Or in smaller towns of Fallout: New Vegas, you see houses powering themselves off of an old fission battery plugged into the side. It's literally a nuclear reactor in a box, just strong enough to keep the lights and appliances of a single home running. You can see one directly outside of Doc Mitchell's door.
@@_armu the power flickers for a second in fallout 4 but stays on when you remove the fusion core. Would of been a cool detail if removing it disabled lights and powered doors, and made terminals no longer powered. Maybe you could find places that already don’t have a fusion core so you’d need to install one to get the doors and terminals working again, and would of added another element to the resource. Do you spend one to gain access to a new area or keep it to power your power armor.
@@blacktemplarbrotherlucius1935 I think Bethesda, puts in detail in different places. Mechanics are old and unoriginal. But their lore building I think is fantastic. Although that definitely applies more so to the elder scrolls series. But Fallout has good lore aswell.
One thing that's interesting, especially given the 1950s aesthetic and art deco design obsession of the universe, is the use of radios in the Fallout universe. There's a real life radio (that saw a resurgence of popularity in the real life 1950s) that doesn't require *_any_* electricity to function: The crystal radio. The radio uses a galena crystal and uses the power from the radio transmission itself to power a small speaker. During the 1920s, these things became ridiculously popular and the United States Bureau of Standards even released official guides and manuals for people at home to make their own crystal radio and encouraged people to do so. Starting in the 1930s they saw a decrease in popularity due to affordable amplified receiver radios (like the old kind using vacuum tubes) becoming available. Although, during WWII, the crystal radios built by troops (called "foxhole radios") because Germans were detecting and triangulating the oscillator signal of Allied radio receivers. The crystal radio can't be detected because it's a passive system that works thanks to the radio signal's own power and transmission. There's nothing to track. Also, in the 1950s, there was - get this - rocket-shaped pocket crystal radios that became hugely popular with kids. Now THAT is something that sounds right out of Fallout.
bro, did you ever saw crystal radio that could power small speaker? All it can power is high impedance headphones. And it requires quite strong signal. And you can!t switch stations so easily. And so on...
@@frantisekdaart "bro, did you ever saw crystal radio that could power small speaker?" Yes. v=N-HFZqdujPE "All it can power is high impedance headphones." Wrong. v=z95QOC9yHrw v=p_xNZTe4i1w "And it requires quite strong signal" Wrong again. v=HvLmJGM_T3M "And you can!t switch stations so easily. And so on..." Also wrong. v=mubvsqFrE88
I always thought it would have been alot more interesting in FO4 if the fusion cores taken from the buildings to use power armour actually had more of an impact, such as disabling the electrics in the building, and there could also be the same in reverse, areas with empty generators that need cores to power up and access the building, it would have given the player a little more to think about in terms of resource management, but I can see why something like that didn't fit into the direction Bethesda had in mind for 4. Shame though.
I have to wonder I that was intended as a mechanic at some early point but got axed for time and complexity, that said, a mod on this basis would be fun
@@justanotheranimeprofilepic that's why it would be cool that's what players do now but if it shut down the building it woul make players think about taking it or at least make you come back for it after exploring the building
@@FlavaTown420 with the fan base fallout 4 is appealing to, having backtrack either to the start or midpoint in a dungeon for a fusion core would just annoy most players
In Fallout 4 my headcannon was that the fusion core generators were there for emergencies and that buildings themselves were still hooked up to the grid
I think the generators worked on their own, with the core as the thied tier backup, but my god I hate the cores completely. The *reactor* in a T51 is meant to last 2-300 years of continuous use, not 200 years of *no* use and 20 minutes of use. Bethesda's decision to give Power Armor early and the resulting need to balance it absolutely destroyed the lore.
Yeah, I think that's a reasonable conclusion. The "fusion" cores aren't fully inserted because they aren't actually being used, or are only being used at a trickle to power the light and buttons on the generators themselves, as the generators are in standby mode and only begin producing full power when the mains power goes out and the core is fully seated.
@@DIEGhostfish yeah its Bad to the Lore but the Power Armor system in Fallout 4 was so much better than that in the previous Fallout parts and in my opinion: gameplay and fun>Lore
You have to remember Fallout isn't post apocalypse, it's post post-apocalypse. Many power stations have been rebuilt, especially on the West Coast, the NCR are close to pre-war technology levels. With working cars and trucks, though these are still somewhat rare. They also have working trains, that's why the Powder Gangers were in Vegas in the first place. To repair and connect the Vegas railway to the NCR one.
And the west coast brotherhood Connaclly has multiple fully operational tanks and aircraft and in 76 only 20 years after the bombs the brotherhood has functioning APCs parked at their main outpost and one at the front gate with power armor taking a seat next to the others instead of being the main source of strength
@@SenketsuFi it means that the world has stabilized after the apocalypse and societies are much bigger and more resilient. Kinda like the wild west or the oregon trail
The Hoover dam was designed to survive without people running it so I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of those bits of automation in things like the overflow rerouting would have become present in other hydroelectric sources across the country
@@thestaminabs they are fusion or fission powered both can theoretically power the robots that long this makes sense thanks to the sci fi bordering magical fission tech let alone fusion
This was actually fascinating. I always just slapped the label of fusion technology over everything because of how ridiculously efficient it would be, it hadn't even crossed my mind that fusion cores might not actually be fusion based. 76 shows that some of the power plants are still functional but just offline, but it did always bug me that buildings didn't seem to lose power when you looted the generator.
Old comment is old. Its fairly reasonable that building large fusion reactors would be costly and take a lot of time especially when displacing already existing infrastructure, aka the nuclear power plants. In real life it takes 10's of years to get something like a nuclear reactor power plant built imagine replacing one. What wouldn't take a super long time especially with lots of money from the government is producing small fusion cores for small fusion reactors attached to power armor. Supplies for power armor and also transportable generators is totally reasonable. We already live in a mixed power society anyways.
Mind was always more that and also, given how long it's been, ghouls etc that someone worked out how to get power going, not well enough to have things pre war but we'll enough to keep lights going at night
As a utility electrician I must say your layman understanding and explanation is basic, but commendable. Overall you say more that is correct than wrong and nothing is directly false. Love to see creators that clearly research and learn.
Also big MT uses what I believe is some sci-fi mumbojumbo based loosely on the wireless power experiments Nikola Tesla theorized and attempted with a big sprinkle of ATOMIC ENERGY! sprinkled in on proper 1950s fashion.
@@DeosPraetorian If the lights are LED maybe but I'm pretty sure lights in Fallout are all incandescent, which means they have a finite amount of (I believe it to be) nitrogen gas inside the bulb and with them being on for 200 years eventually the nitrogen would be used up and the bulb to burn out
@@morticianflame The gas in incandescent bulbs is not a consumable. It's a non-reactive gas put there to displace oxygen so the filament doesn't oxidize and burn away when it heats up. If the bulb remains sealed and the filament doesn't break, it can theoretically continue to remain functional indefinitely. It is repeated heating/cooling cycles that eventually break the filament and make a bulb "burn out" from arcing across the break.
@@morticianflame some lights aren't incandescent and bulbs won't break just sitting there. It would take thousands of years for the nitrogen to leak out.
Or that Raiders, Bandits and other criminals are still around scavenging instead of trying to help grow a farm/community and stuff! Bandits and such should only really be in control within the first few decades, I guess, after that we should have at least civilised ourselves, although am not an expert(I like booze so am an expert in being an alkie lol)
lets not forget, most power stations in the world are made in a way to resist attacks and natural disasters. unless there is a constant bombing or a direct nuclear hit most of these structures can probably handle it. so its not odd that some of the old infrastructure for power generation remains intact ( on the outside)
The real issues will be a rust and decay of parts and wear on structures from lack of care and upkeep. But with the know how and parts (or ways to produce them?) One could reactervate them. Eg: Hoover dam, Helios, dayglow
One could also argue that some maintenance could be done by Protectrons or other such automated robots, thou complete refurbishment of a sub station might be beyond regular maintenance.
I have a PhD in physics, and a professional background in electrical engineering and I can certainly say I’ve never thought twice about this stuff, but I think the devs actually did. Also, funny enough there is a company in Cambridge, MA who is one of the leading fusion research entities. MIT also happens to have a nuclear reactor on/near campus.
EE as well, I really like seeing when these things are given proper consideration from game devs... FO4 reiterates its status as the least intelligent game of the series by having downed and open transmission lines perpetually emitting sparks
Here's one thought about the power cores in the wild. Perhaps they're in a maintenance mode. Kinda how you trickle-charge a battery to keep it topped up. The generators may work in two modes, charge and drain. That solves all three unanswered questions; 1. The generator not actually powering the building means when you pull the core the power stays on. 2. The generator in charge mode means when you pull the core, it stops charging, thus the gen stops. 3. All the cores you find are at full charge, because they were being charged the whole time.
Yeah good point, maybe they're basically backup batteries that would kick on when the building loses power, but since the grid is (apparently) still powered, they're charging instead.
Okay here's a thought: what if fusion cores contain a reverseable nuclear reaction? You give them external power, and that is used to power a fusion reaction. This reaction forms an unstable isotope. When power is removed, the isotope decays, releasing heat that can be used as power like a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Obviously I don't think that's how it would work in the real world, but it's fallout.
@@technicolorskies5432 sort of like a UPS, not enough to run the system long-term, but enough to have time to shut down everything properly. So fusion cores could indeed just be batteries for those times when the grid collapses. Or even for managed blackouts. Or when the grid runs unstable.
If fusion generators recharged fusion cores, it would make so much sense, because the Atom Cats have one outside of their garage, and i guess they'd need something to recharge their fusion core, given how much they use Power Armor
My theory: The towns didn't want to rely on a remote location to remain working, to keep their town powered. One big raider attack on a power plant could leave a town powerless. If this happened in the middle of the night, the whole town could be killed very easily. So they power themselves from within.
I thought something similar, why would a massive settlement like Diamond City rely on a power source they couldn't directly maintain or control. It seems far more believable they would invest into their own sustainable power source.
I would say it's more general than that, infrastructure in general is difficult in unstable regions, that entire stretch from power plant to consumer must be safe. Plus, for that investment to be economical, you're going to want more than jsut a single producer and consumer, otherwise it makes more sense to just have the power plant to be at the settlement (or vice versa). And of course, once you say "multiple producers and consumers", you're talking tight and widespread social order that is so rare if it exists at all in-universe
Thank you Jamie. That makes sense to me. It could be a mix of insufficient pre war power networks and wanting to ensure that they have a strong power source they can protect from things like raiders and super mutants.
Thats.. pretty much just OPs theory lmao things out of your control are vulnerabilities. The more of these needs you bring under your direct control, the safer you'll be. Just makes sense
I figure the unseated Fusion Cores that are harvestable ingame are actually mostly spent and the generators have a mechanism to eject a spent core (yet still partially plugged in, similarly to a car cigarette lighter) and the reason they don’t last as long in power armor is that, as well as they could possibly be a different, civilian core rather than a military-use core, same size and dimensions but the military model having a significantly longer operation time
Probably is we get the brotherhood mentioning in one quest (the quest where you track brotherhood distress beacons) that the fusion cores within the suits they had ran out within eight hours (similar to the in-game time the fusion cores last)
In regards to the fusion core generators I think it’s just a matter of hardware or development time limitations, you’d need to do a lot of scripting to kill lighting nodes off in any interior and even more in an exterior area. Also the commonwealth does have a hydroelectric dam just south of Abernathy farms but given the lack of any water at base I don’t think it’s operational anymore.
@@HappyBeezerStudios if anything it would imply there are more than one generator beyond that, why would anhyone design something to split 30% of the capacity and not if it's objectively not a failsafe measure and have the rest of the 70% stacked in 1 place ?: D
Maybe the fusion cores are just act like some kind of catalyst/accelerant in those "generators" since all are fully charged when someone removes it, while a Power Armor gets its power directly from it. And if a building is still connected to a somewhat live grid, it is possible the the generator is/was too, simply refeeding the surplus electricity to the grid that the building does not needs, so by shutting one down only makes the power-grid weaker, but does not kills the power completely.
Also as a railway engineer: Our main system is divided to sections an substations. There's also some level of automatism like: if a main fuse goes down, the control unit that is responsible for that area try's to turn the power (fuse) back on, after some time, automatically (so in a thunder-storm we don't have to run around like crazy), and only after 2 failed attempts that grid stay "off" , and needs a manual reset, (if the shortage is no longer present). That's why some unfortunate people, who touch the wrong thing, at the wrong time are guaranteed to get cooked, specially if they get suck!
