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Aug. 5th, 2013 10:20 amRandom 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.)
