Courier Six Vs V

Online, if you were to say that Fallout: New Vegas and Cyberpunk 2077 were at all comparable, you'd be faced with some pretty substantial disagreement, but the games are surprisingly similar; on top of the obvious mechanical similarities, both are about how corporations will destroy the worlds, both can trace their lineages directly to TTRPGs, both were *incredibly* buggy at launch, both are set in the Western USA and have important world events taking place in the year 2077, etc. and so forth.

Likewise, the principle characters also have a lot in common, both draw from anarchist ideologies, both can bend to the wills of the business moguls that destroyed their worlds, both survived being shot in the head, both can kit themselves out with all sorts of cybernetic enhancements, etc. etc.

I know this is just a list of connections a la a reddit post but I'm just trying to convey that these aren't two random characters I'm making fight each other because I played both games.

Even though it is that a little bit.

At least it's a better match than a Fallout protagonist BR, and I haven't played any Deus Ex games so I can hardly do that now can I?

Anyway

These games are both very open, with huge variance in beginning, middle and end, and it'd be basically impossible to pin down a "canon" story for  either, so instead I'm going to describe a series of events that can happen in game, representing a typical playthrough of each, being vague where I can afford to be, and trying to stay true to the core themes of the games and the series.

And with that, we're off.

Courier Six:

In 2077 the world ended, the world was bathed in nuclear fire, billions died and what remained was an irradiated wasteland filled with marauders, monsters and the skeletons of the past, but the world was born again, entire towns sprung up from Vault Tec's fallout shelters, the new California republic formed and grew and the brutal ranks of Caesar's Legion fought back, all the while, the New Vegas strip remained, its name in lights, protected and controlled by the enigmatic Mr House, who needed one final piece in play for his plan to come to fruition, the platinum chip.

The delivery of this chip was put in the hands of one of six Mojave express couriers, and he was relieved of his duties by the casino chairman Benny, who tied him up, shot him in the head and buried him in a shallow grave.

But that's not where the story ends, that'd be a pretty short game.

The courier was rescued by a robot cowboy and nurtured back to health by Doc Mitchell, and after defending the town from a gang of escaped convicts, he was hot on the trail of the man with the checkered suit.

His journey led him through towns overrun with crime and a town destroyed by the legion, it brought him face to face with delusional ghouls and their hulking, invisible nightkin enemies and brought him right to the strip, where he convinced Benny to meet with him in private, and he left with blood-stained knuckles and the gun that almost ended his life in his hands.

But his problems got bigger, big enough that a 9mm pistol wouldn't solve them. He'd also discovered that the chip he had almost lost his life delivering was the key Benny's plan for taking over the Strip. With the help of an impractically agreeable robot named Yes Man, he would have to face down the three powerful factions vying for control of Hoover Dam, the greatest energy source in the entire Mojave and the key to controlling the whole area, the brutal Legion, the massive NCR and the Randian 'hero' Mr House.

He'd need something bigger.

Alongside your obvious post apocalypse weapons, shotguns, baseball bats, rifles and knives, the courier carries several tricks more specific to the fallout universe, such as an array of laser and plasma weapons "borrowed" from the silver rush, it's worth noting that the laser varieties are genuine lasers too, refracting through lenses and traveling in a straight line, which means they travel at the speed of light.

They're also capable of disintegrating any enemy in the game, meaning it's powerful enough to vaporize anything from bears to brahmin to giant roboscorpions, and the plasma weapons are even more hefty, boasting considerably more power, albeit with considerably slower projectiles.

 Weapons taken from the legion like the thermal lance and Vulpes Inculta's ripper can make it through steel armor in less than a second. But he's not at all shy about a more heavy-duty approach, miniguns and missile launchers, Gatling lasers and plasma casters, those are small fries compared to the whizzbang new invention, the fat man nuclear catapult, which pairs excellently with Euclid's C finder, a targeting system mistaken for a children's toy that brings down the entire day's yield of a solar power plant like divine fury on whatever idiot it's pointed at.

But you just can't beat a good improvised weapon, like the Golf Club he took from Driver Nephi and used to single handedly raid the Lucky 38 and bludgeon Mr House to death. A slave obeys orders from men like Mr House. The Courier does not.