I think perhaps the fusion cores are the battery and the “generator” is the transformer allowing the nuclear powered battery to use very little power over 200 years but the power armor is lacking that very large transformer (clearly) and so it draws from the core directly, using much more power in a much shorter timeframe
Was thinking the cores had multiple modes of interaction with a generator. The idea revolved around the fusion core generator being the actual producer of power, and the core is essentially a chargeable power source that’s inline with the generator’s power routing. The modes of interaction would have to do with the position of the core in the generator, with the partially exposed position for loot generators acting as a “charge” mode where the generator replenishes the core with the power it generates, while the fully inserted settlement position is like for a “pass through” mode, where the core is more just being used to complete the power circuit for the generator to power external devices.
Yeah, I agree. Mr. House needed a jump start from Hoover dam to bring his fusion system back on line. The mission (The House always wins 7) to sneak into the NCR held substation and place an override chip in the system. I would wonder if the FCs are just to kick start those larger fusion systems over until the reaction becomes self sustaining and then the FC core is pushed out. It could be the reactor refills the core which is why they always have a full charge, except for the one at the museum of history which is only at 50 percent. The ones you build in settlements haven't been in service long enough to for them to be fully self sustaining and/or recover enough power to be useable.
@@jasonrarick2389 well considering that in fallout you have 500kg+ armor that you can walk around just fine and dandy in and an assisted aiming system that freezes time, its not too far fetched to think that their already super unrealistic fusion and fission technology could stay in power for hundreds of years, i believe in the original fallouts its mentioned that the fusion cores that are used for power armor can keep power armor going for hundreds of years, although that has been retconned by bethesda it seems to still be somewhat true with the generators in houses/establishments that seem to have been running for over 200 years.
-a solar power plant in the mojave (Helios one) -a fucking hydroelectric dam (powers a lot of the eastern NCR) -solar panels -nuclear reactor in a box (as mentioned by @malomalovids) -wind (there is a lot of radioactive wind)
well, if you dig around the details of Fallout 4, "Mass Fusion" was running a huge scam. Their "fusion" reactors are all fission. They did finally develop proper fusion but by then it was too late.
@@RaddSpencer all the while Vault tech was sitting on cold fusion tech and kept it secret. which brings us to what do they use to power the vaults for 200+ years.
Maybe the flickering you see in FO4 when you remove the "fusion" core is similar to a brown out and rather than serving as a dedicated generator, it supplements or balances power from other sources similar to a power factor correcter, by removing the core you wouldn't be killing power to a site, but rather in the long term reducing the life expectancy of the powered devices by removing the power filter for lack of a better word.
The biggest problem about the power poles in FO4 is where the lines are sparking, you can see that there's no physical connection to that same line further down, and with no evident underground line feeding up, it made for a big oversight on the devs part. The most notable one is near County Crossing settlement close to a small generation station across the street. Edit to add: Concerning "fusion generators", I can see there being 2 variants, one being like we can use for our settlements and is a single purpose generation system, and the other being a dual purpose generator for the area and a recharger for fusion cores. It doesn't deviate the fact that a building would have multiple sources of power, and could even be an oversight of the devs to fail to animate the rotors of the other generators that don't have a fusion core dock to it. Ultimately, buildings would have many redundant power sources that would provide power for an unknown/indefinite period of time.
Ah, you must have missed the micro tesla coils fitted to it that transfer the electrickery through the very air itself! Mr Tesla was very pleased that they finally implemented that plan of his! 😁
@@aerystargaryenii2565 Paying attention to details, especially with a heavily modified game. Those sparks give 1 cap when scrapped with the right scrapping mod.
@@Celastrous I can't play the game without mods, and after playing it for over 5600 hours and having so many mods that the game would rather crash than run, still fun to play, as long as it actually runs that is...
This is ABSOLUTELY it. They were barely out of the prototype phase, and god knows the US didn't optimize things until later. I'll bet they were power hungry
The lore constantly contradicts itself, some sources state that the power armor reactors are capable of lasting several decades of use before depletion, while others state that the armors' fuel quickly depleted under heavy use. It makes no sense to me, especially when you can acquire the X-01 suit in Fallout 4, that shouldnt be so inneficient then. This is part of the reason why i never bothered trying to understand Fallout's lore, while it may seem interesting and complex in theory, it is a convoluted, self contradicting mess in reality that not even hardcore fans seem to agree on.
@@alanwatts8239 they're doing their best, I didnt even think about the more advanced armor being more efficient, that makes sense, or doesn't, lol, I agree; Fallout is doing it's best lore wise, and for coming from different studios, 30 years and 7 or 8 games, the first half of which they didnt think the series would ever get that far, is actually pretty good, the occasional contradiction is pretty much inevitable
@@alanwatts8239 usually it just goes to bethesda retconning and changing a lot of established lore. Power armor was one of the worst offenders. In the west-tek factory it states that they run on a variation of microfusion cells and have a life span of 200 years worth of continuous use. This was even apparent in fallout 3 where you could see a microfusion cell in the back of power armor. Then fallout 4 came along and its fusion cores. Honestly thats fine considering it was a different type of MFC than whats used in guns so it would make sense lore wise they have a different name and are larger in appearance. But then they only last a few in game hours? Maybe a full day with all the perks? It makes no sense. Some stated its been over 200 years so they are beginning to decay in efficiency but new vegas and the older fallouts establish it isnt hard to remanufacture or produce new MFCs not to mention the enclave had the ability to produce their own power armor even after the war (X-02 was what was used in fo3 as well as hellfire armor in the dlc, also new) so its a bit ludicrous to imagine that they can’t reproduce or reverse engineer fusion cores with the 200 year lifespan. I guess it was to balance out the power armor mechanic (they knocked it out of the park with the power armor honestly in terms of gameplay) but they could have done it with fusion cores having health which they already do just not for the player it seems. You let it get beat up and worn out you just get sealed in the suit or something just taking damage until you can pry your way out. The ability from that one perk to jettison out a fusion core to act as a grenade wouldve helped with this too. I just think they couldve done it better while still keeping with the older fallouts lore.
My personal headcanon is that with improper use of power armor, the fusion core is drained fast. That's why you need power armor training to wear the stuff in 3 and New Vegas, as the Courier probably knows it from experience, and doesn't want to waste a good fusion core, while the Fallout 3 protagonist never knew what power armor was before going through his journey.
You also have to factor in that pre war society would have been extremely power hungry. In the even that a massive chunk of the population and all of it's functioning devices suddenly disappeared, any rector assumed to still be standing might just be idling, for lack of a better term.
I think its more logical to assume that regular generators have the cores sticking out and are not actually being used or at least using the bare minimum, therefor keeping the core charged and meaning you have to push it in all the way to actually work for its intended propose, kinda like a failsafe to avoid the generators form being used unintentionally likely caused by the power variations. This is why the settlement generator cores are all the way it because they are actually being used in this case (edited because I got cells and cores mixed up for a second)
I think buildings could have taken on a more sinister feel if the power cuts out when you pull the core. You taje the elevator to the lowest basement, find a core, the lights go out and now you have to fight ghouls in the dark all the way back up. I dunno. Might be the DM in me.
Basically the inverted version of how dungeons in the game usually work. You fight your way through the building and at the end get some elevator running that brings you back to the entrence.
I always viewed the Fusion Generators as manually triggered back up power supplies for the buildings which were never activated due to the war and grid staying online. Looking at the Fusion core animation for power armour when you place the fusion core into the socket you have to push/ hit the fusion core further in to seat it fully and begin the reaction. To activate the Fusion Generator is the same, push them deeper into the socket and it can deliver a short burst of power to give time to perform emergency tasks. As for the generators animation always took a spinning part to be apart of the cooling loop as when you trigger the reactor the coolant has to be circulating before it is brought online or the piping and moving parts might overheat and warp/ crack or even melt some components. I think that buildings are far more Energy intensive than Power armour as for a buildings usecase the back up power might only last a few hours or even Minutes, while in power armour depending on activity levels the fusion core can last for around 10 hours in game, but lets be more realistic to the world and say a day. This would also explain the sheer size difference between power armour and the Generator. The generator has to have a better cooling capacity to cover the sheer current draw while the Power armour has to be cooled by the frame and the actual armour pieces. So its like comparing an Air cooled engine and a water cooled engine
I always figured the popped out fusion cores were almost spent and needed to be changed, while the ones in our settlements have a charged core, so they are pushed in.
@@SpadaccinoLuciano this is Bethesda after all. They dont care at all if it works or not. Just cares enough to make it easy for players to know if they can take it or not.
Do you reckon that the fusion cores are sticking out of the old box generators, and not the new ones that you build in settlements, because the old ones are slowly ejecting - just as they completely eject when they're spent in your power armour?
One thing to take into account re maintenance is the ubiquitous presence of utility protectrons. It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to think that those protections can maintain facilities to some degree and repair each other (think Dwemer constructs if this were Elder Scrolls). In that vein, perhaps some of the random robot encounters on the roads are actually work crews following a maintenance schedule.
Far harbors fog condensers actually have an In universe explanation for how they work, theyre powered by the wind turbines on the island, Captain avery tells you about it like, 2missions into the DLC on her first optional mission
@@rjwaters3 Yeah, that's true. And they do shut down if you shut down the turbines. I guess my head cannon took over for a second since that doesn't make a ton of sense imo. Since island wide wireless power or a massive underground postwar wiring project doesn't seem realistic for Far Harbor; and the fog condensors at the far flung settlements have a mysterious source of power as well, seems of that they all convey to the wind turbines somehow. Also the condensors at the settlements keep running when the turbines shut down.
21:00 not having all 3 phases is not an issue in most cases. 3 phase is only present in commercial or industrial places so places with small motors, terminals, lights etc would be fine. all these single phase electrical circuits can use any one of the 3 phases. the issue of broken grids only arrises with large motors like elevators which are 3 phase. pumps are not necessarily 3 phase because single phase AC motors do exist, most motors in everyday life are single phase AC motors like fans, appliances and even some industrial tools like drill presses, lathes, welding equipment.
My theory is that Fusion Cores are just batteries, and the machines around it are just charging them, like a backup or something and the ones the build in our settlement are reverse-engineered to use the fusion cores, as actual cores.
As an engineering student, I find this fascinating. Infact, the first thing I do when I join the Minutemen, is start building a power plant at Natick power station with the settlement mod.
Imagine how much cooler the settlements would have been if you could build proper infrastructure and transfer power between settlements, then you could even get radiant quests where people are leeching your power and you can go deal with them
@@swedneck Damnit, now I want Electro-Brahmin, a giant capacitor/battery with a long wire for charging/discharging, but when not in use it's wound around the Brahmin (that's wearing rubber boots). Anyone bumping it or trying to raid the caravan gets zapped! ⚡⚡⚡🐮🐮⚡⚡⚡ 😂
My theory for the fusion cores is that when you plug them in they are “drained” mostly, but not enough to explode. So the power is actually inside the generators. That’s also why when you get them they have only a little bit of charge for your armor.
The *reactor* in a T51 is meant to last 2-300 years of continuous use, not 200 years of *no* use and 20 minutes of use. Bethesda's decision to give Power Armor early and the resulting need to balance it absolutely destroyed the lore.
@@DIEGhostfish perhaps the source of that didnt have the full story, remember as in real life, anything told to you in a video game does not necessarily have to be true. Could be that while a core, while new, has enough energy to run PA for 300 years, but does not itself last 300 years
In 76 you can connect your workshop to the grid from the local nuclear power plant but it doesn't give you much power unless you do the event to repair the power plant that your settlement is closest to.
@@mortenera2294 isince wastelanders and BoS it's not that bad. It's a spin-off, so the lore accuracy is a bit questionable, but it can be a fun experience, if you allow it.
@@Pigness7 If they would hzave called it Fallout Arcade instead of Fallout BoS, people might perhaps think different of it. It should have been marketed as an arcade game.
As an electrical engineer I really enjoyed this, pretty sure you were spot on regarding the transformers and not being able to start 3-phase motors with a lost phase (this is a real thing that happens in industry that we call single phasing). Typically though most industrial sites and some utilities will have NGRs, neutral grounding resistors, that will allow normal operation with a single phase to ground fault. If you lose a second phase to ground it's a phase to phase fault and pretty much everything blows up. So losing just one phase might not happen depending on the situation. Anyways, wikipedia is a pretty good school it seems.
My theory is that the fusion generators CHARGE the fusion cores, hence why there is a core cycle button. The cores function like capacitors in a power supply for a PC and store energy. Granted this is almost assuredly wrong but in my head its more plausible
There was a theory in Fallout 4 for a very short time before it was debunked that you could place drained fusion cores in generators to recharge them, unfortunately not a mechanic. But if you consider that the cores you get from generators are always fully charged I guess the intended use of the cores could go either way...
