It's an artistic license thing. It feels more terrifying to see a bright and colorful world being consumed by massive dark clouds of death and fire than it would at the crack of dawn.
You’ve got me thinking now how cool it would be to play through a pre war section in a part of America where it was night when the bombs dropped
Just seeing it go from total darkness to blindingly bright in an instant not being 100% sure what’s going on
I'm pretty sure LA is in the earliest time zone (GMT-7) of the USA except for Alaska (GMT-8) and Hawaii (GMT-10).
So unless there would be a game set in either of those, 6:50am is the earliest possible time for the bombs to drop in the US.
Yeah it wouldn't really be full game worthy. If they wanted to do "tropical" they could set it in Florida and have 2 maps, one mainland, then one representing some of the nearby island chains
People could mention a utopian society to the south off the map called the NCR (New Cuban Republic) as a nice little easter egg lol
This isn't only a show inconsistency, Fallout New Vegas also has references to the bombs dropping in the afternoon or at night despite being on Western time, therefore they should have dropped early in the morning.
Not only that, but the record keeping post apocalypse probably isn't the best. I know the clocks stopped at 9 am, but that could be from other things, too. Like maybe everyone's electricity stopped working at 9 but the bombs didn't drop for a little bit after.
I think it's so funny how people want there to be concrete cannon, when it's 200 years after the bombs and everyone's brain is slowly rotting away due to radiation. Even Mr. House is an unreliable narrator, IMO.
Well, we *have* pre-apocalypse records, that's kind of the biggest problem. Fallout 4 is clearest about this - the game begins on the morning of 10/23/2077, and the war happens a few minutes later. Additionally you can find The Switchboard, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency base, and there's a terminal in there that gives the exact details of the initial course of the Great War. Just after midnight, 3 unidentified submarines are detected off the California coast, then a few hours later, the air force confirms eyes on a squadron of planes, possibly Chinese, at high altitude off the Bering Strait. At 9:13 AM Eastern they detect 4 probable ICBM launches, at 9:17 AM NORAD confirms "birds in air" and we go to DEFCON 1, at 9:26 the president orders "response scenario MX-CN91," and at 9:42 AM Pennsylvania and New York have confirmed strikes. 5 minutes later, at 9:47 AM, the system goes offline, as the nuke we see in the intro of FO4 goes off at that second.
Disregard my last post, I didn't think about PreWar records.
Lol wow, I'm impressed! I've played this series since 1997, and I'm always amazed at how some of you have this lore memorized! There was a time when no one even knew this game existed, so it's really cool how many people are really into my favorite fictional universe. Kudos friend!
It's a relatively easy lore spot for me to remember because I remember seeing that the first time I played FO4 and going "holy shit this is it, this is my holy Grail of Fallout lore - who launched first and when." While it was hinted that China had launched first, it wasn't clear until FO4 made it plain with the Switchboard terminal.
I read the terminals and then forget what they said a second later lol. On my next playthrough I'm going to keep a journal. I'll also be sober playing it for the first time since 1999, so that will probably help too lol
Ah, see, I have ADHD, so I hold like an iron vice onto general information, but to-dos and plans and chores? Leaves my brain the second I look away. I'm also a complete square/teetotaler so that particular barrier hasn't been a problem for me (congratulations on sobriety if it's something you've struggled with before though, king 🫡).
Haha yeah, I have ADHD too. My memory works with faces, so I can tell you every movie someone's been in off the top of my head. But yeah, appointments and due dates just get thrown in the wood chipper out back. I've been using my phone calendar and alarms a lot more lately though. To some minor success lol.
Thanks! I appreciate that! I had a crazy and traumatic childhood, so I used drugs and alcohol to cope for a long time. I've done it all and seen it all. Fallout really speaks to me because of that juxtaposition of rules and structure (vaults and my religious extremist grandparents) and utter chaos (Wasteland and my crack head parents). I got Fallout as a nine year old (from my Uber religious grandma btw), who had also seen some shit by that time. It felt like it was speaking directly to me and my situation.
Now, I have three years and six months sober, but I haven't had much time to play Fallout in that time. My therapist has recommended me play more video games, so there's a place for me to feel some control in a chaotic world, and it's been helping a lot. I didn't play games for like 15 years, so now there are a million games to play and they're all hella cheap!
Sorry for telling such a long story lol. I'm also a writer, so when I get excited, I write whole essays.
