#and I've been chewing on similar thoughts about Gaming CritiqueTM for a while

[twosides--samecoin]

Being a Logistically and Materially Sound post-apocalypse has never been one of Fallout's goals, even going back to the Interplay games. It's fun to look at Fallout with a "wait how would this work in the real world" lens (I did this when figuring out how much fuel a vertibird would need if it were crossing North America, also for research into much work would be needed to recover irradiated soil vs the "plants fruit 3 days after planting!" Fallout 4 gardening system, because I was curious about figuring those things out) but sometimes I think it's useful to remember that this is also the game series where aliens and a dude that became a tree is canon. Sometimes you gotta throw your hands up and be like "yeah this universe contains 0% realism sometimes and it's fine". Nobody ever asks about the veracity and logistic possibility of the Prydwen or Robobrains or aliens with pew pew guns or disembodied talking brains floating in formaldehyde because we can all suspend disbelief for those things, but point at the Unrealism of the Armoured Exoskeleton which is like. One of the more plausible aspects of this entire game series and the crowd goes wild. People approach me to consult about Fallout worldbuilding for their mod and fanfic writing and even as the "here's how I would think this Fallout Thing would work in the real world" person even I'm like "yeah sure go figure it out if you want but it's ok if you don't, not everything needs an answer"

As a greater critique of Gaming CritiqueTM, I think ludonarrative issues in games is a fascinating topic, but I also think ludonarrative dissonance is a term that's often misunderstood & misused to illustrate someone's dislike of a mechanic or whatever, rather than being accurately used to describe moments where ludonarrative issues are happening. I'm gonna say that staring at an empty power armour shell and saying "but WHERE'S my TEAM OF ENGINEERS and MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and IS THE STEEL HAND-POURED OR RECYCLED" isn't one. Something not having an answer in-universe doesn't make it a ludonarrative problem! It's just an unanswered detail! Like sometimes video games can't be built to address every plausible explanation for every possible worldbuilding question the player's gonna come up with; this makes worse media when creators start trying to stay ahead of fans like that. Also, fuck, there are fanfic writers who have written stories about the Brotherhood of Steel that has plausible logistics/resources planned out. It's ok that the answer isn't contained in the game with a neat lil bow on top u feel me