Pure speculation, but it's reasonable to assume that the fusion cores you get out in the wasteland are "spent" for commercial/residential use. They're partially ejected from the generators in which you find them, perhaps as a safety feature. This would explain why you only get a few hours or days out of them in your power armor. It would also explain why they're ejected at only a mostly depleted state given what happens to them with max Nuclear Physicist perks: they explode...something you certainly wouldn't want to happen in your residential applications.
fallout 1&2 says that power armor lasts hundrers of years so its bethesda who ruined fusion cores and power armor in this matter just for gameplay purposes
@@lifemocker85 You said it yourself, "hundreds of years". Fallout 4 is set almost more than a century after the OG games, which is also more than 200 years since the great war, the power of most of those fusion cores is almost drained.
@@lifemocker85 It could be, but would you honestly expect all the horribly twisted companies in the wasteland to not jump on the ability to say "hundreds" of years the very instant they pass 200years of life expectancy?
On the subway and underground areas if you have ever seen any of the urban exploration or interviews with some of the people that dwell within America's Underground they have electricity and tap right into the existing power network via rerouted cables and splicing... I know this is a much different scenario in the post apocalypse but some messages of the old Power Network would still remain regardless in a dilapidated state that is
Consider also that the generators require nuclear material to build this could mean that the generator itself has a low amount of energy production and that the fusion core is being used to reach criticality for generating larger amounts of power. The core being slightly out when we find them in the wasteland could be like a fuse mechanism or a safety mechanism so that the generator does not explode.
Fusion cores are essentially more advanced version of radio thermoelectric generators (rtg) than what we have in our timeline. We use those in satellites such as the famous voyager 1&2
I've found a couple of those plutonium wells throught the Boston ruins. But they're usually in the less traveled parts. I've also always wondered how the lights haven't burnt out yet, but there is a light bulb that was installed in like 1915 that still burns today in a fire station. The more they get shut off the quicker they burn out.
@@HappyBeezerStudios This is somehow right in between a bot comment and a human comment. Vaguely and tangentially on-topic, but utterly pointless to the discussion at hand
@unfunny2258 same with the ones in the subway stations, as you usually have to click on your pipboy to see better. I just thought it was weird they were still flickering
what a brilliant idea for a video, I haven't seen anyone tackle this subject before. I am impressed with the amount of research you have done. I had no idea about that terminal entry about powerlines being underground. Great video!
I swear I had read in a terminal somewhere that a lot of tech had miniature reactors inside them. So they don’t necessarily need to be plugged in to work. If I remember correctly the same terminal entry also talked about the problem of having a ton of mini nuclear reactors laying around everywhere. That would also explain how some things get power. First thing that comes to mind is the terminal in sanctuary that had the drug stash. No wires leading to the terminal and it’s pretty evident there’s no power in sanctuary considering we have to build that ourselves.
My head cannon for the fusion cores was always that the fusion generators are storing excess power or nuclear material in the fusion cores. The fusion core is then just what Preston described it as, a battery. Its there so if the reactor fails or something, you'll still have power for however long the fusion core's power reserves are good for. So when you remove a fusion core from a building's generator, you're not killing its power supply, you're yoinking its integrated battery backup.
In reference to the "unknown power sources". If we look at the guard, "Stockholm" in Megaton.. This man is in a location with no real way up and down (there is a tricky way). So we must assume there is more to his life than standing up there 24/7? He must have a bed, and a pathway down from his perch (at the least, someone needs to bring him food/water). Based on this information, I believe there are parts of the open-world which aren't rendered at all, but accessible to other living things in the wasteland.
pretty sure Old World Blues have Generators, mostly small ones, i remember them mostly in some of the scientists rooms, and The Giant Roboscorpion is drawing energy from somewhere, you can even overload the electricity in that boss fight to make the generator explode and make the fight easier.
He goes into this in the video; what you see in most places aren't generators, but the "power boxes" that connect to existing networks. And, in Big MT, there are those mysterious "smokestacks" (cooling towers?) just to the northwest of the Dome...
the fusion cores could be fission batteries created as a result of fusion. The Plutonium wells are named that because they fuse lighter elements into plutonium drawing power from fusion. Then the plutonium waste is harvested and turned into fission batteries. The generators and cores are called fusion because their made by Mass Fusion.
I reckon that _"Fusion Cores"_ is just a brand name: 'Power Cores made by Mass Fusion!' Legally speaking, just because it's not really fusion, it's still not lying... I also reckon that the Fusion Generators are just *charging* the Cores using power from the grid - BUT they are themselves also power *_storage_* rather than actual generators, big nuclear batteries that still provide backup power if the grid goes down, so again legally speaking they do the same job as a generator... and because they're nuclear, they can power a small to medium-sized building _(larger buildings tend to have multiple)_ for decades. And if the main power grid has been running at a lower capacity and/or intermittently for 200 years, those fusion generator/battery things would get enough top-ups to never run out.
6:28 you would find large coils of wire in a generator. a generator consists of an alternator which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy so they could be generators still. if you doubt my qualifications im an electrician and ive installed residential automatic backup generators made by honeywell and generac in the 24kW range
Something I think would be interesting for the series to touch on would be.. What happens when the power plants finally breakdown or get overloaded? Is it a giant time bomb waiting to go off across the wasteland?
I would assume if there is a settlement near by they would hire some wastelanders who have engineering skills or maybe even find some from other settlements to try and fix the power plants issues, or better yet get robots to do it.
I think the power plants you see have already been repaired over and over by traveling repair people. I also think the raiders or other factions are just guarding the place from people who actually want to destroy it. Sounds weird, but any line of defense is good against a super mutant.
I assume that the plants have advanced enough control systems for the time period that let it operate autonomously - controlling power distribution to avoid overloads. Maintenance would need to be done by robotic workers if there was no human intervention. It would be cool if an EMP that took out the computer systems caused a plant to be unstable, but that kind of thing kinda loses its urgency if you can just ignore the quest and go do other things for an unlimited amount of time.
I noticed that the fusion you place yourself in settlements don't allow their core to be removed. I am not sure if enemies can destroy them but I know they can cause turrets to need repair if you don't set enough up to prevent them from getting close. I like the heavy laser turrets in Fallout 4, if you are an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel the heavy laser turrets will fight the vertibirds. Set them on a tall enough building and they have a surprisingly long range too. It is fun to get within range of them and annoy the enemies and watch the laser turrets attack them. If they damage them just go back as if you were setting them up and they can be repaired. You can also scrap them if you decide that you want something else in that spot.
Deep dives into the lore of games that I love like this are what youtube is all about. Thank you, very much, for all the effort you put into this awesome video!
Going further on the fusion generator bit, it is sticking out slightly further than one built for a settlement yes, but if you look closer the fusion core has a green light around it which is dim in the wild vs one built for a settlment which is very bright. If we take that at face value, it stands to reason that fusion cores plucked from wild fusion generators are nearing empty.
the last part about developers making power generation being explicit only for story reasons is efficient and is one that FNV also leverages. If Obsidian set their fallout game to a place that does not have a cloes by hydroelectric dam, they would have done what they did as Interplay in Fallout 1 and 2. Being close to the dam just made it easy for them to have a big plot point that also had the benefit of power generation and that power generation also serving purposes like that in Helios 1 or in the independent quest line. Not being explicit in world building may seem lazy, but efficiency is just clever laziness. It is efficient to leave the idea of power generation behind if it serves nothing. They did not even need to justify explicitly how a post apocalyptic society had the resources and the know how to get an entire dam running after 2 centuries of neglect and war and get the power somewhere with damaged infrastructure, though the transmission lines do not seem that damaged. Heck this is the idea of chekov's gun where if you show a gun, shoot it at the next scene it appears otherwise omit it later.
@@nitesy381 House mentions that the NCR was only able to restore the dam enough for it to be around 50% efficient from it's actual output. So they weren't able to fully restore it, only enough to be in "working conditions".
Well if they are able to make robots that are still functional and walking around 200 years later, it shouldn't be surprising that some settlements/city's still have some power running to some extent.
14:45 National Ignition Facility recently had fusion where more power come out then was invested in via laser (after this vid uploaded) An amount of laser energy went into fusion, and more energy was produced. They used very inefficient lasers, so the amount of total energy invested didn't pay off energetically - but that's just because the facility wasn't built for efficiency. We are actually getting closer to economical fusion! That Fallout retro-past is actually still ahead for us to experience :)
I think you've made excellent points, in regard to the fusion generator, I think the biggest evidence that the fusion generator isn't actually providing much power is how the lights flicker, but then come back, implying that while it may have been supplementing the buildings power, the bulk is still coming from the grid
Your fusion core theory actually makes sense. I imagine that the fusion cores get ejected when they're low on power, and that's why they're not fully in the machines when you find them. The spinning thing on the generators could simply just spin when a fusion core detected, so when you remove it, the machine stops running, since there wouldn't be a reason to if the fusion core is removed. The reason the fusion core still has enough power to power your power armor (that's a mouthful), could be that as power is drawn, the core becomes less stable, so the generators are designed to eject them before they reach a set instability. Or a more simple explanation could be that, Mass Fusion just wanted to rip off the consumer, so they set them to be ejected sooner. With the military however, they'd want to get as much battery life as possible, so they'd become the official core suppliers.
Fusion Cores might also work like chemical batteries, in which overtime their output decreases, to the point where they don't provide sufficient output the generator needs, but still enough to run the light and spinny bit, as well as run a suit of power armor for a few minutes.
In Fallout 3, the Museum of Technology references having to install new (and unseen) fission power to power the Vault-tec display in one of the terminal entries. Separately, Mr. House (long may he reign) talks about how the strain of the laser defense system knocked out the 38's fusion power system and why he needs a jump start from Hover to bring the 38 and his other stuff back on line. Fusion and Fission power exist in small and midsized packages. Mass Fusion could be locked in using Fission power because that's where their money was at the time and hadn't had time/resources/smarts to bring their own system to market.
Couldn't those fusion generators be used in case there was a blackout or some other emergency? Would explain why the cores weren't fully inserted since they weren't actually active? Or just running on standby mode drawing enough power just for the automated activation on the machine in case of grid failure.
I just recently found your channel. I must say I love the work you put into these videos and she’s some light on parts of the game I never put too much thought into.
Will say that fusion core ejection equals detonation mechanic of the Nuclear Physicist perk is only available by _manually_ ejecting the core. Otherwise, when you deplete it, it's just deleted from your inventory. And if thermonuclear bombs are any indicator, which use a fusion reaction to get the main part of their yield, albeit kickstarted by a fission reaction, a mushroom cloud doesn't always equate a fission detonation.
I was filming for a settlement build in Fallout 4, and I passed a downed telephone pole line, and it still had power. So, there’s obviously still power being generated in the commonwealth. Which, is so strange because the institute’s whole thing is that they’re having a power crisis. Why don’t they just, take over the power source that’s making the city and its surrounding towns powered?
One could conclude that RTG's (good god, why even!?) are providing the power to the lights. In the real world, the Voyager 1+2 probes were launched in the 1977 ish and is expected to provide power to somewhere around 2025-ish, so its not completely outlandish, I propose that something similar to RTG's could be used to provide constant emergency power, thou it would still have be the kind of techno-pseudo-science of the Fallout universe.
That is effectively what the Plutonium Wells are in Fo4, I would assume. They are just stockpiles of plutonium the unit uses to crate power locally. City sized RTG. It also explains low power levels being able to make lights work but not large equipment since RTG's produce paltry amounts of energy for a very long time.
Shocked how interesting you were able to make this topic. Definitely subbing and watching some more content….and also starting another play through of F3.
21:00 I've actually had that issue recently because of a power grid problem. One phase was offline. Only some of the rooms had working lights, and the weirdest thing was that only half of the cooking plates of the electric stove worked. Overall weird experience.
Maybe the fusion cores are like a back up battery. This would still fit in everything that was said. Maybe it’s being charged by the grid and was designed to be used as a battery backup for temporary loss of power. That’s why lights still work in the buildings. And why it doesn’t last as long in power armor. Great video.
In fallout 4, there’s a power line that is not connected to any line near the settlement right across the guard unit home base. One of the line is sparking. I followed the line and seeing it not connected to anything.
I'm surprised that steam engines weren't in fo4. Makes sense from a lore to. You had a massive war over oil gas and resources and yet you have combustion engines that takes oil and all that to use.
The problem with that is, what do you make the steam with? Coal, oil, gas, or wood. So steam power wouldn't work, the world had run dry of those resources.
Steam engines require fuel, like oil, natural gas, or some other power source. Modern power plants all use steam to drive generators, transducing the mechanical power in steam turbines into electrical power fed into a grid or storage. Steam engines simply are not nearly as efficient as what we have today or what the world in fallout would have. If a nuclear apocalypse happened irl and future people wanted power, it would be much easier to salvage an internal combustion engine from a car than it would be to fabricate their own steam engine.
