Power armor is an iconic part of the Fallout franchise, so much so it serves as the box art for most of the titles. With the notable exception of New Vegas, oddly. Perhaps stomping around an irradiated desert in a tin can with no air conditioning doesn’t appeal to Courier Six.

But power armor should still appeal to you, reader, because the science of what these suits can do is astonishing. And if you had one of these suits, you could become the richest person in the world.

Part 1: Power? In my Armor?

Let’s get the literal first thing out of the way, why is it called power armor? Fallout isn’t the only franchise to use this term, just about any sci-fi story with fancy science armor features some variation of this term. Master Chief, Iron Man, all these guys have some very powerful armor. But that’s not why we call it that.

Power armor isn’t powerful, it’s powered. It literally needs energy in order to operate. When you suit up in Fallout you aren’t just slapping reinforced metal plating to your body, because you’d never be able to move with that much metal weighing you down. Instead the armor has a motorized frame and those motors are what is providing the force that allows you to move. The armor literally does the heavy lifting for you.

There are two main takeaways from this. First is the armor is basically an entire robot, because it is able to stand and move on its own. And you are just a pilot inside the robot, guiding its motions with yours. To a very specific genre of nerds, it’s basically G Gundam. Or the movie Real Steel, except you’re inside the robot instead of shadowboxing outside of it.

And this means you have to be incredibly careful when using it.

For the suit to work correctly and safely, its motors have to match your motions perfectly. Move your left arm? Left arm motors move the metal shell in the same direction at the same speed and stop at the same time. But if the motors don’t stop at the right time? And keep moving the metal shell with you inside of it? They could move beyond a point your bones and muscles can handle and snap your squishy mortal body like a twig.

This is why some games in the Fallout franchise require you to be trained in power armor operation before you can use it. Several of the in-game characters who teach your character the required skill mention this danger. A notable exception to this is Fallout 4, where the normally late-game armor is instead thrust into your possession for free at the beginning of the game. But Fallout 4’s main character is also canonically a former soldier, so it’s likely they already had the training before the player takes over their brain.

So the armor is dangerous. But it’s totally still worth it, because the other important thing that the word “power” means is-

Part 2: Batteries not Included

You need energy to run the motors. This is the primary reason why we don’t have power armor in the real world yet. And believe me, tons of militaries and nerds with welding torches have tried.

For us, we haven’t yet invented an energy source that is strong enough and lightweight enough to be used in a suit like this. For Fallout, the company that invented power armor literally had to invent a power source that meets the criteria: fusion cells.

Power armor, both before and after Fallout 4, runs on fusion power. Nuclear fusion is the process of slamming superheated atoms into each other so hard that they combine. This process, when done correctly, gives off a ton of energy. So fusion in general is an excellent energy source and something our Earth desperately needs.

The only problem with powering your armor with fusion is that “superheated” part. You have to take the fusion fuel, get it around the temperature of the literal Sun, and contain it safely while it does the fusing. In real life this is a serious limitation. And in Fallout it…isn’t. I guess.

Fusion cells have been a standard power source and ammo type in Fallout since the first game, and the fusion cores implemented in Fallout 4 and the Amazon Prime series are the same thing but bigger. All of them are small self-contained fusion reactors that house both the fuel and also the superheated fusion process inside of themselves. And they’re somehow able to do this without any heat leaking out, while being small and light enough to fit in your hand.

My only conclusion is that Fallout’s pre-war scientists were wizards.

This means that a suit of power armor is literally a walking fusion reactor, capable of outputting an absurd amount of electricity per fusion core. You could park the suit outside your house and run an entire neighborhood off of it with jumper cables. Reverse engineering this feature alone would change power generation for the entire world and make you rich.

And that’s still not the craziest part!

Part 3: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Momentum

One of power armor’s biggest selling points in the games themselves is its absurd durability. When you’re inside one of these things you can literally survive a small nuclear blast! With the caveat that you’re standing about 10 feet away from the explosion, that is. Point blank and you’re toast.

But this isn’t its craziest survivability feat, because the armor has one more selling point literally printed on its packaging by the in-universe manufacturer.

It cancels fall damage.

To video game veterans, this is is probably supremely underwhelming. Mario literally never takes fall damage, so why should we care about it in Fallout? Well, my Italian friend with shattered kneecaps, let’s talk momentum.

Power armor lore says that the latest models built before the Great War allowed someone to survive a fall from over three hundred feet. This is consistent with the height of the tallest building you can jump off of in Fallout 4, Trinity Tower. This building is listed as 30 stories tall, and most stories take up about 11 feet of vertical space. This gives the armor a recorded a survivable fall height of 330 feet, which is about 100 meters.

On planet Earth, if you free-fall from a height of 100 meters, you will hit the ground moving at 44.27 meters per second. Otherwise known as 99 miles per hour.

Considering power armor is basically a human shaped car, hitting the ground after jumping from that height is literally the same as a 99mph car crash. Coming to a dead stop. Into pavement. There is no surviving something like that.

And yet Power Armor McProtagonist Guy takes it like a champ!

There is absolutely no way to survive this if physics is operating normally. I don’t care how good your shock absorbers are, they can’t absorb this much momentum on a dime! In the real world slowing down takes both time AND distance. This is why you want to tap your breaks one or two blocks before you reach the stop sign, not as you’re passing it.

Now, we could simply view this as a break between reality and game design. Mario doesn’t take fall damage because he’s in a platformer, and fall damage in a platformer is player hostile game design. But that’s not how we do things around here, if we take this at face value the only explanation is…

Magic.

Or rather, intentionally defying the laws of energy conservation.

The only way to survive a fall like this with no period of slowing down before impact is if Fallout’s pre-war scientists somehow invented a system that literally cancels the fall damage. Something in the suit’s feet must be eliminating all of the pilot’s kinetic energy and momentum the second they make contact with the ground. And if the pilot doesn’t have all the momentum and kinetic energy anymore, then they aren’t moving at 100mph anymore, and their speed magically drops to zero with no force requirement.

That’s the only explanation for where the energy goes, it’s just gone. I wasn’t kidding when I said these scientists were wizards.

Conclusion: Mad Stacks of Caps

To summarize, Fallout’s power armor is:

First, heavy machinery not to be driven under the influence.

Second, a generator with a tiny Sun inside of it.

Three, intentionally warping reality every time you slam someone from the top rope.

This really paints a picture about how evil and incompetent the corporations and world leaders of Fallout’s pre-war setting were. They really had the entire world locked up in a resource war when they had infinite clean energy via hot fusion. The show even goes out of its way to show how Vault-Tec made sure cold fusion (a straight upgrade to hot fusion) never saw the light of day! All the while they were playing with tech that can violate the Laws of Thermodynamics, and they decided it’s only use was in…feet.

But if you can somehow glitch one of these bad boys into our timeline, their loss is our gain. Given how dangerous the suits are to operate, the obvious use for these things is to dismantle them, reverse engineer them, and redefine how our entire species produces energy. Then profit.

Assuming the fossil fuel industry doesn’t have you assassinated first. Capitalism never changes.

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you had fun and learned something! If you liked this then maybe you’ll like some of my other articles too. And make sure to come back for more quality edutainment!

Fallout is the property of Bethesda Softworks. All images and references to any and all intellectual properties made in fair use.