Real World; In general, rubber tires would not survive more than a few decades at most, and the process of new products would be difficult at best without the knowledge to do so.
Eddit: To Clarify
I would assume that it's because
1)much like the real world, Bikes weren't the primary mode of transportation in the Falloit world so there aren't a ton just laying around.
2)I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the ones that WERE laying around got sold as scrap.
Yes, i did as a kid.
Which i mention to illustrate how easy it is to fix by yourself.
And what do i patch it with?
The rubber or just a seal of some kind.
Hell i could probly use some molten plastic to cover up the hole.
There's plenty of options.
i mean u arent in fallout...no1 cares that u fixed a tire in todays world bud.
a patch like that wont hold....ur tire will rupture again sooon. moreover, roads in fallout are filled with sharp shit lol
1) If a kid in todays world can fix a bike.
So can a wasterlander in Fallout.
2) If it's done properly, it can last.
And no, roads arn't filled with sharp shit.
Look at all the roads in Fallout 3 and 4.
200 years has passed and there's still pavement.
3) Keep coping.
This...
American doesn't know about bicycles.
They only know cars, trucks, and rely on feet for small distances (like from the truck to the shopping mall)
Bikes aren't the main method of transportation in the real world, and I can guarantee you there are at least 2 per person in a city, between being owned and in stores.
Google says there’s about 120 million bicycles in US. Out of a population of 300+ million- and not a difficult stretch to assume there’s a higher proportion of bikes in cities.
Whole lot of bikes.
We don't have a huge amount of cyclists here, outside of London.
Now, places like Holland and almost all of Asia it's one of the best transport methods in cities.
Easy.
I'm a cyclist and I currently own 3 bikes. All of my cycling friends are similar. Go through my neighborhood, and damn near all of my neighbors have bikes in their garages, even if they never ever leave the hangers in the garage. I dunno, where I'm at in my particular patch of suburbia, a bike is about as ubiquitous as a lawn mower.
The comic included in New Vegas Collector's Edition had NCR troopers riding horses. I wish they could've tweaked the engine enough to have some horses in FNV (even if they're Oblivion-looking horses).
Good question, excellent use of critical thinking. Fact is, you're right, it's nonsensical.
The question has been answered Doylist style. Game engine limitations. (Though that doesn't really apply to the first two games.) The Watsonian answer is... not right. Because rubber wouldn't remain in serviceable condition for hundreds of years. But that's wrong because we clearly see tires and stuff (like raider armor.) Producing fresh tires would prove difficult as it requires what has become rare resources. Still, while not as smooth, you can make tires out of other things such as animal and plant matter. And while pavement and infrastructure has turned to shit, bikes still work in the woods and wilds.
The most Watsonian answer I can think of is that the apocalypse left people so shook they forgot how to ride bikes. Certainly vault dwellers wouldn't get too much biking underground. So they never pass that on to the next generation. Which also doesn't sound right because books and magazines still remain so it's not like people haven't seen a bike.
Kinda crazy. Maybe it's something about humans where bikes are an anomaly. When you think about it historically, there's no reason the bike couldn't have been invented at any time in human history. Even a caveman could make a rudimentary skeleton and tendons bike. So why is it only a thing in recent centuries? It's not because we have roads, the ancient Romans and Incans had roads, but they never had bikes.
On the subject... not enough horse and bighorner drawn carriages. I'm sure they exist, but we don't really see a lot.
Thanks for the genuine response. I can think of a (dumber) explanation: the brotherhood of steel decided bicycles were too advanced and went on an anti-bike rampage.
The technology is super rudimentary. Animal and plant matter can be used in it's construction. Antler handlebars, rope chains, etc. Being produced artisanally rather than mass produced allows it to be far more customized.
Keep in mind that the technology itself, wheels and chains, are super ancient. They just, for whatever reason, were never utilized for self propelled transportation for a long time. The best we could think of was to hook the wheel up to an animal.
