Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts [Flickr via BibliOdyssey]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a Ukrainian video game in a similar vein to the Fallout franchise. Borrowing material from the novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and Andre Tarkovsky's film Stalker, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes place in the Zone of Alienation after a fictional second Chernobyl Disaster, which killed or mutated many of Chernobyl's residents.

This past August, over 200 players got together to organize a real-life version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., with the Russian town of Vyborg standing in for Chernobyl, and latex masks representing nuclear mutations. Their photos provide a veritable storyboard for military response to a mutant apocalypse.

Stalker: Inhabitants of core 2009 [LiveJournal — Thanks, John Struan!]

Not that all that equipment you're seeing in the top photo is for communication with the outside world, of course. The shelter in Ligatne, Latvia, has separate rooms for the KGB, and they include direct phone lines to Moscow but also rows and rows of gray electronic devices that allow you to listen in on conversations taking place anywhere in the shelter. So even once you were entombed in the ground, hiding from an uninhabitable world, you still would have been under the thumb of the surveillance state at all times.

Somehow that single vase with its drooping flowers is the saddest thing of all.

My favorite part: the huge, monstrous facility only had enough food and supplies to last three months, meaning after months of claustrophobic repression, you still would have had to venture out into an atomic wasteland. Images by AP.

The dark secret of Quintet is that it's sort of a crappy game. Here Newman is, having lost his entire family to the postapocalyptic Rottweilers and stab-happy Quintet players, and he's finally killed his last opponent in the game. And it only now occurs to him to find out what the prize is. Which is, basically, bragging rights. You get to hang around the crappy parlor with the guy in the zany felt hat and talk about all the people you scragged. I would at least want a sticker, or maybe a slice of blueberry pie. With whipped cream.

Unlike today's light water reactors, gen IV nuclear power plants like this futuristic one, in Japan, will be fast reactors that won't have any highly-radioactive Plutonium or Uranium waste to bury deep underground. Instead, these elements will be stripped out of the nuclear waste in a process called "partitioning," and reused. There will be some waste, of course, but it won't have a half-life of several hundred thousand years. Probably more like 1000. AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Here's a schematic for a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor. Also, fast reactors don't produce products that can be weaponized. So countries using gen IV fast reactors, like this one (below) being built in Kalpakkam, India, won't have to worry that somebody might steal a byproduct and stick it in a bomb. Fun fact: experimental facilities like the Idaho National Laboratory in the US have been experimenting with fast reactor technology for over fifty years. Fast reactors were among the first designs tested for nuclear power, but were scrapped because they were too expensive. AP Photo M.Lakshman

The first image stands in stark contrast to the shot above, which shows some Mad Max-looking humans celebrating the downing of a baddie. In this edition of Fallout, you play a character whose father has wandered beyond the edge of the safety of Vault 101, a massive fallout shelter that's been sustaining some of the survivors near Washington D.C. You have to set out after your dad, which of course means you'll be attacked by anything and everything, and will probably involve you getting your hands on some cool guns and popping caps in mutant ass.

• Alien: Blowing up the Nostromo in order to kill one single Alien was one of the biggest (and best) sacrifices in movie history, and the resulting explosion as Ripley flees in the shuttle still stands alone as a perfect example of why you don't need 40 billion rendered polygons showing you just how the ship would look as it broke up into its component atoms. (You can see video of it above.) Plus, you have the audible countdown over the ship's PA system literally beating a ticking clock against Sigourney's ass every step of the way. It worked so good that they decided to repeat it in Aliens.
• Battlestar Galactica — "Exodus Part 2": Lee Adama's emotional outbursts might not win him another command anytime soon, because when he took over as the helmer of the Pegasus he got complacent and fat. However, he redeemed himself by sacrificing his superior ship (with its fighter-building ability) in order to save the Galactica, his pop, and everyone on the planet below. This still stands as one of the most powerful moments in the show. Just when you think everything is hopeless, the camera pulls extremely far back, and... boom. Pegasus to the short-lived rescue.

