If the Fallout series is supposed to be set in 50s due to the Divergence, why did P90s appeared in Fallout 2?

[Delta51]

[Nite69]

its just a game, its suppose to be a future prediction of what the 1950's would look like, but in reality technology is no where near that good for that time.

Like here it is 2017 and we don't even have nuclear powered cars yet

[Hooded Crow]

It's set int the future but it's a future where all our technology centers around Nuclear power which found a foothold in 1951 just after the first atom bomb was dropped which is probably why it seems like this game is stuck in the 50s. It takes place in the year 2287 to be exact

[ronr42]

Originally posted by =EGC= _Nite_:

its just a game, its suppose to be a future prediction of what the 1950's would look like, but in reality technology is no where near that good for that time.

Like here it is 2017 and we don't even have nuclear powered cars yet

Yeah, and whatever happened to that Jet pack I ordered? Fed Ex needs to get on the ball! :)

[krashd]

Though the game is set in 2287 (210 years after the Great War) it was in a parallel future that that war happened, the year 2077 if your maths are up to the task. So the P90 would likely still have been made, since a P90 contains neither transistors nor nuclear technology it would have no difference in either universe and would likely still have been made around 1990 in both universes. Though theirs would have less precision in it's design and would be constructed from simpler materials due to their lack of 1990's computing power to use in CAD and experimenting with polymers.

The reason their 2077 looked like the 1950's is because our universe radically changed when the discovery of the transistor led to huge leaps in miniaturisation where a radio once the size of a table and made from gas valves and nixie tubes could now be made to fit inside a pocket of your jacket thanks to transistors. By the 1970's watches were digital and computers were becoming affordable to everyday citizens for the first time.

While the other universe didn't get all of the modernisation and miniaturisation ours did thanks to our breakthrough in transistor tech, they did get enormous leaps in power thanks to their breakthrough in fusion tech which meant that although their daily lives weren't changed in the 1950's and they would have to wait until the 2050's for gadgets like the pipboy and stealthboy and household robots they would at least have the means to power their all devices practically forever.

A clever plot by Black Isle to make the world in their Fallout games look both ancient and futuristic at the same time. The explanation being that in the 1950's their universe went down a very different path to our own that gave them an enormous, abundant pocket-sized power source but nothing smaller than a car to put it in for almost a century.

[Nina]

Originally posted by =EGC= _Nite_:

its just a game, its suppose to be a future prediction of what the 1950's would look like, but in reality technology is no where near that good for that time.

Like here it is 2017 and we don't even have nuclear powered cars yet

those atomic cars are based on a real concept design from ford

[pontynex]

Originally posted by krashd:

Though the game is set in 2287 (210 years after the Great War) it was in a parallel future that that war happened, the year 2077 if your maths are up to the task. So the P90 would likely still have been made, since a P90 contains neither transistors nor nuclear technology it would have no difference in either universe and would likely still have been made around 1990 in both universes. Though theirs would have less precision in it's design and would be constructed from simpler materials due to their lack of 1990's computing power to use in CAD and experimenting with polymers.

The reason their 2077 looked like the 1950's is because our universe radically changed when the discovery of the transistor led to huge leaps in miniaturisation where a radio once the size of a table and made from gas valves and nixie tubes could now be made to fit inside a pocket of your jacket thanks to transistors. By the 1970's watches were digital and computers were becoming affordable to everyday citizens for the first time.

While the other universe didn't get all of the modernisation and miniaturisation ours did thanks to our breakthrough in transistor tech, they did get enormous leaps in power thanks to their breakthrough in fusion tech which meant that although their daily lives weren't changed in the 1950's and they would have to wait until the 2050's for gadgets like the pipboy and stealthboy and household robots they would at least have the means to power their all devices practically forever.

A clever plot by Black Isle to make the world in their Fallout games look both ancient and futuristic at the same time. The explanation being that in the 1950's their universe went down a very different path to our own that gave them an enormous, abundant pocket-sized power source but nothing smaller than a car to put it in for almost a century.

Pretty much this. It's interesting to think about. They are stuck in a fifties-era mentality, because of the center of their technological boom, in a sense.

[krashd]

Just Google "1950's car of the future" and click on images or better still think back to stuff like The Jetsons or the original Batmobile. In the 50's and early 60's everyone was convinced rocket-powered cars and flying cars were just around the corner and every company had dozens of concept cars that wowed the new middle-class generation of not rich but not poor dreamers with disposable cash.

[Ruin]

There's no reason that a P90 could not have been designed, as it was mainly computer technology which suffered due to the microchip not having been developed, forcing the Fallout world to continue with more primitive forms of computing...

Gun development, for the most part, would have been relatively unaffected...

