Before and After: the Capital Wastelands

Axx

#1 – 2:14 PM December 8, 2008

Cool link. Thanks!

I'm not trying to be a smartass, I just enjoy this kind of thing:

Wiki says that the National Mall is roughly 1.2 sq.km (taken to be from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial).

Your avatar takes about 2 steps/sec when running, which translates to roughly 1.5 meters/sec. This means if your avatar can run across the Wasteland in ~13 minutes then by this reckoning the Wasteland has the same area as the National Mall. Personally, I feel like it would take longer...meaning that the Wasteland is "larger" than the National Mall. Any volunteers want to try it? =)

I think things get really convoluted if you try to estimate the Wasteland's size in different ways. For example, it seems rather certain that buildings and building spacings are NOT to scale. Other objects such as cars do not appear to be to scale either.

Anonymous Anonymous

#2 – 5:16 PM December 8, 2008

Accurate, my ass. The Washington Monument is a masonry structure, built back in the 19th century. It's not a modern steel skeleton or reinforced concrete building. The damaged obelisk is quite wrong, and were those chunks taken out of the real monument, it would simply collapse in a heap.

Anonymous Anonymous

#3 – 6:26 PM December 8, 2008

I was waiting for this :)

zdkm

#4 – 6:34 PM December 8, 2008

I just did it in eleven and a half minutes.

freshyill

#5 – 6:42 AM December 9, 2008

I see the Washington Monument every day, and while I'm no structural engineer, I always assumed it was pretty much solid stone with stairs, etc. in the interior, so what gives with the "skeleton" you see in Fallout 3?

I imagine the Washington Monument to be the world's biggest game of Jenga, and that thing's violating some serious gravity in Fallout 3.

I still need to get this game.

dculberson

#6 – 8:31 AM December 9, 2008

Freshyill, I think you're right. The Washington Monument has no structural steel in it; it's a stone building. So it wouldn't stand with gaping holes in it like that.

Capn Barcode

#7 – 11:00 AM December 9, 2008

That 1.5 m/sec speed is for walking at ~3 mph; running should be 2-3 times that since you pelt along at a good clip in the game. I remember seeing a mention of the world size being about 16 square miles, or 4 miles on a side, but have no URL to give you. Considerably larger than the Mall, but still scaling down the geographic area covered to about 20% of actual or less. (That's a gross estimate; I'm too lazy to measure the real distance from Point of Rocks to the Navy Yard.)

Axx

#8 – 3:24 PM December 9, 2008

Capn,

You have a point.

It's interesting that ZDKM ran across an edge of the map in 11.5 minutes. But to achieve your 16 sq. mi. figure, this would mean that ZDKM would have to run 21 mi/h (!! Micheal Johnson tops off at 28 mi/h). I agree the avatar is running "fast", seemingly faster than my estimate, but I would be skeptical that he is running "Olympic-sprinter fast".

I'm with Brownlee in the suspicion that the world is a little smaller than it appears to be, using scaled-down buildings and other tricks (like many blocked walking paths) to make it seem bigger.

When the construction set comes out, maybe it will be possible to calculate how many avatars you need to lay end to end to cross the map. This would probably be the best estimate as to the world's size.