The Nuka Cola Quantum makes sense but leave the "Cherry" variety its like the Boston version of quantum maybe do a loading screen or make mention of it somewhere, and dear lord Jesus give us super super mutants again.
Really think you should re-consider cats. Again, it makes sense that they can still be thriving in another region. The Commonwealth isn't New California.
Yeah, Nuka World fills in why Quantum is present in the Commonwealth quite nicely, as well as possibly Nuka Cherry (It was recalled but I'm sure they wouldn't pull too much of it out of Nuka World as they probably invested a ton into it being there)
There's nothing wrong with the cats. People just took what Mr. House said far too extreme. It's true, cats are extinct. In the western regions. Can you really expect someone who's remained stuck in New Vegas and only has interests that benefit his city really know what's going on across the United States?
Cats are Extinct, as established in all previous Fallout games, Fallout 3 was set on the East Coast...there were no cats! regardless of what Mr. House said...if the lore has established cats are extinct...then that's where it needs to be! (What do you think all the wild and feral dogs ate?) So I agree with the removal of cats. (Scorpions, roaches, ants,and other bugs Survived...where are all the giant Mutated spiders?) (who knows maybe robert House is Responsible for the extinction of cats...) as for additional Lore...might be nice to read Maxson's terminal, and read the lore that was present in Fallout 3, including the e-mails to & from Sarah Lyons, which I find it hard to believe Maxson would have deleted them, since he had such a crush on her. (If you need the text...let me know.) you Also could add, in diary entries, explaining what happened to Elder Lyons, Sarah Lyons,, Scribe Rothchild, and the Lone Wanderer, if you like to write that is. (I half expected to find a suit of T-51 on the Prydwyn, painted in vault tech colors, with a big 101 on the chest plate, on display. but there is no mention of the Lone Wanderer, who Defeated the Enclave, and brought clean water to the capitol wasteland, no link to that one person, that is responsible for all of that, which sucks, because that one person...is US as players) I agree with removing Nuka Quantum, and Victory, and Clear, and the other limited Nuka Cola flavors that were distributed in the west and in DC, throughout the common wealth, but they should be found in Nuka World.
Not taking into account ludonarrative dissonance, I see?
It's simple, cats didn't make it into FO3 because neither did other small animals. Nothing in that game was smaller than an eyebot as bethesda assumed it might not be good for the engine, especially on the X Box.
You'd never see all these fabled iguanas around the wastes, yet iguana on a stick is a staple of most wastelands if not the mojave.
But here's a middleground for you: Maybe the cats did resurface as a result of institute meddling, but why wouldn't they have just been bog standard descendants of felis domesticus as opposed to assuming they're all synthetic animals that would need to devote up to a quarter of their body cavity to stick a synth component into?
Here's how it happens: A field team goes out to perform an experiment, their test subjects are cats, at least on male and female cat escape because cats are wily little fuckers, or maybe one of the scientists felt bad about performing a test that might kill them, and while they don't breed like rabbits, there's doubtless plenty of prey for them, just because bethesda didn't see fit to represent their prey in game doesn't mean they aren't there(I've also had a cat send a pitbull to the vet while coming out of the encounter unscathed, but that's just an anecdote). Boom, felis domesticus reintroduced to the commonwealth.
i just have always found it hard to believe that cats are still around. but horses, historically one of the most useful animals that humans ever domesticated have been absent from literally every fallout game.
Cats are extinct, otherwise House's comment would be less absolute. But folk haven't joined the dots: seemingly alive cats in the Commonwealth, yet a pile of dead cats in the Institute. Do I need to spell it out? Who would Piper least expect to be an Institute spy?