I never noticed these things about FO4 "Fusion" Cores. It would make most sense if they are just not plugged in. The flickering light and stopped generator could be explained with a 2 stage start up cycle a lot of real motors and generators have. Half Inserted only powers the generator for start up Fully inserted powers connected systems
My theory for the fusion cores and running buildings is that they’re not seated in those machines because those machines are backup generators, meant to be utilized in case the grid goes offline; which isn’t in the case in games like Fallout 4. That’s why they aren’t seated properly, because they need to be activated when the building no longer receives its power from the wider grid. It also makes sense that the fusion cores would only work for a short time in something as big as a building rather than 200 years, which also explains why power armor burns through them so quickly in comparison
I'm watching this after the Fallout show realizing Vault 4 breaks your theory on that the buildings are receiving external energy. However there is the possibility it could vary vault to vault.
Here’s my theory: the fusion core contains the deuterium and tritium fuel to be used in a fusion reactor, hence why the generators shut down after removing the core. It also contains a small battery to jump start a fusion reaction. It would be really cool if in Fallout 5c removing the core would cause a building to lose power, you could replace the core to get the building working again. Maybe they could incorporate this into a quest?
That is at least physically plausible. I'd like a more complex system than just fusion cores, but for a realistic and simple system those would work just fine imo
In regard to fusion cores and fusion generators, I always thought that the reason cores deplete faster in power armor is because of efficiency. I think the big fusion generators are a large structure designed to create as much power as possible from whatever fuel is in the fusion core. but the power armor suits are built to be much more compact, so instead of an efficient generation of power from the core, it just depletes the fuel rapidly and eats up cores.
i also want to add that we know the default fusion generators can provide power to the buildings they are in, but removing the core and turning them off does not cut off power. this is likely because buildings draw power from an external source and the fusion core power is supplemental. we know this from fo4 nuka world where removing a fusion core for the overboss fight reduces the power to the electrified armor, but is not enough to fully disable it.
@@Soundsofthewood thats the same thing as NPC's never running out of ammo. As far as I know the brotherhood still canonically use up fusion cores, its just they don't expire in gameplay because it would be janky to have brotherhood randomly leaving their armor around the commonwealth cause they ran out of power.
Bitter Springs was one of the few settlements in Fallout that had realistic lighting and also electricity complete with a generator and string of lights that to the best of my knowledge were only used in The Bitter Springs area.... also on a side note have you ever seen any of the pictures from the civil war in Syria with the power grid hundreds of cables and wires all in a conjoined malformed mess. ..
you forgot that the Fusion Generators and the Municipal Plutonium Wells to some degree, can be a new and improved version of our world's Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. Basically RTGs generate power from the decay heat of a nuclear matter with the Seebeck principle, they do not require any maintenance, and they do not have any moving parts. That would also explain why the Fusion Generators can power small applications like doors, gates, terminals, fixtures and the like, but cannot be used for high power demanding applications. The lifespan of and RTG is calculated on the nuclear matter that is used in its making, as the generator produces less and less power as time goes on, calculated by the half-life of the nuclear matter used, and the power output would basically halve when the half-life is reached and it would continue to gradually generate less and less, this is why NASA shut off some of the systems of the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, because the RTGs in them are nearing the half-life of the plutonium inside them. The rotating part on Fusion Generators can be a cooling turbine although an RTG would never need one, and the Fusion Cores themselves can also be a core coolant (those are against the principle of how an RTG works, but we can assume that the Fallout version can be ages ahead of our own so may operate in a vastly different fashion), or more accurately, some sort of nuclear material replacement, like a fuel cartridge. This would also suggest the actual NEED to replace the nuclear core, since the RTG is to be discarded once its considered dilapidated in power output, they are single-use. the Fusion Core may be the cartridge of a nuclear matter with a very short half-life like Strontium-90, which is 28.8 years. That also may be why Fusion Generators have replacable fuel while Municipal Plutonium Wells do not, hence their name suggests, they use Plutonium, which has a half-life of 87.7 years. This might also suggest the Fusion Core ITSELF can be an RTG with good thermal insulation outside, and the Fusion Generator simply being a transformer, which is why it has a rotating fan. That can also bring an explanation on why Fusion Cores are used as "Fuel" in power armors, since the frame itself has pathways similar to an RTG with "Radiation if damaged" written on them. Assuming most of the Fusion Generators replace the Fusion Core "Cartridges" around the same time as the others because of how half-life works (it may slightly change with the installation date of the generator, hence why you find cores of various states of depletion, this can not be from the usage amount since RTGs produce a fixed output for a fixed amount of time whether you utilize it all or not), their half lives are long since past so they cant be used to power high demand applications (or power them for a very short time because of how depleted they are, hence why they last so short on power armor), but can still power up small things like lights and terminals. the Municipal Plutonium Wells would have much more power output because of the nuclear matter they have, but neither of them could be of any use for powering a city, or a water purifyer, or anything of the sort. the 0/100 rating of the Fusion Cores can simply be a voltmeter rating of some sort for their power output, and stuff like Fusion Generators and power armor could have capacitors in them to boost the total output. The last question in this theory would be "why does it all have the name "Fusion" in them if there is NO fusion?" Answer to that can basically be marketing. Think of how we name everything "turbo" when we want to imply efficiency and speed, from cartoons to vaccuum cleaners, to fridges, to even the razors Gilette sells, while neither of them mix air with any kind of fuel to increase burning efficiency, which is basically what a turbocharger on a car does. It is named "Fusion" because it is made by Mass Fusion, because it is cool sounding, and because it uses nuclear technology. TL-DR: both Fusion Generators and Municipal Plutonium Wells can be an advanced, Fallout-ifyed version of our worlds RTGs, Fusion Cores can be a replacable nuclear cartridge for the generators to last longer and produce more power in a shorter amount of time, or they can be the generator itself and the panel/device they are inserted to is a mixture of transfomer and capacitor, the name "Fusion" is only there because of the marketing. More info on what RTGs are: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#
As a prior US Army Commo soldier (gotta power that radio, lol) you're very spot on. In the totality of circumstances (in a perfect - all things considered - world) I always assumed that many of the terminals were internally powered to prevent file corruption at a power outage... and that when the power went out that system "could" work in reverse, the 3 phase that is still operating (mostly automated) in conjunction with any wired in vaults and later stage settlements... combined could create a daisy chain accidental (or perhaps on purpose) grid for power to move around the various wastelands. This would still necessitate individuals with generators but also (as we see in NV at the Solar array) vast areas can be limitedly powered on the old grids.
I like your fusion core and station theory. But I have one thought as well to put in what if those aren't just a one-way conduit? What if the stations can both charge the cores but also drain them at times of need kind of like a battery backup
I know I'm a month late to the party but one thought that immediately came to mind regarding the fusion cores was Alternators. When you look at the generator you pull the fusion core out of, what's on the side of it? A spinning gear/wheel. This gear could be acting as an Alternator, keeping the fusion core charged with the generator using the excess to power the building and other machines. When you pull the fusion core, it stops spinning likely as the result of it no longer detecting a fusion core to be charged. While I'm no expert on nuclear energy, fusion or fission it was just the first thing that immediately came to mind.
my idea about the fusion cores is that they are fission as a fusion reaction is self sustaining (as stated by proctor ingram when reactivating liberty prime) meaning that it doesn't deplete or need refuleing, all it needs is the agitator to start the reaction whereas fission power relies on the nuclear decay of atoms when they split, releasing energy. however you can only split a nuclear atom so many times until it becomes a stable isotope again, thus it depletes over time, the same behaviour seen by the "fusion" cores we know and love the fact that the core eject makes this reaction go critical only furthers to back my point
I'm surprised you did not back up your "settlements needing better power sources than the old world underground network once they get big enough" theory with the amount of quests/major events that revolve around the matter. Gecko in fallout 2 being a massive power plant that you can fix up (either for the residents of Gecko, Vault city or endings that weren't able to make it into the game), Helios one being a location that the Legion and Brotherhood of Steel fight for (either for a weapon or for *drum roll please* power). Shoot, the entire plot of NV is about Hoover dam to an extent. Yes it is all examples of large factions or settlements using large pre-war sources of power but it clearly shows the drive/need for more power to expand (Vault city being a great example). I believe these motivations and desire clearly shown in the quests could also apply to why the old world networks may still work, or at least be another piece of the answer. What is stopping someone or a group of people being the ones to repair and maintain some of the powerplants over the past 200 years if the chosen one could do it in Gecko. They do not entirely need to be completely self-sufficient. Either way this channel has grown so much and I love all of these videos. Easily one of the best fallout lore channels. Keep up the great work man, much love
Or in smaller towns of Fallout: New Vegas, you see houses powering themselves off of an old fission battery plugged into the side. It's literally a nuclear reactor in a box, just strong enough to keep the lights and appliances of a single home running. You can see one directly outside of Doc Mitchell's door.
would be interesting if you could destroy those and the power would stop working like when you pull a fusion core fallout 4
@@_armu the power flickers for a second in fallout 4 but stays on when you remove the fusion core. Would of been a cool detail if removing it disabled lights and powered doors, and made terminals no longer powered. Maybe you could find places that already don’t have a fusion core so you’d need to install one to get the doors and terminals working again, and would of added another element to the resource. Do you spend one to gain access to a new area or keep it to power your power armor.
@@clan741 that actually sounds like a cool an interesting mechanic to have!
Too bad thats its too original of an idea for Bethesda.
@@clan741 Maby there's a back up system for when the power goes out 🤷♂️
@@blacktemplarbrotherlucius1935 I think Bethesda, puts in detail in different places. Mechanics are old and unoriginal. But their lore building I think is fantastic. Although that definitely applies more so to the elder scrolls series. But Fallout has good lore aswell.
I've always just assumed that settlements in fallout were powered by the sheer limitless power exuding from Todd Howard's body
"16 times the detail and 16 times THE POWER!"
@@_zigger_ Z
Hey it just works.
The power of his limitless charisma stat
The power of his gamer epicness, that is
One thing that's interesting, especially given the 1950s aesthetic and art deco design obsession of the universe, is the use of radios in the Fallout universe. There's a real life radio (that saw a resurgence of popularity in the real life 1950s) that doesn't require *_any_* electricity to function: The crystal radio. The radio uses a galena crystal and uses the power from the radio transmission itself to power a small speaker.
During the 1920s, these things became ridiculously popular and the United States Bureau of Standards even released official guides and manuals for people at home to make their own crystal radio and encouraged people to do so. Starting in the 1930s they saw a decrease in popularity due to affordable amplified receiver radios (like the old kind using vacuum tubes) becoming available. Although, during WWII, the crystal radios built by troops (called "foxhole radios") because Germans were detecting and triangulating the oscillator signal of Allied radio receivers. The crystal radio can't be detected because it's a passive system that works thanks to the radio signal's own power and transmission. There's nothing to track.
Also, in the 1950s, there was - get this - rocket-shaped pocket crystal radios that became hugely popular with kids. Now THAT is something that sounds right out of Fallout.
I looked it up and man that's hella cool
Sometimes I have to poop for a long time.
I want one now
bro, did you ever saw crystal radio that could power small speaker? All it can power is high impedance headphones. And it requires quite strong signal. And you can!t switch stations so easily. And so on...
@@frantisekdaart
"bro, did you ever saw crystal radio that could power small speaker?"
Yes.
v=N-HFZqdujPE
"All it can power is high impedance headphones."
Wrong.
v=z95QOC9yHrw
v=p_xNZTe4i1w
"And it requires quite strong signal"
Wrong again.
v=HvLmJGM_T3M
"And you can!t switch stations so easily. And so on..."
Also wrong.
v=mubvsqFrE88
I always thought it would have been alot more interesting in FO4 if the fusion cores taken from the buildings to use power armour actually had more of an impact, such as disabling the electrics in the building, and there could also be the same in reverse, areas with empty generators that need cores to power up and access the building, it would have given the player a little more to think about in terms of resource management, but I can see why something like that didn't fit into the direction Bethesda had in mind for 4. Shame though.
I have to wonder I that was intended as a mechanic at some early point but got axed for time and complexity, that said, a mod on this basis would be fun
Problem is it would ruin a lot of terminal lore since most players would take the fusion core first chance and never put it back
@@justanotheranimeprofilepic that's why it would be cool that's what players do now but if it shut down the building it woul make players think about taking it or at least make you come back for it after exploring the building
@@justanotheranimeprofilepicrn there's only pros to taking it and with how powerful they are I think there should be some cons
@@FlavaTown420 with the fan base fallout 4 is appealing to, having backtrack either to the start or midpoint in a dungeon for a fusion core would just annoy most players
In Fallout 4 my headcannon was that the fusion core generators were there for emergencies and that buildings themselves were still hooked up to the grid
I think the generators worked on their own, with the core as the thied tier backup, but my god I hate the cores completely.
