Dear Bethesda,
Hi! It’s me, Austin! Look, we’ve been through this before, so let’s just skip
the foreplay. You know why I’m here. In fact, you may have seen this coming for a
while. I know I have. It comes up in the comments of almost every single letter I write to you.
You know what I’m talking about: fusion cores.
Actually, you’ve never responded to a single letter I’ve written to you other than blah
blah blah, ex parte this, Legal Counsel representing Mr. Howard that, so maybe you weren’t dreading
it at all. I know I have, however; fusion technology is a fucking beast to talk about
and work the math on, and I thought it would be an impossible topic to cover. And yet,
here we are. So, let’s get down to it and talk about the most advanced and surprisingly
badass piece of tech in the entire Fallout franchise.
Your fusion cores come up frequently because, well, some people don’t like them. People
like Runemaker and Game Crow are expecting me to rip your fusion cores to shreds in a
rant so spectacular that it ripples through the space-time continuum to the design board
7 years ago and convinces you to not put Fusion cores into the game at all. And to understand
why I think this is, first we’re going to have to talk about the lore of Fusion technology
in Fallout, the science behind real nuclear fusion, and a whole host of other things so
fucking cool they have to be measured in kelvin. Anybody? Anybody? No. I’ll just. Alright.
Fusion technology has been at the heart of the Fallout Franchise since its inception,
with microfusion being the darling of the series. Microfusion cells were the answer
to the huge energy demands of weapons like laser rifles, plasma rifles, and even the
giant gatling lasers. Microfusion cells are described as self-contained fusion reactors,
and are analogous to batteries, and, for the most part, this has remained consistent across
the various franchises, all the way up to and including Fallout 4.
But what is a fusion reactor? Well, it’s a place where fusion reactions happen.
Okay. That’s not helpful. But it’s true. More specifically, though, in terms of energy
and power, a fusion reactor is a method for creating harnessable electricity from controlled
fusion reactions. In order to understand this fictional technology a bit better, though,
let’s look at something that’s very, very real in our world: nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants create energy the same way we’ve been creating energy for generations:
boiling water. No, seriously. A modern-day nuclear reactor basically works by engineers
chucking a hunk of enriched uranium in a bucket of water so it heats the water up. Eventually,
the water boils into steam--this steam pushes turbines, which in turn transform kinetic
energy into electricity.
Nuclear power plants take advantage of the energy released by nuclear fission, which
is the polar opposite of nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission is honestly pretty complicated, and
there’s many, many types, but at a basic level it’s just an atom falling apart. When
these atomic particles separate, energy is released, and in the case of Uranium-235,
this energy is consistent, predictable, and harnessable for the slow creation of electricity
in a nuclear powerplant, or can be weaponized and forced to undergo fission rapidly, releasing
nearly all of its energy all at once, and we all know how that story goes.
Fusion, by contrast, isn’t atoms breaking apart because they can’t hold themselves
together, but actually two atoms smashing into one another to form a new, heavier atom.
And while we haven’t quite figured out how to induce controlled fusion for the purposes
of creating power, we’ve still managed to make it happen anyway. We haven’t found
a way to make fusion so that it produces more energy than it takes to create it, although
in the 1970s, the PACER project briefly considered detonating hydrogen bombs underground and
using their energy to heat water. Do not mix cocaine with engineering!
The biggest hurdles with nuclear fusion are the immense amounts of energy that are needed
to create the conditions that make fusion possible, containing the materials, and finding
a way to extract the energy itself. If it’s such a pain in the ass, why are Scientists
throwing themselves at the problem every day, trying to figure out a way to make it work?
Because the energy released by nuclear fusion is incredibly high, and the materials used
in it are incredibly abundant AND clean. The easiest atoms to fuse are hydrogen atoms,
and hydrogen is fucking everywhere. It’s just littering our planet. Turn on the faucet,
and it’s there. Uranium, by contrast, can be a bitch to find, and making enriched uranium
is even more of a bitch, and it leaves behind tons of radioactive garbage once it’s been
depleted. After Hydrogen’s been completely fused, all that’s left is non-radioactive
helium, hydrogen, and a few dangerous neutrons, but nothing compared to Uranium, and nothing
that couldn’t be disposed of easily.
In order for fusion to happen, materials have to be heated up until they become plasma.
And then they have to be heated up even more, so that the atoms are moving fast-as-fuck
and are more likely to slam into each other. How hot is hot? Well, it depends on what you’re
trying to fuse, but it ranges from 100 million kelvin, four times hotter than the core of the fucking sun, to over
1 Billion kelvin, the temperature the universe was for several seconds during and after the
big bang. Stars can create fusion at lower temperatures because they make up with their
relative chilliness with incredible pressures we couldn’t hope to ever replicate on our
planet.
Keeping something that’s 100 million kelvin in a bottle is no easy feat. But we’re not
here to look into that. At all. If I had the answers on how to reliably produce nuclear
fusion for the purposes of meaningful energy, I wouldn’t be making YouTube videos right
now, I’d be sipping margaritas at my personal villa carved into the side of Cerro de la
Silla mountain overlooking Monterrey. The point is, at some point in the history
of Fallout’s world, Pre-war Scientists and engineers not only solved the problem of creating
centralized fusion power plants, but also found a way to reduce this technology into
distributable, high-energy-density consumer and military power units in the form of microfusion
cells and fusion cores.
