More mapping fun

[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).