The *reactor* in a T51 is meant to last 2-300 years of continuous use, not 200 years of *no* use and 20 minutes of use. Bethesda's decision to give Power Armor early and the resulting need to balance it absolutely destroyed the lore.
Yeah, I think that's a reasonable conclusion. The "fusion" cores aren't fully inserted because they aren't actually being used, or are only being used at a trickle to power the light and buttons on the generators themselves, as the generators are in standby mode and only begin producing full power when the mains power goes out and the core is fully seated.
@@DIEGhostfish yeah its Bad to the Lore but the Power Armor system in Fallout 4 was so much better than that in the previous Fallout parts and in my opinion: gameplay and fun>Lore
@@chrisrecchia2732 1&2 were the best.
I wanna get hooked up to the grip
You have to remember Fallout isn't post apocalypse, it's post post-apocalypse. Many power stations have been rebuilt, especially on the West Coast, the NCR are close to pre-war technology levels. With working cars and trucks, though these are still somewhat rare. They also have working trains, that's why the Powder Gangers were in Vegas in the first place. To repair and connect the Vegas railway to the NCR one.
And the west coast brotherhood Connaclly has multiple fully operational tanks and aircraft and in 76 only 20 years after the bombs the brotherhood has functioning APCs parked at their main outpost and one at the front gate with power armor taking a seat next to the others instead of being the main source of strength
"Post post-apocalypse" - damn that's a really good point, spot on. I think that's why it's such an interesting world.
Neo-Post Apoc.
@@TheGr8one1022 stupid question. what does post post apocalyptic mean exactly...
@@SenketsuFi it means that the world has stabilized after the apocalypse and societies are much bigger and more resilient. Kinda like the wild west or the oregon trail
The Hoover dam was designed to survive without people running it so I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of those bits of automation in things like the overflow rerouting would have become present in other hydroelectric sources across the country
I read somewhere that it could run for a total of 6 hours with no men operating it.
@@Notaffiliated64 and a futuristic version with robots it would need zero people for those two hundred years easily
@@ChangerofWays-Tzeentch but who's powering the robots for 200 years?
@@thestaminabs they are fusion or fission powered both can theoretically power the robots that long this makes sense thanks to the sci fi bordering magical fission tech let alone fusion
@@thestaminabs if robots are working the dam and generating power they could probably charge them selves in the dam
The fact about the noodle shop in DC being a generator is my new favourite detail.
Diamond City singlehandlely being powered by the heat created from those noodles
I always wondered why its name was "Power Noodles" tbh
I looked for their power source so many times, I thought it was an omitted detail, but it was there in plain sight the whole time.
@@852Duarte if you hack the noodle robot he slowly kills the entire city because he is unkillable himself
Nani ni shimasu ka?
This was actually fascinating. I always just slapped the label of fusion technology over everything because of how ridiculously efficient it would be, it hadn't even crossed my mind that fusion cores might not actually be fusion based. 76 shows that some of the power plants are still functional but just offline, but it did always bug me that buildings didn't seem to lose power when you looted the generator.
Old comment is old. Its fairly reasonable that building large fusion reactors would be costly and take a lot of time especially when displacing already existing infrastructure, aka the nuclear power plants. In real life it takes 10's of years to get something like a nuclear reactor power plant built imagine replacing one. What wouldn't take a super long time especially with lots of money from the government is producing small fusion cores for small fusion reactors attached to power armor. Supplies for power armor and also transportable generators is totally reasonable. We already live in a mixed power society anyways.
Mind was always more that and also, given how long it's been, ghouls etc that someone worked out how to get power going, not well enough to have things pre war but we'll enough to keep lights going at night
As a utility electrician I must say your layman understanding and explanation is basic, but commendable. Overall you say more that is correct than wrong and nothing is directly false. Love to see creators that clearly research and learn.
Also big MT uses what I believe is some sci-fi mumbojumbo based loosely on the wireless power experiments Nikola Tesla theorized and attempted with a big sprinkle of ATOMIC ENERGY! sprinkled in on proper 1950s fashion.
You wire dragging.
@@TieSyndicate yes i agree
@@TieSyndicate being a sparky is better than the rest of the trades XD
@@medicmain3947 lol the dread s40
or the death bringer sandblasters!
Most impressive thing isn't the fact that power still exist but that 200+ year old light bulbs still work and haven't blown out
I mean usually the lights blow out from being turned on and off
@@DeosPraetorian If the lights are LED maybe but I'm pretty sure lights in Fallout are all incandescent, which means they have a finite amount of (I believe it to be) nitrogen gas inside the bulb and with them being on for 200 years eventually the nitrogen would be used up and the bulb to burn out
@@morticianflame The gas in incandescent bulbs is not a consumable. It's a non-reactive gas put there to displace oxygen so the filament doesn't oxidize and burn away when it heats up. If the bulb remains sealed and the filament doesn't break, it can theoretically continue to remain functional indefinitely. It is repeated heating/cooling cycles that eventually break the filament and make a bulb "burn out" from arcing across the break.
@@morticianflame some lights aren't incandescent and bulbs won't break just sitting there. It would take thousands of years for the nitrogen to leak out.
Or that Raiders, Bandits and other criminals are still around scavenging instead of trying to help grow a farm/community and stuff! Bandits and such should only really be in control within the first few decades, I guess, after that we should have at least civilised ourselves, although am not an expert(I like booze so am an expert in being an alkie lol)
lets not forget, most power stations in the world are made in a way to resist attacks and natural disasters. unless there is a constant bombing or a direct nuclear hit most of these structures can probably handle it. so its not odd that some of the old infrastructure for power generation remains intact ( on the outside)
The real issues will be a rust and decay of parts and wear on structures from lack of care and upkeep.
But with the know how and parts (or ways to produce them?) One could reactervate them.
Eg: Hoover dam, Helios, dayglow
One could also argue that some maintenance could be done by Protectrons or other such automated robots, thou complete refurbishment of a sub station might be beyond regular maintenance.
@@TheArchaos got to give it to protectrons a Mr handies. They do keep a few plants chugging
@@TheSemajshadow that's true actually. mr Handy's and protectrons still do their jobs after war.
Robots and chain link fences-
Fallout 3
I have a PhD in physics, and a professional background in electrical engineering and I can certainly say I’ve never thought twice about this stuff, but I think the devs actually did. Also, funny enough there is a company in Cambridge, MA who is one of the leading fusion research entities. MIT also happens to have a nuclear reactor on/near campus.
How well do you understand theoretical physics?
EE as well, I really like seeing when these things are given proper consideration from game devs...
FO4 reiterates its status as the least intelligent game of the series by having downed and open transmission lines perpetually emitting sparks
Is your PhD theoretical?
@@simoneidson21 💀
@@simoneidson21 Dr. Fantastic moment
Here's one thought about the power cores in the wild. Perhaps they're in a maintenance mode. Kinda how you trickle-charge a battery to keep it topped up. The generators may work in two modes, charge and drain. That solves all three unanswered questions;
1. The generator not actually powering the building means when you pull the core the power stays on.
2. The generator in charge mode means when you pull the core, it stops charging, thus the gen stops.
3. All the cores you find are at full charge, because they were being charged the whole time.
Yeah good point, maybe they're basically backup batteries that would kick on when the building loses power, but since the grid is (apparently) still powered, they're charging instead.
Okay here's a thought: what if fusion cores contain a reverseable nuclear reaction? You give them external power, and that is used to power a fusion reaction. This reaction forms an unstable isotope. When power is removed, the isotope decays, releasing heat that can be used as power like a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
Obviously I don't think that's how it would work in the real world, but it's fallout.
@@technicolorskies5432 sort of like a UPS, not enough to run the system long-term, but enough to have time to shut down everything properly.
So fusion cores could indeed just be batteries for those times when the grid collapses. Or even for managed blackouts. Or when the grid runs unstable.
If fusion generators recharged fusion cores, it would make so much sense, because the Atom Cats have one outside of their garage, and i guess they'd need something to recharge their fusion core, given how much they use Power Armor
I agree the cores would be better called a capacitor and fusion is a brand name
the generators do charge the cores but won't accept cores anymore
Just a nit pik but terminals have internal power, which is why you find them working in every corner of the wasteland: Nuclear powered Commodore 64.
I noticed that too, in FO3, FO4 and NV. I think the radios are also self powered.
My theory: The towns didn't want to rely on a remote location to remain working, to keep their town powered. One big raider attack on a power plant could leave a town powerless. If this happened in the middle of the night, the whole town could be killed very easily. So they power themselves from within.
I thought something similar, why would a massive settlement like Diamond City rely on a power source they couldn't directly maintain or control. It seems far more believable they would invest into their own sustainable power source.
I would say it's more general than that, infrastructure in general is difficult in unstable regions, that entire stretch from power plant to consumer must be safe. Plus, for that investment to be economical, you're going to want more than jsut a single producer and consumer, otherwise it makes more sense to just have the power plant to be at the settlement (or vice versa). And of course, once you say "multiple producers and consumers", you're talking tight and widespread social order that is so rare if it exists at all in-universe
Good theory
Too bad it's absolutely retarded
Thank you Jamie. That makes sense to me. It could be a mix of insufficient pre war power networks and wanting to ensure that they have a strong power source they can protect from things like raiders and super mutants.
Thats.. pretty much just OPs theory lmao things out of your control are vulnerabilities. The more of these needs you bring under your direct control, the safer you'll be. Just makes sense
I figure the unseated Fusion Cores that are harvestable ingame are actually mostly spent and the generators have a mechanism to eject a spent core (yet still partially plugged in, similarly to a car cigarette lighter) and the reason they don’t last as long in power armor is that, as well as they could possibly be a different, civilian core rather than a military-use core, same size and dimensions but the military model having a significantly longer operation time
@@billyparker5974 ok nerd
@@billyparker5974 I think this is an awesome comment. :D
Probably is we get the brotherhood mentioning in one quest (the quest where you track brotherhood distress beacons) that the fusion cores within the suits they had ran out within eight hours (similar to the in-game time the fusion cores last)
@@billyparker5974 While there is no direct night vision, the sole survivor can add two different ways to highlight enemies.
Interesting idea. They could be partially pushed out automatically as a way to show that they need replacing.
The fusion generators could just be backup generators like a lot of important buildings have irl in case the grid goes down.
except the grid did go down and you then took the core out. it doesn't make sense lol
@@mowvuit would 100% make sense if they ran back up for hundreds of years but didn't die after 20 minutes in power armour.
In regards to the fusion core generators I think it’s just a matter of hardware or development time limitations, you’d need to do a lot of scripting to kill lighting nodes off in any interior and even more in an exterior area. Also the commonwealth does have a hydroelectric dam just south of Abernathy farms but given the lack of any water at base I don’t think it’s operational anymore.
FYI in Nuka-World if you take the fusion core from the generator before the fight with the overboss, gage says power to the arena is down 40%.
30
That only makes it obvious that there is another generator somewhere.
@@HappyBeezerStudios feet Brno
But also if you do that you break the fight and colter is invincible.
@@HappyBeezerStudios if anything it would imply there are more than one generator beyond that, why would anhyone design something to split 30% of the capacity and not if it's objectively not a failsafe measure and have the rest of the 70% stacked in 1 place ?: D
Maybe the fusion cores are just act like some kind of catalyst/accelerant in those "generators" since all are fully charged when someone removes it, while a Power Armor gets its power directly from it. And if a building is still connected to a somewhat live grid, it is possible the the generator is/was too, simply refeeding the surplus electricity to the grid that the building does not needs, so by shutting one down only makes the power-grid weaker, but does not kills the power completely.
Also as a railway engineer: Our main system is divided to sections an substations. There's also some level of automatism like: if a main fuse goes down, the control unit that is responsible for that area try's to turn the power (fuse) back on, after some time, automatically (so in a thunder-storm we don't have to run around like crazy), and only after 2 failed attempts that grid stay "off" , and needs a manual reset, (if the shortage is no longer present).
That's why some unfortunate people, who touch the wrong thing, at the wrong time are guaranteed to get cooked, specially if they get suck!
I think perhaps the fusion cores are the battery and the “generator” is the transformer allowing the nuclear powered battery to use very little power over 200 years but the power armor is lacking that very large transformer (clearly) and so it draws from the core directly, using much more power in a much shorter timeframe
Was thinking the cores had multiple modes of interaction with a generator. The idea revolved around the fusion core generator being the actual producer of power, and the core is essentially a chargeable power source that’s inline with the generator’s power routing. The modes of interaction would have to do with the position of the core in the generator, with the partially exposed position for loot generators acting as a “charge” mode where the generator replenishes the core with the power it generates, while the fully inserted settlement position is like for a “pass through” mode, where the core is more just being used to complete the power circuit for the generator to power external devices.
