In Fallout 2 you had the back of the Advanced Power Armor with a hatch to the microfusion power supply. It had a nuclear trefoil stamped on it. In New Vegas, the interpretation is really good up until this one detail, where they slapped some goofy slow-spinning fan there instead. It makes me facepalm a bit.

maybe the fusion generator tended to overheat in the desert, and so needed special cooling. Like your gfx card after playing fallout for 5 hours..

I haven't seen it yet, but I imagine power armor needs a cooling system or even a respirator/filtration system.

Air conditioning.

Wow.
I haven't seen that yet.

I did make a mod of my own if you want to swap them out... It should be ready soon enough. When it is I'll upload it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bivcr9N-kFI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDu1MQ80cFo&t=5m55s

I love the armor design Obsidian did. I'm just not exactly sure how I feel about the fan.

For the sake of sanity, I may just go with the whole cooling/ventilation for air filtration reasoning.

I don't really mind the fan. I figure you've got to keep the suit's important bits cool in the hot mojave desert. I like to imagine that I'm walking the wasteland in the height of post-apocalyptic comfort thanks to that huge fan.

You should feel alot cooler. Ba Dum Tish

The vault says its one of the oldest models of Advanced Power Armors, being used under the command of dike Richardson in 2241. Its probably one of the final builds but overheated often, so the fan could be used as a cooling system.

I like the fan, kinda. Good armor, if you have problems finding it, theres a group of deathclaws you can find it buy, but I figured it'd get real hot in that thing, and it is lit up so seems like it's letting off the heat from the power supply or something.Don't you just feel like a tank in that thing?

I love the fan and the orange glow, it's badass.

To each his own.

Ya know... In the early game (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Advanced_Power_Armor_%28Fallout_2%29) that armor is mentioned to recycle what you drink. Did they give it the "auto drink" in New Vegas ~like they did the Canteen? (meaning that dehydration shouldn't happen when wearing it.)

Like everyone else said, since it is a very old model, it would need a cooling system so it would not overheat, and maybe cool down the user as well, becuase remember, this is a desert. :toughninja:

Is it ever explicitly said that the radiation symbol was a radiation symbol? Being only a couple of pixels high, it could very easily have been a fan. ('sides, there's a whole bunch of Fallout 2 staff who worked for New Vegas, so I'd think they'd know!)

I like the design. It's about a million times better than it was in the beta screenshots.

Just to make sure everyone knows this. "Very old" is a relative term. It could be as young as 40 years old, compared to T-51b suits which are at best 203 years old and T-45d suits which are even older than that. Advanced Power Armor was made by the Enclave after the bombs fell. It's technologically more advanced than any other model series of powered armor.



The original back. Just to post it.
http://i.imgur.com/cYcEd.jpg

This really isn't that big an issue for me. It's just one of those things that bugs me a bit.