Cats from vaults? Vaults like Vault 81, that have been opening it's doors to the outside for some time now? A vault which has at least one cat that likes to escape out of the Vault for shenanigans? A cat that looks suspiciously like just about all the cats present in the Commonwealth?
oh, good grief, i've never played and do not intend to ever play any of the other prior fallout games, as far as lore goes....bethesda/microsoft owns it now so even the holy words/writ of the original dev team doesn't count anymore, just look at what a certain rodent has done to the work of george lucas... i.e the extended universe........you can't win darth.....if you strike me down i shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.........<----------name that quote
To be honest, I find a lot of the objection to things like the existence of T-60 Power Armor as a prewar variant of Power Armor to be rather shortsighted. Why would the development of PA stop just because T-51 PA was as good as it was in the Battle of Anchorage? I don't see that it being minimally available in an area where there were several military bases as being outside the realm of possibility.
The great war, thats what would stop the development of Power Armor.
As for you Ubercoincollector, your defeatism is sickening. The corporate timeline of bethesda will keep degenerating but the true canon, what we belive in our hearts is what happend within the fiction can be changed much more easily
I know this is an old mod and probably won't get updated again, but I have an input to make regarding cats. People seem to take every bits of dialogue religiously as if the unreliable narrator doesn't exist. Mr. House is not an all-knowing and infallible entity. He even admits that his range is limited around Vegas and even Goodsprings was hard enough for him to reach, let alone New England. So it's not lore-breaking when cats are still roaming around in the East Coast even if they no longer exist in the West.
I'm not sure if anyone previous has mentioned; but this mythology that fans have invented of how distribution works really confuses me. While Quantum shouldn't be in vending machines yet...the product would have been delivered WEEKS ahead of it's release. When a product has a release date, that is not the date that store fronts receive the product, that is the date they can begin selling it.
There is no need to justify Quantum being out in the world. it makes complete logical sense for it to be around.
now it being in vending machines ... that one is beyond me; but the bottles themselves would be in numerous areas.
A post-war entrepreneur, has acquired surviving vending machines and restored damaged ones, and had them distributed through the Commonwealth. Not that, she could acquire and hoard significant quantities of Quantum.
Something I've noticed is the Assultrons. I would like to presume there is some vague lore on why they're not anywhere else other than the Commenwealth and West Virginia, but it makes no sense why an advanced combat robot wouldn't be somewhere like.. idk, Washington D.C.!? Essentially the hub for most of the U.S. government?! If someone knows, please tell me, its something that just rubs me the wrong way.
Here's one for you: the bridge from Sanctuary Hills. "WHAT the heck do you mean by that?" do you ask? Well think about it. Codsworth tells the SS to go to Concorde by going "over the foot bridge and past the Red Rocket". If the only way into Sanctuary Hills is by way of a FOOT bridge, how did all those vehicles get there and WHY would anyone buy one to begin with if the only place to drive it was up around the circle and back to your drive-way?????????????????HMMMM.
I have it, but that's not my point. I shouldn't need a mod to change something that shouldn't be in the first place!That bridge should already be a two lane, flat, concrete structure. NOT a rotted out wooden hump in the road!
that bridge is a famous historical landmark in Boston. This specific rotted out wooden hump had to be in the game somewhere. But I take your point -- why Sanctuary? Why is there no other bridge? Weird.
No, because the real bridge wouldn't be a foot-bridge either, because freight wagons would need to use it, plus the fact that the road to the real bridge wouldn't dead-end into a small community.
A Street View photograph of the real area: https://www.google.ca/maps/@42.4690599,-71.3503588,3a,75y,268.49h,85.89t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipPe2dhPNe4Axyf-CdMFwWgO6pqPr772evNE8Rdh!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipPe2dhPNe4Axyf-CdMFwWgO6pqPr772evNE8Rdh%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya243.74586-ro0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352
Or https://www.google.ca/maps/@42.4705362,-71.3520854,16.25z for a basic overhead view of the area in the real world.
The real bridge near the Minuteman Statue is in fact a foot bridge. Sanctuary/Sanctuary Hills is rotated by about 30~45 degrees relative to the real bridge, though, the Minuteman statue is on the wrong side of the bridge, and Lowell Rd near the existing park would be a more appropriate bridge into the community, which does in fact have a cul-de-sac (branching off of a thru-road) -- two of them, actually, although the Pondview Lane one is likely the reference they used.