Like a car battery. Also, cars have a way to charge batteries or at least keep them charged while running
Yeah, I agree. Mr. House needed a jump start from Hoover dam to bring his fusion system back on line. The mission (The House always wins 7) to sneak into the NCR held substation and place an override chip in the system. I would wonder if the FCs are just to kick start those larger fusion systems over until the reaction becomes self sustaining and then the FC core is pushed out. It could be the reactor refills the core which is why they always have a full charge, except for the one at the museum of history which is only at 50 percent. The ones you build in settlements haven't been in service long enough to for them to be fully self sustaining and/or recover enough power to be useable.
As an actual electrical engineer, I love this video topic and how you approached it.
yet didnt mention or clarify any of the mistakes?
well then how do they do it? 200 years a long time in machine life even with all the fission/fusion sorcery
@@jasonrarick2389 well considering that in fallout you have 500kg+ armor that you can walk around just fine and dandy in and an assisted aiming system that freezes time, its not too far fetched to think that their already super unrealistic fusion and fission technology could stay in power for hundreds of years, i believe in the original fallouts its mentioned that the fusion cores that are used for power armor can keep power armor going for hundreds of years, although that has been retconned by bethesda it seems to still be somewhat true with the generators in houses/establishments that seem to have been running for over 200 years.
@@Videoswithsoarin which you also didn't do
Little did you know, three weeks after this video the US government successfully discovered fusion power
-a solar power plant in the mojave (Helios one)
-a fucking hydroelectric dam (powers a lot of the eastern NCR)
-solar panels
-nuclear reactor in a box (as mentioned by @malomalovids)
-wind (there is a lot of radioactive wind)
I like the idea that Fusion core is just a product name for a fission core created by Mass Fusion.
Basically a Mass Fusion Core, just how Xbox is short for DirectX Box
@@HappyBeezerStudios Microsoft DirectBox
well, if you dig around the details of Fallout 4, "Mass Fusion" was running a huge scam. Their "fusion" reactors are all fission. They did finally develop proper fusion but by then it was too late.
Dont stray from thinking of them as that product.
@@RaddSpencer all the while Vault tech was sitting on cold fusion tech and kept it secret. which brings us to what do they use to power the vaults for 200+ years.
Maybe the flickering you see in FO4 when you remove the "fusion" core is similar to a brown out and rather than serving as a dedicated generator, it supplements or balances power from other sources similar to a power factor correcter, by removing the core you wouldn't be killing power to a site, but rather in the long term reducing the life expectancy of the powered devices by removing the power filter for lack of a better word.
The biggest problem about the power poles in FO4 is where the lines are sparking, you can see that there's no physical connection to that same line further down, and with no evident underground line feeding up, it made for a big oversight on the devs part. The most notable one is near County Crossing settlement close to a small generation station across the street.
Edit to add: Concerning "fusion generators", I can see there being 2 variants, one being like we can use for our settlements and is a single purpose generation system, and the other being a dual purpose generator for the area and a recharger for fusion cores. It doesn't deviate the fact that a building would have multiple sources of power, and could even be an oversight of the devs to fail to animate the rotors of the other generators that don't have a fusion core dock to it. Ultimately, buildings would have many redundant power sources that would provide power for an unknown/indefinite period of time.
Yeah this always made me facepalm when seeing them. FO4 made things so much more dumb and goofy, but not in a good way.
Ah, you must have missed the micro tesla coils fitted to it that transfer the electrickery through the very air itself! Mr Tesla was very pleased that they finally implemented that plan of his! 😁
How do you even notice that lol
@@aerystargaryenii2565 Paying attention to details, especially with a heavily modified game. Those sparks give 1 cap when scrapped with the right scrapping mod.
@@Celastrous I can't play the game without mods, and after playing it for over 5600 hours and having so many mods that the game would rather crash than run, still fun to play, as long as it actually runs that is...
watching your videos has reignited my passion to play the fallout series again, keep up the good work
Power Armor might not need so much power, it could just use it very inefficiently, which is why it eats fusion cells so quickly.
This is ABSOLUTELY it. They were barely out of the prototype phase, and god knows the US didn't optimize things until later. I'll bet they were power hungry
The lore constantly contradicts itself, some sources state that the power armor reactors are capable of lasting several decades of use before depletion, while others state that the armors' fuel quickly depleted under heavy use.
It makes no sense to me, especially when you can acquire the X-01 suit in Fallout 4, that shouldnt be so inneficient then.
This is part of the reason why i never bothered trying to understand Fallout's lore, while it may seem interesting and complex in theory, it is a convoluted, self contradicting mess in reality that not even hardcore fans seem to agree on.
@@alanwatts8239 they're doing their best, I didnt even think about the more advanced armor being more efficient, that makes sense, or doesn't, lol, I agree; Fallout is doing it's best lore wise, and for coming from different studios, 30 years and 7 or 8 games, the first half of which they didnt think the series would ever get that far, is actually pretty good, the occasional contradiction is pretty much inevitable
@@alanwatts8239 usually it just goes to bethesda retconning and changing a lot of established lore. Power armor was one of the worst offenders. In the west-tek factory it states that they run on a variation of microfusion cells and have a life span of 200 years worth of continuous use. This was even apparent in fallout 3 where you could see a microfusion cell in the back of power armor. Then fallout 4 came along and its fusion cores. Honestly thats fine considering it was a different type of MFC than whats used in guns so it would make sense lore wise they have a different name and are larger in appearance. But then they only last a few in game hours? Maybe a full day with all the perks? It makes no sense. Some stated its been over 200 years so they are beginning to decay in efficiency but new vegas and the older fallouts establish it isnt hard to remanufacture or produce new MFCs not to mention the enclave had the ability to produce their own power armor even after the war (X-02 was what was used in fo3 as well as hellfire armor in the dlc, also new) so its a bit ludicrous to imagine that they can’t reproduce or reverse engineer fusion cores with the 200 year lifespan. I guess it was to balance out the power armor mechanic (they knocked it out of the park with the power armor honestly in terms of gameplay) but they could have done it with fusion cores having health which they already do just not for the player it seems. You let it get beat up and worn out you just get sealed in the suit or something just taking damage until you can pry your way out. The ability from that one perk to jettison out a fusion core to act as a grenade wouldve helped with this too. I just think they couldve done it better while still keeping with the older fallouts lore.
My personal headcanon is that with improper use of power armor, the fusion core is drained fast. That's why you need power armor training to wear the stuff in 3 and New Vegas, as the Courier probably knows it from experience, and doesn't want to waste a good fusion core, while the Fallout 3 protagonist never knew what power armor was before going through his journey.
You also have to factor in that pre war society would have been extremely power hungry. In the even that a massive chunk of the population and all of it's functioning devices suddenly disappeared, any rector assumed to still be standing might just be idling, for lack of a better term.
I think its more logical to assume that regular generators have the cores sticking out and are not actually being used or at least using the bare minimum, therefor keeping the core charged and meaning you have to push it in all the way to actually work for its intended propose, kinda like a failsafe to avoid the generators form being used unintentionally likely caused by the power variations. This is why the settlement generator cores are all the way it because they are actually being used in this case
(edited because I got cells and cores mixed up for a second)
I just think the generator is running off of something else and the fusion core is there for a backup power provider.
I think buildings could have taken on a more sinister feel if the power cuts out when you pull the core. You taje the elevator to the lowest basement, find a core, the lights go out and now you have to fight ghouls in the dark all the way back up. I dunno. Might be the DM in me.
Basically the inverted version of how dungeons in the game usually work. You fight your way through the building and at the end get some elevator running that brings you back to the entrence.
I always viewed the Fusion Generators as manually triggered back up power supplies for the buildings which were never activated due to the war and grid staying online.
Looking at the Fusion core animation for power armour when you place the fusion core into the socket you have to push/ hit the fusion core further in to seat it fully and begin the reaction.
To activate the Fusion Generator is the same, push them deeper into the socket and it can deliver a short burst of power to give time to perform emergency tasks.
As for the generators animation always took a spinning part to be apart of the cooling loop as when you trigger the reactor the coolant has to be circulating before it is brought online or the piping and moving parts might overheat and warp/ crack or even melt some components.
I think that buildings are far more Energy intensive than Power armour as for a buildings usecase the back up power might only last a few hours or even Minutes,
while in power armour depending on activity levels the fusion core can last for around 10 hours in game, but lets be more realistic to the world and say a day.
This would also explain the sheer size difference between power armour and the Generator. The generator has to have a better cooling capacity to cover the sheer current draw while the Power armour has to be cooled by the frame and the actual armour pieces. So its like comparing an Air cooled engine and a water cooled engine
I always figured the popped out fusion cores were almost spent and needed to be changed, while the ones in our settlements have a charged core, so they are pushed in.
But it's a FUSION core, not a battery. It's the source of power, not just a way to store it.
@@SpadaccinoLuciano this is Bethesda after all. They dont care at all if it works or not. Just cares enough to make it easy for players to know if they can take it or not.
@@SpadaccinoLuciano it's also a fusion CORE, and none of the designs envisioned use any sort of central core.
Do you reckon that the fusion cores are sticking out of the old box generators, and not the new ones that you build in settlements, because the old ones are slowly ejecting - just as they completely eject when they're spent in your power armour?
no, the fusion cores stick out to communcate to the player that they can be pulled out
The generators would blow in a couple years
Good point. @@aleanscm9350
Hmm what if the generators cycles the elements in the core convert it to what it needs and refuels it?
Eventually that would be depleted too because it's a closed system?@@vexile1239
There is a mod I always use in fallout4 that gives solar panels in settlement builds. Love the no generator buzz noise.
I know I'm late but do you remember the name? I find it quite emersion breaking that the settlers sleep close to a 450 loud noise machine
One thing to take into account re maintenance is the ubiquitous presence of utility protectrons. It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to think that those protections can maintain facilities to some degree and repair each other (think Dwemer constructs if this were Elder Scrolls). In that vein, perhaps some of the random robot encounters on the roads are actually work crews following a maintenance schedule.
Far harbors fog condensers actually have an In universe explanation for how they work, theyre powered by the wind turbines on the island, Captain avery tells you about it like, 2missions into the DLC on her first optional mission
@@rjwaters3 Yeah, that's true. And they do shut down if you shut down the turbines. I guess my head cannon took over for a second since that doesn't make a ton of sense imo. Since island wide wireless power or a massive underground postwar wiring project doesn't seem realistic for Far Harbor; and the fog condensors at the far flung settlements have a mysterious source of power as well, seems of that they all convey to the wind turbines somehow. Also the condensors at the settlements keep running when the turbines shut down.
21:00 not having all 3 phases is not an issue in most cases. 3 phase is only present in commercial or industrial places so places with small motors, terminals, lights etc would be fine. all these single phase electrical circuits can use any one of the 3 phases. the issue of broken grids only arrises with large motors like elevators which are 3 phase. pumps are not necessarily 3 phase because single phase AC motors do exist, most motors in everyday life are single phase AC motors like fans, appliances and even some industrial tools like drill presses, lathes, welding equipment.
My theory is that Fusion Cores are just batteries, and the machines around it are just charging them, like a backup or something and the ones the build in our settlement are reverse-engineered to use the fusion cores, as actual cores.
As an engineering student, I find this fascinating. Infact, the first thing I do when I join the Minutemen, is start building a power plant at Natick power station with the settlement mod.
@Black Boy King TV I build settlements for all factions.
There are actually some power stations in Natick MA circa 2022
Imagine how much cooler the settlements would have been if you could build proper infrastructure and transfer power between settlements, then you could even get radiant quests where people are leeching your power and you can go deal with them
@@swedneck Damnit, now I want Electro-Brahmin, a giant capacitor/battery with a long wire for charging/discharging, but when not in use it's wound around the Brahmin (that's wearing rubber boots). Anyone bumping it or trying to raid the caravan gets zapped! ⚡⚡⚡🐮🐮⚡⚡⚡ 😂
Colony builder games are cool
My theory for the fusion cores is that when you plug them in they are “drained” mostly, but not enough to explode. So the power is actually inside the generators. That’s also why when you get them they have only a little bit of charge for your armor.
i always just thought of them as batteries - batteries with a massive storage charge, but batteries nonetheless.
The *reactor* in a T51 is meant to last 2-300 years of continuous use, not 200 years of *no* use and 20 minutes of use. Bethesda's decision to give Power Armor early and the resulting need to balance it absolutely destroyed the lore.
@@DIEGhostfish perhaps the source of that didnt have the full story, remember as in real life, anything told to you in a video game does not necessarily have to be true. Could be that while a core, while new, has enough energy to run PA for 300 years, but does not itself last 300 years
In 76 you can connect your workshop to the grid from the local nuclear power plant but it doesn't give you much power unless you do the event to repair the power plant that your settlement is closest to.
