Vault Dweller's Survival Guide

See also: Vault Dweller's Survival Guide: Pocket Reference Edition

'''ISSUED BY VAULT-TEC DOCUMENTATION DEPARTMENT, JANUARY, 2077'''

NOTICE.This document contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the New Amended Espionage Act, 50 U.S.C., 31 and 32. Its transmission or the revelation of its contents in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by the law.'''

General
Welcome to Vault-13, the latest in a series of public defense works from Vault-Tec, your contractor of choice when it comes to the best in nuclear shelters. Vault-Tec, America's Final Word in Homes. This document, VTB-001, the Vault Dwellers Survival Guide, is for the events following a world-wide nuclear war. In the case of a limited scale nuclear war, or other world ending catastrophe, please refer to the appropriate documentation (see also page 1.8):

* Document not available at this time, will be available the 3rd quarter of 2078.

While we hope that peace will prevail and the need for such from the ground up to provide the best chance for a good life following nuclear armageddon. It is the duty of every American citizen to learn and use the skills necessary for a comfortable Vault life.

''Don't let what could have happened bother you. We have enough problems to deal with in the here and now.'' - Overseer

The Vault series of survival shelters are designed from the ground up to provide the best chance for a good life following nuclear armageddon. It is the duty of every American citizen to learn and use the skills necessary for a comfortable Vault life. The best place to start is with a description of your new home.

Important Vault statistics
Vault Number ............................13

Starting construction date .......August 2063

Ending construction date ..........March 2069

Starting Budget .........................$400,000,000,000

Final Budget, with interest ........$645,000,000,000

Total number of occupants .......1,000 (at capacity)

Total duration ...........................10 years (at capacity)

Number of living quarters .........100 (hot bunking required if at maximum capacity)

Door thickness ..........................4 yards, steel

Earth coverage .........................3,200,000 tons of soil, at 200 feet

Computer control system .........Think machine

Primary power supply ...............Geo-thermal

Secondary power supply ..........General Atomics Nuclear Power backup systems

Power requirements .................3.98mkw/day

Stores .......................................Complete construction equipment, hydro-agricultural farms, water purification from underground river, defensive weaponry to equip 10 men, communication, social and entertainment files (for total duration)

Nuclear blast effects
Vault-13 is designed to provide protection from the effects of a nuclear blast. To better understand the protection provided, we have included a section from the High Energy Weapons FAQ that explains how a nuclear blast causes damage. The first thing bomb victims experience is the intense flux of photons from the blast, which releases 70-80% of the bomb's energy. The effects go up to third degree thermal burns and are not a pretty sight. Initial deaths are due to this effect. The next phenomenon is the supersonic blast front. You see it before you hear it. The pressure front has the effect of blowing away anything in its path. After the front comes the overpressure phase. It would feel like being underwater a few hundred meters. (At a few thousand meters under the sea, pressurized hulls implode.) The pressure gradually dies off, and there is a negative overpressure phase, with a reversed blast wind. This reversal is due to air rushing back to fill the void left by the explosion. The air gradually returns to normal atmospheric pressure. At this stage, fires caused by electrical destruction and ignited debris turn the place into a firestorm. Then come the middle term effects such as keloid formation and retinal blastoma. Genetic or hereditary damage can appear up to forty years after initial irradiation.

Atmospheric effects of blasts
The Mushroom Cloud. The heat from fusion and fission instantaneously raises the surrounding air to 10 million degrees C. This superheated air plasma gives off so much light that it looks brighter than the sun, and is visible hundreds of kilometers (km) away. The resultant fireball quickly expands. It is made up of hot air, and hence rises at a rate of a few hundred meters per second. After a minute or so, the fireball has risen to a few kilometers, and has cooled off to the extent that it no longer radiates.

The surrounding cooler air exerts some drag on this rising air, which slows down the outer edges of the cloud. The unimpeded inner portion rises a bit quicker than the outer edges. A vacuum effect occurs when the outer portion occupies the vacuum left by the higher inner portion. The result is a smoke ring.

The inner material gradually expands out into a mushroom cloud, due to convection. If the explosion is on the ground, dirt and radioactive debris get sucked up the stem, which sits below the fire-ball.

