstable
Atom falls apart and loses a single helium nucleus at a very high speed this radiation is the least dangerous
Kind because it can't penetrate very far like it stopped by clothes and paper and even your own skin in theory alpha radiation
Can cause a lot of damage if it's in huge amounts in the form of radiation burns?
But generally you have to eat or breathe alpha radiation into your body
In order for it to do real damage. Beta particles are similar but their electrons so slightly more penetrative. And yes
I hear you giggling in a back of the class there
But if you like penetration, like deep into your organs penetration, nothing tops gamma rays
Which are photons the same particles that make up visible light, but at a really high energy level now
It's really uncommon for there to be just one form of radiation the expulsion of helium atoms via alpha decay
frequently ejects
Electrons because the nucleus is no longer strong enough to hold on to them and gamma rays because there's excess energy to get rid of
So they just kind of go hand in hand.
Now these forms of radiation are dangerous because they can I annoys the atoms in your cells completely changing how they function sometimes
the point of causing something as slow acting as cancer or straight-up causing enough damage to enough cells to cause
Organ failure imagine radiation hitting your brain, for example that could kill you in no time gamma rays
Meanwhile, essentially cook you alive from the inside out... FUN!! In order for there to be radiation present
There has to be unstable atoms nearby and after a nuclear bomb. It's really clear where they came from
So there's gotta be radioactive particles in the water. And these radioactive particles are probably plutonium.
*stumbles over words again* Why, why would I say that? Well, it's because of radioactive half-lives fission bombs aren't 100% efficient
So there's often leftover nuclear materials from the initial payload
and while many nuclear byproducts are created when they go off most of them either have really short half-lives of a handful of minutes or
really long ones like in the millions of years, for example
Uranium-235 has a half-life of 700 and 3.8 million years meaning that. Yeah, it'll be around for a long time
But also means you need a ton of it in order for it to be dangerous
plutonium-239 meanwhile has a half-life of only
24,000
110 years right in the sweet spot where it won't decay right away
But can still be decaying at a rate regular enough to cause some damage
Now the rads you experienced from swimming in the water
Pretty much has to come from gamma rays in order for them to be able to kill you that fast if they were
Alpha rays the water itself would likely
Deflect and absorb it all before it even touched your skin beta rays might get you eventually but they just give you a mild sunburn
gamma rays meanwhile travel much further in water
Now given that rads are dependent upon mass
we're gonna have to figure out how much energy you're absorbing in order to figure out how many atoms of
Plutonium-239 are floating in the water an average human weighing 75 kilograms absorbing 1,000 rads or 10
Grays is 750 joules or two point four six nine five joules per second or fifteen point four trillion mega electron
Volts per second amounting to a grand total of four point six eight quadrillion mega electron volts to kill you
Which means that in the five point, oh six in game minutes, it takes you to die three hundred and sixty trillion
Plutonium-239 atoms need to decay as each atom releases 13 mega
volts of gamma-ray energy per split but it gets worse because that's only however many atoms are splitting in any given moment not how many
need to be there because atomic half-life is an average of how likely atoms are to split in any given time period so we gotta divide that 360 trillion atoms by 300 3.7 to get
How many atoms are splitting for a second 1.1 8 trillion multiply those by 31 million five hundred fifty six thousand nine hundred and twenty
6.08 the exact number of seconds in a year to calculate how many atoms are splitting in a year multiply that by twenty four thousand
one hundred and ten years to get the exact number of atoms that split within the half-life where half the atoms that are good a
fission have
Fizzed
then multiply that by two and finally we're gonna know how many atoms are surrounding the character in any given moment, 1.8 septillion atoms of
Plutonium-239 weighing just shy of three grams, but we're still not done because water attenuates signals
And we need to know the total amount of suspended particles in the water
Not just whatever happens to be near you which means given that for every seven centimeters of distance we have to account for the energy
being halved which means in short that atoms that are seven centimeters away have to be twice as common as they are right against your
Skin to be as powerful
We take this out by taking the average height depth and width of a human measuring out seven centimeters from that calculating the volume
multiplying the 1.8 trillion atoms that need to fission by
1.5 to get an average and divide that by the volume to get an average density of
plutonium per cubic meter of water
one point four one three four five times ten to the twenty fifth power atoms per cubic meter of water or
23 grams of the stuff per cubic meter is not a small amount a small koi pond would have about a pound of
Plutonium in it, but no problem. You say I just won't drink the water or swim. I'll drink rainwater
clear
Refreshing rainwater to which I say if there were no bombs drop of the area where the crap that all this come from
That's right the rain
Remember when i told you that the area of the map would be important later if we highlight all the bodies of water and measure their area and
Give them an average depth of 1.5 meters
That means there's over 1.1 billion liters of standing natural water in this area meaning at the start of the game
There's over
26,000 kilograms or over
55,000 pounds of plutonium
dissolved throughout the map meaning an average of
1040 kilograms of plutonium
Falls per year West Virginia has an average of 0.99 meters of rainfall per year
meaning that per year 29 billion litres of water rains down here or over
735 billion liters over 25 years in order to deposit this much plutonium
That means that the rain itself has to have a density of points zero zero three
Oh, six seven seven four six one four two micrograms per cubic meter of plutonium in it
That means that it's a drinking only seventy five million seven hundred and eighty eight thousand five hundred and thirty nine
Raindrops of water before you fell over dead sounds like a lot until you consider that's only six hundred and fifty seven liters
Which of you drinks the recommended two liters per day means you drop that in less than a year
So yeah turns out these trees may for some reason be green now
But they won't be green ten years from now and vault-tec and by extension
Bethesda totally screwed you over by locking you out of the fall only 25 years after the bombs drop as the rain
continues to fall and
continues to deposit more plutonium
These lakes will eventually go critical they won't explode but they'll go from giving you points five rads a second to over
1000 these trees are gonna die soon
And if your character manages to survive somehow their kids definitely won't not unless you make a lot of radaway
Like a lot because you are screwed
otherwise
nobody in this valley is gonna live more than 50 years and soon it'll be just like the glowing sea and fallout 4 turns out
Even if an area wasn't bombed directly can still be rendered totally boned by nukes dropped elsewhere
In fact for my calculations if the bombs had a similar efficiency of the 15% to the fat man
It had take no less than 200 eleven bombs worth of
Leftover plutonium to radiate in area this badly. So, you know, that's fun
West Virginia being in such a terrible state
even though no bombs are dropped there means that the rest of the united states must be way, WAY worse like just
TERRIBLE it's you know, have fun with that one
sincerely, Austin
Subtitles credited to Fire Dream. Thanks for watching!