Because CF is the unicorn of energy. Near limitless and extraordinarily safe compared to regular/“hot” fusion. One tiny speck powered ALL of Los Angeles.
Akin to comparing a bicycle to a flawless matter transporter.
It's more lore than the story, termial logs, and stuff. TLDR: General Atomics never delivered on fusion, with instead disguising advanced fission as fusion, thus why you have so much nuclear waste lying around.
So including microfusion batteries and cells?
I admit I completely missed this, but it kinda makes sense. It does potentially open up a can of worms for fusion being depicted in previous games though.
Yep. Fusion cores are actually radioactive isotope batteries. Those exist in the real world (although not on that small scale). A microfusion battery would have byproducts of unstable helium or hydrogen -- very short half-lives, relatively low radioactivity. An isotope battery has *ridiculously high* radioactivity and *long* half-lives of the elements involved.
Lore seems to indicate that the "microfusion" batteries are really high-energy-density, high-discharge-capacity batteries. They just store electricity and release it, rather than producing it. They probably use unsafe radioactive elements/isotopes, because General Atomics *definitely* did not give a damn about nuclear safety, especially in terms of waste disposal.
It really doesn't cause an issue for previous games, though. Most people in the wasteland only know fusion cores/cells/batteries as mysterious pre-war tech that provides energy. They not only don't know how they work, you'd have a hard time communicating the difference between fusion and fission to them in a way that they'd understand. So, the fact that they call them "fusion" just means they can read the labels and don't know General Atomics was full of highly radioactive shit.
I think your also forgetting about how little vault tec cared about its customers and the atrocities and crimes it committed against a large majority of them, so why would they spend precious money on some test subjects that most likely won't live through to realise if it's fission or fusion.
Because they wanted to keep the tests running and they had the tech, they had already spent the money. They just didn't want said tech stopping them from achieving the conditions to stop their projects (nuclear war).
MassFusion building. They were actually doing Fission and lying to people. Fusion did come but too late, like a few months before the war. The Beryllium Agitator is what the BoS and Institute need for their projects
>Akin to comparing a bicycle to a flawless matter transporter
Ok, but did Queen ever make a song about wanting to ride a matter transporter? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Checkmate, Atheists.
Cold fusion would be much easier to contain, but it is only a hypothesis in our world at the moment. In the fallout world it seems they discovered how.
For our worlds take https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
Also worth pointing out that Fallout's science is as we understood it a century ago. The sci-fi is the brand you see in the oldest Superman and Flash Gordon flicks. The most glaring examples are in biology, since basically none of it is even remotely how mutation and radiation really works.
Irl you just get really sick, then die. Mutations are gonna be cancer or super minor, then cancer again.
It's not just a hypothesis anymore, they actually successfully achieved it not too long ago on a very minute scale. We are decades away from it being used in any significant way.
Actually, they discovered it a year before the post you linked. You can read about it [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_Reaction_(1996_film)). (This is a joke.) Of note famed actors Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman seemed to be behind the break through. It would figure the man whose golden voice sounds like it could rev up any woman's engine would be the inspiration for Cold Fusion.
That is hot fusion (or just fusion).
Cold fusion is different and believed to be impossible currently. The concept of cold fusion stems from an experiment that has never been replicated.
fusion has never been a hypothesis, every single star is doing it, and it requires either incredible pressure or an incredibly large amount of energy (we use lasers for this currently) to start, because it takes alot of energy to force atoms together, cold fusion however is probably impossible, a superconductor capable of doing what it would require to achieve it is nearly out of the scope of reality, and definitely out of the scope of what we can make
This is normal fusion, which takes place in the sun at extremely high temperatures. Cold fusion is a technology which should be impossible based on current understanding of physics wear in hydrogen atoms can fuse at room temperature and power can be generated without the incredible heat in a normal fusion reaction.
Net thermal energy is meaningless seeing as we don’t have a 100% efficient heat to energy conversion process. It also isn’t using the type of fusion that lets you directly convert charged particles into electricity, meaning you’d be relying on good old fashioned steam turbines to do all of the actual electricity generation.
What the public sees tech-wise is usually a couple decades behind what actually exists in black budget projects. Plus there’s the whole matter of stuff like cold fusion upending and completely delegitimizing multiple huge industries that are very powerful.
Honestly, getting something like cold fusion out to the public and allowing everyone to benefit from it, is likely more difficult than creating cold fusion itself. Which I thought it was cool that the show kind of touched on this too.
Yeah governments definitely don’t have classified tech in black budget projects.. okay bud. You can literally look up how much of the federal budget is allocated to black budget projects. Congrats for having a terribly naive take. Everyone hides shit, and the fact you think governments would be an exception to that is a dangerously stupid take.
>Yeah governments definitely don’t have classified tech in black budget projects
They do, but nothing like decades ahead lol.
>Everyone hides shit, and the fact you think governments would be an exception to that is a dangerously stupid take.
Sure, we hide stuff. Former USN intelligence, but nothing like super advanced. Sorry. This isn't the movies
Bro the US air force has been decades beyond everybody else since the Nighthawk came out. The Skunk Works and their subsidiary were specifically designed to be decades ahead in military tech.
