Navarro
Well-known member
Given that a guy in T-51B or T-45D PA can go all 'chad in a warzone' and come out with nary a scratch on them because you'll need heavy laser, anti-material caliber, gauss, anti-tank, or (later) plasma weapons to even have a hope to harm the PA...
... you get power issues.
Lyons' expedition also faced (and in this universe, lost to) the DC Enclave, but they're a minority.
Then there is the fact that a T-60 series PA managed to be in the fucking plasma exhaust of a plasma rocket for almost a minute straight... and the T-60 is implied to be simply a T-45 series but better in the same way that the X-0X/APA series of PA is the T-51 series but better.
I don't think the Arcjet rocket was meant to be a plasma or nuclear rocket, but using conventional rocket fuel.
Problem is, in this case, that most of civilization is still not that technologically capable yet. To give a GURPS analogy, the vast majority of the "outside world's" tech base is several tech levels lower than what is required to mass-produce the good stuff, leaving only salvage and stupidly expensive slow-production of somewhat wide quality of the good stuff. It also doesn't help that these civilizations tended to also damage technology in their scrummaging of the ruins of the old world. This isn't Battletech or Warhammer 40k where archeo-tech is a reality, this is within a period of two centuries and change by FO4.
Yep. As you can see in NV the NCR produces combat armour suits by hand. Their current status in this fic as a near peer to E-US is the result of the capture of a motherlode of tech blueprints and decades of desperate crash-industrialisation programs.
The majority of post-war civilizations are getting there, but for all their bumbling about it'll take a better part of a century to do so even during New Vegas.
Which is why an Enclave that abandons its "must genocide all wastelanders" thing is so scary ... it has literally all publically available pre-War patents and scientific research, PLUS stuff from black-budget pre-War projects and post-War advancements. I had to give the NCR a MAJOR lucky break for them to be even competitive.
Kill enough Neo-enclave officials,including president,widraw - and they would fight each other over who rigtfully president is.
Er, no? Even when Richardson and literally the entire Enclave government of FO2 died on the oil rig, control was rather smoothly transferred to JHE over in Raven Rock. Plus there are the logistical issues of getting a strike force to literally the most secure place in the country. And the likelihood that such a move would cause E-US to take the gloves off.
EDIT: I mean, even in FNV killing Caesar didn't cause the Legion to fall into warlordism immediately.
Also, such a move would probably end with your transports getting shot down after entering DC airspace, or barely managing to land in front of the WH before being mobbed by a mixture of the US Secret Service, DCPD tactical teams, DPI eyebots suddenly getting put into "combat mode", Adams AFB security, and outraged citizens.
EDIT 2:
Let's go over this in detail. Presuming your transports aren't shot down by a fighter squadron stationed at Adams or the laser/SAM ground-based air defenses, let's say you manage to land your strike team say, right next to the Washington Monument and head for the WH. At which point the US Secret Service immediately activate the laser fence and the force-screen field fortifications concealed in the lawn, DCPD tactical teams (who actually use old suits of T-45 captured from the BoS way back in the day and deploy via surplus vertibird) move in, and at the least Battalion-strength formations of Virginia and Maryland National Guard units swing into high alert, as well as the USAF security of Adams AFB, who also wear PA (T-51) and the security at the Pentagon (T-90). Plus the Mr. Gutsies, Assaultrons and Sentry Bots which are also part of Adams AFB and Pentagon security are gunning for you.
Oh, and the President immediately moved from the White House into the bunker underneath as soon as your transport was spotted on radar, and can travel to either the Pentagon, the Capitol building, his fortified private villa to the south, or Adams AFB (from which he could fly all the way to Germany if he felt like it) within at the most 30 minutes via the Presidential metro.
Meanwhile pissed-off local citizens (who're packing and have at least a basic level of marksmanship and gun safety training from high school) are also converging on your position and shooting at you, and the DPI just set all their eyebots (which are militarised, unlike privately-owned ones) in the city to combat mode.
And "killing enough officials" - the Cabinet-level muck-a-mucks and grand poobahs aren't all in one building like at the oil rig, they're in their own offices which went into lockdown the moment enemy soldiers touched down in the city. So the strike team has to travel all across the city while constantly being shot at, repeatedly storming lightly-fortified buildings (bar one, which is heavily fortified) while under attack from behind, in the hope of killing enough enemy officials the national government spontaneously collapses. And one of the buildings they have to storm is the literal Pentagon.
Alternatively, the E-USA would follow the constitution and allow either Congress to choose, or follow the current line of succession (here's ours today, but not sure if they'd have the same departments)
At least one person from this list is the "designated survivor" in any case where they'd all be together, and is not in the same place as the others, explicitly to prevent full executive decapitation.
1 Vice President 2 Speaker of the House of Representatives 3 President pro tempore of the Senate 4 Secretary of State 5 Secretary of the Treasury 6 Secretary of Defense 7 Attorney General 8 Secretary of the Interior 9 Secretary of Agriculture 10 Secretary of Commerce 11 Secretary of Labor 12 Secretary of Health and Human Services 13 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development 14 Secretary of Transportation 15 Secretary of Energy 16 Secretary of Education 17 Secretary of Veterans Affairs 18 Secretary of Homeland Security
An analogue to "Homeland Security" exists, but might not have the same name - "Secretary of Defense" is now "Secretary of War". And there's a "Secretary of
"Neo-enclave" truly sees itself as the pre-war US, just with large portions of it's territories under control of hostile insurrectionists.
Indeed.
Though, I guess that the Brotherhood/NCR could believe that civil war would result from a fully successful decapitation strike.
No. NCR knows it's dealing with a hostile state with sophisticated political and bureaucratic structures. Albeit a state they view as totalitarian, possibly genocidal, and utterly illegitimate, but definitely something longer-lasting than Caesar's tribal confederation. NCR High Command's hope is not that the E-US's armies will collapse into warlordism on killing their President, but that a sufficiently large military victory will cause all the "oppressed second-class slaves" in E-US territory to rise up in their support.
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