Given the scale of the in-game bridge relative to the original Old North Bridge, it's fairly clear that vehicle traffic would actually be able to traverse the in-game bridge one at a time (not a chance for the real bridge, although a side-by-side would work just fine), which makes sense for an upscale elite suburb home to people like highly-successful drug dealers, lawyers, and ex-soldiers. All in all, "fixing" this would literally involve tearing one of the highest detail map sections asunder, tossing mod and savegame compatibility out the window. It's an acceptable break from reality and doesn't contradict any existing lore, so it's A-OK.
Afraid I must disagree. The map you posted goes across a river and keeps going. It does not dead-end into a small community. So, it is still not right. Besides even if it did, the problem with all of the cars is still there. Plus, the picture shows nothing but a park. The whole "problem" I'm having, is the presence of vehicles in a community serviced by a FOOT bridge!
so i see a lot of misunderstanding here about the X-01 and whether or not its pre or post war well let me set the record straight 1. it has an entirely different name than the advanced power armor mark 1 which is the armor people confuse it for. 2. the X means its a proto type that hasnt been given formal classification yet. so in conclusion the x-01 is pre war and the advanced power armor mark 1 is its post war successor. now lets move on to the kid in a fridge quest and how it "breaks canon" ITS A FUCKING JOKE QUEST!!!! its literally no different than finding the tardis or crashed star trek shuttle in fallout 1 or finding the time travel rock thing that is also from star trek in fallout 2 that lets you travel back in time and set the events of fallout 1 in motion. why dont you nerds complain about those? is it because you accept that fallout 1 and 2 are clear dark comedies that are clearly not meant to be take seriously in any way shape or form? or because you have massive nostalgia boners and refuse see flaws in your precious classics?
What a weird little rant. It's fine if you don't care about lore consistency, but is there a particular reason why are you acting so bitter and triggered towards people who do? (calling them "nostalgia nerds" or whatever term you are trying to pull here out of your buzzword bingo)
Besides, since you are so against this, why did you look this mod up in the first place? Just to crap all over it and people who like it? Don't you have something better to do?
The post raises some good points though. I was thinking about 'kid in a fridge' and that maybe ghouls go into hibernation, maybe for years at a time, and only become active when they are disturbed by a potential threat, and maybe that would explain Billy's situation... Ultimately though it doesn't matter because it's not meant to be explainable, it's just a gag.
99% certain there is a loading screen bit that outright declares X-01 to be made by the post-war government remnants, so even FO4 says X-01 is post-war.
Here's the exact text from one of Fallout 4's own loading screens:
" The X-01 series of Power Armor was specially engineered and employed by remnants of the U.S. military after the Great War, and offers increased protection over the older, pre-war models. "
Billy is lore-friendly. Ghouls in anerobic conditions can enter a suspended state - two are in Fallout 2. Those cases were months rather than years, but they were adults merely in closed coffins, whereas Billy is a kid in a hermetically sealed fridge. After his air ran out he'd have only been awake for brief moments. Also, as with ferals, in such a state rads may have helped sustain him, and perhaps he'd even just started to turn into a feral but the process, like the rest of him, was stalled by entering a catatonic state at that time.
"House made a very specific point that something had gone extinct "like the way of the common house cat" iirc back in New Vegas. And I feel like he's not one to lie about something so trivial. At least, from his perspective."
He could just mean they aren't commonly kept as pets. Even though that makes no sense. He also might not *care* to keep track of whether cats exist or not. And I think it's somewhat plausible they'd be rare in the mojave, but more common elsewhere.
"Tatos... there were potatoes in Rivet City, and throughout the other games. In fact, Potatoes and Tomatoes aren't even close to being the same species... granted Fallout has always had wacky but this is just scientifically improbable."
Do... do you think that zip guns don't exist?