Collisions and ionization of the cloud particles result in lightning bolts flickering to the ground.

Initially, the cloud is orange-red due to a chemical reaction when the air is heated. When the cloud cools to air temperature, the water vapor starts to condense. The cloud turns from red to white.

In the final stages, the cloud can get about 100km across and 40km high, for a megaton class explosion.

Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). A nuclear explosion gives off radiation at all wavelengths of light. Some is in the radio/radar portion of the spectrum - the EMP effect. The EMP effect increases the higher you go into the atmosphere. High altitude explosions can knock out electronics by inducing a current surge in closed circuit metallic objects - electronics, power lines, phone lines, TVs, radios, etc. The damage range can be over 1000km.

Overview of immediate effects
The three categories of immediate effects are: blast, thermal radiation (heat), and prompt ionizing or nuclear radiation. Their relative importance varies with the yield of the bomb. At low yields, all three can be significant sources of injury. With an explosive yield of about 2.5 kilotons (kT), the three effects are roughly equal. All are capable of inflicting fatal injuries at a range of 1km.

The fraction of a bomb's yield emitted as thermal radiation, blast, and ionizing radiation is essentially constant for all yields, but the way the different forms of energy interact with air and target vary dramatically.

Air is essentially transparent to thermal radiation. The thermal radiation affects exposed surfaces, producing damage by rapid heating. A bomb that is 100 times larger can produce equal thermal radiation intensities over areas 100 times larger. The area of an (imaginary) sphere centered on the explosion increases with the square of the radius. Thus the destructive radius increases with the square root of the yield (this is the familiar inverse square law of electro-magnetic radiation). Actually the rate of increase is somewhat less, partly due to the fact that larger bombs emit heat more slowly which reduces the damage produced by each calorie of heat. It is important to note that the area subjected to damage by thermal radiation increases almost linearly with yield.

Blast effect is a volume effect. The blast wave deposits energy in the material it passes through, including air. When the blast wave passes through solid material, the energy left behind causes damage. When it passes through air it simply grows weaker. The more matter the energy travels through, the smaller the effect. The amount of matter increases with the volume of the imaginary sphere centered on the explosion. Blast effects thus scale with the inverse cube law which relates radius to volume.

The intensity of nuclear radiation decreases with the inverse square law like thermal radiation. However nuclear radiation is also strongly absorbed by the air it travels through, which causes the intensity to drop off much more rapidly.

These scaling laws show that the effects of thermal radiation grow rapidly with yield (relative to blast), while those of radiation rapidly decline.

In a small nuclear attack (bomb yield approx. 15kT) casualties (including fatalities) would be seen from all three causes. Burns (including those caused by an ensuing fire storm) would be the most prevalent serious injury (two thirds of those who would die the first day would be burn victims), and occur at the greatest range. Blast and burn injuries would be found in 60-70% of all survivors. People close enough to suffer significant radiation illness would be well inside the lethal effects radius for blast and flash burns, as a result only 30% of injured survivors would show radiation illness. Many of those people would be sheltered from burns and blast and thus escape the main effects. Even so, most victims with radiation illness would also have blast injuries or burns as well.

With yields in the range of hundreds of kilotons or greater (typical for strategic warheads) immediate radiation injury becomes insignificant. Dangerous radiation levels only exist so close to the explosion that surviving the blast is impossible. On the other hand, fatal burns can be inflicted well beyond the range of substantial blast damage. A 20 megaton bomb can cause potentially fatal third degree burns at a range of 40km, where the blast can do little more than break windows and cause superficial cuts.

A convenient rule of thumb for estimating the short-term fatalities from all causes due to a nuclear attack is to count everyone inside the 5 psi blast overpressure contour around the hypocenter as a fatality. In reality, substantial numbers of people inside the contour will survive and substantial numbers outside the contour will die, but the assumption is that these two groups will be roughly equal in size and balance out. This completely ignores any possible fallout effects.

Overview of delayed effects
Radioactive Contamination. The chief delayed effect is the creation of huge amounts of radioactive material with long lifetimes (half-lifes ranging from days to millennia). The primary source of these products is the debris left from fission reactions. A potentially significant secondary source is neutron capture by non-radioactive isotopes both within the bomb and in the outside environment.