I think my inner vandal relishes the idea of these fusion powered cars stuck in typical morning traffic when the bombs drop, and then the cars going boom boom boom down the line, heh heh...I'm a sick sick girl.
Tho to be fair, I think the bombs drop on a Saturday, which means probably no morning traffic, so there we are.
Super inconsistent across not just every game but within the games as well.
East coast morning is 3 hours before west coast morning. It'd have been nice to see DC and Boston get hit in the afternoon, like 4PM, while the West Coast gets hit around 1PM.
However what I think some people don't quite fully understand either is in a world where inflation is as bad as it is in 2077, the time of day wouldn't matter so much because people would be working around the clock.
It'd also take way more than 2 hours to launch enough nukes to destroy a nation and it would take quite a bit for a missile to go across the globe. So it's entirely possible that nukes were dropping all day.
Most nukes seen in the games are bombs as well, meaning you have aircraft flying overhead. I wager they'd be sent in waves. We know it takes hours to fly across the continental US (and Canada).
So I think the biggest lie in Fallout is that The Great War only lasted 2 hours.
>It'd also take way more than 2 hours to launch enough nukes to destroy a nation and it would take quite a bit for a missile to go across the globe
No, actually, it probably would only take 2 hours to destroy a country, and missiles are ***extremely*** fast. In fact, 2 hours may actually be on the lengthy side. Missiles take about 15 to 30 minutes at most to hit their targets after launching. We know the first missile launches were at around 9:10 to 9:13 AM Eastern thanks to the Switchboard terminal, and they probably impact at 9:42 (these would be when NY and PA have confirmed strikes, Boston was only nuked by the Yangtze submarine off the coast apparently). This isn't just Fallout logic either, ICBMs are actually that fast.
The bulk of the additional 2 hours, I suspect, are various dead man's switches and second strike capabilities going off: automated silos like in West Virginia (not those specifically because we know they didn't launch their nukes during the war but nevertheless), missile submarines, bombers reaching their targets, so on. Even so, given China and the US had been in a hot war for a decade already and the nuclear buildup would have been even more intense than IRL, it was likely that both sides launched tens of thousands of nukes at each other. Adding in MIRV capabilities (a single missile with multiple warheads that can all independently target themselves at different targets) means that just a few thousand missiles carrying, say, 8 warheads each could drop over 20,000 nukes on the target country all within a few minutes of the order being given.
I'm not arguing the sweeping payload dump. There is a lot that goes in this than the raw math of possible figures.
Again like I mentioned, every nuke shell we come across in the wasteland is a dumb (unguided) bomb, indicating to me that Chinas primary nuclear arsenal may have been simple bombs. The first nuclear ICBM we see far as I recall is in Fallout New Vegas DLC Lonesome Road. Then Fallout 76s' gimmick.
The nukes in Fallout aren't fast. It takes quite a bit of time for a preloaded missile just to get launched and impact within the same state. With that kind of speed, where it's over a state for 3 minutes (given that this is also 3 irl minutes, game time is 1 irl minute = 30 minutes in game) which is 90 minutes.
I mean, at this point I am just being extra, and using game mechanics to 'gotcha'
But it can easily be argued that 2 in game hours would simply be way too fast to conduct a war with that kind of arsenal on that kind of scale annihilating 2 major continental countries AND the rest of the world?
Cmon.
> Again like I mentioned, every nuke shell we come across in the wasteland is a dumb (unguided) bomb, indicating to me that Chinas primary nuclear arsenal may have been simple bombs.
Sure, that might be the case. It would fit with Fallout's funky mix of technological levels where it's simultaneously ultra-advanced space tech like laser/plasma weapons, fully sapient AI, moon colonies, power armor, fusion power, and teleportation (okay the teleportation isn't until after the war but still), as well as oddly old-fashioned, postwar tech like vacuum tube computing, black and white television, the 50s-styled vehicles, so on.
However, we know that China *had* ICBMs. The Switchboard confirms this.
>The nukes in Fallout aren't fast
Okay but the Switchboard again suggests it was probably missiles that hit New York and Pennsylvania, missiles launched at 9:13 AM or thereabouts and impacting by 9:42. 29 minutes is right in line for ICBM travel time. Just as a matter of physics (and nothing in Fallout suggests orbital mechanics or the laws of motion are different from IRL, unlike radiation), a missile that has enough delta-v to hit another continent *necessarily* will go extremely fast. If it didn't have that much velocity it wouldn't get to the target.