In case it wasn't already obvious the courier was off his face on grade A narcotics for a lot of this. He can sharpen his mind with mentats, greatly increase his physical power with buffout, increase his damage output by 25% with psycho and reduce incoming damage to a similar degree with Med-X, on top of all that, he also has a sub-dermal implant that lets him inject the reflex boosting drug 'Turbo' multiple times a day and triple his reaction speeds alongside a plethora of implants that improve everything about him from the toughness of his skin to his intelligence to even his luck and he can always use a magic box called a stealth boy to just, sneak past any problems. And obviously, someone with this much shit in their system at all times is going to have built up a few resistances, he's toughed out radiation, venoms, neurotoxins and a fungal disease that was infectious enough to kill an entire vault full of people, much to the displeasure of his brain.

It's not just his immune system doing all the work either, the man has an insanely tough body, he can survive artillery bombardment, laser weapons and small nuclear warheads as well as the bullet to the brain that started this whole journey. Monsters like deathclaws, which are capable of smacking around cars like they're made of paper can't even stagger him. Power Armor also increases his strength and durability exponentially, requiring special training from the brotherhood of steel to even wear it, it's strong enough to withstand a rocket's ignition test, and protect the inhabitant the whole way through even keeping them from falling over completely.

But all of this durability only factors in if anybody manages to hit him, a tough ask considering he can dodge sonic attacks from ungodly water monsters and use the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System to shoot the weapon right out of your hands.

But, what if someone does hit him, despite all of this and they manage to hurt him? Not to worry, he can heal anything from bullet wounds to a crippled skull and broken spine with a couple of stimpacks, made all the more convenient by a handmade modification allowing them to inject without the Courier's input, making his survivability a matter of not dying in one hit, because supply is not going to be an issue for a compulsive hoarder like him.

This kind of insane endurance would have proved especially useful when storming into Caesar's camp in a haze of drug-induced psychosis and drunken rage and leaving only children and corpses behind, taking Caesar's blood spattered clothes and displacer glove with him.

The courier's escapades are multitudinous and bizarre from this point forwards, he trained in martial arts, able to paralyze a man with a single strike, he got locked in a casino and walked out with a decked out holorifle and a suspicious amount of gold, all while intuiting communications made by a mute woman without knowing sign language. He helped Joshua Graham protect his tribe, picking up some powerful poisons on the way and managed to outsmart the greatest scientists in history, without a brain. But it all came to ahead on the lonesome road. You see, before the platinum chip, before benny, Courier Six had been hired to deliver something to Death Valley, and once he had gone, it went to hell. Nukes went off, the area was irradiated beyond repair, it even awakened a species of tunneling monsters capable of taking on deathclaws, and Ulysses wanted answers. He wanted the courier to come back and pay for his crimes. And he did. He trekked through the lonesome road accompanied by an eyebolt named ED-E and equipped with a red glare missile launcher, a hefty anti-material sniper rifle and an impressive set of elite riot gear.

 He killed hordes of the marked men he had condemned months before. The courier arrived, faced down Ulysses and stopped him from launching a nuclear warhead on the Mojave, stopped him from making the past's mistakes again, and attoned for the destruction he himself had been complicit in. 

He came back to the Mojave and made up his mind. He was sick of the men striving to be like the great nation of days gone, the nation that never truly existed and the nation that had destroyed the world and he was tired of the men pillaging and defiling every settlement they came across in the name of progress and order. He stormed hoover dam himself, cleaving through NCR soldiers and Caesar's Legionaries alike, making his way to the Legate's camp, killing the last high ranking officer of the legion, Lanius with Caesar's own weapon. And on the way back, for good measure, he threw the NCR general off the side of the dam.

And so the courier who had cheated death in the cemetery outside of Goodsprings, cheated death once again, and the Mojave Wasteland was forever changed.

V:

Imagine a world where corporations rule everything, where the rich live in marble palaces and the poor are resigned to uninhabitable slums, where entire nations are left uninhabitable by wars manufactured by arms companies and everything you do is done through a corporate product. It's far fetched I know but you'll have to stick with me.