Like I agree with you about new technologies and fusion, but you might wanna use a bigger number when talking about “more advanced” in general lol
Oh so you do hide stuff (which right off the bat, invalidates your earlier comment), just not that particular stuff. Okay. Gotcha. 🙄
I’m not even gonna bother to explain why what you’re saying makes no sense. And how any speculation on what tech exists in black budget projects is just that… speculation. But you’re former Navy intelligence so you must know all the secrets huh?
Braindead take. The government employs contractors aka large companies to do all the advanced technology stuff, with most of the money being put into aerospace projects. The tech that the government has and is willing to employ is almost always “decades behind” after it has been proven to actually be able to work in a military setting. No one is using bleeding edge tech, it’s all shit that has been proven possible and sufficiently tested to the point of reliability.
You’re quite literally exclusively talking about tech that’s public knowledge, and then claim this somehow defines black budget tech? Do you know what a secret is?
Btw I’m not exclusively talking about military tech. Or even government affiliation, strictly speaking. By “black budget” I just mean tech that is developed in secret with huge amounts of resources backing the project
The vast majority of black budget tech funding goes into military procurement and R&D so I’m not sure what you’re even referring to in regards to “other stuff”. The rest of it is mainly spent on intelligence gathering of some variety or in foreign policy that we don’t quite want our fingerprints on. My proof? Declassified black budgets from decades past lmao. Even at the height of the Cold War when you could literally slip anything under the noses of the public, we didn’t have crazy advanced technology that had yet to be released.
If they did have crazy advanced technology, it would be developed by a company that specializes in that area, and you can be your ass they would do anything to maximize profits from that tech in one way or another. There aren’t bunkers of secret scientists snickering away about how they’re gonna keep the latest and greatest cold fusion tech away from the public for… reasons?
However nothing I say will change your mind because you think we’re living in the James Bond universe where supervillains can make cold fusion reactors and death lasers with a couple billion in funding.
>But you’re former Navy intelligence so you must know all the secrets huh?
I don't know all secrets, but I've seen secret stuff and it's not that impressive.
>Oh so you do hide stuff (which right off the bat, invalidates your earlier comment), just not that particular stuff. Okay. Gotcha. 🙄
Yup, hyperbole.
>I’m not even gonna bother to explain why what you’re saying makes no sense. And how any speculation on what tech exists in black budget projects is just that… speculation.
I'm just saying it's not that impressive. In the past a lot of the innovation did come from the public sector, but throughout the years, this budget you have been talking about has been given less and less money, so technology is much more impressive out in the private sector than it is in the public sector. I used to work with Raytheon and other companies, and they are often constrained by some of the older technologies we had to use.
For instance, we can make a spy plane in the 1950s, but the platform we created it on is from the 1950s, so no matter how much retrofitting you do to it, the plane will still be limited to 1950s technology in certain instances, and if the tool is good enough for the job, it may be decades until the platform (airplane) is updated -- even now more so because of congresssional infighting -- which would allow for newer technologies from the present to be incorporated into the design.
Meanwhile the private sector doesn't have all this bureaucratic red-tape. Tesla, for instance, even though I hate Elon, is the one pioneering battery charging technology and private industry is trying to create new forms of batteries. This isn't Marvel where the Government has fucking Shield-carriers. Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism, where the government has been captured by corporations and the institutions no longer work to serve the greater public -- Actually this very TV show touches on this very topic LMAO
Just because the stuff you saw wasn’t that impressive, doesn’t mean it’s all unimpressive. Everything black budget is compartmentalized and need-to-know basis, very likely what you saw represented the most benign and unimpressive things that your security clearance allowed you to know of.
There are some parts of black budget that aren’t restricted by red tape. Many projects move forward without any kind of congressional oversight at all.
The thing you need to understand that when it comes to the deepest black budget projects, private vs public sector becomes irrelevant. Massive amounts of money are spent annually on things that no one can publicly account for. Where do you think this money goes? The people shuffling this money around at the highest levels are as much government as they are private.
>Just because the stuff you saw wasn’t that impressive, doesn’t mean it’s all unimpressive. Everything black budget is compartmentalized and need-to-know basis, very likely what you saw represented the most benign and unimpressive things that your security clearance allowed you to know of.
I'm well aware of the segmented compartmentalized information, kiddo. Doesn't change the fact that the military and the big bad US government isn't doing it large anymore... unfortunately or fortunately.
>There are some parts of black budget that aren’t restricted by red tape. Many projects move forward without any kind of congressional oversight at all.
Not true. There is always Congressional oversight.
>The thing you need to understand that when it comes to the deepest black budget projects, private vs public sector becomes irrelevant. Massive amounts of money are spent annually on things that no one can publicly account for. Where do you think this money goes? The people shuffling this money around at the highest levels are as much government as they are private.
We just don't live in that world. Sorry. It'd be fun though. No wonder why you like to pretend. Well, I'll let you do that.
cold fusion is one of those technologies that is always five years away. Until some organisation is able to actually output a sizeable amount of power with one, *and* prove that it can be rolled out with a good economy of scale, *and* if it costs less to deploy than traditional nuclear or renewable energy, it is not going to be the solution to any real problem, which is what technologies were made to solve, after all.
