I’m a big fan of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I tried Fallout 4 during a free weekend but it wasn’t for me. I’ve thought a lot about where New Vegas might be headed and my perspective is one of continuing on from where we left off at the outbreak of the third world war. There’s no need to continue with the administrations that lead to the war, but from a technical standpoint we want to go back to the most advanced stuff we know. I think New Vegas is well placed to do that.
Lots of metal working stuff
We see that they have some industrial stuff left around New Vegas. H&H Tools factory, REPCONN headquarters, REPCONN test site, and the Sunset Sarsparilla headquarters for instance. We also see lots of industrial locations in the Capital Wasteland. Starting with these things provides a good way to get our own industry off the ground.
So let’s call pre-war tech Generation 0. Let’s use Generation 0 stuff to make our Generation 1 equipment; lathes, grinders, shapers, presses, mills, drills, surface plates, calipers and micrometers. We make as few of these as needed so we can start making equipment using our Generation 1 stuff. Then we make the best equipment we can using our own components, which we call Generation 2. We’re still interested in lathes, grinders, shapers, presses, mills, drills, surface plates, calipers and micrometers.
We’re going to want plenty of equipment for railroads, quarries, chemical plants, electronics, weapons manufacturing. They should all be made with Generation 2 equipment. So in theory we only need pre-war equipment to make our very first equipment. All our subsequent lathes and drills and stuff we make using our own equipment in a “circular” fashion. We put very little wear on pre-war equipment.
In reality we’re bound to look at our Generation 2 stuff and the parts made from them and say “Well, this isn’t quite right, we forgot to XYZ” and need to go back to our pre-war stuff to make new lathes and drills and so on based on which things we realized we had screwed up. Still, we put as little wear as possible on pre-war equipment, only reverting to it when we have to. Hopefully we can soon make do without pre-war equipment and correct our mistakes within our Generation 1 and Generation 2 stuff.
Pakistan provides an interesting example of how of they making the base for a lathe in with only casting using a crude mold and a shaper. Pakistan is generally a notable source of how one might bootstrap industry but not quite as useful in how to achieve very high precision. A more complete example exists using some store-bought things and using a more full-featured home setup. We can see This Old Tony make just a back plate for a lathe as well.
We need various cutting tools and high speed steel is very attractive and it’s useful to understand why rake and relief-angles are needed. Today we see carbide used quite extensively but it’s not necessary and it’s something that can be introduced as some later stage. Access to Tungsten is needed but to make them into useful tools high heat seems like the biggest requirement.
Speaking of which, we need furnaces obviously to smelt metal but that’s not particularly hard. Doing things with the right atmosphere is harder but doable.
Equipment
Measuring is Alpha and Omega. If we can’t measure the radius, length, width and so on we can make things really well but we wouldn’t know that. Conversely we might have issues in tolerances but if we have a good way of measurement we can try and try again until we get things right. We can measure within a fraction of a millimeter using standard micrometers(with Vernier scales), completely based on mechanics. No electrical or electronic stuff necessary.
Indicators tend to be very useful and I have no idea how they are built(unlike micrometers and calipers that are more obvious in how they work) but I think we can probably think something out. Similarly surface plates are important, as they give us a stable reference on which to take measurements using indicators.
Something quite useful has been the gauge block which are pieces of metal with a known dimension and these as used to check and trim measuring instruments like micrometers. Over time they wear so we need our own method of making these things but we probably need to use pre-war gauge blocks for a longer period of time than pre-war drills and grinders. I think the stuff that gives us the highest resolution would be optical flats and monochromatic light-sources. They don’t necessarily give us measurements in clear numbers but are great for measuring flatness on reflective parts. So surface plates made of granite can’t really benefit but if they are made from steel? That could work. And gauge blocks are almost always made of metal so optical flats can measure their flatness really well. I have no clue how to make optical flats though so there’s no telling how long New Vegas would need to start making them. The optical flat-thing is about interference and interferometry is about comparing things in how they cause electromagnetic waves interfere with one another. Laser light is pretty good for this but white light has some benefits in visibility even though the interference patterns aren’t as clear.