When atoms fission they can split in some 40 different ways, producing a mix of about 80 different isotopes. These isotopes vary widely in stability; some are completely stable while others undergo radioactive decay with half-lifes of fractions of a second. The decaying isotopes may themselves form stable or unstable daughter isotopes. The mixture thus quickly becomes even more complex, some 300 different isotopes of 36 elements have been identified in fission products.

Short-lived isotopes release their decay energy rapidly, creating intense radiation fields that also decline quickly. Long-lived isotopes release energy over long periods of time, creating radiation that is much less intense but more persistent. Fission products thus initially have a very high level of radiation that declines quickly, but as the intensity of radiation drops, so does the rate of decline.

A useful rule-of-thumb is the "rule of sevens". This rule states that for every seven-fold increase in time following a fission detonation (starting at or after 1 hour), the radiation intensity decreases by a factor of 10. Thus after 7 hours, the residual fission radioactivity declines 90%, to one-tenth its level of 1 hour. After 7*7 hours (49 hours, approx. 2 days), the level drops again by 90%. After 7*2 days (2 weeks) it drops a further 90%; and so on for 14 weeks. The rule is accurate to 25% for the first two weeks, and is accurate to a factor of two for the first six months. After 6 months, the rate of decline becomes much more rapid. The rule of sevens corresponds to an approximate t^-1.2 scaling relationship.

These radioactive products are most hazardous when they settle to the ground as "fallout". The rate at which fallout settles depends very strongly on the altitude at which the explosion occurs, and to a lesser extent on the size of the explosion.

If the explosion is a true air-burst (the fireball does not touch the ground), when the vaporized radioactive products cool enough to condense and solidify, they will do so to form microscopic particles. These particles are mostly lifted high into the atmosphere by the rising fireball, although significant amounts are deposited in the lower atmosphere by mixing that occurs due to convective circulation within the fireball. The larger the explosion, the higher and faster the fallout is lofted, and the smaller the proportion that is deposited in the lower atmosphere. For explosions with yields of 100kT or less, the fireball does not rise above the troposphere where precipitation occurs. All of this fallout will thus be brought to the ground by weather processes within months at most (usually much faster). In the megaton range, the fireball rises so high that it enters the stratosphere. The stratosphere is dry, and no weather processes exist there to bring fallout down quickly. Small fallout particles will descend over a period of months or years. Such long-delayed fallout has lost most of its hazard by the time it comes down, and will be distributed on a global scale. As yields increase above 100kT, progressively more and more of the total fallout is injected into the stratosphere.

An explosion closer to the ground (close enough for the fireball to touch) sucks large amounts of dirt into the fireball. The dirt usually does not vaporize, and if it does, there is so much of it that it forms large particles. The radioactive isotopes are deposited on soil particles, which can fall quickly to earth. Fallout is deposited over a time span of minutes to days, creating down-wind contamination both nearby and thousands of kilometers away. The most intense radiation is created by nearby fallout, because it is more densely deposited, and because short-lived isotopes haven't decayed yet. Weather conditions can affect this considerably of course. In particular, rainfall can "rain out" fallout to create very intense localized concentrations. Both external exposure to penetrating radiation, and internal exposure (ingestion of radioactive material) pose serious health risks.

Explosions close to the ground that do not touch it can still generate substantial hazards immediately below the burst point by neutron-activation. Neutrons absorbed by the soil can generate considerable radiation for several hours.

The megaton class weapons have been largely retired, being replaced with much smaller yield warheads. The yield of a modern strategic warhead is, with few exceptions, now typically in the range of 200-750 kT. Recent work with sophisticated climate models has shown that this reduction in yield results in a much larger proportion of the fallout being deposited in the lower atmosphere, and a much faster and more intense deposition of fallout than had been assumed in studies made during the sixties and seventies. The reduction in aggregate strategic arsenal yield that occurred when high yield weapons were retired in favor of more numerous lower yield weapons has actually increased the fallout risk.

SimTek operations
The Vault-Tec Research Group has determined that after a long period of security, many Vault-Dwellers will feel "uncomfortable"? with the idea of returning to the outside world. The SimTek 5000 will provide a safe and reassuring return to life on the outside world. This chapter will give you a brief walk-through of the operation of the SimTek 5000.