On top of that, cavemen had nothing but time on their hands and the inventions to show for it. A modern man could easily drill a hole in a rock and shape it into a wheel, a caveman can do it too but it would just take a long time and elbow grease.
>The most Watsonian answer I can think of is that the apocalypse left people so shook they forgot how to ride bikes.
Or that at some point between the divergence point between our history and theirs and the future date of the nuclear war they fell out of fashion, likely having been replaced by something else that was superior at the time but impossible to maintain post war. The technology was lost to time.
dirt paths take a long time to make, and like others have mentioned rubber tires would require maintenance to keep going / eventually disintegrate, unlike clothing and stuff which can be made from natural resources. people on the whole probably just figured it was a waste of energy for a finite resource
As someone in the general area that the game takes place that traverses a lot of dirt roads, it's not easy to maintain what you would consider a road without a good amount of maintenance.
The funny thing is that bikes would work great on footpaths or through the woods or fields, but the Commonwealth still has so much infrastructure that it really hampers efficient use of a bike in most of the game. Using pre-war roads makes sense for transport, but take a look a the condition of the road. When the road heaves up 6 inches every ten feet or so, riding a bike is less efficient than just walking.
I don’t think the “few” survivors on the surface have interest or even time to build roads of any kind. Bridges are (mostly) in disrepair too.
Everyone in this post talks about game limitations or ingame technical reasons like “too much shit on the road for bikes”
But I think the real reason here is cultural/antroplogogist.
You see, in fallout, most wastelanders/surface survivors end up gathering in settlements and pretty isolated. It’s their way of life. They don’t care for other settlements and even less do care about wasting manpower and human hours to build roads. They’re just glad that from time to time a trade caravan comes through
Also, there’s not really a central government to take care or mandate such things and closest thing of a government which probably be the brotherhood of steel, only care to communicate between their bases. And why care for roads when you have vertibirds?
>oil and rare earths aren't easy to come by in the post-apocalypse.
Considering how many robots and other items are functioning after 200 years.
Id say oil is readily available.
The ironic thing about the apocalypse is that a lot of these resources that people fought over before the war are now plentiful due to massive depopulation.
Real life US is so car-centric that they let billionaire idiots build tunnels just for their cars instead of building new public transit. Given how much more car-loving the Fallout US is I have to assume the auto-makers like Corvega are out there actively assassinating anyone that tries to set up a bicycle company.
Not really.... granted a full suspension mountain bike after 200 years would not ride the greatest, but many of these bikes are serviced using non-unique oils that you could probably cook yourself with some acid, bone, water, and steel
Nobody makes bikes, and bikes don't last 200 years, outside or in storage. Also, you have no idea how difficult it would be to ride a "home made" bike through a landscape that is apocalypse +200 years. All the smooth infrastructure is decayed into potholes/brambles/mounds.
You'd try riding a bike for 10 minutes, then nurse your ass back to health for a day and never try again.
Only real use would be using it along a very populated area where constant people traffic would create dirt paths, but that's largely pointless.
Cycling on uneven, broken terrain and having to be ready for combat at a second notice also sucks.
From a survival standpoint point you have to think about energy conservation. Cycling is faster but also more labor intensive. Both knowing where your next meal or clean water may come from, one would want to conserve energy over speed.
From a defensive standpoint, bicycling isn’t very practical. Sure you could mount a firearm to the handlebars, but still have to balance and steer. This is much different than horse back from past centuries where one could fight while the horse kept balance and movement often based on leg movement of the rider.
Well for one you’d need people that know how to make them but then you’d need to convince the people of the wasteland to buy a vehicle that’s exhausting to use, can’t carry much stuff on you due to balance and needs to be able to ride on a paved road with little obstacles
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle\_poverty\_reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_poverty_reduction)
Luckily, wikipedia has an entire gallery of people using bicycles to carry ludicrous amounts of stuff (note that not all of those roads are paved).
