One Fallout 3 fan investigated how many bombs actually landed on the Capital Wasteland: it turns out, not that many

pcgamer.com:

In the event of an actual nuclear holocaust, there probably wouldn't be a lot of sidequests left to complete or environmental storytelling to puzzle out, but that wouldn't make for a fun videogame, so Bethesda understandably played it fast and loose with nuclear physics in designing Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland. Even in the face of that, Any Austin on YouTube⁠—who has a bit of a speciality in puzzling out videogame open world logistics⁠—had to ask: how many bombs actually landed in Fallout 3, and where?

According to the capital-L Lore, it was in the hundreds, but the actual evidence in the game is a fair bit short of that. Any Austin started with the most concrete sites in his survey⁠—ones strictly spelled out somewhere in game⁠—and worked outwards to sites of a more «environmental storytelling skeletons hugging each other» variety. Radioactive puddle at the bottom of what looks like a crater? Sounds like a bomb site to me. How about some flattened trees and knocked down walls in Germantown suggesting an airburst detonation? You know what, I buy it.

There are only two 100% story-confirmed bomb sites in the game (leaving aside undetonated Megaton), but by applying a creative, investigative eye to the wasteland and turning to forum forensics, unearthing bombsite musings from yeoman gamer gumshoes of yesteryear, Any Austin was able to up that number to a staggering, uh, 12.

While 12 nuclear detonations in and around a major metropolitan population center would be an incalculable tragedy ushering in a new age of fear and horror the likes of which we haven't seen since WWII, it's still far short of the «hundreds» that supposedly landed on DC in 2077, or even the 77 that Mr. House thwarted in his defense of Las Vegas.

But before we have to resort to such barbaric defenses as «suspension of disbelief» or «artistic intent,» Any Austin has a more elegant explanation: scale. In the Lore, places like Cyrodil or Skyrim are supposed to be the size of countries, but in-game they