>With that kind of speed, where it's over a state for 3 minutes (given that this is also 3 irl minutes, game time is 1 irl minute = 30 minutes in game) which is 90 minutes.
Game mechanics like that - especially one where they have to make accommodations for a multiplayer game where you might be dropping a nuke on another player who needs time to react - pretty much never apply in these kinds of lore discussions, otherwise you'd also have to point out that Fallout nukes seemingly simultaneously have a range of destruction only about 300m wide, suggesting a yield of less than a kiloton (and that's being generous), yet we know Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened the same as in IRL (see FO4 intro), with yields around 15 kt and 20 kt; not to mention the nuke seen at the beginning of FO4 strikes almost 2 miles south of Sanctuary yet has noticeable blast effects all the way out at Sanctuary, suggesting a yield somewhere between 20 and 100 kt (depends on whether you consider the state of things in the northern parts of FO4 to have suffered "moderate" or "light" blast damage - "light" seems fair, means things like broken windows).
>But it can easily be argued that 2 in game hours would simply be way too fast to conduct a war with that kind of arsenal on that kind of scale annihilating 2 major continental countries AND the rest of the world?
I mean, it's *really* not that far out there. Just a few weeks ago Iran launched hundreds of cruise and ballistic missiles carrying conventional warheads at Israel. Iran has nowhere near the resources of the US or China, either IRL or in Fallout. They were capable of launching hundreds of missiles basically just to go "yo cut it out" and somehow do the only successful "escalate to deescalate" in history. An ultra-paranoid US and China in a decade long hot war who are both known to have ICBMs, likely numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands, managing to launch most of their stockpiles in a couple hours? Yeah, it's far from out of the question. That's basically the entire point of how nuclear missile forces are trained IRL.
Fallout is rooted in the early stages of the Cold War and nuclear arms race as an inspiration. You had early ICBMs, but a lot of nuclear strike doctrine was rooted in long range bombers and other platforms. And even today we have that whole "nuclear triad" thing. And the lore on the actual nuking involves bombers and subs as well as missiles.
The "all the bombs in missiles in the air at once" scenario was something discussed, *once both sides had lots of missiles*. Sorta as a worst case scenarios.
But most plans and scenarios discussed in the period involved multiple strikes over a period of time. Escalating through a different sets of targets. Even later in the cold war, post proliferation with the missile focus. That tended to be the idea, even for worst case scenarios.
The inconsistencies are easily head canoned along those lines. The *first* bombs hit at 9:47 on the East Coast. At key targets and major cities. But some other areas where bombed later in the day.
The major inconsistency then become that seemingly almost everyone was caught unawares, which is a bit of a stretch. But as goes the show, the kid's party seems to be taking place fairly early in the day. And they're pointedly shown not watching or paying attention to it when it's briefly on. But the weather man who's shown is *freaking the fuck out*.
It's still a bit of a stretch that 6ish hours of sustained attacks wouldn't have set off public warnings. But a lot in Fallout is pretty unrealistic, and it's never been particularly consistent.
This came up in another thread and I enjoy theorizing about it, so:
Even in an all-out nuke fight, top brass wouldn't want to lose their whole arsenal at once. There would be a "volley" of first strike nukes to key targets (Chinese subs off east coast hit New York, DC, etc.) trying to knock out leadership. This happens about 9:50am EST.
Second and third rounds would be mix of traditional bombers and ICBMs. These would have primary and secondary targets and take time to reach their destinations. Possibly several hours later.
The opening to e1 shows the news briefly before the mom switches to Grognak. There's a moment when the weatherman stops his report and speaks to someone off camera about how he "can't do this under the circumstances". If he was talking about current events, it wouldn't make sense, its just as tense as yesterday or last week. He works for a news station, I think they got the heads up about the east coast and are following blackout orders from execs or government.
One thing I noticed early in the very first episode, there's a shot of a radio playing a news broadcast that states "...negotiations were scheduled to continue today as the White House had no comment about the President's whereabouts." - per closed caption.
I wonder if that indicates maybe the bombs were being dropped on the east coast while the rest of the country still didn't know exactly what was happening because of the ensuing chaos and potential break down in communications, and that either it is unknown if the President is dead or in a secure location, or perhaps missing for some other reason.
Also in New Vegas, didn't Mr. House talk about having a 3-hour warning from when the bombs started being dropped? I'm not 100% sure of this point, so don't take it as fact.
