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Aug. 5th, 2013 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynRandom realization about the Fallout universe, or at least about the setting on a day-to-day basis before the Great War:
When I first started playing Fallout 3 I found myself wondering where the air conditioners were on the prewar buildings. Not so much the houses- the house windows were all boarded up, so I assumed any AC units would have been pushed out to be used for scrap or something- but in the office buildings. The DC area gets hot in the summer, but every single office building- even the Congressional offices- had fans among the various world objects you couldn't pick up or interact with. I couldn't find any signs of central air conditioning vents, either. People in the prewar world apparently dealt with being overheated without AC, which had me wondering how far back the divergence went. The first US patent for an air conditioner was in 1906, to Willis Haviland Carrier, with earlier mechanical air cooling systems existing in 1902.
Then Fallout New Vegas came out and several buildings in the Vegas area had AC units sticking out of the windows. Well, okay. Room air conditioners existed; possibly central AC units did too and just weren't... maybe they had different vent styles. And the Vegas area was horrifically hot compared to the mere miserable heat I remembered from DC visits during the summer, so maybe it was just that AC had only really been popular in the hotter parts of the US.
It wasn't until about a week ago when I was wandering through CVS looking for some household cleaning supplies and passed through the seasonal goods aisle that it struck me. The Fallout universe was in the grip of a twenty-year-long energy crisis when the Great War finally hit. And what's the first thing utility companies do when things get hot? Beg people to reduce their load on the grid by either setting their AC units higher or switching to using fans.
(Mind you, the Great War happened in late October, which could also explain the absence of room AC in the DC region. On the other hand, the presence of fans in all of the office buildings would appear to indicate that it was a disgustingly hot October. Perhaps global warming was also in full force.)
When I first started playing Fallout 3 I found myself wondering where the air conditioners were on the prewar buildings. Not so much the houses- the house windows were all boarded up, so I assumed any AC units would have been pushed out to be used for scrap or something- but in the office buildings. The DC area gets hot in the summer, but every single office building- even the Congressional offices- had fans among the various world objects you couldn't pick up or interact with. I couldn't find any signs of central air conditioning vents, either. People in the prewar world apparently dealt with being overheated without AC, which had me wondering how far back the divergence went. The first US patent for an air conditioner was in 1906, to Willis Haviland Carrier, with earlier mechanical air cooling systems existing in 1902.
Then Fallout New Vegas came out and several buildings in the Vegas area had AC units sticking out of the windows. Well, okay. Room air conditioners existed; possibly central AC units did too and just weren't... maybe they had different vent styles. And the Vegas area was horrifically hot compared to the mere miserable heat I remembered from DC visits during the summer, so maybe it was just that AC had only really been popular in the hotter parts of the US.
It wasn't until about a week ago when I was wandering through CVS looking for some household cleaning supplies and passed through the seasonal goods aisle that it struck me. The Fallout universe was in the grip of a twenty-year-long energy crisis when the Great War finally hit. And what's the first thing utility companies do when things get hot? Beg people to reduce their load on the grid by either setting their AC units higher or switching to using fans.
(Mind you, the Great War happened in late October, which could also explain the absence of room AC in the DC region. On the other hand, the presence of fans in all of the office buildings would appear to indicate that it was a disgustingly hot October. Perhaps global warming was also in full force.)
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Date: 2013-08-06 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-06 01:29 pm (UTC)I'm still toying with the idea that the Sabin polio vaccine didn't catch on. I'm not sure about that one. The reason I'm debating it is that Fallout 3 features crutches and medical braces as inventory objects. This is largely because Fallout 3 introduced weapons crafting, and you can use the crutch as part of a gun that makes choo-choo noises when you shoot railroad spikes at people and tear their limbs off (no, really) and the medical brace as part of a Freddy Kruegeresque claw weapon. The vast majority of brace/crutch combinations seem to be in children's rooms in residential buildings, and since the prewar world is meant to have been like the 1950s, the possibility exists that polio was still a threat and, as it does in the real world, tended to strike children rather than adults. But since there are no signs of wheelchairs and the few hospital areas you pass through don't have iron lungs, it couldn't have been as potent a strain of polio as the one that parents were terrified of in our world. If the Salk killed-virus vaccine existed but the Sabin live-virus vaccine didn't, and vaccine uptake took somewhat longer, the possibility exists that polio mutated into a less devastating but still widespread strain. Granted, it's also possible that a 1950sesque world just didn't bother with little things like safety standards and the children got injured on a regular basis, also explaining the equipment- but the first aid kits you find often contain Med-X syringes, and that's synthetic morphine. Which would be indicative of a widespread need for advanced pain management, which also ties into the polio possibility.
I am ignoring the blood bags you find in medkits because those are basically there as part of a fetch quest and make no sense at all, whereas the Med-X can make sense if you squint at it hard enough.