[pontynex]

Originally posted by krashd:

Just Google "1950's car of the future" and click on images or better still think back to stuff like The Jetsons or the original Batmobile. In the 50's and early 60's everyone was convinced rocket-powered cars and flying cars were just around the corner and every company had dozens of concept cars that wowed the new middle-class generation of not rich but not poor dreamers with disposable cash.

Hell, look at the Chrysler Typhoon. We truly believed we could do anything, go to the moon, build jet-cars. But I suppose practicallity won out.

[BaneBlackGuard]

from a technology standpoint, much was possible that we haven't embraced because the costs for those technologies, both economically and personal freedom, would have been too great. we have the technology to replace all highways with maglev systems that could get people from one spot in the world to any other at the speed of a sr-71 blackbird. technology and technical know how haven't been the limiting factors. every home could have it's own fission powerplant. technology wise nothing is keeping us from doing it.

[hedy]

It's not set in the 1950's. It just has technology that was expected in the 50's. The games seem to be in an alternate universe where the cold war continued past 2000's. Thus hindering the technological advancements that we have in our current universe. You may notice that calendars in the game from before the war say "2077" That's when the nukes were dropped. The game takes place in 2277, I believe.

[Darkaiser]

Originally posted by BaneBlackGuard:

from a technology standpoint, much was possible that we haven't embraced because the costs for those technologies, both economically and personal freedom, would have been too great. we have the technology to replace all highways with maglev systems that could get people from one spot in the world to any other at the speed of a sr-71 blackbird. technology and technical know how haven't been the limiting factors. every home could have it's own fission powerplant. technology wise nothing is keeping us from doing it.

Some kid built a very small reactor in a shed behind his house some years ago. Used tiny amounts of radioactive material from smoke detectors. It's still more efficient to build one big reactor rather than each home having their own but the only reason that we don't run everything off of a combination of solar, wind and nuclear now is Big Oil likes money

[pontynex]

Originally posted by Darkaiser:

Originally posted by BaneBlackGuard:

from a technology standpoint, much was possible that we haven't embraced because the costs for those technologies, both economically and personal freedom, would have been too great. we have the technology to replace all highways with maglev systems that could get people from one spot in the world to any other at the speed of a sr-71 blackbird. technology and technical know how haven't been the limiting factors. every home could have it's own fission powerplant. technology wise nothing is keeping us from doing it.

Some kid built a very small reactor in a shed behind his house some years ago. Used tiny amounts of radioactive material from smoke detectors. It's still more efficient to build one big reactor rather than each home having their own but the only reason that we don't run everything off of a combination of solar, wind and nuclear now is Big Oil likes money

Pretty much. There is a reason "Fusion technology is only fifty years away."

[Ruin]

Originally posted by Darkaiser:

Some kid built a very small reactor in a shed behind his house some years ago. Used tiny amounts of radioactive material from smoke detectors. It's still more efficient to build one big reactor rather than each home having their own but the only reason that we don't run everything off of a combination of solar, wind and nuclear now is Big Oil likes money

No, it's because of ill-informed idiots who are terrified that nuclear power will result in some massive nuclear explosion the likes of Chernobyl...

As it is, the majority of the worlds' power actually comes from coal-fired plants (AFAIK), not from oil... That's cars...

The problem with renewables is that they cannot be relied upon for base-load power... You need something which can be relied upon for a minimum out-put, to ensure supply, this cannot be guaranteed with solar, or wind-power...

So the only other options are geo-thermal, but it requires the right conditions, hydro-electric, which requires big-arse dams and disruption to river flow, which is another environmental no-no, or Nuclear, which I covered above...

Because of these factors, we are stuck with pollution belching coal plants until some new form of technology comes along...

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Ruin:

No, it's because of ill-informed idiots who are terrified that nuclear power will result in some massive nuclear explosion the likes of Chernobyl...

It's not surprising that people are cautious of that, given the extreme difficulty in handling the consequences.

Originally posted by Ruin:

The problem with renewables is that they cannot be relied upon for base-load power... You need something which can be relied upon for a minimum out-put, to ensure supply, this cannot be guaranteed with solar, or wind-power...

That's would also be a problem for fossil fuels, it's just that we've already got a massive volume of chemical storage for them in convenient forms (coal, oil, and the like). With fossil fuels, we're simply drawing on the massive amounts of stored energy already banked by past plants and animals (which ultimately derived all their energy from sunlight).

The solution is simply to find ways to store the power you're generating for later use, just as all those ancient living organisms (inadvertently) did. For example, you can create direct storage through high-volume batteries, or perform chemical conversions like creating burnable hydrogen from water using elecrolysis (you get back the stored energy when you burn the hydrogen in oxygen, yielding water).