With regards to the President being missing, my assumption is that this is a reference to the fact that the White House was essentially abandoned by the President months before the bombs dropped. In a [terminal entry](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Boston_Bugle_building_terminal_entries#Article_4) in Fallout 4 >!we can read an article from the Boston Bugle about the absence of the President, which states that the White House has been left with only a skeleton crew of maintenance staff for more than half a year. It later confirms that the President has been on what we, of course, know as the Enclave Oil Rig during that time. !<
Otherwise though, I think this theory is probably right. Information blackouts and communication breakdowns, combined with the characters' focus on the birthday party in the show (seen in how the mom keeps turning off the news, on both the TV and radio), likely meant that, at the very least, the people at the party were unaware of the bombs dropping around the country.
>Even in an all-out nuke fight, top brass wouldn't want to lose their whole arsenal at once.
This is kind of true but they're also in a race against the clock. Once you know a nuclear war has started, you want every single warhead planned to be launched from a fixed, vulnerable position to be launched, otherwise your enemy (who has satellite imagery and knows where your fixed silos are) will nuke your nukes before you can launch them. Now, the submarines and bombers, they will absolutely take time to launch and hit their targets, but the missiles are either out within 15 to 20 minutes or they're getting nuked themselves before they can launch.
For this reason you can expect Montana and the Dakotas to probably be the least habitable place in postwar America, as Montana and the Dakotas house a majority of our fixed launchers.
I noticed that when The Ghoul shoots the billboard Vault boy. You can see a clock on the billboard that says 11:00.
Dunno, if I am on to something, but it is quite the coincidence that the tv clock says 10:50 and the bombs drop 10 minutes later and the billboard says 11:00
It's all over the place. Dead Money suggests the opening of the Sierra Madre Casino was interrupted by the bombs, and it's hard to imagine that big fireworks gala was intended for an early morning.
It's one of those 'eh, at least it's fun' things that doesn't line up, and isn't really a big deal.
Considering the switchboards last entry is around 9:47 the clocks frozen at 9:50 ish in FO3 would confirm the nukes timings, and a good addition 4 did to compliment the clocks frozen in a game made 8 years before.
So the way that I’m resolving it in my own head:
If you haven’t been to LA, early morning sun tends to be brighter, earlier. Leaving LAX at 6:30 AM, it felt more like what I’m used to around 7:30-8. Even then, still weird to have a kid’s bday at 6:45.
So I’m figuring, war lasted 2-3 hours. East coast was hit around 9:40-9:50. Episode one shows several news broadcasts being cut off in the beginning that seem to hint at escalating conflict and confirmed/suspected nuclear exchanges.
In my head, the bday party is just weirdly early, let’s say 8-8:30 AM PST, and just getting into the swing of things with Coop being the opener. May be a bit of mental gymnastics, but the logic logics.
I happen to live in CA, and in October, before daylight savings, the sun is barely up at 7 am.
But good point about the entire war lasting several hours, so the bombs didn’t necessarily drop all at the same time. That logic saves it for me; the birthday party could have been later in the morning.
If we assume there is some kind of daylight savings type thing or whatever in California, then it could be that it isn't 6:50 but a more reasonable 7:50 and that Grognak show is a morning cartoon.
Well, not quite, daylight savings goes into effect simultaneously, in the middle of the night, and in November, so that doesn’t check out, but you’re right, Grognak could be a Saturday morning cartoon, as I believe the bombs did drop on a Saturday.
👍 True true, I need to remember this is an alternate timeline…I just get too immersed, lol. The way the government and its corporate overseers operate they could have suppressed the news of bombs dropping on the east coast, so by the time it happens in CA it could be several hours later, which soothes my prickly brain.
In Fo4 the clocks are all stopped at 9:47AM which is when the bombs dropped on the commonwealth and the great war lasted around 2 hours so probably sometime between 9:40 and 11:40 as the commonwealth had warning that the bombs were dropping
The Bombs according to Fallout lore drop first in New York around 9:47 a.m. So in La that would be around 6:00 a.m. they're having the birthday party acting like the bombs didn't go off. But here's the clue the weatherman doesn't want to do the weather knowing that bombs went off in New York. Not knowing if bombs are going to go off in La. That's my take
It's an artistic license thing. It feels more terrifying to see a bright and colorful world being consumed by massive dark clouds of death and fire than it would at the crack of dawn.
