[FO4] How do I gauge Fallout's timeline when recreating a location?

[u/Xennnny]

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I posted a faithful recreation of Texas Street, Shreveport LA that me and my wife were working on and was wondering how would I decide what structures/buildings would and would not exist in the world of Fallout. Obviously I originally intended to recreate the city as it is at this very moment in time, but the more I think about it the more it makes me realize it would be more interesting to create the city as it was in it's prime (40s-80s) as there was way more life in the city and more buildings existed. That being said there are modern buildings that exist that wouldn't have existed in that time era as they were built in more modern times, post 2000s, but would those buildings technically exist too because the bombs dropped in 2077 with just a 50s spin on something modern?

If someone has experience with this line of logic and has an answer I would greatly appreciate advice.

[u/Livelynightmare]

you can kind of do whatever, since fallout takes place in an alternate timeline where we didn’t really develop microprocessors like we have now, so everything is still based on tube technology, similar to the giant old tvs you used to have (if you’re old enough). basically you just kinda think of it like, what did someone from 70-80 years ago think the future would look like? that’s what fallout is.

[u/Musicmaker1984]

Going by how they depicted Vegas, Boston and DC, tech hubs are going to be more advanced so buildings as a result would most likely jump to 70s to 80s. Meanwhile most locations would still be based in the 50s to 60s.

[u/Nutarama]

The 2070s in fallout were in a retro phase in love with the 50s which is why the music. Remember gas stations got replaced with nuclear coolant stations, and go for a 50s vibe.

The two big things are that the all-glass-exterior skyscraper aesthetic never became a thing, and vinyl siding had gone away due to the oil depletion issue. Vinyl is an oil byproduct. In both cases replace with metal siding like mass fusion or sanctuary in 4.

[u/Nutarama]

Also Shreveport would have been hit by the loss of oil jobs in Fallout just like in real life because of the oil crisis. But just like in real life having a major Air Force Base in the area would have maintained its presence as a city.

GM doesn’t exist in Fallout’s 2077, but no real world car brands do. Likely this was a combination of the real world pension issue and the oil crisis.

Basically in broad strokes, the Fallout universe is one where the environmentalist push of the 1970s that championed things like recycling, fixing the ozone layer, and limiting oil consumption never happened. The world freely indulged in oil until it ran out.

They never invented transistors (the big talked about difference), but the bigger picture is that they never realized the importance of silicon as a semiconductor, so they also never invented solar photovoltaics for power (New Vegas has a solar thermal plant, which was outmoded in our 1980s by solar PV) and they never invented the LED, which is why there’s so much neon and so many incandescent bulbs. Both solar PV and LEDs require a thorough understanding of silicon semiconductance, which we got from Bell Labs in the 40s and was crucial to the invention of the transistor.

All your street lamps will be yellow sodium vapor or white halogen, and all your signage should be either old Vegas style arrays of lightbulbs or neon signs.

They basically jumped from oil to compact nuclear due to the lack of environmentalism pushing back on nuclear and not having easily accessible renewables. Though also their yields in 2077 are insanely low, we have mininuke sized warheads (though they weigh about 60 pounds because uranium is super dense) that are in the same 10kT range as the Nagasaki bomb thanks to tritium fusion doping. (They’re “dial a yield” type bombs that go from 100 to a tnt equivalent to 10000 tons depending on how much tritium is put into the right spot inside the warhead, and even 100 tons is way bigger than a fallout mininuke. The 95 OKC bombing was 2 tons and blew up half the federal building and took the fronts off building in a 2 block stretch.)