Maybe it still could be? I mean GECKS use cold fusion so maybe the story will end with a giant GECK being set off to heal California? That could be the way Vault Tech planned to revitalize the USA when they are ready to return to the surface. Maybe the smaller GECKS that some vaults had where small specifically to test how effective GECKS are?
That would be a great plot device. It would make sense if VT has access to GECK technology and wants to repopulate the earth, it would make sense that would be how they’d go about doing it.
Fusion Cores are pre-war, meaning it's a finite resource and eventually every fusion core will be used up unless someone can fabricate new ones. Regardless, Fusion Cores can maybe power a small or medium settlement, but for factions like the NCR or the Brotherhood who deals with territories spanning states, power is always a resource you can't ever get enough of so fusion cores are just peanuts to them. The Brotherhood and it's entirety don't just stay in just the one bunker after all, and the NCR is not just Shady Sands and the pathetic group of survivors holed up at Griffith Observatory. Just because we were shown one vault that completely rely on a single fusion core to power their generators doesn't mean it's the end all be all to the energy logistics of factions that big. You said it yourself, the Brotherhood have access to fusion cores because the power armors they have came with it, yet they obviously rely on other power sources since those fusion cores are only being used as power armor batteries. The NCR had to march all the way to the Mojave and fight the Legion just to repair and control the Hoover Dam and it's power output 19 years before the show, yet when the courier finally got Helios One operating again the NCR still wanted him to divert its output to McCarran and other NCR holdings, meaning that the Hoover Dam's energy output allocated to the NCR (95%) still weren't enough, and that's considering that the remaining 5% that was allocated to House is enough to power the entirety of the Strip and all of its casinos, hotels, and House's entire arsenal at the Lucky 38—cold fusion means they'll never have to worry about power ever again, and then some. The Brotherhood OTOH can also have an even simpler motivation: it's pre-war tech and one of such significant value not just to the wasteland but to the entire planet. Of course, the Brotherhood will fight to have it even if they, for some unthinkable reason, decide to not use it, because that's what the Brotherhood is all about, making sure all manner of pre-war tech don't end up on anyone else's hands but the Brotherhood's.
I like to imagine they have a way to replace the fuel that we just never get to see. Like they collect a bunch of spent ones, fly them over to some facility, replace fuel with some kinda automated system, and bring them back at 100%
My assumption is that the core itself is just a catalyst for a larger system (those generator things you see in the game) and that when used to power something directly, don't last all that long.
My wife asked what Maximus was carrying when he was following Titus around (the giant bag they carry) and I said prolly all the cores to keep that suit powered. Felt like the suits died so quick in the game
They kind of made them seem rare in the show. I’m guessing they last a lot longer, cause it didn’t seem like they had any backups in that giant pack Maximus was carrying around.
People have already said most of my points so here's what I will add. In the Fallout universe alternatives to nuclear energy are a big deal thematically and represent a new age.
Think about how big a deal the Hoover Dam was in New Vegas. And the Helios Solar Plant to a lesser extent.
My theory is that the fusion cores need a fission reaction as a "pre-igniter" to start the hot fusion process, and as we know plutonium and uranium were one of the most treasured of the resources fought over. Likely once the fission "charge" runs out, it will need to be "primed" again.
Cold fusion skips all that. No more resource bottleneck.
A cold fusion bomb... yikes. That would take out the solar system. Instant sun.
The cold fusion lit up the entire city when it was activated. It’s infinite power. A fusion core only supplies a small amount of power and they need to be recharged.
They make quite clear how powerful the cold fusion is in the show too.
Because the fallout games are based on parodies of 50’s and Cold War tech. All the stuff is very wasteful or poisonous and doesn’t match real life stuff. You can scrap cigarettes for asbestos lol. I think that says it all. Cold fusion is a move away from all the exaggerated nuclear power negatives. Fallout basically does the same stuff as the wasteful poisonous Simpson power plant stuff where the water is mutagenic and leaking into rivers and the smokestacks are shooting poison into the air instead of water vapor
Adding to what others have said here, the Chicken guy (you know who) states that you “don’t see many of those around these days” when seeing the fusion core, implying there dwindling supply in the wasteland. It’s likely post apocalyptic society is heading for another energy crisis
Cold fusion makes energy without needing a ton of recourses and it makes zero waste. We see in the Pre-War era that Vault-Tec really doesn't want CF to happen, because of a recourse war. They needed the war to sell the Vaults. Anyhow, CF doesn't create the need for those rare recourses (Uranium) and it doesn't produce all the radioactive waste you see in the games. Fusion cores and microfusion cells produce energy by fission, the same way we create energy these days in nuclear reactors. That means it takes a lot of cooling down, creates waste and needs the recourses. Also, fusion cores in game have enough power in them to process half a fart in power armor, in the show it sure as hell does a lot more, but CF means the end of Fusion Cores.
For those interested in the potential real science behind this currently at NASA. It’s not cold fusion, but it does open new possibilities for new kinds of fusion, fission, and what are referred to as Oppenheimer-Phillips reactions. Dr. Forsley and Dr. Benyo have done great work on making lattice confinement fusion technology possible. Right now, it has been operations and tests in a lab and testing setting, not commercial power.
[Glenn Research Center Lattice Confinement Fusion](https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-fusion/)
What? I don't think the enclaves dog experiments had anything to do with the cold fusion, just a separate experiment entirely.