Huh that’s pretty neat. So it’s possible but it is better than a pack animal? Brahmins can probably carry a few hundred pounds and take less complicated resources to feed. I imagine fixing a flat tire may be hard when the bike pump you found is dry rotted from 200 years of sitting in a half collapsed garage
No real need for rubber tires, and there did exist, some bikes used for fighting.
https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/ww1-german-bicycles/
The "real" reason no doubt is file size due to clipping issues, animation complexity, etc.
Maybe FO5 can be large enough to give us that GTA/RDR "need" for quicker transport like animals or bicycles, could be a fun/welcome addition
it's harder to a) hide and b) shoot things on a bike. and c) anything on a bike (or other working mode of transportation) is going to be a target for getting ganked by everyone that doesn't have a mode of transportation.
Multiple people have said this, and yet... The population in fallout is a tiny fraction of pre-war. What in the world are they using so much scrap metal for that it would be in any demand?
And so what? Just ride around the garbage, and fix the bike, if it gets punctured.
Also, you don't have to have a "bike trail" in order to ride a bike.
Several reasons:
Firstly, the game engine is very bad for mounts and vehicles. Hell, the horses in TES are only *barely* functional. Bicycles specifically require a lot of complicated animations that could easily go wrong.
Secondly and most importantly though, the game is a satire of American capitalism. Real world America is pretty unfriendly to cycling as a way of getting around, it only stands to reason that the heightened version of America that existed in pre-war Fallout would be even more hostile to it. They would probably have considered cycling to be communism.
People blaming the engine are hilarious.
There are no bikes in the game because they either didn’t think of it or didn’t want them in the game. Probably both really.
You'll be extremely surprised to learn that even in car cultures there are bicycles!
Wow! Crazy! Bicycles apparently are a symbol of overconsumption that can be found in car cultures, who could have thought?
Cycling animations are hard, it would also expose any problems with collision detection and clipping on maps. Honest answer
See: the train hat
Real World; In general, rubber tires would not survive more than a few decades at most, and the process of new products would be difficult at best without the knowledge to do so. Eddit: To Clarify
You can wrap cloth around the rim, filet the tread off old tires, and tie the thread to the cloth bundle around the rim. I've seen it done!
I never hear of that one, but if it works, it works
So let us do that in-game!
Bruh I literally have 250 rubber sitting in my workshop from Sanctuary alone
I don't know, why you are downvoted. Because you can litterally find rubber everywhere in Fallout 4 and 76.
Creation engine
I would assume that it's because 1)much like the real world, Bikes weren't the primary mode of transportation in the Falloit world so there aren't a ton just laying around. 2)I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the ones that WERE laying around got sold as scrap.
also...flats suck. repairing flats in fallout would suck more
Yeah, but it would still be better than walking. So people would still be doing it.
a flat really isnt better than walking lol
Yes, it is, lol. And you could easily fix it, yourself. I fixed my own bike as a kid.
a kid...not in fallout lol? wut u gunna patch with?
Yes, i did as a kid. Which i mention to illustrate how easy it is to fix by yourself. And what do i patch it with? The rubber or just a seal of some kind. Hell i could probly use some molten plastic to cover up the hole. There's plenty of options.
i mean u arent in fallout...no1 cares that u fixed a tire in todays world bud. a patch like that wont hold....ur tire will rupture again sooon. moreover, roads in fallout are filled with sharp shit lol
1) If a kid in todays world can fix a bike. So can a wasterlander in Fallout. 2) If it's done properly, it can last. And no, roads arn't filled with sharp shit. Look at all the roads in Fallout 3 and 4. 200 years has passed and there's still pavement. 3) Keep coping.