76 is still alive? lmao
@@mortenera2294 isince wastelanders and BoS it's not that bad. It's a spin-off, so the lore accuracy is a bit questionable, but it can be a fun experience, if you allow it.
@@hyperturbotechnomike lores pretty rock solid
@@hyperturbotechnomike its in my top 3 spinoffs
3: tactics
2: 76
1: NV
we dont talk about the other spin off
@@Pigness7 If they would hzave called it Fallout Arcade instead of Fallout BoS, people might perhaps think different of it. It should have been marketed as an arcade game.
i’m an electrician, i recently got into your vids and this is the one i’ve ben impressed the most with, great job man :)
Did you also achieve your studies on Wikipedia?
As an electrical engineer I really enjoyed this, pretty sure you were spot on regarding the transformers and not being able to start 3-phase motors with a lost phase (this is a real thing that happens in industry that we call single phasing). Typically though most industrial sites and some utilities will have NGRs, neutral grounding resistors, that will allow normal operation with a single phase to ground fault. If you lose a second phase to ground it's a phase to phase fault and pretty much everything blows up. So losing just one phase might not happen depending on the situation. Anyways, wikipedia is a pretty good school it seems.
My theory is that the fusion generators CHARGE the fusion cores, hence why there is a core cycle button. The cores function like capacitors in a power supply for a PC and store energy. Granted this is almost assuredly wrong but in my head its more plausible
There was a theory in Fallout 4 for a very short time before it was debunked that you could place drained fusion cores in generators to recharge them, unfortunately not a mechanic.
But if you consider that the cores you get from generators are always fully charged I guess the intended use of the cores could go either way...
@@_armu Definitely possible.
Pure speculation, but it's reasonable to assume that the fusion cores you get out in the wasteland are "spent" for commercial/residential use. They're partially ejected from the generators in which you find them, perhaps as a safety feature. This would explain why you only get a few hours or days out of them in your power armor. It would also explain why they're ejected at only a mostly depleted state given what happens to them with max Nuclear Physicist perks: they explode...something you certainly wouldn't want to happen in your residential applications.
fallout 1&2 says that power armor lasts hundrers of years so its bethesda who ruined fusion cores and power armor in this matter just for gameplay purposes
This makes sense... Failsafe at 5-10% so it auto ejects the core preventing meltdown.
@@lifemocker85 You said it yourself, "hundreds of years". Fallout 4 is set almost more than a century after the OG games, which is also more than 200 years since the great war, the power of most of those fusion cores is almost drained.
@@chimpy5323 "hundreds" can be also like 500
@@lifemocker85 It could be, but would you honestly expect all the horribly twisted companies in the wasteland to not jump on the ability to say "hundreds" of years the very instant they pass 200years of life expectancy?
On the subway and underground areas if you have ever seen any of the urban exploration or interviews with some of the people that dwell within America's Underground they have electricity and tap right into the existing power network via rerouted cables and splicing... I know this is a much different scenario in the post apocalypse but some messages of the old Power Network would still remain regardless in a dilapidated state that is
Consider also that the generators require nuclear material to build this could mean that the generator itself has a low amount of energy production and that the fusion core is being used to reach criticality for generating larger amounts of power. The core being slightly out when we find them in the wasteland could be like a fuse mechanism or a safety mechanism so that the generator does not explode.
Fusion cores are essentially more advanced version of radio thermoelectric generators (rtg) than what we have in our timeline.
We use those in satellites such as the famous voyager 1&2
I've found a couple of those plutonium wells throught the Boston ruins. But they're usually in the less traveled parts. I've also always wondered how the lights haven't burnt out yet, but there is a light bulb that was installed in like 1915 that still burns today in a fire station. The more they get shut off the quicker they burn out.
"A light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"
@@HappyBeezerStudios This is somehow right in between a bot comment and a human comment.
Vaguely and tangentially on-topic, but utterly pointless to the discussion at hand
that light also is uselessly dull
@unfunny2258 same with the ones in the subway stations, as you usually have to click on your pipboy to see better. I just thought it was weird they were still flickering
Lightbulbs mainly burn out due to planned obsolescence, it's not even a conspiracy.
This is the thing that has always bugged me about the Fallout games.
It's the same problem that has been solved with the torch guys who are constantly maintaining the torches in dungeons, they are called lazy solutions!
what a brilliant idea for a video, I haven't seen anyone tackle this subject before. I am impressed with the amount of research you have done. I had no idea about that terminal entry about powerlines being underground. Great video!
I swear I had read in a terminal somewhere that a lot of tech had miniature reactors inside them. So they don’t necessarily need to be plugged in to work. If I remember correctly the same terminal entry also talked about the problem of having a ton of mini nuclear reactors laying around everywhere. That would also explain how some things get power. First thing that comes to mind is the terminal in sanctuary that had the drug stash. No wires leading to the terminal and it’s pretty evident there’s no power in sanctuary considering we have to build that ourselves.
My head cannon for the fusion cores was always that the fusion generators are storing excess power or nuclear material in the fusion cores. The fusion core is then just what Preston described it as, a battery.
Its there so if the reactor fails or something, you'll still have power for however long the fusion core's power reserves are good for. So when you remove a fusion core from a building's generator, you're not killing its power supply, you're yoinking its integrated battery backup.
In reference to the "unknown power sources". If we look at the guard, "Stockholm" in Megaton.. This man is in a location with no real way up and down (there is a tricky way). So we must assume there is more to his life than standing up there 24/7? He must have a bed, and a pathway down from his perch (at the least, someone needs to bring him food/water).
Based on this information, I believe there are parts of the open-world which aren't rendered at all, but accessible to other living things in the wasteland.
pretty sure Old World Blues have Generators, mostly small ones, i remember them mostly in some of the scientists rooms, and The Giant Roboscorpion is drawing energy from somewhere, you can even overload the electricity in that boss fight to make the generator explode and make the fight easier.
He goes into this in the video; what you see in most places aren't generators, but the "power boxes" that connect to existing networks. And, in Big MT, there are those mysterious "smokestacks" (cooling towers?) just to the northwest of the Dome...
@Work and Stuff The giant roboscorpion needed to have an external poewr source in order to work, that is the main reason it was still a prototype
the fusion cores could be fission batteries created as a result of fusion. The Plutonium wells are named that because they fuse lighter elements into plutonium drawing power from fusion. Then the plutonium waste is harvested and turned into fission batteries. The generators and cores are called fusion because their made by Mass Fusion.
I reckon that _"Fusion Cores"_ is just a brand name:
'Power Cores made by Mass Fusion!'
Legally speaking, just because it's not really fusion, it's still not lying...
I also reckon that the Fusion Generators are just *charging* the Cores using power from the grid - BUT they are themselves also power *_storage_* rather than actual generators, big nuclear batteries that still provide backup power if the grid goes down, so again legally speaking they do the same job as a generator... and because they're nuclear, they can power a small to medium-sized building _(larger buildings tend to have multiple)_ for decades.
And if the main power grid has been running at a lower capacity and/or intermittently for 200 years, those fusion generator/battery things would get enough top-ups to never run out.
6:28 you would find large coils of wire in a generator. a generator consists of an alternator which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy so they could be generators still. if you doubt my qualifications im an electrician and ive installed residential automatic backup generators made by honeywell and generac in the 24kW range
Something I think would be interesting for the series to touch on would be.. What happens when the power plants finally breakdown or get overloaded? Is it a giant time bomb waiting to go off across the wasteland?
I would assume if there is a settlement near by they would hire some wastelanders who have engineering skills or maybe even find some from other settlements to try and fix the power plants issues, or better yet get robots to do it.
@@SeengignPaipes Hence why I think it could make for a neat story
I think the power plants you see have already been repaired over and over by traveling repair people.
I also think the raiders or other factions are just guarding the place from people who actually want to destroy it.
Sounds weird, but any line of defense is good against a super mutant.
I assume that the plants have advanced enough control systems for the time period that let it operate autonomously - controlling power distribution to avoid overloads. Maintenance would need to be done by robotic workers if there was no human intervention.
It would be cool if an EMP that took out the computer systems caused a plant to be unstable, but that kind of thing kinda loses its urgency if you can just ignore the quest and go do other things for an unlimited amount of time.
There’s probably hundreds of robots/AI in there, like Hoover dam
I noticed that the fusion you place yourself in settlements don't allow their core to be removed. I am not sure if enemies can destroy them but I know they can cause turrets to need repair if you don't set enough up to prevent them from getting close. I like the heavy laser turrets in Fallout 4, if you are an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel the heavy laser turrets will fight the vertibirds. Set them on a tall enough building and they have a surprisingly long range too. It is fun to get within range of them and annoy the enemies and watch the laser turrets attack them. If they damage them just go back as if you were setting them up and they can be repaired. You can also scrap them if you decide that you want something else in that spot.
lol concrete floor walls was the biggest protection
Deep dives into the lore of games that I love like this are what youtube is all about. Thank you, very much, for all the effort you put into this awesome video!
Btw, last December, we were able to generate power through fusion. Though it will take time for more widespread use.
Dev of Fallout 3 didn't even think about power source. My man filled in the blank for them.
Going further on the fusion generator bit, it is sticking out slightly further than one built for a settlement yes, but if you look closer the fusion core has a green light around it which is dim in the wild vs one built for a settlment which is very bright. If we take that at face value, it stands to reason that fusion cores plucked from wild fusion generators are nearing empty.
David Attenborough: "Here we see the wild fusion generator in it's native environment. Isn't it beautiful."
@@brodriguez11000 I'm sure this joke would be funnier if I knew who David attenborough was. 😅
the last part about developers making power generation being explicit only for story reasons is efficient and is one that FNV also leverages. If Obsidian set their fallout game to a place that does not have a cloes by hydroelectric dam, they would have done what they did as Interplay in Fallout 1 and 2. Being close to the dam just made it easy for them to have a big plot point that also had the benefit of power generation and that power generation also serving purposes like that in Helios 1 or in the independent quest line. Not being explicit in world building may seem lazy, but efficiency is just clever laziness. It is efficient to leave the idea of power generation behind if it serves nothing. They did not even need to justify explicitly how a post apocalyptic society had the resources and the know how to get an entire dam running after 2 centuries of neglect and war and get the power somewhere with damaged infrastructure, though the transmission lines do not seem that damaged. Heck this is the idea of chekov's gun where if you show a gun, shoot it at the next scene it appears otherwise omit it later.
well hoover dam was designed to last, it wasnt build by apple
@@Helperbot-2000 thank god it was but war and 200 years will never be kind to machinery more complex than a bolt action.
@@nitesy381 House mentions that the NCR was only able to restore the dam enough for it to be around 50% efficient from it's actual output. So they weren't able to fully restore it, only enough to be in "working conditions".
@@combinecommando001 Been to the damn just recently in a playthrough, yup the thing isn't running on full capacity.
@@combinecommando001 NV did put that into account.
Well if they are able to make robots that are still functional and walking around 200 years later, it shouldn't be surprising that some settlements/city's still have some power running to some extent.
14:45 National Ignition Facility recently had fusion where more power come out then was invested in via laser (after this vid uploaded)
An amount of laser energy went into fusion, and more energy was produced.
They used very inefficient lasers, so the amount of total energy invested didn't pay off energetically - but that's just because the facility wasn't built for efficiency.
We are actually getting closer to economical fusion! That Fallout retro-past is actually still ahead for us to experience :)
Does that mean fusion reactors will have a huge laser beam in the middle? Sweet
I think you've made excellent points, in regard to the fusion generator, I think the biggest evidence that the fusion generator isn't actually providing much power is how the lights flicker, but then come back, implying that while it may have been supplementing the buildings power, the bulk is still coming from the grid
Your fusion core theory actually makes sense.
I imagine that the fusion cores get ejected when they're low on power, and that's why they're not fully in the machines when you find them.
The spinning thing on the generators could simply just spin when a fusion core detected, so when you remove it, the machine stops running, since there wouldn't be a reason to if the fusion core is removed.
The reason the fusion core still has enough power to power your power armor (that's a mouthful), could be that as power is drawn, the core becomes less stable, so the generators are designed to eject them before they reach a set instability.
Or a more simple explanation could be that, Mass Fusion just wanted to rip off the consumer, so they set them to be ejected sooner. With the military however, they'd want to get as much battery life as possible, so they'd become the official core suppliers.
Fusion Cores might also work like chemical batteries, in which overtime their output decreases, to the point where they don't provide sufficient output the generator needs, but still enough to run the light and spinny bit, as well as run a suit of power armor for a few minutes.
In Fallout 3, the Museum of Technology references having to install new (and unseen) fission power to power the Vault-tec display in one of the terminal entries. Separately, Mr. House (long may he reign) talks about how the strain of the laser defense system knocked out the 38's fusion power system and why he needs a jump start from Hover to bring the 38 and his other stuff back on line. Fusion and Fission power exist in small and midsized packages.