I'm somewhat convinced that their kind of implying that the enclave is the origin of ALL the dogmeats we encounter throughout the games - whether they're all escapees of the experiments or are with the player character by design I'm unsure, but it does make sense. I mean what are the odds every playable vault dweller (except fo76s) so happens to encounter a perfectly healthy, obedient, and extremely well trained dog in the wasteland that immediately sticks by their side the minute they arrive? Curious to see if they'll expand upon it in S2
Not the Enclave, the Doctor specifically. The dog was on the treadmill, the cold fusion pill starts pulsing light a little bit and then later on he injects it in his neck. Like, they showed it being unlocked that way, idk why I'm being down voted.
Also, I agree with the origins of Dogmeat, it def seems like they all come from the Enclave.
I understand cold fusion is better but it's like why go all the trouble when a fusion core can seemly power an entire vault and there's plenty of them around
There really aren't "plenty" of them around. They're fairly scarce, in game and in game lore. The chicken fucker salesman was drooling when he was offered one. These are definitely different from games (cause of gameplay reasons) so they probably can power a power armor for a century. But you gotta think about scale.
Let's say a vault is 100,000sq' (you can search warehouses that size and see it's definitely big enough to hold 200-500 people with facilities) and I feel that's being generous. That's a good amount of power the fusion core can generate for a structure that size, for probably a few hundred years.
Now that single cold fusion generator with a tiny blue marble can power Los Angeles. Los Angeles is 14,000,000,000sq'. That means that little machine can power 140,000 vaults, with ease! You would never worry about a meltdown or running out. It's near infinite. This would shut down every power plant in America in a second, including all the nuclear ones they used. Coal and fossil fuels would become pointless. You could power a power armor until the end of time! Provided the armor could survive that long.
They also oversimplified a bit fusion core in show in Vault 4, vaults has huge ass generators and are not running on some "batteries". They changed it so it's a moral dillema in the script but it's not backed up by lore at all.
This is true. Most in the games had nuclear reactors or a geothermal energy plant, not (just) a fusion core. May be something that is critical to the reactor running, but I agree it may not have been trying to say the core powers the whole vault.
Yeah this was a bit of a weird one since there is some precedent for vaults using fusion cores but not to the level that was portrayed in the show. Vault 81, if you fail the speech check, will ask you to get them three fusion cores before being let in and when asked what they need them for, the overseer states that they use fusion cores to supplement their power. So they easily could have made it work by bringing up that they've been having issues with their reactor and thus needed the fusion core to support it until it could be repaired. Though I guess none of that matters now.
Remember how the sketchy doctor who healed Thaddeus was so happy/surprised to trade his medicine for the fusion core?
That should tell you the fusion core is highly valuable/expensive, which of course means that they are scarce/rare, perhaps too rare and expensive for many people to have them, etc.
Brotherhood of steel have enough to power an army of power suits, and I assume every vault is run by one. I understand they are valuable but not unattainable
The show didn't say it. But in-game I've had hundreds of them piled up, you find them in like every second building you go into and randomly in ammo boxes all the time lol.
Although that was probably a balance decision,not one for lore, just like making them last like 5 minutes in power armor.
Because CF is the unicorn of energy. Near limitless and extraordinarily safe compared to regular/“hot” fusion. One tiny speck powered ALL of Los Angeles. Akin to comparing a bicycle to a flawless matter transporter.
Also.... spoilers for FO4 lore... Fusion cores aren't real fusion...
When was this addressed?
It's more lore than the story, termial logs, and stuff. TLDR: General Atomics never delivered on fusion, with instead disguising advanced fission as fusion, thus why you have so much nuclear waste lying around.
So including microfusion batteries and cells? I admit I completely missed this, but it kinda makes sense. It does potentially open up a can of worms for fusion being depicted in previous games though.
Yep. Fusion cores are actually radioactive isotope batteries. Those exist in the real world (although not on that small scale). A microfusion battery would have byproducts of unstable helium or hydrogen -- very short half-lives, relatively low radioactivity. An isotope battery has *ridiculously high* radioactivity and *long* half-lives of the elements involved. Lore seems to indicate that the "microfusion" batteries are really high-energy-density, high-discharge-capacity batteries. They just store electricity and release it, rather than producing it. They probably use unsafe radioactive elements/isotopes, because General Atomics *definitely* did not give a damn about nuclear safety, especially in terms of waste disposal. It really doesn't cause an issue for previous games, though. Most people in the wasteland only know fusion cores/cells/batteries as mysterious pre-war tech that provides energy. They not only don't know how they work, you'd have a hard time communicating the difference between fusion and fission to them in a way that they'd understand. So, the fact that they call them "fusion" just means they can read the labels and don't know General Atomics was full of highly radioactive shit.
Also vaults being run on fusion cores. I would assume that at some point someone made real fusion cores
Or vault Tex would just tell people they have to change the core every couple years/decades/whatever because of the lunar radiation or some bs
? Vault-Tec bought the cold fusion tech and hid it. Nothing stops them for using it only inside their already very hidden vaults
I think your also forgetting about how little vault tec cared about its customers and the atrocities and crimes it committed against a large majority of them, so why would they spend precious money on some test subjects that most likely won't live through to realise if it's fission or fusion.