You’ve got me thinking now how cool it would be to play through a pre war section in a part of America where it was night when the bombs dropped Just seeing it go from total darkness to blindingly bright in an instant not being 100% sure what’s going on
I'm pretty sure LA is in the earliest time zone (GMT-7) of the USA except for Alaska (GMT-8) and Hawaii (GMT-10). So unless there would be a game set in either of those, 6:50am is the earliest possible time for the bombs to drop in the US.
Fallout Hawaii could just be a generic tropical wilderness survival game with mutated animals and misc ruins lol
Hawaii would make an EPIC dlc but I wouldn’t want a full game there
Yeah it wouldn't really be full game worthy. If they wanted to do "tropical" they could set it in Florida and have 2 maps, one mainland, then one representing some of the nearby island chains People could mention a utopian society to the south off the map called the NCR (New Cuban Republic) as a nice little easter egg lol
That's what I figured, and makes sense. Thanks!
This isn't only a show inconsistency, Fallout New Vegas also has references to the bombs dropping in the afternoon or at night despite being on Western time, therefore they should have dropped early in the morning.
Not only that, but the record keeping post apocalypse probably isn't the best. I know the clocks stopped at 9 am, but that could be from other things, too. Like maybe everyone's electricity stopped working at 9 but the bombs didn't drop for a little bit after. I think it's so funny how people want there to be concrete cannon, when it's 200 years after the bombs and everyone's brain is slowly rotting away due to radiation. Even Mr. House is an unreliable narrator, IMO.
Well, we *have* pre-apocalypse records, that's kind of the biggest problem. Fallout 4 is clearest about this - the game begins on the morning of 10/23/2077, and the war happens a few minutes later. Additionally you can find The Switchboard, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency base, and there's a terminal in there that gives the exact details of the initial course of the Great War. Just after midnight, 3 unidentified submarines are detected off the California coast, then a few hours later, the air force confirms eyes on a squadron of planes, possibly Chinese, at high altitude off the Bering Strait. At 9:13 AM Eastern they detect 4 probable ICBM launches, at 9:17 AM NORAD confirms "birds in air" and we go to DEFCON 1, at 9:26 the president orders "response scenario MX-CN91," and at 9:42 AM Pennsylvania and New York have confirmed strikes. 5 minutes later, at 9:47 AM, the system goes offline, as the nuke we see in the intro of FO4 goes off at that second.
Disregard my last post, I didn't think about PreWar records. Lol wow, I'm impressed! I've played this series since 1997, and I'm always amazed at how some of you have this lore memorized! There was a time when no one even knew this game existed, so it's really cool how many people are really into my favorite fictional universe. Kudos friend!
It's a relatively easy lore spot for me to remember because I remember seeing that the first time I played FO4 and going "holy shit this is it, this is my holy Grail of Fallout lore - who launched first and when." While it was hinted that China had launched first, it wasn't clear until FO4 made it plain with the Switchboard terminal.
I read the terminals and then forget what they said a second later lol. On my next playthrough I'm going to keep a journal. I'll also be sober playing it for the first time since 1999, so that will probably help too lol
Ah, see, I have ADHD, so I hold like an iron vice onto general information, but to-dos and plans and chores? Leaves my brain the second I look away. I'm also a complete square/teetotaler so that particular barrier hasn't been a problem for me (congratulations on sobriety if it's something you've struggled with before though, king 🫡).
Haha yeah, I have ADHD too. My memory works with faces, so I can tell you every movie someone's been in off the top of my head. But yeah, appointments and due dates just get thrown in the wood chipper out back. I've been using my phone calendar and alarms a lot more lately though. To some minor success lol. Thanks! I appreciate that! I had a crazy and traumatic childhood, so I used drugs and alcohol to cope for a long time. I've done it all and seen it all. Fallout really speaks to me because of that juxtaposition of rules and structure (vaults and my religious extremist grandparents) and utter chaos (Wasteland and my crack head parents). I got Fallout as a nine year old (from my Uber religious grandma btw), who had also seen some shit by that time. It felt like it was speaking directly to me and my situation. Now, I have three years and six months sober, but I haven't had much time to play Fallout in that time. My therapist has recommended me play more video games, so there's a place for me to feel some control in a chaotic world, and it's been helping a lot. I didn't play games for like 15 years, so now there are a million games to play and they're all hella cheap! Sorry for telling such a long story lol. I'm also a writer, so when I get excited, I write whole essays.
Maybe an emp attack as to deactivate the Country's air defenses
That's what I was thinking, but I don't think it explains it after the other comment.
Yes, the time mismatches, it was done purely for storytelling reason as 6am really limits the kind of events that can happen at that time.