You know, you could easily explain the cats with a simple computer entry in one of the Institute scientist computers. Something about how he/she had a pet (pun intended) project to make a completely synthetic cat and see if it spread throughout the commonwealth. (to be clear, that wouldn't make cats "synths" as we know it, but rather a genetically constructed creature that is fully biological with no added parts and works just like any other living creature)
You could even make it something that was done off the books, without the rest of the Institutes knowledge or approval.
Or if you reaaaly need an explanation... there were cats in a vault somewhere. Hell, maybe Vault Tech ran a cat-based experiment.
Lets bring back horses too which were also established that they are extinct.
Seeing as how that's also dumb... sure. If cows can survive in whatever mutant state, so can horses.
Most of the Food in the USA is produced in the midwest, so east coast communities would surely suffer just as much as west coast. Every animal has mutated in all areas, including humans. To exclude one special from is kind of ridiculous. A mutated cat species would be much more believable. Those small farms are hardly enough to feed the amount of people living in the commonwealth either, and pre-war food supplies have to be dwindling. Cannibalism is rampant, I'm actually surprised they haven't Disneyfied that too.
I think all involved are probably vastly overestimating how hard it would be to wipe out cats as a species. They're fast little buggers and can take care of themselves.
While it's true that there would be... difficulties, on both coasts, that was 200 years ago. The assertion that pre-war food is still a source of food is already absurd. Cannibalism, well, it definitely could still happen for ritual purposes and such, but as a food source? Thermodynamics is laughing at you.
I mean, yeah, cats would presumably have mutated somewhat. But I'd expect mutants and non-mutant cats to exist, just like mutant and non-mutant humans, and mutant and non-mutant dogs, etc.
Well, is it so far-fetched that the Institute found records of their popularity and thought to bring them back? If anything it makes even more sense than them bringing gorillas back. The only problem is that when you kill cats, they drop meat. I would suggest removing that and adding synth components to them instead. AFAIK late-series Synths have meat. They're bioengineered life forms with a few electronic bits, not robots.
Upgrading the model won't make the armor less rusty. I think the military paint would work much better, personally. As for the soldiers, they could have made it somewhere. Power Armor can't tank a nuclear bomb head on, but it can probably shield them from a blast that far away, letting them stumble off to somewhere their armor might be found later (military checkpoint, probably).
I think it *can* tank a nuclear bomb head on in game, but that's because the Fatman is weird. More seriously, they could have gone quite a long ways and done almost anything, and thus their armor could have ended up anywhere.
because most of the midwest is covered in the same radioactive field of death as the glowing sea which has made travel incredibly hazardous The primary target was flyover country? I mean, I *guess* that'd be helpful for Vault Tech... "Only groups with access to vertibirds can cross in reasonable time and safety, Ships, airships, or conventional airplanes. Demonstrably none of these are beyond the technical ability of surviving communities.
"and even then the different BoS chapters have almost no interaction because long-range communication is all but impossible." Lolwut? We know radios work from how they're everywhere. Hell, we know there are active satelites. Military satelites, which you'd expect would be the first to go if any were targeted.
"Imagine walking the length of the US by foot to trade, in a world as hostile as Fallout where near-constant raiders is the least of your trouble."
Well, it'd probably be car. Or by wagon, if for some reason you don't have that and 'horses are extinct' somehow (I guess somehow vaporizing their primary habitat would help). And you wouldn't walk the whole length of the US. You'd relay. Like the Silk Road. Which crossed the whole length of south asia.
"They actually explained this in Fallout 3. The purifier, for some reason, only worked in that area of the Potomac. Probably because it's a very large body of water and they've only got one purifier. It's not like one facility like that could possibly purify ALL of the nation's water. Especially when there's still ground water, and not all rivers are connected, etc. Also radioactive rain. "
Ah, of course. Using a device that could be used much more effectively to solve a problem that shouldn't exist, and then failing to solve that problem anyways. (Ironically, the Game Over from activating the GECK in place is probably the best outcome...)
Most flora and fauna are gone because Avellone said so, not because House said so. Or you gonna claim Avellone doesn't know what he's talking about either?