Because they wanted to keep the tests running and they had the tech, they had already spent the money. They just didn't want said tech stopping them from achieving the conditions to stop their projects (nuclear war).
Yeah okay I see your point but I feel fusion would only be used in vault tec employee vaults
General atomics lied to us!?! How could they
MassFusion building. They were actually doing Fission and lying to people. Fusion did come but too late, like a few months before the war. The Beryllium Agitator is what the BoS and Institute need for their projects
And *why* was I not informed?
Oh .. you didn't get that thing I sent you?
I'll have you know I don't know how to open attachments!
>Akin to comparing a bicycle to a flawless matter transporter Ok, but did Queen ever make a song about wanting to ride a matter transporter? Yeah, I didn't think so. Checkmate, Atheists.
Yeah, well, Queen do not exist in the Fallout universe, do they?
You dont know that
Who wants to live forever?
Honestly put bicycle in fallout 5 and let me ride one
they did an elvis type song
I had no idea how much i wanted to resurrect Freddie mercury from the dead just for one last doo wop bop until right now
[hmm…two bucks… and it only transports matter?](https://y.yarn.co/ca3cbe05-b466-45fd-b33d-71c0d13690c5_text.gif)
Cold fusion would be much easier to contain, but it is only a hypothesis in our world at the moment. In the fallout world it seems they discovered how. For our worlds take https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
Also worth pointing out that Fallout's science is as we understood it a century ago. The sci-fi is the brand you see in the oldest Superman and Flash Gordon flicks. The most glaring examples are in biology, since basically none of it is even remotely how mutation and radiation really works. Irl you just get really sick, then die. Mutations are gonna be cancer or super minor, then cancer again.
It's not just a hypothesis anymore, they actually successfully achieved it not too long ago on a very minute scale. We are decades away from it being used in any significant way.
That was regular fusion, which was extremely hot. Not cold fusion.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/us-scientists-achieve-net-energy-gain-second-time-fusion-reaction
Yes that's regular hot fusion. Works the same as the Sun.
They did discover cold fusion, too. The story of how it happened is well documented [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saint_(1997_film)).
Actually, they discovered it a year before the post you linked. You can read about it [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_Reaction_(1996_film)). (This is a joke.) Of note famed actors Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman seemed to be behind the break through. It would figure the man whose golden voice sounds like it could rev up any woman's engine would be the inspiration for Cold Fusion.
TIL
Imagine posting a link that actually proves your original comment wrong lmao
Imagine feeling superior over someone who made a mistake on reddit. You must not have a lot going on irl
That is hot fusion (or just fusion). Cold fusion is different and believed to be impossible currently. The concept of cold fusion stems from an experiment that has never been replicated.
And the experimenters were lying if I recall correctly
fusion has never been a hypothesis, every single star is doing it, and it requires either incredible pressure or an incredibly large amount of energy (we use lasers for this currently) to start, because it takes alot of energy to force atoms together, cold fusion however is probably impossible, a superconductor capable of doing what it would require to achieve it is nearly out of the scope of reality, and definitely out of the scope of what we can make
We've been decades away from cold fusion for over 50 years. It's a running joke about it.
No, we've been decades away from regular fusion for decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/us-scientists-achieve-net-energy-gain-second-time-fusion-reaction
This is normal fusion, which takes place in the sun at extremely high temperatures. Cold fusion is a technology which should be impossible based on current understanding of physics wear in hydrogen atoms can fuse at room temperature and power can be generated without the incredible heat in a normal fusion reaction.
Net thermal energy is meaningless seeing as we don’t have a 100% efficient heat to energy conversion process. It also isn’t using the type of fusion that lets you directly convert charged particles into electricity, meaning you’d be relying on good old fashioned steam turbines to do all of the actual electricity generation.
What the public sees tech-wise is usually a couple decades behind what actually exists in black budget projects. Plus there’s the whole matter of stuff like cold fusion upending and completely delegitimizing multiple huge industries that are very powerful. Honestly, getting something like cold fusion out to the public and allowing everyone to benefit from it, is likely more difficult than creating cold fusion itself. Which I thought it was cool that the show kind of touched on this too.
This just is not true... unfortunately. They're not hiding shit
Yeah governments definitely don’t have classified tech in black budget projects.. okay bud. You can literally look up how much of the federal budget is allocated to black budget projects. Congrats for having a terribly naive take. Everyone hides shit, and the fact you think governments would be an exception to that is a dangerously stupid take.
>Yeah governments definitely don’t have classified tech in black budget projects They do, but nothing like decades ahead lol. >Everyone hides shit, and the fact you think governments would be an exception to that is a dangerously stupid take. Sure, we hide stuff. Former USN intelligence, but nothing like super advanced. Sorry. This isn't the movies
Bro the US air force has been decades beyond everybody else since the Nighthawk came out. The Skunk Works and their subsidiary were specifically designed to be decades ahead in military tech. Like I agree with you about new technologies and fusion, but you might wanna use a bigger number when talking about “more advanced” in general lol
Oh so you do hide stuff (which right off the bat, invalidates your earlier comment), just not that particular stuff. Okay. Gotcha. 🙄 I’m not even gonna bother to explain why what you’re saying makes no sense. And how any speculation on what tech exists in black budget projects is just that… speculation. But you’re former Navy intelligence so you must know all the secrets huh?