  
  

• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Captains of the Enterprise sure have been careless with their ships. What are they on, Enterprise-Q by now? However, the first time the Enterprise was sacrificed was probably the best. Faced with insurmountable odds, Kirk proves he's best at surviving by activating the ship's self-destruct sequence and letting it take out some nosy Klingons. As he watched it burn to cinders from the planet below, he asks Bones "My god, what have I done." Nothing that Starfleet will court martial him for, apparently.

  

• The Fifth Element: Even cruise ships aren't safe in this film, especially when carrying blue-skinned singing divas with stones buried in their stomachs. The poor luxury spaceliner Fhloston Paradise survives an attempt by Zorg to blow it to smithereens, only to find itself blown up moments later by someone with the sense to use a very short timer and not a wonky thing that you deactivate with a hotel cardkey. Cool escape pods, though.

• Tron: While fleeing Sark and his troops, Tron and his girlriend Yori narrowly escape on a Syd Mead designed Solar Sailer, which rides beams of light around Tronworld. Sark's massive carrier eventually catches up with it and opens up a ship-chomping hole, reducing it to pieces. The best comparison would be if a modern-day aircraft carrier chewed up a catamaran. Sark and the others leave the ship, and he orders it to be derezzed, which is what is really cool about Tron. If you need something, the system can rez it up, and when you're done, you just recycle it.

  

• Lost in Space: Bonehead Joey, er... Major West uses remote control to ignite the engines on the superior Proteus, full of futuretech and possibly life-saving equipment in order to get hull-burning space spiders off the Jupiter 2. However, not content to just let them burn up in the engine's wake, he also makes the ship self-destruct. Even though his ship has had its systems majorly trashed by the malfunctioning Robot, he still blows up the first sweet ride they find. Oh, and it manages to make their own ship crash. Genius.

• The Last Starfighter: When video game expert turned space pilot Alex keys the "Death Blossom" onboard his Gunstar, it turns into a hypersonic laser death machine. However, once it's in the post-orgasmic glow it's rendered dead and useless. They can't even steer out of the way of Xur's approaching ship, which shipicides itself into a moon. However, that bastard Xur got away, never to be caught since the movie didn't get a sequel.

  

• Independence Day: This is more of a shipicide from within, but when Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith fly up to the alien mothership and plant the virus, they're basically giving the thing a huge case of indigestion, which it doesn't quite recover from. Sadly (or maybe gladly) I couldn't get a clip from this since three of the Blockbuster stores I visited in Los Angeles don't carry ID4. Lame. But as a bonus, enjoy this clip mashing up Star Wars with Independence Day. Randy Quaid uses the Force.

  

• Return of the Jedi: While this one wasn't done on purpose, it's sort of a hilarious "Oops" moment as a rebel A-Wing pilot banzais into the bridge of the Imperial Flagship Super Star Destroyer Executor. This causes the ship to veer out of control and crash right into the the new and improved Death Star. Either that was one extremely lucky hit on the bridge, or whoever built the windshield of that thing needs to be fired. It can withstand the rigors of laser fire and hyperspeed, but can't take the impact of a measly A-Wing? I wonder if that have a transportation safety board that investigates these things.

  

• Vanilla Sky: Cameron Diaz gets an honorable mention in this film for tanking her "ship" (okay, a Buick Skylark) off a bridge in an effort to die in a warped suicide love pact with Tom Cruise. Let this be a note to you love 'em and leave 'em types out there: if you scorn someone, they may seek revenge, fuck up your face, and force you to go into a bizarre cryogenic freeze / lucid dreaming / virtual reality state of existence. Just so you know.

  

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Thanks to Seth L, who pointed out these cool pictures in a comment thread about scary settings in scifi movies.

Kursk Wreck [English Russia]

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iphone image by idiotboy Crystal meth bong image by kissthis.