Welding is best done with either inert gases or some flux that vaporizes when you do the welding, otherwise the hot metal oxidizes very quickly which is bad so giving weld just a few second to cool off before coming into contact with oxygen is worth a lot. MIG and TIG use inert gases and stick-welding has flux around the metal used as a welding material. I argue that the electrical aspect is easy enough but the chemistry needed is more difficult. I think a flux for stick-welding is a good place to start and inert gases might be put into use some time later. Back in the olden days they used oxy-acetylene and no inert gas which probably works but I hope that stage of development can be skipped.
On the same track we will need rust-proofing for things, like rails for railroads or anything else that we think might be exposed to the elements. For this reason a chemical plant is quite necessary just to get metal-working to work well. We’re obviously going to need it later on anyway for pharmaceuticals so chemical plants are a good investment even if you just have flux and rust-proofing in mind for starters.
Train
A lot of railroad seems to be intact in the Fallout world. Indeed it doesn’t make a lot of sense to target rails with nuclear warheads and they are very robust unless hit with a nuclear warhead directly. So there should be quite a lot of railroad around for New Vegas to use. Some might be stolen, some might be buried under sand or vegetation, some might have passed through a town that got a direct hit from nukes but most should be there.
I argue that New Vegas should make a train with a crane on the front that can lift things up if they have been buried under something or can lift entirely new rails into place when that’s necessary. I strongly recommend having the ability to move the crane between cars to fetch components. You probably can’t have these kinds of tracks between the cars most of the time(or they will be crushed or pulled apart) so they will have to be installed on straight sections, things lifted by the crane and moved back to the driver’s cab, the connections between the cars removed and then the train is driven back to wherever we need the crane to put things into place.
Power is produced by a nuclear reactor as many such are found in the Fallout world. In the long run I think coal is a better fuel but for starters a nuclear reactor providing electricity will work fine. As the image shows, cars are connected with a thick cable that carries electricity from the nuclear reactor. Since reactors tend to irradiate things pretty bad it is placed as far away from the driver’s cab as possible. I imagine there being a lot of lead shielding and the concept of small-ish nuclear reactors isn’t new.
We would need a hot-shop for performing maintenance on the nuclear car. It’s all good when we fuel a new engine compartment but after it has been used things will be neutron-activated and consequently radioactive and the fuel would contain fission products that are super-radioactive. This isn’t a new problem.
The train should have feelers in the front to check rails ahead of it for correctness so that the train doesn’t derail first and then determine that the rails are out of spec(the UK has something called the “new measurement train” which uses lasers and stuff to measure the train tracks with very high precision). This requires the train to move pretty slowly but I don’t really see the rush… It probably takes quite a bit of time to repair the broken stuff too so travelling a few kilometres per hour seems fine.
Radio
I think an important thing for the train to have is a radio. If it should happen to be overrun by raiders at some point at least they can inform New Vegas of where the problem was located. The next party sent there will be big enough to deal with any threat. A train should carry maybe a few armed soldiers and be well reinforced to deal with hostile fauna so most raiders probably can’t be a big threat. Carrying an artillery cannon on a car would make it very effective against targets found some ways away.
Radio can be very important for other reasons. It could be very useful to provide radio transmissions across California, Arizona and Utah as a service. New Vegas needs to be useful to the NCR as a free agent. If the NCR thinks more benefit can be gained by taking over New Vegas and turning it into yet another part of the NCR, then New Vegas is in trouble and it’s not going to develop any further than the NCR has done in its entire existence.
So New Vegas running hubs throughout California, Arizona and Utah where people can send and receive messages for some reasonable cost makes it’s less convenient to just take over. Of course a radio hub can’t be so constructed as to be useful for someone who takes it over or we’re back to a situation where the NCR can just take it. For this reason I argue that the radio hubs should be made sort of like FPGAs. Lots of different components but by themselves they do nothing, it is only some electronic signal that determines how they are interconnected that they actually do something.