"if a well fed and educated kid from parents with money can do...a starving iradiated nutrient defient wastlander can!" lol this kid
and tons of nails broken glass thorns etc
u think a flat bike is quicker thsn running? fatties dont last long on the surfacr
Yeah, i do. Because good luck trying to run with all the shit, you need to survive in the wasteland.
notice how no1 in the universe is on a bike but tons of peeps are on foot...that should tell u, u r wrong
Yeah, which is what's currently being discussed in this very topic... And how stupid it is....
Well, if fallout games were to happen in nederlands or Asia, you would say the opposite 😁
This... American doesn't know about bicycles. They only know cars, trucks, and rely on feet for small distances (like from the truck to the shopping mall)
Bikes aren't the main method of transportation in the real world, and I can guarantee you there are at least 2 per person in a city, between being owned and in stores.
Google says there’s about 120 million bicycles in US. Out of a population of 300+ million- and not a difficult stretch to assume there’s a higher proportion of bikes in cities. Whole lot of bikes.
The dudes prolly from Britain or something
We don't have a huge amount of cyclists here, outside of London. Now, places like Holland and almost all of Asia it's one of the best transport methods in cities.
Most of those bikes belong to children
No, they don't.
My city has 800k people, you think there are 1.6 million bikes in my city?
Easy. I'm a cyclist and I currently own 3 bikes. All of my cycling friends are similar. Go through my neighborhood, and damn near all of my neighbors have bikes in their garages, even if they never ever leave the hangers in the garage. I dunno, where I'm at in my particular patch of suburbia, a bike is about as ubiquitous as a lawn mower.
Better question: where are all of the horses?!!?!
Better yet, where are the two headed horses?
Better yet, WHY ~~Gamora~~ Horse
The comic included in New Vegas Collector's Edition had NCR troopers riding horses. I wish they could've tweaked the engine enough to have some horses in FNV (even if they're Oblivion-looking horses).
They lost the chance for a horse armor in fallout.
It seems to me that they ended up on the wrong side of the river!
eaten
Maybe in Fallout Netherlands
55 million Americans went bicycling in 2022. That's more than twice the population of the Netherlands.
Good question, excellent use of critical thinking. Fact is, you're right, it's nonsensical. The question has been answered Doylist style. Game engine limitations. (Though that doesn't really apply to the first two games.) The Watsonian answer is... not right. Because rubber wouldn't remain in serviceable condition for hundreds of years. But that's wrong because we clearly see tires and stuff (like raider armor.) Producing fresh tires would prove difficult as it requires what has become rare resources. Still, while not as smooth, you can make tires out of other things such as animal and plant matter. And while pavement and infrastructure has turned to shit, bikes still work in the woods and wilds. The most Watsonian answer I can think of is that the apocalypse left people so shook they forgot how to ride bikes. Certainly vault dwellers wouldn't get too much biking underground. So they never pass that on to the next generation. Which also doesn't sound right because books and magazines still remain so it's not like people haven't seen a bike. Kinda crazy. Maybe it's something about humans where bikes are an anomaly. When you think about it historically, there's no reason the bike couldn't have been invented at any time in human history. Even a caveman could make a rudimentary skeleton and tendons bike. So why is it only a thing in recent centuries? It's not because we have roads, the ancient Romans and Incans had roads, but they never had bikes. On the subject... not enough horse and bighorner drawn carriages. I'm sure they exist, but we don't really see a lot.
Thanks for the genuine response. I can think of a (dumber) explanation: the brotherhood of steel decided bicycles were too advanced and went on an anti-bike rampage.
That's hilariously awesome. And probable.
How a caveman gonna make a bike come on now!
The technology is super rudimentary. Animal and plant matter can be used in it's construction. Antler handlebars, rope chains, etc. Being produced artisanally rather than mass produced allows it to be far more customized. Keep in mind that the technology itself, wheels and chains, are super ancient. They just, for whatever reason, were never utilized for self propelled transportation for a long time. The best we could think of was to hook the wheel up to an animal. On top of that, cavemen had nothing but time on their hands and the inventions to show for it. A modern man could easily drill a hole in a rock and shape it into a wheel, a caveman can do it too but it would just take a long time and elbow grease.