Fast-forward to Fallout 4, and we’re ejecting and slapping fusion cores into suits of power
armor and gatling lasers at a somewhat-alarming rate, something that comes as a bit of a surprise
to those of us who have played other games in the franchise and are used to wantonly
running around in Power Armor without any consequences. More alarming, even, is that
fusion cores seem to be operating without problems for 100’s of years, and then dissipate
in what feels like minutes once inserted into a suit of power armor. What’s actually going
on here? Well, in order to figure that out, we’re going to have to do some SCIENCE.
What’s in a Fusion Core? Hydrogen. Probably. Why hydrogen? Well, it’s abundant, sure,
but it’s also the easiest element to fuse and contain. Fusion can be initiated at comparatively
low temperatures of 100 Million Kelvin. Scientists in our real world are particularly interested
in two specific isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. Normal hydrogen is pretty simple.
It’s about as simple as you can get, actually. It’s just one proton surrounded by one electron.
Goody. Deuterium, however, has an extra neutron tacked onto it, and tritium has two. And when
these two atoms collide, they form Helium-4, and release an assload of energy. Okay, actually
it’s almost no energy at all per fusion, a paltry 17.59 mega-electron volts, which
is such a small amount of energy I can’t give you something to compare to. It’s nothing.
But you take a shitton of these atoms, which are pretty damned light, and fuse them together?
That energy starts to add up quickly. And all you need is some pure deuterium gas, since
deuterium can fuse with itself to create tritium. Of course, having all these atoms together
doesn’t mean they’re going to fuse exactly how you want them to, and deuterium goes through
something called a cycle, which is all the possible fusions it can make, which thankfully
is pretty small. Thankfully, you can take all these possible reactions and add their
power output together, which will give you a pretty accurate average of how much energy
you’ll get per six deuterium atoms you have in your gas, which is 43.2 Mega-electronvolts.
So it’s pretty safe to say that the gas being used in fusion cores is deuterium. But
how much is in there? Well, in order to figure that out, we have to figure out how much energy
is in a fusion core. Impossible, you say? OhohoHO, do I have some fucking surprises
for you. Sit your ass down, strap yourself in, and get ready for shit to get awesome.
Of course, fusion generators were added into Fallout 4’s Wasteland Workshop add-on, and
I could’ve probably built one and connected a bunch of lightbulbs to it in order to estimate
its power, but that would’ve required me to learn the settlement system so fuuuuuuuck
that shit.
You see, fusion cores power power armor, sure, but they also power the heavy gatling laser
weapon. Our gatling laser is the key to our fusion core’s energy potential, but we need
something to compare to. Gatling lasers are, effectively, the science fiction answer to
miniguns, an actual weapon we have in our real world. So, I opened up one of my Survival
games, where weapon damage is more realistic, and spawned and murdered a bunch of raiders
at point blank range, recorded how many shots it took to kill them, did the same thing with
the gatling laser, and averaged all my answers. I killed 50 Raider veterans with each weapon,
and the gatling laser is actually quite a bit stronger than the minigun. 1.785 times,
in fact.
Real world miniguns fire 7.62x51mm NATO rounds and deliver a terrifying 3304 joules of energy
per round. Miniguns in the Fallout world, however, fire 5mm rounds, which, thankfully,
are much less intense, and are going to make our numbers manageable. The rare 5mm Remington
ammunition delivers 504 joules in a fraction of a second. So if we take this and multiply
it by our handy 1.785, we get a whopping 899 joules per shot for our gatling laser. Delivered
over the same amount of time, this means that the gatling laser is delivering a 2.06 MEGAwatts.
That means in less time you can blink, this laser is delivering the same power of a LMS
class locomotive train engine. Maximising power efficiency with all the nuclear physicists
perks, a fusion core has an average of 624 shots per core, bringing our total wattage
at 1.28 over a quarter of a second, the power output of a fucking hydroelectic dam.
I know, that sounds intense and impossible, but it’s a surprisingly achievable level
of energy, even today. The wattage is a bit extreme, but that’s the amount of energy
in a lithium-ion battery weighing a surprisingly light pound-and-a-half, less than a kilogram!
So in order to--what’s that? Shit. I’m running out of time? Fuck. I have--have you
seen my spreadsheet? I have so much more to go. Okay. Fuck. Alright. Just, let me, one
sec. Cue the music. No, not that music, the--the, fuck you, you know the music. Yes, that music,
thank you, jesus. Ahem.