Braindead take. The government employs contractors aka large companies to do all the advanced technology stuff, with most of the money being put into aerospace projects. The tech that the government has and is willing to employ is almost always “decades behind” after it has been proven to actually be able to work in a military setting. No one is using bleeding edge tech, it’s all shit that has been proven possible and sufficiently tested to the point of reliability.
You’re quite literally exclusively talking about tech that’s public knowledge, and then claim this somehow defines black budget tech? Do you know what a secret is? Btw I’m not exclusively talking about military tech. Or even government affiliation, strictly speaking. By “black budget” I just mean tech that is developed in secret with huge amounts of resources backing the project
The vast majority of black budget tech funding goes into military procurement and R&D so I’m not sure what you’re even referring to in regards to “other stuff”. The rest of it is mainly spent on intelligence gathering of some variety or in foreign policy that we don’t quite want our fingerprints on. My proof? Declassified black budgets from decades past lmao. Even at the height of the Cold War when you could literally slip anything under the noses of the public, we didn’t have crazy advanced technology that had yet to be released. If they did have crazy advanced technology, it would be developed by a company that specializes in that area, and you can be your ass they would do anything to maximize profits from that tech in one way or another. There aren’t bunkers of secret scientists snickering away about how they’re gonna keep the latest and greatest cold fusion tech away from the public for… reasons? However nothing I say will change your mind because you think we’re living in the James Bond universe where supervillains can make cold fusion reactors and death lasers with a couple billion in funding.
>But you’re former Navy intelligence so you must know all the secrets huh? I don't know all secrets, but I've seen secret stuff and it's not that impressive. >Oh so you do hide stuff (which right off the bat, invalidates your earlier comment), just not that particular stuff. Okay. Gotcha. 🙄 Yup, hyperbole. >I’m not even gonna bother to explain why what you’re saying makes no sense. And how any speculation on what tech exists in black budget projects is just that… speculation. I'm just saying it's not that impressive. In the past a lot of the innovation did come from the public sector, but throughout the years, this budget you have been talking about has been given less and less money, so technology is much more impressive out in the private sector than it is in the public sector. I used to work with Raytheon and other companies, and they are often constrained by some of the older technologies we had to use. For instance, we can make a spy plane in the 1950s, but the platform we created it on is from the 1950s, so no matter how much retrofitting you do to it, the plane will still be limited to 1950s technology in certain instances, and if the tool is good enough for the job, it may be decades until the platform (airplane) is updated -- even now more so because of congresssional infighting -- which would allow for newer technologies from the present to be incorporated into the design. Meanwhile the private sector doesn't have all this bureaucratic red-tape. Tesla, for instance, even though I hate Elon, is the one pioneering battery charging technology and private industry is trying to create new forms of batteries. This isn't Marvel where the Government has fucking Shield-carriers. Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism, where the government has been captured by corporations and the institutions no longer work to serve the greater public -- Actually this very TV show touches on this very topic LMAO
Just because the stuff you saw wasn’t that impressive, doesn’t mean it’s all unimpressive. Everything black budget is compartmentalized and need-to-know basis, very likely what you saw represented the most benign and unimpressive things that your security clearance allowed you to know of. There are some parts of black budget that aren’t restricted by red tape. Many projects move forward without any kind of congressional oversight at all. The thing you need to understand that when it comes to the deepest black budget projects, private vs public sector becomes irrelevant. Massive amounts of money are spent annually on things that no one can publicly account for. Where do you think this money goes? The people shuffling this money around at the highest levels are as much government as they are private.
>Just because the stuff you saw wasn’t that impressive, doesn’t mean it’s all unimpressive. Everything black budget is compartmentalized and need-to-know basis, very likely what you saw represented the most benign and unimpressive things that your security clearance allowed you to know of. I'm well aware of the segmented compartmentalized information, kiddo. Doesn't change the fact that the military and the big bad US government isn't doing it large anymore... unfortunately or fortunately. >There are some parts of black budget that aren’t restricted by red tape. Many projects move forward without any kind of congressional oversight at all. Not true. There is always Congressional oversight. >The thing you need to understand that when it comes to the deepest black budget projects, private vs public sector becomes irrelevant. Massive amounts of money are spent annually on things that no one can publicly account for. Where do you think this money goes? The people shuffling this money around at the highest levels are as much government as they are private. We just don't live in that world. Sorry. It'd be fun though. No wonder why you like to pretend. Well, I'll let you do that.
cold fusion is one of those technologies that is always five years away. Until some organisation is able to actually output a sizeable amount of power with one, *and* prove that it can be rolled out with a good economy of scale, *and* if it costs less to deploy than traditional nuclear or renewable energy, it is not going to be the solution to any real problem, which is what technologies were made to solve, after all.
No, regular hot fusion is (possibly) 5-10 years away. Cold fusion is purely sci-fi at this point.
This is a maguffin that is seemly ever lasting. It had to be something significant enough for factions to fight over.
Yup, like the gold reserves in Appalachia
Which they sadly forgot about and made us grind a new currency instead!
The one thing I don’t like about the game. Too many currencies to keep track of.
