Wasteland Survival Guide: Travel Talk - Solving The Vertibird Problem
- Hi and welcome to a third absurdly niche TED talk on realistic travel in the Fallout universe (for fanfiction and tabletop RP purposes). Warning: longpost incoming - I’m trying to fix Bethesda Problems in this post so I know y’all understand that’s an ENDEAVOR
- Today we are covering fuels and vehicles - i.e. “why are there working vertibirds” and “how do I have the option to put combustion-engine generators in my FO4 settlements/FO76 C.A.M.P.s, but don’t have the option to place my companions in a refurbished car to reenact the Orange Mocha Frappuccinos scene from Zoolander”
- In the first of these travel talks I mentioned hypothetical travel range of stolen borrowed BoS vertibirds as an alternative to long-distance foot travel and people tagged the post with good critique: Vertibirds are a questionable option unless we have a good fuel source
- Y’all are absolutely right! Fuel has to be coming from somewhere and may be very scarce, and I needed to solve this problem for my own fic development so I’m also dumping my findings here. In this post I’m going to try to Make It Work (because no, Todd Howard, it DOES NOT “just work”) so here is my best and unquestionably, absurdly overthought attempt at solving The Vertibird Problem
-Placing a cut here for everyone’s sanity, post continues below
- For me the single biggest willful suspension of disbelief issue with working vertibirds is that they are clearly not nuclear-powered (no rads on explosion, black fuel smoke from damaged nacelles, etc), and the Resource Wars, ending with the Great War, were literally fought over global lack of (mostly fossil) fuel
- So how are all these vertibirds whizzing about two hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse and a global fuel crisis, and what does all of this mean for post-war transit?
- The best answer I’ve got is actually grounded in the Resource Wars. A full overview would be a post unto itself and this post is moronically long already so here’s the tl;dr version
- The Resource Wars lasted decades and included at minimum the US’s 2051 invasion of Mexico, the Euro-Middle Eastern war of 2052-2060, the Sino-American War of 2066-2077, the US “annexation” of Canada during the Sino-American War, and the Great War of 2077 (the 10-23-77 nuclear exchange). The driving causes in each conflict were shortages (actual and/or manufactured) of fossil fuels and/or uranium. By the late stages of the Sino-American War pretty much all remaining fossil fuel reserves and crude oil deposits of any significant size were in US possession - specifically US military possession - and they Would Not Share
- The nuclear exchange occurred while the Sino-American War was still in progress and vertibirds were in active use, meaning US crude oil deposits were not fully tapped out. Alaska certainly wasn’t - it was home to was the last or one of the last large oil deposits, and thus was the focus of the Chinese invasion
- This is critical to the rest of my hypothesis, because a lot of the aviation fuels that would probably be compatible with vertibird engines require refining crude oil
- Let’s start with understanding the birds’ fuel needs. The V-22 Osprey - my chosen “IRL vertibird analogue” - is powered by two Rolls Royce AE1107C-Liberty Free Shaft Gas Turbine Engines. Sorry to anyone who is military & has worked with these aircraft/may be watching me stumble through this, please correct me on inaccuracies
- The Internet tells me that gas turbines usually have fuel flexibility, meaning they can take a variety of fuels including LNG (liquefied natural gas), JP-8 (Jet Propellant 8, a kerosene based aviation fuel), FSJF (fully synthetic jet fuel), and synthetic kerosene
- Problem 1: Vertibirds would need an in-universe equivalent to one of these fuels to operate
- A LOT of it
- Someone has done the math on the Internet for V-22 Osprey fuel consumption and it appears that each engine can consume up to 35kg/min of fuel if the tiltrotor is hovering under a full payload (meaning engines are operating at 90% power)
- That said, the Brotherhood is pretty much never going to have a vertibird at full payload even with occupants in power armor, and a bunch of rogue companions joyriding between Boston and DC almost certainly wouldn’t. If you just stick four to five people in a vertibird you’re only going to need a little over one-third of its operating range to make a one way trip from DC to Boston or vice versa, and I’m presuming 1/3 of the fuel capacity is needed to travel 1/3 the optimal operating range. But it’s still a lot of fuel
- Problem 2: fuel degradation. V-22 Ospreys are military aircraft and JP-8 is a kerosene based aviation fuel preferred by the US military, so let’s start with that option (and simplify it to “kerosene based aviation fuel” instead of the actual formula)
- Kerosene is derived from petroleum, as are most non-synthetic fuel options for these aircraft
- While the crude oil used to manufacture petroleum products can sit for millions of years, the fossil fuels derived from it typically have a shelf life
- Ergo, JP-8 - and most other fuels refined from crude oil - degrade
- Restek’s web page tells me that JP-8 has a minimum shelf life of 6mos. and a maximum shelf life of 85mos.