Knowing how much energy and power our gatling laser, we can work our way backwards and figure
out how much energy is in our fusion cores. Lasers are notoriously lossy means of energy
delivery, which is why energy weapons haven’t taken off in our world, and on a good day
usually waste over 60% of their energy in heat into the source generating them, but
let’s say they made lasers more efficient in the world of Fallout, and waste only 40%
of their energy. In order to find out how much energy is used we just multiply energy
delivered by 1.4, and to change that from joules to mega-electronvolts, we multiply
by Avogadro’s constant to get a number in the quintillions. Divide that by the number
of mega-electronvolts created per deuterium cycle to get how many fusion cycles it would
take to create that amount of energy, multiply that number by six--the number of atoms used
per cycle-- to determine how many deuterium atoms in total it will take to create that
much energy, divide that number by two to get how many molecules of D2 aka 2H2 aka gas
that is, since D2 gas is two deuterium molecules bound together, divide by Avogadro’s constant--yes
I know this process could probably be simplified--to get how many moles of gas that is, which you
can use to determine how much mass that much gas will make up. Almost none, great. Fractions
of a gram, and fractions of a pound. Cool.
*deep breath*
Of course this isn’t the only factor to consider, and presuming that fusion is created
on-demand to meet energy demands, this means the gas is going to need to be kept at a state
of near-fusion, which requires energy to maintain. Since the most readily available form of energy
is in the cell itself, it stands to reason that fusion is used to sustain the heat and
run the processes. This means over time there will be a power draw and a loss of fusible
atoms. Since all power cores were created at least 210 years before Fallout 4, we can
presume that they have enough deuterium gas in them to maintain fusion for 210 years,
PLUS the gas that’s used by the core itself in the game. To determine this draw, I took
a percentage of one cycle’s worth of atoms consumed to create energy for one shot from
the gatling laser, turned that into atoms-per-second consumed, and atoms-per-year, and atoms-per-210
years. I added this on top of our other gas, giving us the amount of hydrogen cores consume
in total from the time the bombs were dropped in 2077 all the way until they’re discharged
fully in 2287 in Fallout 4.
I then hopped in a suit of power armor and depleted three cores, one by just running
around at normal speed, one while sprinting nonstop, and a third by jetpack. This gave
me time in real world seconds it took to deplete the core with various activities. Knowing
the total energy in the core and knowing that one real-world second is actually 20 seconds,
I was able to determine power-draw in watts power armor actually has, 9.63 watts for just
running around, 109.17 watts for sprinting, and a feisty 1,106.42 watts for the jetpack.
*deep breath*
Applying hydrogen degradation time plus an average-use-per-day model with three wattage
buckets, I was actually able to paint a picture for usage time for all Four Fallout games
prior to Fallout 4, with a single core lasting 63 years in Fallout 1, 23 years in Fallout
2, 5 years in Fallout 3, and 3 years in Fallout New Vegas. Somewhat troubling, however, is
that this means that fusion cores are scheduled to all be completely expired 62 days after
the start of Fallout 4, whether they’ve been used or not due to the amount of hydrogen
that’s depleted to maintain plasma state. The life of the cores could be extended with
the inclusion of a lithium-ion chemical battery, which has an energy density of .876 megajoules-per-kilogram,
but eventually this would bleed away as well, leaving the world without fusion cores and,
incidentally, the Brotherhood of Steel completely impotent in the face of the Institute unless
they could find a way to refuel them.
Interestingly, I applied the same numbers to brand new cores manufatured in 2077 and
discovered that with average-to-heavy use of 12 hours a day, a brand new fully-charged
core would last 105 fucking years, which is almost exactly the amount of time writers
in Fallout 1 said the fuel in power armor would last. The biggest danger is the failure
of components. Likely safeguards were put in place, but should they fail any number
of extraordinarily fucking terrible things could happen. Best case scenario the core
simply goes cold, but if containment fails then the core would turn into a rocket projectile
shooting face-meltingly hot plasma all over anybody unfortunate enough to be close, and
if fusion regulators fail and let fusion go unchecked it could release all the remaining
energy at once, resulting at, best blowing up the person using it and anyone nearby,
and at worst turning the surrounding city block into a crater of molten rubble and powderized
flesh.
Anyway, it turns out your Fusion Cores are actually pretty legit, Bethesda. I’m surprised.
I’m also entirely certain you didn’t put this much thought into it. In either case,
I really think people may need to consider not complaining about a piece of technology
that still manages to work after being abandoned for two centuries. Apple could take a page
out of your book.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
Do you know that I used to do web design work? I hated it. Seriously. I mean, there’s not
just the problem with getting one thing wrong with CSS or HTML and having to spend two hours
finding the broken bracket, but there’s also cross-site optimization, and clients
who, for some fucking reason, were still using Internet Explorer 6 in 2014. What’s the
matter with you?! Anyway. When I got married, I actually made a website for it, but I didn’t
want to deal with the headache for something that was supposed to be so much fun. So I
made our site with Squarespace, which is why I was totally pumped when they approached
us to sponsor this episode. Squarespace makes it incredibly easy to make a website with
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you sign up you get a free domain name. If you wanna start a free trial, head on over
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Oh, also, head on over to our Twitch channel, twitch.tv/shoddycast. Starting at 10 AM I’m
going to be finishing up my playthrough of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and then later in
the week I’ll be creating a poll for what you guys want to see next.