This would mean that a radio hub contains lots of wires, amplifiers, encoders and so on but connections are determined based on an electronic signal. Basically amplifier X is connected to 10 different things and it’s a set of electronic signals that control relays that determine which thing amplifier X actually interacts with. This means that if a radio hub loses power then it won’t work when the power is restored again. All electronic signals went away. Only when New Vegas consults its drawings do they know how things work(realistically they already have the needed configuration) and move the correct configuration under guard to a radio hub where it is installed. But it’s still something that is dependent on power. Even as the configuration is moved from New Vegas down through the NCR for instance there needs to be a battery that keeps the ephemeral data in storage. If the shipment is under attack they just power down the configuration-device.
Another important part of this is to have contact with Pittsburgh. We saw in the Fallout 3 DLC The Pitt how they have become a huge producer of steel which will be very useful to New Vegas. With modern equipment this range isn’t too difficult to achieve but I think New Vegas will need pretty big tranceivers to make that communication work. But this needs only be spark-gap technology and it was in the early 20th century that this technology was used across the Atlantic.
For this kind of communication secrecy and authentication seems necessary, unlike the services provided to ordinary citizens as a commercial service. Today we have fancy asymmetric cryptography but I think New Vegas is going to have to rely on maybe a polyalphabetical substitution cipher or more realistically a One-Time-Pad system. Whereas polyalphabetical ciphers aren’t trivial to crack One-Time-Pad is the only thing proven to be secure. The drawback is of course that you have to physically transport the pad to the other party but I argue that New Vegas needs to be able to reach Pittburgh by train anyway so creating a huge tome of random numbers that can be used to encrypt radio traffic seems like a problem that isn’t too hard to solve.
Each message should be of the format
PAGE LINE LENGTH MSG
So it would be like
0025 08 0020 XALIJHWFGLAIGWLYUWCO
The last page of each book should be an emergency page and denoted as XXXX(message decoded for demonstration’s sake)
XXXX 01 0068 LAST TRANSMISSION NOT DECODABLE. START OVER AT BOOK 0004 PAGE 0050.
Spaces are encoded as well, otherwise it would be easier to do statistical analysis.
For this application it’s possible for people to send and receive these messages, not having any idea what they’re about. The One-Time-Pad would be locked up somewhere and whoever is in charge would take a message its encrypted form, sit down and apply the needed offsets according to the pad, marking which numbers have already been used. This would take some time but for communication from one side of the country to the other? I think a few minutes is doable.
Semiconductors
Real semiconductors seem like a big challenge and in our timeline we had relay-based logic in some railroad applications until the early 2000’s so New Vegas can probably get by using relays for a long time. It doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to automate radio-sending and -receiving.
Long term viability
Radio is one way in which New Vegas can make itself indispensible to the NCR. Simiarly it’s chemical plants should try to get into fertilisers and pharmaceuticals as soon as possible to increase the importance of New Vegas as a separate entity. New Vegas isn’t a democracy so it would be just fine for the NCR to make everything seem like anything that happens is a big win for them. They get radio, chemicals, fertilisers and machine tools because they have this great little place at the outskirts that comes up with great stuff. Even if behind the scenes it may be that the NCR leadership is gnashing their teeth at New Vegas not being annexed by the NCR, this need not be presented outwards.
In the longer run high-tech seems like a good route forward for New Vegas. It shouldn’t take people that long to get New Vegas machine tools(for a price of course) and make their own machine tools from them, making it less necessary for them to buy those things from New Vegas. But pharmaceuticals and high precision parts and tools need to stay the preserve of New Vegas for as long as possible. People can probably get down to 0.01 millimeters with the use of micrometers, indicators and gauge blocks but interferometry and cleanrooms should be kept under lock and key as much as possible. Bearings is an interesting example of something very necessary but also quite difficult to make with high precision, so New Vegas could supply this initially and it will take some time for other players to catch up.
Similarly New Vegas can be a source of information, science and engineering. Some knowledge is kept local but a lot of useful stuff can be taught to people from all around the area, making New Vegas more important as an independent component.
Some good references on metalworking:
https://www.youtube.com/@MaterialsScience2000/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@ThisOldTony/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@ROBRENZ/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@Abom79/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@oxtoolco/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@FireballTool/videos