- The takeaway: most fossil fuels/non-synthetic fuels manufactured/refined pre-war would no longer be viable by the time even FO76 takes place, nevermind over 200 years later (loss of combustion properties, instability, water invading the fuel, etc). An exception is natural gas (addressed father down)
- So vertibirds need a lot of fuel and (with the exception of LNG) it can’t really be scrounged from pre-war sites. How do we solve these problems?
- Conclusion - unless these birds have been retrofitted to take fusion cores or something (unlikely since as noted above, they fireball on crash/send up black fuel smoke/don’t emit rads like the fusion powered cars do when they explode), we can safely assume that the Brotherhood is likely drilling and at minimum refining crude oil somewhere
- It is not unreasonable to assume that the Brotherhood’s east coast chapter could have a bunch of scribes assigned to manufacturing aviation fuel (sounds like Order of the Quill territory to me, since it would be development and implementation of non-combat technology)
- So they probably have a fuel stockpile(s) somewhere that you could beg, borrow or steal from
- I’d hypothesize that the Enclave remnants at Raven Rock and Adams Air Force Base were likely refining their own fuel as well, so your party may also have the option to bust open another Enclave base and siphon their fuel tanks.
- Other facilities operated by ZAX units that use vertibirds, vertibots or cargo bots, like MODUS’s setup in the Whitespring bunker in WVA, would have to be doing this as well. MODUS claims to have full manufacturing facilities, so it’s not super far-fetched
- But hang on: where are these organizations getting crude oil from in a post-apocalyptic universe and following a fuel-shortage war, you may ask? Access to at least a small amount of crude oil makes sense in canon for the West Coast Brotherhood because oil rig platforms still exist there - at minimum we have the west coast Enclave base ‘built over the world's last accessible underwater oil deposit in the Pacific Ocean’ (until it’s destroyed) - but where are the East Coast Brotherhood/East Coast Enclave remnants getting crude oil from?
- Folx, I propose to you: WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA
- (alternatively WVA, there are some deposits out there too and both areas are close enough to the Citadel for our purposes)
- We know the Western PA area is populated during the events of FO3 (the Pitt) and apparently also during the events of FO76 (since I understand FO76 content related to the Pitt is dropping in fall ‘22) and given events of FO3 there have to be viable ground routes into and out of the area
- A few big ole’ blatant assumptions principles underlie this hypothesis, as follows, but I think it holds up
- First assumption: None of the top-100 producing oil fields in the US are located on the East Coast but we have a lot of smaller, lower-yield deposits out here including many in Western PA. It seems possible that some of these smaller east coast deposits might still exist
- Second set of assumptions: “I’m not buying it. Why, with a global fossil fuel crisis pre-war, would there still be any remaining crude oil deposits other than in Alaska?” Everyone, please welcome my archenemy friend Late-Stage Capitalism, who will be assisting with this part of the discussion
- Late-stage capitalist economies display even more of an every-corporation-for-itself setup than a regular capitalist economy. We see evidence everywhere in-universe of corporations blatantly cooking the books to protect resources, dupe shareholders and drive up profit margins. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if some of them reported false information about crude oil deposit exhaustion to their military contract holders just to manufacture more of a shortage/be able to “discover” further resources at those deposits at later dates/grift a higher contract value
- Also typical of late-stage capitalism: favoring high-risk, high-reward opportunities instead of assured, lower-profit-margin opportunities. Small deposits might not have been as commercially attractive to develop when fuel magnates were scrambling to fulfill large-scale military contracts. Alaska was still producing. Cold fusion power development was also starting to take off. Why bother with a large resource expenditure for low return at a small crude oil deposit site? We know from FO76 that the WVA fuel magnate AMS shoulder-checked the waning coal industry out of the way in favor of uranium mining, and jumped from there to producing the most unstable, dangerous fuel source they’d ever accidentally discovered (ultracite) in expectation of a better return on investment, despite uranium still being a perfectly viable fuel. So, ignoring lower profit margins from small crude deposit development in favor of cash cows, and reporting those deposits as played out in order to refocus the military’s interest on fuel sources that can be provided quickly with a higher profit margin, seems in line with these corporations’ and the military-industrial complex’s priorities.