Here's the harsh fact of the matter, though: Avellone doesn't have creative control anymore. His word, however holy it once was, isn't law anymore with regard to Fallout lore. I don't like that, and most Fallout fans don't either, but it doesn't make it any less true. Bethesda have the creative reins, and they've retconned him. The rest of us just have to accept that.
Yeah, they mention a lot of things in the older games that Avellone reconned later. The only difference is when Avellone reconned things people clap like brain-damaged seals and when Beth does it they cry.
Late bump, but the one thing that drives me absolutely crazy is people relying on singular words or sentences out of context as if they defy the actual intentions of the original designers. For instance, a single misuse of the word "he" is not enough to confirm that the Fallout 1 protagonist is male in defiance of all obvious intent that the character's gender be totally amorphous.
Likewise, a character mention that their cat's breath smells like cat food (a well-known Simpsons reference) is not sufficient evidence to prove that cats exist. Not by a long shot.
Bethesda retconned this, yes, but did so out of ignorance of the lore. There's a difference between ignorance, as Bethesda's designers often did, versus deliberate countermanding of community misinterpretation, as Avellone often did. Frankly I dislike Avellone's own "Fallout is Happy Days" sensibilities compared to Fargo's "Fallout is a badly maintained Civil Defense program", so it's not like I'm defending him and throwing Bethesda under the bus, but this nuance is fairly critical.
Okay putting this out there but there's a massive difference between an out-of-game document referring to the Vault Dweller as a "he" and a character in-game talking about their literal cat when it comes to established lore.
I have one for you. Power Armor X-01. If you are high enough level (about 60 or so, I believe) and you find a "Leveled" set of armor, it's an X-01!!! I've found so many of them, it isn't funny! There needs to be a removal of a majority of them (ALL of them from the random list) and the number of findable sets set at about 2! These were under research when the bombs fell (if I remember correctly) and should NOT be so easily found. There are a couple mods that have X-01's and higher, but these are connected with the Enclave, which is legit. Please help.
One big curiosity I've always had is Ghouls needing/not needing to eat. This isn't just an inter-game inconsistency, it's a consistency between things in Fallout 4! On one hand, Kid in A Fridge implies Ghouls do not have to eat, as well as other Ghoul NPCs mentioning it. However, The Brotherhood of Steel quest "Duty or Dishonor" implies that (at least) Feral Ghouls eat.
Ghouls not needing to eat is a lore inconsistency exclusive to Fallout 4. This is shown by events in Fallout 1: Where a massive city inhabited entirely by Ghouls has a water purifier attached to an old Vault's water purification chip, since their basic mechanical purifier is broken. You need that chip, but if you take it without fixing the purifier, all the Ghouls either die of dehydration, or leave and are left to the Wastes. So Ghouls not needing to eat is a pretty big change.
Necropost! But how do you connect ghouls dying from dehydration in Fallout 1 and hunger? If ghouls don't need to eat, it doesn't mean they don't need to drink. They die because you steal their only source of water, and they die of dehydration. Got nothing to do with hunger or claims that Ghouls don't need food.
The Slog, or whatever it is called, in FO4 debunks Kid in A Fridge itself. If ghouls didn't need to eat why would they be bothering to grow a farm? Also note that ghoul settlers also require food/water just like humans.
This reply is hella late but yes, T-60 did not exist prior to Fallout 4 and in previous games T-51b was the best power armor seeing mass deployment before the bombs dropped. Mind you T-45 also didn't exist prior to fallout 3 but it fit well with the lore so was considered a good addition.
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Synth-ify Cats
Nuka Cola Cherry/Quantum
Decompose relevant skeletons (Lost Patrol, General McGann)
Institute FEV/Supermutants
Add EXP Bonus for finding House's/Other Notes
It's true, cats are extinct. In the western regions. Can you really expect someone who's remained stuck in New Vegas and only has interests that benefit his city really know what's going on across the United States?
