(Originally posted 6/20/2022)
There is a co-op first-person shooter game that was released in 2013 called Payday 2. In this game, you play as a member of the notorious Payday gang, a fictional group of criminals known for their extensive history of robbing banks, stealing confidential information from federal institutions, and completing a multitude of outlandish heists. One such heist has your crew stealing a bunch of nuclear warheads from a private mercenary company’s warehouse and transporting them to a cargo train station nearby, using forklifts and/or a muscle car that apparently once belonged to Muammar Gaddafi. This mission is specifically called Meltdown, for obvious reasons. Super weird, I know.
However, there is another mission that is a little bit more grounded in reality that has your crew stealing a fusion reactor prototype for a U.S. congressman so that his campaign for the next election is supported by most, if not all, of the oil and gas industry. This heist would of course be referred to as Big Oil.
This heist takes 2 days to complete. The first day consists of clearing out the headquarters of a local biker gang and stealing what they know about the secret whereabouts of the scientist responsible for the fusion reactor prototype. The only word to describe it would be a cakewalk. Easily stealth-able with a lot of extra loot in the form of assault weapons and ATMs in the basement of the building makes it a breeze.
The second day is infamous for being one of the worst days to play through in the game. First of all, it is impossible to fully complete the day without the police getting involved. Even if you sneak past all the guards and the cameras, responding to the minimum amount of pagers to avoid suspicion, and going through the tedious process of hacking the laboratory door open, you must figure out which out of the 12 fusion reactors is the working prototypes. Yes, the scientist made 12…11 of which don’t work. Once you obtain A fusion reactor prototype, you must light a flare on the conveniently placed plane runway across from the house’s driveway to let your helicopter pilot know to swing by and retrieve it. The police will be alerted of course immediately after picking up a prototype, but the worst part is that after receiving it, the pilot has to fly all the way back to wherever he came from so that someone with the scientific knowhow can test to see if it actually works. If it doesn’t work, this process is repeated until the prototype taken by the pilot actually works. With the entire ordeal being very time-consuming and the fact you will be under constant heavy fire from authorities (sometimes out in the open), this has been cemented as one of the least enjoyable missions out of the entire game.
The most convoluted and confusing part of this mission has to do with determining which one of the 12 fusion reactor prototypes is the real one. There are three clues hidden in or around the scientist’s house that can help. The first is a journal that has the name of the gas followed by some measurements and numbers that don’t matter. The important part is the name of the gas, since that shows you which color the reactor’s gas canister is. Deuterium is blue, helium is green, and nitrogen is yellow.
The second clue is a clipboard that has some unit conversions and typical science stuff followed by a number and “x H”. This basically states how many hoses are connected to the top of the gas canister of the fusion reactor. If it’s “2 x H”, there’s 2 hoses. “3 x H”? 3 hoses. But if it reads “∞ x H”, that means there is 1 hose. This kind of inspires me to take better notes when working on practically anything since this guy’s writings just seem so vague and nonsensical sometimes. I get that this man is a high-value target and wants to hide his research to the point of living like a hermit with a large security detail out in the mountains, but come on. He has these notes scattered everywhere, sometimes even outside!
The third clue is a computer terminal displaying a graph with a non-strict inequality sign and a number for psi (pound-force per square inch). This indicates what the pressure gauge should read on the gas canister for the fusion reactor prototype. However, every prototype gauge is in bar rather than PSI. Having to do a unit conversion just to figure that out every time would suck. The value on the terminal is always about equal to 400 bar though, so all you gotta do is see whether or not the gauge is above or below 400.
Now, it would be so terrible if you had to check every single fusion engine in the laboratory to make sure if they satisfied all 3 aspects (canister color, number of nozzles/hoses, pressure reading) every single time you wanted to complete this heist. Thankfully, the developers of Payday 2 decided to issue static spawns for each engine. Ultimately, this means that you can narrow down the number of potential candidates in terms of a working fusion reactor prototype to at most 2 before the lab door is even open.
The layout of this laboratory can be seen below:
| Left Room | Whiteboard | Right Room |
| #12 | #7 | —–^—– | #2 | #1 |
| #10 | #9 | —Stairs— | #4 | #3 |
| #8 | #11 | —–^—– | #6 | #5 |
| Main Floor |
Note: Hovering over each numbered cell in the above table will show its respective settings for its fusion reactor prototype. For example, fusion engine #1 has a nitrogen canister with 1 hose, set below 400 bar of pressure.
An interesting thing to note is that at least 99% of people do not want to memorize this information. That is where the power of programming comes in. Some absolute mad lad managed to develop a tool specifically to solve this problem: the Big Oil Engine selector.
In just 3 clicks, you can figure out not only what prototype number you have to grab but where to grab it, since it highlights the position of the correct engine in the map of the laboratory at the bottom of the selector. What’s even crazier about this is that I checked this on the Wayback Machine to see when this website was created and the earliest instance of this page in particular was ONE MONTH after the game first launched back in 2013.
This has me inspired. I think I’m gonna try to program that, if not something similar for a different game.
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