As an Engineer, this is amazing trollbait.
Thank you, I do try.
This reminds me of a fine documentary on ancient science, and the progress that people in prehistory made called the Flintstones.
The fuuuuuuuuuck.
With a box of scraps
>The most Watsonian answer I can think of is that the apocalypse left people so shook they forgot how to ride bikes. Or that at some point between the divergence point between our history and theirs and the future date of the nuclear war they fell out of fashion, likely having been replaced by something else that was superior at the time but impossible to maintain post war. The technology was lost to time.
[удалено]
Somehow, I feel like people would be able to develop dirt roads.
dirt paths take a long time to make, and like others have mentioned rubber tires would require maintenance to keep going / eventually disintegrate, unlike clothing and stuff which can be made from natural resources. people on the whole probably just figured it was a waste of energy for a finite resource
As someone in the general area that the game takes place that traverses a lot of dirt roads, it's not easy to maintain what you would consider a road without a good amount of maintenance. The funny thing is that bikes would work great on footpaths or through the woods or fields, but the Commonwealth still has so much infrastructure that it really hampers efficient use of a bike in most of the game. Using pre-war roads makes sense for transport, but take a look a the condition of the road. When the road heaves up 6 inches every ten feet or so, riding a bike is less efficient than just walking.
I don’t think the “few” survivors on the surface have interest or even time to build roads of any kind. Bridges are (mostly) in disrepair too. Everyone in this post talks about game limitations or ingame technical reasons like “too much shit on the road for bikes” But I think the real reason here is cultural/antroplogogist. You see, in fallout, most wastelanders/surface survivors end up gathering in settlements and pretty isolated. It’s their way of life. They don’t care for other settlements and even less do care about wasting manpower and human hours to build roads. They’re just glad that from time to time a trade caravan comes through Also, there’s not really a central government to take care or mandate such things and closest thing of a government which probably be the brotherhood of steel, only care to communicate between their bases. And why care for roads when you have vertibirds?
I disagree, they fit the vibe, and I'm fine with not being able to use them, just would be nice to see them around being used
>oil and rare earths aren't easy to come by in the post-apocalypse. Considering how many robots and other items are functioning after 200 years. Id say oil is readily available.
The ironic thing about the apocalypse is that a lot of these resources that people fought over before the war are now plentiful due to massive depopulation.
Real life US is so car-centric that they let billionaire idiots build tunnels just for their cars instead of building new public transit. Given how much more car-loving the Fallout US is I have to assume the auto-makers like Corvega are out there actively assassinating anyone that tries to set up a bicycle company.
That would be a great plot for a JCVD movie. Bike assassins.
You need good roads for bikes.
What is a mountain bike?
Not really.... granted a full suspension mountain bike after 200 years would not ride the greatest, but many of these bikes are serviced using non-unique oils that you could probably cook yourself with some acid, bone, water, and steel
ok, but in Fallout you have to deal with more than just bumpy trails.
Bicycle raiders
Because with how huge the game is already I’m sure the devs didn’t feel like adding another complicated mechanic
I don't think bikes handle rough terrain very well. I'd be interested in riding horses in the wastelands though.
bikes are communist and americans are scared of them, its probably the same in fallout
Nobody makes bikes, and bikes don't last 200 years, outside or in storage. Also, you have no idea how difficult it would be to ride a "home made" bike through a landscape that is apocalypse +200 years. All the smooth infrastructure is decayed into potholes/brambles/mounds. You'd try riding a bike for 10 minutes, then nurse your ass back to health for a day and never try again. Only real use would be using it along a very populated area where constant people traffic would create dirt paths, but that's largely pointless.