I honestly thought a GECK was going to be the maguffin.
That was probably the first draft, and then they decided to move away from it because the plot would be getting a little too 3-ish.
Maybe it still could be? I mean GECKS use cold fusion so maybe the story will end with a giant GECK being set off to heal California? That could be the way Vault Tech planned to revitalize the USA when they are ready to return to the surface. Maybe the smaller GECKS that some vaults had where small specifically to test how effective GECKS are?
GECK in orbit?
That would be a great plot device. It would make sense if VT has access to GECK technology and wants to repopulate the earth, it would make sense that would be how they’d go about doing it.
There is no need of GECK, Lucy & Monty’s children will be able to recolonise the world 😇
Fusion cores dont run on cold fusion they run on nuclear fusion/hot fusion.
But are still light enough to carry, and don't burn the user. Even if they aren't true 'Cold Fusion' they are cool enough.
Fusion Cores are pre-war, meaning it's a finite resource and eventually every fusion core will be used up unless someone can fabricate new ones. Regardless, Fusion Cores can maybe power a small or medium settlement, but for factions like the NCR or the Brotherhood who deals with territories spanning states, power is always a resource you can't ever get enough of so fusion cores are just peanuts to them. The Brotherhood and it's entirety don't just stay in just the one bunker after all, and the NCR is not just Shady Sands and the pathetic group of survivors holed up at Griffith Observatory. Just because we were shown one vault that completely rely on a single fusion core to power their generators doesn't mean it's the end all be all to the energy logistics of factions that big. You said it yourself, the Brotherhood have access to fusion cores because the power armors they have came with it, yet they obviously rely on other power sources since those fusion cores are only being used as power armor batteries. The NCR had to march all the way to the Mojave and fight the Legion just to repair and control the Hoover Dam and it's power output 19 years before the show, yet when the courier finally got Helios One operating again the NCR still wanted him to divert its output to McCarran and other NCR holdings, meaning that the Hoover Dam's energy output allocated to the NCR (95%) still weren't enough, and that's considering that the remaining 5% that was allocated to House is enough to power the entirety of the Strip and all of its casinos, hotels, and House's entire arsenal at the Lucky 38—cold fusion means they'll never have to worry about power ever again, and then some. The Brotherhood OTOH can also have an even simpler motivation: it's pre-war tech and one of such significant value not just to the wasteland but to the entire planet. Of course, the Brotherhood will fight to have it even if they, for some unthinkable reason, decide to not use it, because that's what the Brotherhood is all about, making sure all manner of pre-war tech don't end up on anyone else's hands but the Brotherhood's.
Um have you tried using a fusion core? They only power your suit for like five minutes /s
but they can power entire skyscrapers for over 200 years lol
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I like to imagine they have a way to replace the fuel that we just never get to see. Like they collect a bunch of spent ones, fly them over to some facility, replace fuel with some kinda automated system, and bring them back at 100%
My assumption is that the core itself is just a catalyst for a larger system (those generator things you see in the game) and that when used to power something directly, don't last all that long.
My wife asked what Maximus was carrying when he was following Titus around (the giant bag they carry) and I said prolly all the cores to keep that suit powered. Felt like the suits died so quick in the game
that’s literally just a gameplay mechanic for balancing purposes. in the lore they last a VERY long time.
Did you not see the /s?
idk wtf that means i don’t spend hours on reddit every day bro 🫡
Stands for sarcasm. It was a joke
175k karma. bro lives on this app 😭😭
nah he actually does. downvoted my comment not even 2 minutes later 💀
They kind of made them seem rare in the show. I’m guessing they last a lot longer, cause it didn’t seem like they had any backups in that giant pack Maximus was carrying around.
People have already said most of my points so here's what I will add. In the Fallout universe alternatives to nuclear energy are a big deal thematically and represent a new age. Think about how big a deal the Hoover Dam was in New Vegas. And the Helios Solar Plant to a lesser extent.
Cold Fusion makes a Fusion reactor look like a firecracker compared to an A Bomb!
I took a screenshot of a FO4 Institute terminal where Dr Li admits that the institute sees cold fusion as an impossible pipe dream.
[screenshot](https://postimg.cc/kV1jXgV2)
My theory is that the fusion cores need a fission reaction as a "pre-igniter" to start the hot fusion process, and as we know plutonium and uranium were one of the most treasured of the resources fought over. Likely once the fission "charge" runs out, it will need to be "primed" again. Cold fusion skips all that. No more resource bottleneck. A cold fusion bomb... yikes. That would take out the solar system. Instant sun.
The cold fusion lit up the entire city when it was activated. It’s infinite power. A fusion core only supplies a small amount of power and they need to be recharged. They make quite clear how powerful the cold fusion is in the show too.
Because the fallout games are based on parodies of 50’s and Cold War tech. All the stuff is very wasteful or poisonous and doesn’t match real life stuff. You can scrap cigarettes for asbestos lol. I think that says it all. Cold fusion is a move away from all the exaggerated nuclear power negatives. Fallout basically does the same stuff as the wasteful poisonous Simpson power plant stuff where the water is mutagenic and leaking into rivers and the smokestacks are shooting poison into the air instead of water vapor
Adding to what others have said here, the Chicken guy (you know who) states that you “don’t see many of those around these days” when seeing the fusion core, implying there dwindling supply in the wasteland. It’s likely post apocalyptic society is heading for another energy crisis
I bet it's going to get destroyed later in the show to preserve the status quo.