This is the world of Cyberpunk, in the year 2077 and a pair of streetkids named V and Jackie are about to make it to the big leagues, they were hired by THE Dexter DeShawn for a simple heist job. This would do it all for them, it would cement their legacies, they might even get a drink named after them at the afterlife, and be able to live for ever in the minds of their fellow guns for hire, the heaping pile of eddies they'd make for it certainly didn't hurt either, and all they had to do was steal a biochip? Easy money. 

It was not, in fact, easy.

While they were stealing the biochip, the CEO of Arasaka industries paid a visit, only to be strangled to death by his own son, leaving you as the only witnesses to such an act, and the number one suspects once you got caught and had to jump from the tower to safety below.

This daring escape damaged the biochip's container beyond repair and Jackie stuck it in his head to try and preserve its integrity, but by the time they were out of the building, it was too late for Jackie, and the chip's protection was left on V's shoulders. He slotted it into his neural port and went back to Dexter to tell him the bad news. In return for such fierce loyalty, Dexter shot him in the head and left him to die in a dump.

V narrowly escaped, thanks to Arasaka's now disgraced bodyguard Takemura dragging him out of the scrapheap and driving him to safety, or so it seemed. The chip was inseparably lodged into V's brain thanks to the bullet, and worse, it was rewiring his neurons, replacing his entire self with someone else, someone more dangerous. The infamous rocker boy terrorist, Johnny Silverhand. Left with a vanishingly small amount of time on his hands, and the guy that did a 9/11 in his head, V would have to cement his legacy quickly if he wanted to live a full life. 

And so that's what he did, he went on missions of corporate espionage, he got drunk, he got high, he dominated the street racing scene and got himself a sweet set of wheels, he fought corporations he fought street gangs and he worked with both. He a group of prostitutes take over their brothel and he nailed a murderer to a cross like Jesus.

He pushed his body past the limits of humanity, getting torn apart and put back together by 'ripperdocs', from the absurdly expensive to the sketchy and the seedy, allowing him to do everything from jumping in midair to slowing time while he's dodging, as if he needed it, he was already completely capable of dodging bullets. His gorilla arms allowed him to dominate the local street fighting scene, and his monowire lets him catch foes off guard with a huge shock, charging over time and releasing huge amounts of electricity and heat into enemies and his mantis blades could melt through solid steel.

In fact, these modifications are so widespread that average people can punch clean through concrete pillars and scanner technology is almost completely ubiquitous, implants on the palm of your hand let you interface with auto-targeting smart weapons and implants like the bio monitor and second heart give you a second wind after an attack that normally would have flatlined you. Not to mention the extremely convenient access to upgrades that render you immune to fire, poison, shock or bleeding, or the dermal implant that lets you turn invisible at will.

But the cream of the crop, the thing that let V bend the world to his whims is his ability to hack anything he can interface with successfully, he can force someone to detonate a grenade while they're holding it, or slit their own throat. He can overheat someone's internals and make them burn from the inside out or fuck with their sensory organs to disorient them, and anything connected object in the environment serves as a potential distraction, a potential 'in' to a network, and a potential explosive if anyone gets close to it.

The hacking is powerful, but its by no means perfect, anyone not connected to the system, or anything too antiquated can't be interfaced with at all, like an old crane V had to operate with punchcards.

 But it is by no means his only option, he can blow people apart with all sorts of pistols, rifles and shotguns, like Skippy, the pistol with a conversation algorithm that's hard coded to shooting for the head, or overwatch, a powerful sniper rifle that once belonged to the Nomad Panam, who V began to grow closer to. 

All the while, he grew closer to Johnny, who would incessantly comment on the daily comings and goings of V's life with all the pointless edge of a pizza cutter, but the two were starting to see eye to eye, they became friends, they were becoming more alike, V started wearing Johnny's old clothes, starting using his gun, he saw Johnny's memories, felt his emotions. 

He even started letting Johnny take over occasionally to play gigs with his old band and relive bygone flings. But this isn't who V was, right? Johnny was a terrorist, he destroyed a skyscraper with a nuke, killing God knows how many? And Johnny had more enemies than V wanted to meet, like the infamous man turned machine Adam Smasher, who some say even survived that cataclysmic nuke. 