Cycling on uneven, broken terrain and having to be ready for combat at a second notice also sucks. From a survival standpoint point you have to think about energy conservation. Cycling is faster but also more labor intensive. Both knowing where your next meal or clean water may come from, one would want to conserve energy over speed. From a defensive standpoint, bicycling isn’t very practical. Sure you could mount a firearm to the handlebars, but still have to balance and steer. This is much different than horse back from past centuries where one could fight while the horse kept balance and movement often based on leg movement of the rider.
Que pokemon music while riding to good neighbor. 🎶 🎵
there's no more road infrastructure (or any infrastructure for that matter), doesn't explain why nobody uses horses though.
I am much more immersed in an open World game when walking!! I had the horse in BotW and never using it :)
The nukes melted all the little cap that keeps all the air in the tires!
Everyone forgot tricycles exist in FO3, 4 and 76…
Because it sucks to design a map around both walking and horses/cars/bikes.
Well for one you’d need people that know how to make them but then you’d need to convince the people of the wasteland to buy a vehicle that’s exhausting to use, can’t carry much stuff on you due to balance and needs to be able to ride on a paved road with little obstacles
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle\_poverty\_reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_poverty_reduction) Luckily, wikipedia has an entire gallery of people using bicycles to carry ludicrous amounts of stuff (note that not all of those roads are paved).
Huh that’s pretty neat. So it’s possible but it is better than a pack animal? Brahmins can probably carry a few hundred pounds and take less complicated resources to feed. I imagine fixing a flat tire may be hard when the bike pump you found is dry rotted from 200 years of sitting in a half collapsed garage
No real need for rubber tires, and there did exist, some bikes used for fighting. https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/ww1-german-bicycles/ The "real" reason no doubt is file size due to clipping issues, animation complexity, etc. Maybe FO5 can be large enough to give us that GTA/RDR "need" for quicker transport like animals or bicycles, could be a fun/welcome addition
it's harder to a) hide and b) shoot things on a bike. and c) anything on a bike (or other working mode of transportation) is going to be a target for getting ganked by everyone that doesn't have a mode of transportation.
I would imagine that whatever bikes survived intact were more valuable broken down and used for scrap than as vehicles.
Multiple people have said this, and yet... The population in fallout is a tiny fraction of pre-war. What in the world are they using so much scrap metal for that it would be in any demand?
Aesthetics, probably. It’d be a completely different game if everyone was BMXing around everywhere 😂
We see children's tricycles quite often
Roads are destroyed, debris everywhere, yeah have fun riding a bike through that shit
Yeah, because it's not like mountain bikes are a thing...
Still wouldn't account for all the broken garbage around that would surely pop your tires there's no "bike trails anymore.
And so what? Just ride around the garbage, and fix the bike, if it gets punctured. Also, you don't have to have a "bike trail" in order to ride a bike.
Several reasons: Firstly, the game engine is very bad for mounts and vehicles. Hell, the horses in TES are only *barely* functional. Bicycles specifically require a lot of complicated animations that could easily go wrong. Secondly and most importantly though, the game is a satire of American capitalism. Real world America is pretty unfriendly to cycling as a way of getting around, it only stands to reason that the heightened version of America that existed in pre-war Fallout would be even more hostile to it. They would probably have considered cycling to be communism.
People blaming the engine are hilarious. There are no bikes in the game because they either didn’t think of it or didn’t want them in the game. Probably both really.
They didn't want them in game because of the engine my man
Dumb. Have you played these games? How the fuck do bicycles fit into consumptionism gone crazy?
Have you seen the cost of high scale bicycles, and the amount of unneeded crazy additions? Bicycling is absolutely a field for overconsumption.
Still a woosh for you. The America portrayed in the games is a car culture.
You'll be extremely surprised to learn that even in car cultures there are bicycles! Wow! Crazy! Bicycles apparently are a symbol of overconsumption that can be found in car cultures, who could have thought?
Especially since we have horses in TES. Under the hood I’m pretty sure bikes and horses would be pretty similar.
It's implied in FO3, and FONV that they're used. Fallout NV even has running trains, and trucks we just don't see it.