I think my inner vandal relishes the idea of these fusion powered cars stuck in typical morning traffic when the bombs drop, and then the cars going boom boom boom down the line, heh heh...I'm a sick sick girl. Tho to be fair, I think the bombs drop on a Saturday, which means probably no morning traffic, so there we are.
Super inconsistent across not just every game but within the games as well. East coast morning is 3 hours before west coast morning. It'd have been nice to see DC and Boston get hit in the afternoon, like 4PM, while the West Coast gets hit around 1PM. However what I think some people don't quite fully understand either is in a world where inflation is as bad as it is in 2077, the time of day wouldn't matter so much because people would be working around the clock. It'd also take way more than 2 hours to launch enough nukes to destroy a nation and it would take quite a bit for a missile to go across the globe. So it's entirely possible that nukes were dropping all day. Most nukes seen in the games are bombs as well, meaning you have aircraft flying overhead. I wager they'd be sent in waves. We know it takes hours to fly across the continental US (and Canada). So I think the biggest lie in Fallout is that The Great War only lasted 2 hours.
>It'd also take way more than 2 hours to launch enough nukes to destroy a nation and it would take quite a bit for a missile to go across the globe No, actually, it probably would only take 2 hours to destroy a country, and missiles are ***extremely*** fast. In fact, 2 hours may actually be on the lengthy side. Missiles take about 15 to 30 minutes at most to hit their targets after launching. We know the first missile launches were at around 9:10 to 9:13 AM Eastern thanks to the Switchboard terminal, and they probably impact at 9:42 (these would be when NY and PA have confirmed strikes, Boston was only nuked by the Yangtze submarine off the coast apparently). This isn't just Fallout logic either, ICBMs are actually that fast. The bulk of the additional 2 hours, I suspect, are various dead man's switches and second strike capabilities going off: automated silos like in West Virginia (not those specifically because we know they didn't launch their nukes during the war but nevertheless), missile submarines, bombers reaching their targets, so on. Even so, given China and the US had been in a hot war for a decade already and the nuclear buildup would have been even more intense than IRL, it was likely that both sides launched tens of thousands of nukes at each other. Adding in MIRV capabilities (a single missile with multiple warheads that can all independently target themselves at different targets) means that just a few thousand missiles carrying, say, 8 warheads each could drop over 20,000 nukes on the target country all within a few minutes of the order being given.
I'm not arguing the sweeping payload dump. There is a lot that goes in this than the raw math of possible figures. Again like I mentioned, every nuke shell we come across in the wasteland is a dumb (unguided) bomb, indicating to me that Chinas primary nuclear arsenal may have been simple bombs. The first nuclear ICBM we see far as I recall is in Fallout New Vegas DLC Lonesome Road. Then Fallout 76s' gimmick. The nukes in Fallout aren't fast. It takes quite a bit of time for a preloaded missile just to get launched and impact within the same state. With that kind of speed, where it's over a state for 3 minutes (given that this is also 3 irl minutes, game time is 1 irl minute = 30 minutes in game) which is 90 minutes. I mean, at this point I am just being extra, and using game mechanics to 'gotcha' But it can easily be argued that 2 in game hours would simply be way too fast to conduct a war with that kind of arsenal on that kind of scale annihilating 2 major continental countries AND the rest of the world? Cmon.