It's simple, cats didn't make it into FO3 because neither did other small animals. Nothing in that game was smaller than an eyebot as bethesda assumed it might not be good for the engine, especially on the X Box.
You'd never see all these fabled iguanas around the wastes, yet iguana on a stick is a staple of most wastelands if not the mojave.
But here's a middleground for you:
Maybe the cats did resurface as a result of institute meddling, but why wouldn't they have just been bog standard descendants of felis domesticus as opposed to assuming they're all synthetic animals that would need to devote up to a quarter of their body cavity to stick a synth component into?
Here's how it happens: A field team goes out to perform an experiment, their test subjects are cats, at least on male and female cat escape because cats are wily little fuckers, or maybe one of the scientists felt bad about performing a test that might kill them, and while they don't breed like rabbits, there's doubtless plenty of prey for them, just because bethesda didn't see fit to represent their prey in game doesn't mean they aren't there(I've also had a cat send a pitbull to the vet while coming out of the encounter unscathed, but that's just an anecdote). Boom, felis domesticus reintroduced to the commonwealth.
Nah bro, I'm pretty sure cats are just extinct ;P
As for you Ubercoincollector, your defeatism is sickening. The corporate timeline of bethesda will keep degenerating but the true canon, what we belive in our hearts is what happend within the fiction can be changed much more easily
There is no need to justify Quantum being out in the world. it makes complete logical sense for it to be around.
now it being in vending machines ... that one is beyond me; but the bottles themselves would be in numerous areas.
just my two cents
Or https://www.google.ca/maps/@42.4705362,-71.3520854,16.25z for a basic overhead view of the area in the real world.
The real bridge near the Minuteman Statue is in fact a foot bridge. Sanctuary/Sanctuary Hills is rotated by about 30~45 degrees relative to the real bridge, though, the Minuteman statue is on the wrong side of the bridge, and Lowell Rd near the existing park would be a more appropriate bridge into the community, which does in fact have a cul-de-sac (branching off of a thru-road) -- two of them, actually, although the Pondview Lane one is likely the reference they used.
Given the scale of the in-game bridge relative to the original Old North Bridge, it's fairly clear that vehicle traffic would actually be able to traverse the in-game bridge one at a time (not a chance for the real bridge, although a side-by-side would work just fine), which makes sense for an upscale elite suburb home to people like highly-successful drug dealers, lawyers, and ex-soldiers. All in all, "fixing" this would literally involve tearing one of the highest detail map sections asunder, tossing mod and savegame compatibility out the window. It's an acceptable break from reality and doesn't contradict any existing lore, so it's A-OK.
Besides, since you are so against this, why did you look this mod up in the first place? Just to crap all over it and people who like it? Don't you have something better to do?
Really bizzare behaviour.
Ultimately though it doesn't matter because it's not meant to be explainable, it's just a gag.
" The X-01 series of Power Armor was specially engineered and employed by remnants of the U.S. military after the Great War, and offers increased protection over the older, pre-war models. "
What were you saying again?
He could just mean they aren't commonly kept as pets. Even though that makes no sense. He also might not *care* to keep track of whether cats exist or not. And I think it's somewhat plausible they'd be rare in the mojave, but more common elsewhere.
"Tatos... there were potatoes in Rivet City, and throughout the other games. In fact, Potatoes and Tomatoes aren't even close to being the same species... granted Fallout has always had wacky but this is just scientifically improbable."
Do... do you think that zip guns don't exist?
You know, you could easily explain the cats with a simple computer entry in one of the Institute scientist computers.
Something about how he/she had a pet (pun intended) project to make a completely synthetic cat and see if it spread throughout the commonwealth.
(to be clear, that wouldn't make cats "synths" as we know it, but rather a genetically constructed creature that is fully biological with no added parts and works just like any other living creature)
You could even make it something that was done off the books, without the rest of the Institutes knowledge or approval.
Or if you reaaaly need an explanation... there were cats in a vault somewhere. Hell, maybe Vault Tech ran a cat-based experiment.
Lets bring back horses too which were also established that they are extinct.