But Johnny was starting to sound pretty convincing, the chip was already deteriorating V's body, he was coughing up blood all the time and passing out every couple of days, his time was nearly up and Arasaka had made his life a living hell. He'd tried to be their lapdog to find a way to stop this terminal brain overwriting but they offered you nothing useful. They needed to go. V started gearing up, EMPs bioweapons, Sticky grenades and antipersonnel lasers that slice through enemies like they're made of butter, he really got to grips with Johnny's pistol, and especially the inbuilt flamethrower. And a modern day samurai would be nothing without his sword imbued with anything from electricity to white hot fire, or his baseball bat, or the dildo he uses as a club he got at a 'meeting' with an esteemed arms dealer.

And so, with the help of Panam, her nomad gang called the Aldecados and a hovercraft tank they boosted earlier that week, V stormed arasaka tower and confronted Adam smasher, the man who got Johnny killed all those years ago, getting his soul stuck on a biochip and getting V in this whole mess. Right off the bat he kills an elder Aldecado named Saul but V and Panam fought with a vengeance, whittling down the metal behemoth until, finally, V blew a hole in his skull with Johnny's pistol.

V descends, all the way down to the Mikoshi chamber, a connection to the deepest network in all of night city and he finds out that he truly is already gone. Any hope of a cure is gone. He either has to relinquish his body to Johnny and live the rest of his life as an engram in the net; or lose Johnny and return to his body, living the last few months of his life before his brain shuts down completely. But, just like Johnny changed V, V managed to change Johnny too, gone was the abusive, selfish rocker boy, and in his place was a valued friend, a man who gave his chance at the life that was robbed from him back to his best friend, to let him live out his last days in peace, with the people he loved. And that's what he did. The two men bid each other farewell, Johnny was gone, and V rode off into the night with Panam, his head quieter than it had been in a long time, with the rest of his life ahead of him and a brilliant, blazing legacy behind him.

Fight:

"Okay Courier, I'm calibrating the time machine as we speak, in a moment you'll be blasted all the way back to 2077, right before the bombs dropped, and I need you to gather as much data on the manufacturing process of mentats before I pull you out of there ok?"

Courier Six is in the Big MT, helping the brilliant, but somewhat deranged Mobius with his experiments. He's geared up, dressed in full riot gear with a classic cowboy duster and a big iron on his hip. The rest of his equipment lies in a set of crates around him, sent to be sent off after him in the 'time machine'.

The time machine, of course, is just a massive stone ring Mobius had found in New California and attached a door to, but the Courier steeled himself regardless, and went in.

He emerged on the other side, blinking a couple of times to get used to the neon lights before him. This didn't seem right. This wasn't his 2077. A crate flickered into existence behind him with a hastily scrawled note stapled to it. It read:

"Hello Courier, very sorry but time travel isn't an exact science and it appears you've ended up in the wrong timeline, still it represents a brilliant opportunity for SCIENCE does it not? Stick around, see what you can find and I'll pull you out again in a little while."

The Courier sighed, and looked around. He saw a brightly lit city in the distance, surrounded by a barren wasteland. Despite everything, it seemed kind of familiar. He scanned his surroundings and just down the road there was a small tavern of sorts. He walked in and sat down at the bar, attracting a couple of wary looks from the patrons. The bartender came over, "Heya choom what can I get ya."

"Whiskey," The courier grunted back, knocking back the glass as soon as it came.

"20 eddies"

"Here you go", said the courier, handing over two dozen bottle caps.

"Is this some kind of Joke?"

"Oh uh, sorry, I'm not from around here, my mistake"

The courier reached into his coat and pulled out a wad of pre-war money and started counting the notes.

"Hey, you do know that you can't pay for drinks with junk or antiques, right?" snapped the bartender, clearly frustrated.

One of the patrons got up and walked over, taking off his shades on the way.

"Is there some kind of problem here?"

"Yeah this fuckin kleptoid is the problem, come on V help me out here"

The patron, V turned on the courier, leaning in

"Cough up, gajin, or I'll make sure the next joint you visit is the fucking columbarium" [✊ 20/20]

The courier leaned in further, making eye contact and holding V gently by his jacket

[Confirmed Bachelor] "Surely there's something I could do to get a handsome guy like yourself to buy me a drink", he whispered.