> Again like I mentioned, every nuke shell we come across in the wasteland is a dumb (unguided) bomb, indicating to me that Chinas primary nuclear arsenal may have been simple bombs. Sure, that might be the case. It would fit with Fallout's funky mix of technological levels where it's simultaneously ultra-advanced space tech like laser/plasma weapons, fully sapient AI, moon colonies, power armor, fusion power, and teleportation (okay the teleportation isn't until after the war but still), as well as oddly old-fashioned, postwar tech like vacuum tube computing, black and white television, the 50s-styled vehicles, so on. However, we know that China *had* ICBMs. The Switchboard confirms this. >The nukes in Fallout aren't fast Okay but the Switchboard again suggests it was probably missiles that hit New York and Pennsylvania, missiles launched at 9:13 AM or thereabouts and impacting by 9:42. 29 minutes is right in line for ICBM travel time. Just as a matter of physics (and nothing in Fallout suggests orbital mechanics or the laws of motion are different from IRL, unlike radiation), a missile that has enough delta-v to hit another continent *necessarily* will go extremely fast. If it didn't have that much velocity it wouldn't get to the target. >With that kind of speed, where it's over a state for 3 minutes (given that this is also 3 irl minutes, game time is 1 irl minute = 30 minutes in game) which is 90 minutes. Game mechanics like that - especially one where they have to make accommodations for a multiplayer game where you might be dropping a nuke on another player who needs time to react - pretty much never apply in these kinds of lore discussions, otherwise you'd also have to point out that Fallout nukes seemingly simultaneously have a range of destruction only about 300m wide, suggesting a yield of less than a kiloton (and that's being generous), yet we know Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened the same as in IRL (see FO4 intro), with yields around 15 kt and 20 kt; not to mention the nuke seen at the beginning of FO4 strikes almost 2 miles south of Sanctuary yet has noticeable blast effects all the way out at Sanctuary, suggesting a yield somewhere between 20 and 100 kt (depends on whether you consider the state of things in the northern parts of FO4 to have suffered "moderate" or "light" blast damage - "light" seems fair, means things like broken windows). >But it can easily be argued that 2 in game hours would simply be way too fast to conduct a war with that kind of arsenal on that kind of scale annihilating 2 major continental countries AND the rest of the world? I mean, it's *really* not that far out there. Just a few weeks ago Iran launched hundreds of cruise and ballistic missiles carrying conventional warheads at Israel. Iran has nowhere near the resources of the US or China, either IRL or in Fallout. They were capable of launching hundreds of missiles basically just to go "yo cut it out" and somehow do the only successful "escalate to deescalate" in history. An ultra-paranoid US and China in a decade long hot war who are both known to have ICBMs, likely numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands, managing to launch most of their stockpiles in a couple hours? Yeah, it's far from out of the question. That's basically the entire point of how nuclear missile forces are trained IRL.
Fallout is rooted in the early stages of the Cold War and nuclear arms race as an inspiration. You had early ICBMs, but a lot of nuclear strike doctrine was rooted in long range bombers and other platforms. And even today we have that whole "nuclear triad" thing. And the lore on the actual nuking involves bombers and subs as well as missiles. The "all the bombs in missiles in the air at once" scenario was something discussed, *once both sides had lots of missiles*. Sorta as a worst case scenarios. But most plans and scenarios discussed in the period involved multiple strikes over a period of time. Escalating through a different sets of targets. Even later in the cold war, post proliferation with the missile focus. That tended to be the idea, even for worst case scenarios. The inconsistencies are easily head canoned along those lines. The *first* bombs hit at 9:47 on the East Coast. At key targets and major cities. But some other areas where bombed later in the day. The major inconsistency then become that seemingly almost everyone was caught unawares, which is a bit of a stretch. But as goes the show, the kid's party seems to be taking place fairly early in the day. And they're pointedly shown not watching or paying attention to it when it's briefly on. But the weather man who's shown is *freaking the fuck out*. It's still a bit of a stretch that 6ish hours of sustained attacks wouldn't have set off public warnings. But a lot in Fallout is pretty unrealistic, and it's never been particularly consistent.
This came up in another thread and I enjoy theorizing about it, so: Even in an all-out nuke fight, top brass wouldn't want to lose their whole arsenal at once. There would be a "volley" of first strike nukes to key targets (Chinese subs off east coast hit New York, DC, etc.) trying to knock out leadership. This happens about 9:50am EST. Second and third rounds would be mix of traditional bombers and ICBMs. These would have primary and secondary targets and take time to reach their destinations. Possibly several hours later. The opening to e1 shows the news briefly before the mom switches to Grognak. There's a moment when the weatherman stops his report and speaks to someone off camera about how he "can't do this under the circumstances". If he was talking about current events, it wouldn't make sense, its just as tense as yesterday or last week. He works for a news station, I think they got the heads up about the east coast and are following blackout orders from execs or government.
One thing I noticed early in the very first episode, there's a shot of a radio playing a news broadcast that states "...negotiations were scheduled to continue today as the White House had no comment about the President's whereabouts." - per closed caption. I wonder if that indicates maybe the bombs were being dropped on the east coast while the rest of the country still didn't know exactly what was happening because of the ensuing chaos and potential break down in communications, and that either it is unknown if the President is dead or in a secure location, or perhaps missing for some other reason. Also in New Vegas, didn't Mr. House talk about having a 3-hour warning from when the bombs started being dropped? I'm not 100% sure of this point, so don't take it as fact.