Seeing as how that's also dumb... sure. If cows can survive in whatever mutant state, so can horses.
Most of the Food in the USA is produced in the midwest, so east coast communities would surely suffer just as much as west coast. Every animal has mutated in all areas, including humans. To exclude one special from is kind of ridiculous. A mutated cat species would be much more believable. Those small farms are hardly enough to feed the amount of people living in the commonwealth either, and pre-war food supplies have to be dwindling. Cannibalism is rampant, I'm actually surprised they haven't Disneyfied that too.
I think all involved are probably vastly overestimating how hard it would be to wipe out cats as a species. They're fast little buggers and can take care of themselves.
While it's true that there would be... difficulties, on both coasts, that was 200 years ago. The assertion that pre-war food is still a source of food is already absurd. Cannibalism, well, it definitely could still happen for ritual purposes and such, but as a food source? Thermodynamics is laughing at you.
I mean, yeah, cats would presumably have mutated somewhat. But I'd expect mutants and non-mutant cats to exist, just like mutant and non-mutant humans, and mutant and non-mutant dogs, etc.
Well, is it so far-fetched that the Institute found records of their popularity and thought to bring them back? If anything it makes even more sense than them bringing gorillas back. The only problem is that when you kill cats, they drop meat. I would suggest removing that and adding synth components to them instead.
AFAIK late-series Synths have meat. They're bioengineered life forms with a few electronic bits, not robots.
Upgrading the model won't make the armor less rusty. I think the military paint would work much better, personally. As for the soldiers, they could have made it somewhere. Power Armor can't tank a nuclear bomb head on, but it can probably shield them from a blast that far away, letting them stumble off to somewhere their armor might be found later (military checkpoint, probably).
I think it *can* tank a nuclear bomb head on in game, but that's because the Fatman is weird.
More seriously, they could have gone quite a long ways and done almost anything, and thus their armor could have ended up anywhere.
because most of the midwest is covered in the same radioactive field of death as the glowing sea which has made travel incredibly hazardous
The primary target was flyover country? I mean, I *guess* that'd be helpful for Vault Tech...
"Only groups with access to vertibirds can cross in reasonable time and safety,
Ships, airships, or conventional airplanes. Demonstrably none of these are beyond the technical ability of surviving communities.
"and even then the different BoS chapters have almost no interaction because long-range communication is all but impossible."
Lolwut? We know radios work from how they're everywhere. Hell, we know there are active satelites. Military satelites, which you'd expect would be the first to go if any were targeted.
"Imagine walking the length of the US by foot to trade, in a world as hostile as Fallout where near-constant raiders is the least of your trouble."
Well, it'd probably be car. Or by wagon, if for some reason you don't have that and 'horses are extinct' somehow (I guess somehow vaporizing their primary habitat would help). And you wouldn't walk the whole length of the US. You'd relay. Like the Silk Road. Which crossed the whole length of south asia.
"They actually explained this in Fallout 3. The purifier, for some reason, only worked in that area of the Potomac. Probably because it's a very large body of water and they've only got one purifier. It's not like one facility like that could possibly purify ALL of the nation's water. Especially when there's still ground water, and not all rivers are connected, etc. Also radioactive rain. "
Ah, of course. Using a device that could be used much more effectively to solve a problem that shouldn't exist, and then failing to solve that problem anyways. (Ironically, the Game Over from activating the GECK in place is probably the best outcome...)
Likewise, a character mention that their cat's breath smells like cat food (a well-known Simpsons reference) is not sufficient evidence to prove that cats exist. Not by a long shot.
Bethesda retconned this, yes, but did so out of ignorance of the lore. There's a difference between ignorance, as Bethesda's designers often did, versus deliberate countermanding of community misinterpretation, as Avellone often did. Frankly I dislike Avellone's own "Fallout is Happy Days" sensibilities compared to Fargo's "Fallout is a badly maintained Civil Defense program", so it's not like I'm defending him and throwing Bethesda under the bus, but this nuance is fairly critical.