"Uh sorry I'm spoken for" said V, clearly flustered, "Hey you can't flirt your way out of this you fucking gonk, pay up"

"Well, it was worth a shot," said the courier, grabbing V's Jacket and headbutting him with full force.

 V staggered back as the bar started emptying out. They knew what V was capable of and didn't wanna get in the way of it. The Courier leapt behind the bar and pulled out his magnum revolver, assessing the situation.

"Holy shit V, are you trying to be the dumbest motherfucker in Night City or does this just happen by accident" 

V drew his gun and spat back, "He caught me off guard ok, you've been distracted by dumber shit than that before"

As he turned to face the courier a bullet whizzed past his face and shot the pistol right out of his hands.

"Jackass" muttered V as he ducked behind a table, grabbing a tech pistol, turning on his scanner and shooting straight through the bar into the courier's calf.

"Shit, Johnny, I think this guy might be a cyberpsycho"

"Bull shit, you're just saying that because he's giving you a run for your money."

"No," said V as he pulled the pin on a biohaz grenade and lobbed it over the bar, "I scanned him, he's got a bunch of homebrewed chrome, none of it is even connected to the net"

"V LOOK OUT" 

The courier had leapt out of the poisonous cloud, toughing out the toxins, and armed with a knife coated in cazadore venom. V dodged just in time and the knife missed his head by inches, glancing his shoulder, but his cyberware had already started pumping the poison out of his system, he hit the courier with a sharp punch in the arm, making him drop the knife and giving V a chance to draw his thermal katana. He swung at the courier like a bolt of lightning and his blade was only just stopped by a miniature chainsaw, he kept pushing and he melted through the ripper, but not before his sword was so thoroughly shredded it broke in two. The courier threw a punch and V responded by dodging it, then he dodged another, and another. His implants were going into overdrive and he looked like a blur to the courier, responding with his own blows, hitting hooks and uppercuts and jabs until he drew back for one final punch and sent the courier flying through the door into the road outside.

V started to leave but he was stopped in his tracks by a coughing fit.

"Hey V, uh, maybe you should take a back seat for this one"

"No I'm fine Johnny I can do it" V coughed back, 

"Come on, let me take the wheel for a bit, I'll give him a real night city welcome!"

"Fine.." V reluctantly pulled a pill out from his pocket, pseudoendotrizine, and took it.

Outside, the courier was hurriedly getting into his power armor, and just as he'd fastened the helmet in place, a porsche on autopilot came barreling down the road and rammed into him.

Johnny jumped into the car, now fully in control of V's body and he revved the engine but the car was slowing, and fast. The courier had managed to get a good foothold and was stopping the car with the hydraulics in his armor. Johnny put the pedal to the metal and started unloading his pistol at the courier, but the bullets just bounced off the helmet. The courier redoubled his efforts and brought the car to a grinding halt, holding it it in place as he reached over to the left hand side, tearing the door clean off and lunging at Johnny, who activated his monowire and unloaded thousands of volts directly into the power armor, blasting it backwards and making the plates fall right off the frame, giving Johnny the chance to start circling the courier as he extricated himself from the broken armor and put on his riot gear helmet, ready to fight.

He tried to focus in on Johnny with VATS but his pip boy screen went completely black and sparks exploded in his face, he turned to face the car but he was met with a rain of SMG rounds being fired out the window. He withstood the incessant spray of bullets for as long as he could, ducking down into the debris of one of the crates to find something that might help. He emerged and yelled to Johnny.

"HEY, ARE YOU GONNA TRY AND HIT ME AGAIN OR ARE YOU SCARED I'LL RIP OFF ANOTHER DOOR?!"

As Johnny circled round he turned the car towards the courier and started accelerating towards him. The courier stared him down until the last second where he activated his implant and felt the rush of turbo in his veins. The car sped towards him but he leapt aside with ease, and threw a fat mine in through the window. Time returned to its normal pace and the car kept going for a second before it exploded in a mushroom cloud and the shockwave scattered the debris of the fight like tumbleweeds.

