u/Dreaming_of_Rlyeh

I've been just wandering around the Commonwealth lately "sight-seeing" and it got me wondering what all these locations were like before the bombs dropped. I think the one I'd most like to see pre-war is the General Atomics Galleria. I can imagine it bustling with people on a Sunday out with the family, enjoying all of the activities. There's also a few restaurants like The Gwinnett Restaurant that I think would have been great back in the day. It's all fun to think about. Which would you most like to see in its heyday?

I was thinking about the 9 bombs that made it through House's defenses, and knew that Obsidian are the type to make sure they'd show all 9 in-game, so I went looking, but can only find 8. Does anyone know where the 9th might be?

Here's the 8:

1. Moe's crater south of Black Mountain
2. Black Mountain itself
3. Cottonwood Crater
4. Mesquite Mountains Crater
5. The One (dud)
6. Very small crater just south of Ranger Station Echo
7. The crater blocking the north-west exit of the map
8. There's a crater between the BoS Safehouse and Nellis that's off-map, but very easy to spot on the Pip-Boy map or heightmap.

I thought The Devil's Throat was at first, but looking it up, it's based on a real-life sinkhole, so I don't know if it's meant to be a bomb-site. Maybe it is though, considering how irradiated it is. I couldn't find any others, so unless someone else has any idea, I'm just going to headcanon that it is haha

Even if they were small nukes, this seems a bit excessive. You could take out the entire city with a single high yield bomb. Could they have known House would be able to disable or shoot down most of them? Was he the target rather than the city itself? I'm trying to wrap my head around why any enemy would waste so many bombs on a city that's not exactly a strategic target. Are there any answers in the lore? If not, what do you guys think is the reason?

At first I was just curious where the Glowing Sea crater was, so I worked out all the angles from the game locations that have real-world equivalents (because the map isn't 1:1 I figured angles would work better) and averaged where they all intersected. If anyone's wondering, it's between Millis and Medway.

Anyway, once I'd plotted this location, I then got to wondering how big the bomb would have been. The only info we have is the wind it caused, and the fact that no one at Sanctuary got burnt from the flash. I looked up that the threshold for second-degree burns is roughly 4.5 cal/cm², so I put that into NukeMap and made the bomb just big enough to not reach Sanctuary. I put a marker there, and you can see in the bottom right that the wind there would have been 28 kph, which seems about right for what we see as we're being lowered in the vault. After all of this, I came to the conclusion that the bomb was likely 5 Mt. Any bigger and the player would have been fried. Any smaller and the wind would have been little more than a gust.

I know this is a bit of a "nerd out", but I just wanted to share what I'd found and see what you guys think on the matter, even if it's "Nope, you're completely wrong for THIS reason..." haha

Here's the link to the same map if you want to play around with it yourself: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=42.148073&lng=-71.3692225&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&crater=1&psi=1,20,200,5&rem=&therm=4.5&cloud=1&zm=11