RobCo PIPBoy 2000
To help Vault Dwellers record information (and information is extremely valuable, in fact, it might be the most valuable weapon we have against the end of civilization, so pay attention!), Vault-Tec has selected the RobCo Industries RobCo PIPBoy 2000 as the Personal Information Processor of choice for its Vault Dwellers.

The RobCo PIPBoy 2000 (hereafter called the PIPBoy), is a handy device that you wear on your wrist. It's small, especially by today's standards, and it will store a goodly amount of information for you. And using modern super-deluxe resolution graphics to boot!

The PIPBoy 2000 can be used to keep track of important dates and events. Use it to remember everyone's birthday's and anniversaries so that you (...)

''We reprogrammed your PIPBoy to keep track of the number of days remaining in the Vault water stores. This note is the only thing you should care about until we are safe and have a restored water processing chip. ''

''The note shows the number of days before we croak. If that happens, your adventures on the outside won't be worth a set of thermal underwear in Death Valley at high noon! We'll be dead. And we don't want that. Go to it!''

(...) and it is a very useful tool for scheduling meetings and appointments. And your PIPBoy has been programmed to properly handle all calendar dates, even after the turn of the century!1

1Your PIPBoy 2000 has a three month limited warranty.

Vault Personnel
The key to a successful reintroduction of civilization follow-ing a massive scale nuclear war is people. Here at Vault-Tec, we are working to ensure that your fellow man (and woman) is up to the task of bringing America back from the dead.

Equipment
Vault-13 comes prepared with the latest in survival equipment. The items in your storage containers will last 1,000 people over 10 years in comfortable and modern surroundings. When it is time to leave the Vault, and return to rebuild America, your friends at Vault-Tec have provided you with everything that you will need.

We have ensured that all of your rebuilding needs will be covered (...)

''Yeah, right. Who wrote this? What budget did they get? We already used most of the equipment on failed attempts to contact an outside civilization. And we've been in here a lot longer than ten years. We have little left to give you, but we will give you what we can.''

(...) undergone extensive testing to make sure the equipment is reliable.

Flotation Homes and Seaweed
A complete survival guide for the ocean bound. More tips, instructions, and plans than you could possibly ever use.

A PERMANENT STATE OF BEING? WE FIELD-TEST THE LATEST WATERPROOF SPF 900 SUNSCREENS PLANT A GARDEN YOU CAN COME BACK TO! WATERBEDS- A PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE COPING WITH YOUR NEW MOBILE HOME

VTF-100

A Vault-Tec publication

Special Vault Dwellers Issue - July 2076

Houseboat Cruise Control! Coming Soon!

Coping With Mr. Virus!
An extended pamphlet for the whole family! Includes the popular How-To-Burn- Diseased-Bodies section.

Fifteenth Edition - December 2076

Featuring the latest Super Ebola Quarantine Techniques!

WARNING:

All references to the government sanctioned and controlled FEV virus are not allowed in this publication.

Vault Dweller's Survival Guide (abridged version)
A condensed version of the VDSG, containing just the important information you need!

Effective Date March, 2077

For Survivors of a Limited Scale Nuclear War

First Printing VTB-OO2-13

How to Eat Rat
Over 101 recipes, from basic meals to a complete set of dishes, all the way from snacks to desserts!

Second Edition

NEW FOR '77:

15 five-minute Recipes and the tasty Rodent a la King!

How To Dodge Falling Rocks
Available the 3rd quarter of 2078

GECK
Future-Tec, a division of Vault-Tec, presents the following advertisement for your enjoyment!

When the All Clear sounds on your radio, you don't want to be caught without...

THE GARDEN OF EDEN CREATION KIT!!

The kit includes:


 * Base Replicator Unit - replicates food and basic items needed for building your new world. Just add water! (powered by cold fusion)
 * Holodisc Reader with Library - includes selections from the Library of Congress, complete set of encyclopedias, and other life saving information, all contained on four-hundred and sixty handy holodiscs!1 and... A Miniature Pen Flashlight!2

4 out of 5 nuclear scientists recommend the Garden of Eden Creation Kit over the other leading survival kits!

1 A condensed version is available on three handy holodiscs

2 Not suitable for children under the age of three. A different toy is available for younger children.