More mapping fun

[castlebravo92]

Leveraging Nuclear War Simulator Hysplit fallout + the T2K target list for the Houston area to generate old school style blast/fallout maps.

Fallout contours = 3000/1000/300 rem.

Blast PSI contours = 5 / 2 / 1 PSI.

[chico20854]

Very impressive!!!!

[castlebravo92]

(Almost) full North America* map with fallout contours and targets (3000/1000/300 rem cutoff):



* Not counting Alaska and part of Mexico and Hawaii.

[Tegyrius]

Welp, so much for any plans anyone might've had for a Gulf Coast Sourcebook.

- C.

[castlebravo92]

Or an Ottawa sourcebook.



Ottawa, which was hit hard enough as it is, is directly downwind from the Chalk River Nuclear Power Plant, which was targeted in the Canada hit list.

Incidentally, the fallout in these maps is grossly exaggerated. In most cases (except for specific rainouts where the stabilized nuclear cloud is *under* a rainstorm), airbursts create very little acutely dangerous fallout. But GDW generally went with the "airbursts don't create as much fallout as ground bursts".

Assuming the same attack pattern, in reality there would be a lot fewer 3000/1000 rem contours, and the >0 and <10 rem contours would be much more widespread, but I tried to make it "canon consistent". Also, after 3 years, even the 3000 rem radiation zone would be largely 1 rem/hour exposure risk. Except for Ottawa. The radionucleotides from a nuclear meltdown tend to be longer lived gamma ray emitters than what's produced from a nuclear detonation.

GDW's canon target list for North America only has ~24 ground bursts (25 if you count the Seattle atomic demolition munition in the Northwest Sourcebook).

[Tegyrius]

Originally Posted by castlebravo92

GDW's canon target list for North America only has ~24 ground bursts (25 if you count the Seattle atomic demolition munition in the Northwest Sourcebook).

I wouldn't count that, honestly. The Pacific Northwest is not canon, and the canon nuclear target list is generally restricted to 500kt or higher yields (Howling Wilderness, p. 10).

(I'm comfortable with GDW's reasoning on that latter item. It left the door open for future authors and GMs to write in smaller-yield strikes on sourcebook-level targets without the need for retcon. The same consideration also applies to tactical nuclear strikes, which are so undocumented that they can be treated as a random encounter.)

Your point about reduction in actual radiation hazard over time (in most cases) is well-taken. I think the affected areas would still be significantly underpopulated in 2000, though, due to what I'll term "psychological contamination." In my own sometimes-CBRNE-adjacent day job, I see significant public misunderstanding about chemical, biological, and radiation hazards, and I would expect most survivors of the general public to be very wary of an area that was once contaminated (or believed to be so). Absent a well-trusted official source (and how many of those are still extant by 2000?), I think few citizens would be comfortable resettling areas formerly subjected to significant fallout. Communities on the fringe of such areas might go so far as to screen, forcibly decontaminate, or outright ostracize anyone seen exiting such areas... which would make for some interesting encounters, and possibly a reason for the party's 54B to actually use his MOS for a change!

- C.

[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Tegyrius

I wouldn't count that, honestly. The Pacific Northwest is not canon, and the canon nuclear target list is generally restricted to 500kt or higher yields (Howling Wilderness, p. 10).

(I'm comfortable with GDW's reasoning on that latter item. It left the door open for future authors and GMs to write in smaller-yield strikes on sourcebook-level targets without the need for retcon. The same consideration also applies to tactical nuclear strikes, which are so undocumented that they can be treated as a random encounter.)

Your point about reduction in actual radiation hazard over time (in most cases) is well-taken. I think the affected areas would still be significantly underpopulated in 2000, though, due to what I'll term "psychological contamination." In my own sometimes-CBRNE-adjacent day job, I see significant public misunderstanding about chemical, biological, and radiation hazards, and I would expect most survivors of the general public to be very wary of an area that was once contaminated (or believed to be so). Absent a well-trusted official source (and how many of those are still extant by 2000?), I think few citizens would be comfortable resettling areas formerly subjected to significant fallout. Communities on the fringe of such areas might go so far as to screen, forcibly decontaminate, or outright ostracize anyone seen exiting such areas... which would make for some interesting encounters, and possibly a reason for the party's 54B to actually use his MOS for a change!

- C.

Yeah, "safe" is a relative term. In Red Star/Lone Star, for example, GDW had a fairly large area of Corpus Christi still affected by radiation (1d6 rads per hour), which is quite hot (if you go to sleep fine, and potentially wake up with radiation sickness, I consider that pretty hot). Whereas, in reality, even with a ground burst where you had direct neutron activation of the soil and radioactive crater ejecta, there likely would not be any areas (*) that hot after 3 years (* - weathering and runoff could concentrate radioactive materials in isolated cases, but the same action would reduce radioactive concentration everywhere else).

But "safe" in military/game terms does not make it safe for habitation (see Chernobyl Exclusion Zone) and there would be a lot of long term cancer exposure risks even if dosage is down to 10 rem a year (or 0.00114077 rem per hour). Contour lines in the maps are total (infinity) doses rather than H+1 doses.

Realistically, using New Palestine as a case in point, I think all of the refinery and chemical fires and resulting contamination along the gulf coast would be a more persistent settlement threat (as well as disrupting Gulf fishing and shrimping).

[Homer]

I would be more worried about chemical and petroleum plume contamination along the Gulf more than any fallout. The industrial centers along the coast were already pretty dirty as is. For example, the area from Lake Charles north beach south to Holley Beach was polluted by refinery waste, ship waste, sewage, etc. Direct and secondary effects of the Westlake strike would have made things worse, at least initially. In addition to the damage, the farms along I-10 and the 1-10 corridor itself would have suffered. Long term, the hurricanes and storms endemic to the area may help disperse some of this more quickly than elsewhere.

[Raellus]

These are very cool maps, Castlebravo. Any plans to do up a European fallout contours and targets map?

-

[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Raellus

These are very cool maps, Castlebravo. Any plans to do up a European fallout contours and targets map?

-

If someone gives me a laydown file with lat, lon, yield, height of burst, and (ideally) date of detonation, I can produce them for wherever. Europe will take a little bit more work to get a "realistic" fallout map because the attacks happens over a period of around ~16 months in total, whereas with the Thanksgiving Day Massacre, I can pretty much handwave and say they all occurred on 11-28-97 and use a single day's weather file (that's really why I need the date of each attack, so I can see what NOAA weather files I need to download and use).

Incidentally, what I did to produce the fallout maps is this:
1. Created a Nuclear War Simulator replay scenario with the target list (editing the json directly - doing it through the GUI for ~170 detonations is tedious and error prone).
2. Ran the replay through the detonations.
3. Ran the HYSPLIT/NWS integration to generate the fallout textures
4. Wrote a python script to convert the directory of fallout textures to a KML file.
5. Load the KML file into QGIS.

There was about a week of iterating to get #4 working properly and with decent visuals (the PSI rings were created with a different python script I had written a couple of months prior).

In NWS, you can specify the number of particles used in the fallout simulation. I think the ones above were generated using 1000 particles. I just did a run (it took two days) using 60,000 particles, and...it looks basically identical to the one using 1000 particles (which can run in about 10 minutes).

In any event, the process is streamlined to where it's pretty low effort once I have the laydown file.