Mass Fusion could be locked in using Fission power because that's where their money was at the time and hadn't had time/resources/smarts to bring their own system to market.
Your absolute dedication to not putting stuff down to lazy design/writing is truly awe-inspiring dude!
Couldn't those fusion generators be used in case there was a blackout or some other emergency? Would explain why the cores weren't fully inserted since they weren't actually active? Or just running on standby mode drawing enough power just for the automated activation on the machine in case of grid failure.
Have you considered, that probably Dave himself is responsible for restoring power to the capital wasteland?
@@OfficialRadKing33 shut up scam bot
I just recently found your channel. I must say I love the work you put into these videos and she’s some light on parts of the game I never put too much thought into.
Dude I love your in-depth videos. You cover every detail!
Will say that fusion core ejection equals detonation mechanic of the Nuclear Physicist perk is only available by _manually_ ejecting the core. Otherwise, when you deplete it, it's just deleted from your inventory. And if thermonuclear bombs are any indicator, which use a fusion reaction to get the main part of their yield, albeit kickstarted by a fission reaction, a mushroom cloud doesn't always equate a fission detonation.
I was filming for a settlement build in Fallout 4, and I passed a downed telephone pole line, and it still had power.
So, there’s obviously still power being generated in the commonwealth. Which, is so strange because the institute’s whole thing is that they’re having a power crisis.
Why don’t they just, take over the power source that’s making the city and its surrounding towns powered?
One could conclude that RTG's (good god, why even!?) are providing the power to the lights. In the real world, the Voyager 1+2 probes were launched in the 1977 ish and is expected to provide power to somewhere around 2025-ish, so its not completely outlandish, I propose that something similar to RTG's could be used to provide constant emergency power, thou it would still have be the kind of techno-pseudo-science of the Fallout universe.
That is effectively what the Plutonium Wells are in Fo4, I would assume. They are just stockpiles of plutonium the unit uses to crate power locally. City sized RTG. It also explains low power levels being able to make lights work but not large equipment since RTG's produce paltry amounts of energy for a very long time.
There is also wireless energy, like crystal radios. also you can make wireless power in your settlements.
also space based wireless power, like in nv, how you can condense the power into a beam and fire it.
Shocked how interesting you were able to make this topic. Definitely subbing and watching some more content….and also starting another play through of F3.
21:00 I've actually had that issue recently because of a power grid problem. One phase was offline. Only some of the rooms had working lights, and the weirdest thing was that only half of the cooking plates of the electric stove worked. Overall weird experience.
Maybe the fusion cores are like a back up battery. This would still fit in everything that was said. Maybe it’s being charged by the grid and was designed to be used as a battery backup for temporary loss of power. That’s why lights still work in the buildings. And why it doesn’t last as long in power armor. Great video.
In fallout 4, there’s a power line that is not connected to any line near the settlement right across the guard unit home base. One of the line is sparking. I followed the line and seeing it not connected to anything.
Heh, it's that magical underground power coming in from one of the poles!
I'm surprised that steam engines weren't in fo4. Makes sense from a lore to. You had a massive war over oil gas and resources and yet you have combustion engines that takes oil and all that to use.
The problem with that is, what do you make the steam with? Coal, oil, gas, or wood. So steam power wouldn't work, the world had run dry of those resources.
Steam engines require fuel, like oil, natural gas, or some other power source. Modern power plants all use steam to drive generators, transducing the mechanical power in steam turbines into electrical power fed into a grid or storage.
Steam engines simply are not nearly as efficient as what we have today or what the world in fallout would have.
If a nuclear apocalypse happened irl and future people wanted power, it would be much easier to salvage an internal combustion engine from a car than it would be to fabricate their own steam engine.
@@Celastrous depending on the engine design. You can make a pop engine boat entirely out of tubes and a heater that wouldn't need oil
@@Xahnel wood. have you seen the commonwealth? So much dead, dry wood (and broken houses all over made of it).
@@liquidsleepgames3661 The heater would still need to be some source of fuel... Wood, candle wax, etc..
I never noticed these things about FO4 "Fusion" Cores.
It would make most sense if they are just not plugged in. The flickering light and stopped generator could be explained with a 2 stage start up cycle a lot of real motors and generators have.
Half Inserted only powers the generator for start up
Fully inserted powers connected systems
I actually like this interpretation
My theory for the fusion cores and running buildings is that they’re not seated in those machines because those machines are backup generators, meant to be utilized in case the grid goes offline; which isn’t in the case in games like Fallout 4. That’s why they aren’t seated properly, because they need to be activated when the building no longer receives its power from the wider grid. It also makes sense that the fusion cores would only work for a short time in something as big as a building rather than 200 years, which also explains why power armor burns through them so quickly in comparison
I'm watching this after the Fallout show realizing Vault 4 breaks your theory on that the buildings are receiving external energy. However there is the possibility it could vary vault to vault.
Here’s my theory: the fusion core contains the deuterium and tritium fuel to be used in a fusion reactor, hence why the generators shut down after removing the core. It also contains a small battery to jump start a fusion reaction.
It would be really cool if in Fallout 5c removing the core would cause a building to lose power, you could replace the core to get the building working again. Maybe they could incorporate this into a quest?
That is at least physically plausible. I'd like a more complex system than just fusion cores, but for a realistic and simple system those would work just fine imo
In regard to fusion cores and fusion generators, I always thought that the reason cores deplete faster in power armor is because of efficiency. I think the big fusion generators are a large structure designed to create as much power as possible from whatever fuel is in the fusion core. but the power armor suits are built to be much more compact, so instead of an efficient generation of power from the core, it just depletes the fuel rapidly and eats up cores.
i also want to add that we know the default fusion generators can provide power to the buildings they are in, but removing the core and turning them off does not cut off power. this is likely because buildings draw power from an external source and the fusion core power is supplemental. we know this from fo4 nuka world where removing a fusion core for the overboss fight reduces the power to the electrified armor, but is not enough to fully disable it.
It's only the players power armor that depletes them though.
The BoS and others never run out of power in their armor.
@@Soundsofthewood thats the same thing as NPC's never running out of ammo. As far as I know the brotherhood still canonically use up fusion cores, its just they don't expire in gameplay because it would be janky to have brotherhood randomly leaving their armor around the commonwealth cause they ran out of power.
Bitter Springs was one of the few settlements in Fallout that had realistic lighting and also electricity complete with a generator and string of lights that to the best of my knowledge were only used in The Bitter Springs area.... also on a side note have you ever seen any of the pictures from the civil war in Syria with the power grid hundreds of cables and wires all in a conjoined malformed mess. ..
you forgot that the Fusion Generators and the Municipal Plutonium Wells to some degree, can be a new and improved version of our world's Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. Basically RTGs generate power from the decay heat of a nuclear matter with the Seebeck principle, they do not require any maintenance, and they do not have any moving parts. That would also explain why the Fusion Generators can power small applications like doors, gates, terminals, fixtures and the like, but cannot be used for high power demanding applications. The lifespan of and RTG is calculated on the nuclear matter that is used in its making, as the generator produces less and less power as time goes on, calculated by the half-life of the nuclear matter used, and the power output would basically halve when the half-life is reached and it would continue to gradually generate less and less, this is why NASA shut off some of the systems of the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, because the RTGs in them are nearing the half-life of the plutonium inside them. The rotating part on Fusion Generators can be a cooling turbine although an RTG would never need one, and the Fusion Cores themselves can also be a core coolant (those are against the principle of how an RTG works, but we can assume that the Fallout version can be ages ahead of our own so may operate in a vastly different fashion), or more accurately, some sort of nuclear material replacement, like a fuel cartridge. This would also suggest the actual NEED to replace the nuclear core, since the RTG is to be discarded once its considered dilapidated in power output, they are single-use. the Fusion Core may be the cartridge of a nuclear matter with a very short half-life like Strontium-90, which is 28.8 years. That also may be why Fusion Generators have replacable fuel while Municipal Plutonium Wells do not, hence their name suggests, they use Plutonium, which has a half-life of 87.7 years. This might also suggest the Fusion Core ITSELF can be an RTG with good thermal insulation outside, and the Fusion Generator simply being a transformer, which is why it has a rotating fan.
That can also bring an explanation on why Fusion Cores are used as "Fuel" in power armors, since the frame itself has pathways similar to an RTG with "Radiation if damaged" written on them. Assuming most of the Fusion Generators replace the Fusion Core "Cartridges" around the same time as the others because of how half-life works (it may slightly change with the installation date of the generator, hence why you find cores of various states of depletion, this can not be from the usage amount since RTGs produce a fixed output for a fixed amount of time whether you utilize it all or not), their half lives are long since past so they cant be used to power high demand applications (or power them for a very short time because of how depleted they are, hence why they last so short on power armor), but can still power up small things like lights and terminals. the Municipal Plutonium Wells would have much more power output because of the nuclear matter they have, but neither of them could be of any use for powering a city, or a water purifyer, or anything of the sort. the 0/100 rating of the Fusion Cores can simply be a voltmeter rating of some sort for their power output, and stuff like Fusion Generators and power armor could have capacitors in them to boost the total output.
The last question in this theory would be "why does it all have the name "Fusion" in them if there is NO fusion?"
Answer to that can basically be marketing. Think of how we name everything "turbo" when we want to imply efficiency and speed, from cartoons to vaccuum cleaners, to fridges, to even the razors Gilette sells, while neither of them mix air with any kind of fuel to increase burning efficiency, which is basically what a turbocharger on a car does. It is named "Fusion" because it is made by Mass Fusion, because it is cool sounding, and because it uses nuclear technology.
TL-DR: both Fusion Generators and Municipal Plutonium Wells can be an advanced, Fallout-ifyed version of our worlds RTGs, Fusion Cores can be a replacable nuclear cartridge for the generators to last longer and produce more power in a shorter amount of time, or they can be the generator itself and the panel/device they are inserted to is a mixture of transfomer and capacitor, the name "Fusion" is only there because of the marketing.
More info on what RTGs are: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#
As a prior US Army Commo soldier (gotta power that radio, lol) you're very spot on. In the totality of circumstances (in a perfect - all things considered - world) I always assumed that many of the terminals were internally powered to prevent file corruption at a power outage... and that when the power went out that system "could" work in reverse, the 3 phase that is still operating (mostly automated) in conjunction with any wired in vaults and later stage settlements... combined could create a daisy chain accidental (or perhaps on purpose) grid for power to move around the various wastelands. This would still necessitate individuals with generators but also (as we see in NV at the Solar array) vast areas can be limitedly powered on the old grids.
I like your fusion core and station theory. But I have one thought as well to put in what if those aren't just a one-way conduit? What if the stations can both charge the cores but also drain them at times of need kind of like a battery backup
As an electrician and a fallout fan this was cool to watch! 😂
Always a good day when you upload! Seems like an interesting topic.
I know I'm a month late to the party but one thought that immediately came to mind regarding the fusion cores was Alternators. When you look at the generator you pull the fusion core out of, what's on the side of it? A spinning gear/wheel. This gear could be acting as an Alternator, keeping the fusion core charged with the generator using the excess to power the building and other machines. When you pull the fusion core, it stops spinning likely as the result of it no longer detecting a fusion core to be charged. While I'm no expert on nuclear energy, fusion or fission it was just the first thing that immediately came to mind.
my idea about the fusion cores is that they are fission as a fusion reaction is self sustaining (as stated by proctor ingram when reactivating liberty prime) meaning that it doesn't deplete or need refuleing, all it needs is the agitator to start the reaction
whereas fission power relies on the nuclear decay of atoms when they split, releasing energy. however you can only split a nuclear atom so many times until it becomes a stable isotope again, thus it depletes over time, the same behaviour seen by the "fusion" cores we know and love
the fact that the core eject makes this reaction go critical only furthers to back my point
I'm surprised you did not back up your "settlements needing better power sources than the old world underground network once they get big enough" theory with the amount of quests/major events that revolve around the matter. Gecko in fallout 2 being a massive power plant that you can fix up (either for the residents of Gecko, Vault city or endings that weren't able to make it into the game), Helios one being a location that the Legion and Brotherhood of Steel fight for (either for a weapon or for *drum roll please* power). Shoot, the entire plot of NV is about Hoover dam to an extent. Yes it is all examples of large factions or settlements using large pre-war sources of power but it clearly shows the drive/need for more power to expand (Vault city being a great example). I believe these motivations and desire clearly shown in the quests could also apply to why the old world networks may still work, or at least be another piece of the answer. What is stopping someone or a group of people being the ones to repair and maintain some of the powerplants over the past 200 years if the chosen one could do it in Gecko. They do not entirely need to be completely self-sufficient.
Either way this channel has grown so much and I love all of these videos. Easily one of the best fallout lore channels. Keep up the great work man, much love