fairly sure they said "source of clean water" at some point, but that could have been a slip 'o the tongue. Unless they have some kind of purifier rigged into the sluice gates?

Well to blow up any dam, the best bet is to get a bomb on the water side deep enough so that the water has a compression effect, but not so deep that you are up against the thickest section of the structure.

Soooo, a good sized A-Bomb about 1/3 of the way down.

Another option would be numerous large A Bombs scattered throughout the structure itself (it's riddled with tunnels) set to simultaneously detonate.

To do so with conventional explosives, you would quite probably have to pack every open area within the dam, it's massively, massively overbuilt.

1 rocket versus 13-18 feet thick concrete... pretty self explanatory, the hoover dam is probably thicker then your average nuclear bunker wall.... short of a direct nuclear ballistic missile i dont know how much damage you could really do to it, and the base of the dam is most likely about 50-150 feet thick slab so even then im not sure whether or not you could completely destroy it since i know nearly nothing of the hoover dam myself dimension wise, these are estimated measures, and the dam itself is mostly likely much more immense then this

I think if you find a clip from “Bevis and Butthead do America” when their at the dam is all the info you will need to stop the dam, I'll be damed

I'm not sure if anyone else has already mentioned this, but aside from the fact the dam is huge, there's also the fact that the Caesar's Legion wants control of it for themselves. For the same reasons NCR does(energy, mainly from what I've read/heard/seen, but also water). If they destroyed it, that'd ruin the whole purpose of fighting with the NCR-when it comes to the Hoover Dam, anyways.

Any further details on the factions' reasoning are among the things I've forgotten from the past months of news, OR has simply not been told/leaked/covered yet. In which case you'd have to get the game and play it, or wait for others to play it and then make news of it.

the orbital laser wouldn't destroy the dam, its a heat ray, it would likely just increase the cement's durability (and melt the pavement on the road).
a mini nuke would take a chunk outta the wall but unless you bombard it, it wont do alot, to top it off unless you took out a large portion or punched threw from about the middle you will likely just cause a water fall.
no, likely to destroy the dam you would either have to over load the generators or explode a mall nuke from the interior from around the mid section.

as for a dam buster, you would need an extremely large plane and a crew that knew what they were doing. as well as a dam buster 5X the normal size, old dam busters were designed to nock out small dams, they had to be rotated correctly before launch and then dropped at the correct time with enough spin, to much spin and it would hop around, to little and it would instantly sink. if it was dropped to soon it would sink to far and barely effect the dam, if it was released to late it would hop over the dam.
good luck finding a plane that could carry a normal one lol, if you did manage to find one you would probably do more damage ramming the plane into the dam then using the buster.

you are all ignoring one important fact:

1.the Dam has to be well guarded, fortified even in addition to its original size. how exactly did you intend on getting a bunch of nukes/disgustingly enormous amounts of explosives into the Dam without being killed?


2. if you could get inside......Megaton bomb anyone?






lol jk on #2, I'm not a 10 yr old who thinks you could get it there in the first place

Megatron is underneath it.

Hmm

Hoover Dam is so thick that the concrete in some sections is still curing.

errr madcat beat mee

I don't think you will be able to destroy Hover Dam all the way until near the end of the game. If you can just nuke the dam at the first half an hour of the start of the game, the entire war between the factions wouldn't make sense anymore since the dam is the thing that they are all fighting over for.

I hope the endings of the game will be as well thought out and creative and the ones in the original games!

And, they had to build a huge refrigeration plant not for the workers but to pump chilled water through the concrete. There is so much concrete that it would have overheated during the curing process causing failure of the concrete.

It would probably take a direct hit from a 100kt or larger nuke to destroy it outright...I doubt it could be done with conventional explosives unless you can control the site uninterrupted for several weeks to set it up for demolition. And if you can control it that length of time...why blow it up?

I concur.

One of the endings for Van Buren was lauching B.O.M.B. - 001(Ballistic Orbital Missile Base)'s payload at Hoover Dam, the ending narration said:

Another ending with the dam's destruction was destroying the construction debris on the dam, that ending narration was:

http://http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Hoover_Dam_design_document/5#End_Movies

So for anyone wondering how to blow it up, this is how it would have been done in Van Buren.

If you know Tank Girl, whoever controls Hoover Dam becomes Water and Power. The have almost all the water and ALL of the Power.

Hoover dam is hiding the cube.

I'm surprised the Chinese didn't nuke it as a priority target. Kind of like the Gecko nuke plant in FO2, survived completely intact... Yet the Chinese put at least 5 nukes right down The Glow's throat and that was ultra top secret.

"Just repeat to yourself, "It's just a show, I should really just relax.""
-Mystery Science Theatre 3000-

By 2077 the united states must have had hundreds of nuclear powerplants chances are some would have survived. The Van Buren Story for the Hoover Dam I hope the story is something like that for New Vegas.

A large enough Nuke on a direct hit would breach the dam causing flooding. Don't know if it would remove the concrete as described. Then again, the Tsar Bomba probably would have elminated a large part of it with a direct air burst in front of the dam, or possibly a water burst behind it.

My point should have been made more clear. Nothing you would carry in there is going to blow up the dam.

The idea that a carefully placed bomb that could be manevoured by one or two people could cause destruction of that edifice is hard to accept. I know it was done in a movie once, but that was a dam one hundreth the size of the Hoover and it was fictional. The Submarine pens used by Germany only had roofs that were at first 3 to 6 feet thick. The Allies dropped tons of bombs on these things and never hurt them. It was only when they used 12,000 and 22,000 pound bombs did they cause damage. The Hoover dam is a minimum of 45 feet thick and goes to 600 feet at the bottom. The dams that were breached in WWII by the Dam Busters were only breached in a small area. If one of the controlling factions were to plant explosives to sabatoge it, I am sure one could pack enough in the tunnels and chambers to breach it as a last ditch kind of thing.

two nukes, down in the maintainence tunnels by the lower tier sluice gates would do it. Your PC would need timed explosives though, because 1) it would be impossible to do otherwise unless you got a follower to set the other one off and 2) it is suicide anyway.

I still go by the Methane-powered bomber with dambuster bombs theory. Yup

(It is just me or does anyone else feel paranoid talking about the best way of blowing up Hoover Dam? lol *waves to the NSA peeps*)

Better be these http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qHX493bB3U

Or they should at least sing it.

And we better find the New city of R'lyeh and cthulhu taking up residence in that lake there.

Lake monsters

NSA can't hear my posts or read my mind or think my voice....

There have been some Fantastic http://www.google.com/search?q=history+channel&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=hoover+dam+site:history.com&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=wjI&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=ivm&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=SXe1TOGoOoS8lQe_-5HtBQ&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=10&ved=0CDoQqwQwCQ&fp=9f2370386c77b788 if your really interested in learning the history. I've seen a few of them on TV over the years, and as a result I feel as though I already have familiarity about it, what it means, how it really got built. I highly recommend them for those who have never seen - perhaps some distraction food as we run down the clock.

Miax