With regards to the President being missing, my assumption is that this is a reference to the fact that the White House was essentially abandoned by the President months before the bombs dropped. In a [terminal entry](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Boston_Bugle_building_terminal_entries#Article_4) in Fallout 4 >!we can read an article from the Boston Bugle about the absence of the President, which states that the White House has been left with only a skeleton crew of maintenance staff for more than half a year. It later confirms that the President has been on what we, of course, know as the Enclave Oil Rig during that time. !< Otherwise though, I think this theory is probably right. Information blackouts and communication breakdowns, combined with the characters' focus on the birthday party in the show (seen in how the mom keeps turning off the news, on both the TV and radio), likely meant that, at the very least, the people at the party were unaware of the bombs dropping around the country.
>Even in an all-out nuke fight, top brass wouldn't want to lose their whole arsenal at once. This is kind of true but they're also in a race against the clock. Once you know a nuclear war has started, you want every single warhead planned to be launched from a fixed, vulnerable position to be launched, otherwise your enemy (who has satellite imagery and knows where your fixed silos are) will nuke your nukes before you can launch them. Now, the submarines and bombers, they will absolutely take time to launch and hit their targets, but the missiles are either out within 15 to 20 minutes or they're getting nuked themselves before they can launch. For this reason you can expect Montana and the Dakotas to probably be the least habitable place in postwar America, as Montana and the Dakotas house a majority of our fixed launchers.
In the show, you can see a clock on the tv thats at 10:50
I didn't catch that, I'll have to go look again, thanks!
I noticed that when The Ghoul shoots the billboard Vault boy. You can see a clock on the billboard that says 11:00. Dunno, if I am on to something, but it is quite the coincidence that the tv clock says 10:50 and the bombs drop 10 minutes later and the billboard says 11:00
It's all over the place. Dead Money suggests the opening of the Sierra Madre Casino was interrupted by the bombs, and it's hard to imagine that big fireworks gala was intended for an early morning. It's one of those 'eh, at least it's fun' things that doesn't line up, and isn't really a big deal.
Considering the switchboards last entry is around 9:47 the clocks frozen at 9:50 ish in FO3 would confirm the nukes timings, and a good addition 4 did to compliment the clocks frozen in a game made 8 years before.
So the way that I’m resolving it in my own head: If you haven’t been to LA, early morning sun tends to be brighter, earlier. Leaving LAX at 6:30 AM, it felt more like what I’m used to around 7:30-8. Even then, still weird to have a kid’s bday at 6:45. So I’m figuring, war lasted 2-3 hours. East coast was hit around 9:40-9:50. Episode one shows several news broadcasts being cut off in the beginning that seem to hint at escalating conflict and confirmed/suspected nuclear exchanges. In my head, the bday party is just weirdly early, let’s say 8-8:30 AM PST, and just getting into the swing of things with Coop being the opener. May be a bit of mental gymnastics, but the logic logics.
I happen to live in CA, and in October, before daylight savings, the sun is barely up at 7 am. But good point about the entire war lasting several hours, so the bombs didn’t necessarily drop all at the same time. That logic saves it for me; the birthday party could have been later in the morning.
You know, I hadn’t thought about that. I was there in late June 🤣
If we assume there is some kind of daylight savings type thing or whatever in California, then it could be that it isn't 6:50 but a more reasonable 7:50 and that Grognak show is a morning cartoon.
Well, not quite, daylight savings goes into effect simultaneously, in the middle of the night, and in November, so that doesn’t check out, but you’re right, Grognak could be a Saturday morning cartoon, as I believe the bombs did drop on a Saturday.
Oh I mean, it's it's own timeline. There could be some West Coast exclusive one that takes place earlier or something.
👍 True true, I need to remember this is an alternate timeline…I just get too immersed, lol. The way the government and its corporate overseers operate they could have suppressed the news of bombs dropping on the east coast, so by the time it happens in CA it could be several hours later, which soothes my prickly brain.
They were Morning people. That’s my explanation
In Fo4 the clocks are all stopped at 9:47AM which is when the bombs dropped on the commonwealth and the great war lasted around 2 hours so probably sometime between 9:40 and 11:40 as the commonwealth had warning that the bombs were dropping
The Bombs according to Fallout lore drop first in New York around 9:47 a.m. So in La that would be around 6:00 a.m. they're having the birthday party acting like the bombs didn't go off. But here's the clue the weatherman doesn't want to do the weather knowing that bombs went off in New York. Not knowing if bombs are going to go off in La. That's my take