- Third assumption: the US military would have needed large volumes of fuel/fuel sources very fast before the nuclear exchange, so sheer time constraints for contract fulfillment might have caused fuel magnates to abandon development of smaller deposits in areas like western PA, and report them as played out, before moving on to faster-producing prospects (someone familiar with commercial drilling please feel free to set me straight, I have no idea what I’m doing)
- Fourth assumption: the distance from Citadel in DC to some of these sites in PA is close enough for a caravan to traverse over a short 9-day travel time (Somerset, PA to the Pentagon is 178mi. - figuring 20mi. per day maximum progress, the route is 8.9 days’ travel for a one-way trip), making transport of armored fuel tanks viable
- The BoS may have even rehabbed/refitted a pre-war refinery, and may have found at least some barrels of crude there to get them started
- They could pretty painlessly transport aviation fuel stockpiles to the Citadel or to the Prydwen’s dry dock (is that even a thing for dirigibles?) or home mooring site at the remains of Adams AFB
- Given these points, the BoS Western PA drilling/refining hypothesis seems viable
- So find your local BoS outpost, beg, borrow or steal that fuel, get that bird’s tanks filled and get to the choppa
- Bonus content: liquefied natural gas - Unlike fuels refined from crude oil, natural gas has an indefinite shelf life. Find an intact fuel holding tank post-war? Fair game!
- This could also potentially be drilled for post-war, from small deposits, just like crude oil. Natural gas pockets typically sit over oil deposits, so I again direct hopefuls to Western PA or West Virginia
- As for liquefying the natural gas: the temperature must be reduced substantially to change this stuff to a liquid state. Well, if there’s one thing I’m not worried about existing in this universe…it’s viable cryotechnology
- Grab that fuel and bon voyage
- But make sure you do a full fuel dump/strip down/blowout of your bird’s fuel system and engines first if you’ve been using petrol-product-based fuels up until now? I think that’s how it works? Someone in aviation help me out?
- Bonus content: Gasoline - Regular gasoline degrades like other fossil fuels. It actually begins degrading pretty quickly (within a few months to a year, unless well stabilized). It begins losing its combustible properties. It can wreck a combustion engine. It also can start leaving residue that will block fuel lines. Ethanol additives can draw water into a container, which presents its own problems.
- So if someone has viable gasoline, someone has been refining it post-war, or taking it from someone else who has
- Bonus content: Ethanol - There’s literally no viable reason we don’t have this other than that corn growth for food is paramount. I choose to believe that my settlements’ non-fusion generators run on ethanol
- Todd Howard you coward give me an ethanol-combustion-engine-retrofitted Fusion Flea or a motorbike or even one of those hybrid bicycles with a pedal dynamo attached jeebus are you just trying to avoid the inevitable Mad Max: Fury Road references?
- Thank you for coming to my absurdly long TED talk
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Travel Talk 2 - moving between East Coast and West Coast locations - https://edaworks.tumblr.com/post/687085337288245248/wow-so-uh-you-all-really-liked-my-post
Travel Talk 1 - moving between FO3 and FO4 locations - https://edaworks.tumblr.com/post/686101227706138624/hi-and-welcome-to-my-absurdly-niche-ted-talk-on