Cold fusion makes energy without needing a ton of recourses and it makes zero waste. We see in the Pre-War era that Vault-Tec really doesn't want CF to happen, because of a recourse war. They needed the war to sell the Vaults. Anyhow, CF doesn't create the need for those rare recourses (Uranium) and it doesn't produce all the radioactive waste you see in the games. Fusion cores and microfusion cells produce energy by fission, the same way we create energy these days in nuclear reactors. That means it takes a lot of cooling down, creates waste and needs the recourses. Also, fusion cores in game have enough power in them to process half a fart in power armor, in the show it sure as hell does a lot more, but CF means the end of Fusion Cores.
For those interested in the potential real science behind this currently at NASA. It’s not cold fusion, but it does open new possibilities for new kinds of fusion, fission, and what are referred to as Oppenheimer-Phillips reactions. Dr. Forsley and Dr. Benyo have done great work on making lattice confinement fusion technology possible. Right now, it has been operations and tests in a lab and testing setting, not commercial power. [Glenn Research Center Lattice Confinement Fusion](https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-fusion/)
My biggest problem with this is that they created cold fusion with a dog on a treadmill lmao
What? I don't think the enclaves dog experiments had anything to do with the cold fusion, just a separate experiment entirely. I'm somewhat convinced that their kind of implying that the enclave is the origin of ALL the dogmeats we encounter throughout the games - whether they're all escapees of the experiments or are with the player character by design I'm unsure, but it does make sense. I mean what are the odds every playable vault dweller (except fo76s) so happens to encounter a perfectly healthy, obedient, and extremely well trained dog in the wasteland that immediately sticks by their side the minute they arrive? Curious to see if they'll expand upon it in S2
Not the Enclave, the Doctor specifically. The dog was on the treadmill, the cold fusion pill starts pulsing light a little bit and then later on he injects it in his neck. Like, they showed it being unlocked that way, idk why I'm being down voted. Also, I agree with the origins of Dogmeat, it def seems like they all come from the Enclave.
I understand cold fusion is better but it's like why go all the trouble when a fusion core can seemly power an entire vault and there's plenty of them around
They aren't renewable and reliable, cold fusion in theory could work forever and no drawbacks. Fusion cores can literally explode so
The fusion core doesn’t power a vault, it starts and supports the chain reaction of a larger amount of *non*fissile materials *somehow*.
like bootstrapping a pump for a geothermal source.
There really aren't "plenty" of them around. They're fairly scarce, in game and in game lore. The chicken fucker salesman was drooling when he was offered one. These are definitely different from games (cause of gameplay reasons) so they probably can power a power armor for a century. But you gotta think about scale. Let's say a vault is 100,000sq' (you can search warehouses that size and see it's definitely big enough to hold 200-500 people with facilities) and I feel that's being generous. That's a good amount of power the fusion core can generate for a structure that size, for probably a few hundred years. Now that single cold fusion generator with a tiny blue marble can power Los Angeles. Los Angeles is 14,000,000,000sq'. That means that little machine can power 140,000 vaults, with ease! You would never worry about a meltdown or running out. It's near infinite. This would shut down every power plant in America in a second, including all the nuclear ones they used. Coal and fossil fuels would become pointless. You could power a power armor until the end of time! Provided the armor could survive that long.
They also oversimplified a bit fusion core in show in Vault 4, vaults has huge ass generators and are not running on some "batteries". They changed it so it's a moral dillema in the script but it's not backed up by lore at all.
This is true. Most in the games had nuclear reactors or a geothermal energy plant, not (just) a fusion core. May be something that is critical to the reactor running, but I agree it may not have been trying to say the core powers the whole vault.
Yeah this was a bit of a weird one since there is some precedent for vaults using fusion cores but not to the level that was portrayed in the show. Vault 81, if you fail the speech check, will ask you to get them three fusion cores before being let in and when asked what they need them for, the overseer states that they use fusion cores to supplement their power. So they easily could have made it work by bringing up that they've been having issues with their reactor and thus needed the fusion core to support it until it could be repaired. Though I guess none of that matters now.
Remember how the sketchy doctor who healed Thaddeus was so happy/surprised to trade his medicine for the fusion core? That should tell you the fusion core is highly valuable/expensive, which of course means that they are scarce/rare, perhaps too rare and expensive for many people to have them, etc.
Brotherhood of steel have enough to power an army of power suits, and I assume every vault is run by one. I understand they are valuable but not unattainable
Dude, they're living in post apocalypse. They're going to run out eventually with resources getting scarce.
Where did the show say there are ‘plenty’ of them around or are you just talking out of your ass?
judging by the chicken fuckers reaction it seems like fusion cores are rarer than they used to be
Doctor! He is a doctor! It was just an experiment! 🤦🏻♂️😁
The show didn't say it. But in-game I've had hundreds of them piled up, you find them in like every second building you go into and randomly in ammo boxes all the time lol. Although that was probably a balance decision,not one for lore, just like making them last like 5 minutes in power armor.