V gasped as his body was brought back from the brink in the wreckage. Trying to crawl free of the burning car, he stammered "Johnny what the hell happened?"

"I was giving him a real run for his money but he had a bomb on him, nothing I could have done. That biomonitor saved your ass though, so you'd better get out there and finish this."

V hastily got out a sniper rifle and used the burning car as cover, withstanding the fire effortlessly, A high caliber bullet shot out of the courier's anti material rifle and missed V by an inch but V fired back, hitting the courier squarely in the chest three times and staggering him dramatically. V took his chance, he ran forwards, his cyberware moving him so fast he seemed to blink in and out of existence, but the courier had drawn a laser rifle and V kept getting tagged by the barrage of lasers, he felt his body temperature soar and his implants started to melt but his second heart kicked in and cooled him down again right as he reached the courier and lashed out with his monowire, cutting the rifle clean in two and laying into him. He let out a flurry of punches, moving faster than the eye could see and attacking relentlessly. The courier's armour started to buckle, the helmet was denting and the visor was cracked but he just couldn't keep up with the endless punches coming his way. His implant went off one more time and he felt the familiar rush of turbo in his blood. The punches were slower now, they still hurt but he could see them now and with a burst of speed he caught V's arm in his left hand and gripped tight. V tried to escape with his cyberware but the flashes of incredible speed weren't enough to break the courier's grip. The courier squeezed harder as he slid his right hand into a power fist and shattered V's arm with his left. He drew back as V struggled and slammed the power fist into V's face, sending a shockwave through his entire body, reducing him to a splatter of viscera and implants on the road and a dismembered forearm, still in the courier's hand.

He took off his helmet, dropped the arm and set to work gathering up the treasure trove of futuristic tech that lay before him in a puddle of human remains, before taking one last look at the city that lay before him and being zapped back to 2282.

Who won and why?

So, the courier won, and that's an outcome I'm pretty confident with, but I want to make it clear that V certainly held some advantages. To start off with, his tech was superior, it seems obvious to say but his abilities to predict bullet trajectories, hack from afar, double jump, fire homing bullets, etc and so forth were all incredibly useful in a fight against someone with comparatively antiquated tech. V also had a much more comprehensive list of immunities, with implants that make him immune to fire, shock and bleeding, as well as a perk making him immune to poison, which would have hurt the courier's chances significantly, given how potent a lot of his neurotoxins and motortoxins are. V is also likely to be a more hand to hand fighter, while the courier may know a couple of takedowns or pressure point moves, V is able to consistently box above his weight class, often fighting people with outright illegal modifications that are likely to boast far more power than anything V has access to. Finally, and perhaps most significantly V is a whole lot faster. At base, V can, unreliably, dodge bullets, which usually travel at around Mach 2, and he has several implants that slow time, some allowing complete free movement with a 50% time slow, and other offering a more limited range of movement, such as just aiming, to as slow as 10% of initial time. That means, so long as he isn't on cool down for his time slowing abilities, V can dodge projectiles coming in at Mach 4, and tag things moving as fast as mach 20. This, alongside his homing bullets, and the Courier's comparatively sluggish speeds of Mach 1 to Mach 3 after pumping himself full of drugs means V would be unlikely to miss any shots at all, his advantage is that significant.

However, as significant as any of these advantages may be, they are not enough to decide the outcome on their own, and they are not enough to outdo the courier's significant advantages in other ways. To start with, the courier's top speed is above V's bottom speed, meaning, at the very least, he would be able to hit V while his cool downs were in effect or, more simply, if he failed to dodge. Additionally V and comparable characters have been tagged with bullets when faced with heavy enough gunfire or a powerful enough opponent, both in gameplay and in cutscenes, and the courier could fill the gap by targeting fast moving objects with VATs, as well as the advantage of his laser weapons being, well light speed, and therefore impossible to dodge if they were on target when they were fired, making the chance of V getting tagged significantly higher, this also applies to weapons like Euclid's c finder which shoots a beam travelling at 1% the speed of light, or the Tesla cannon, which shoots projectiles at mach 100 speeds. On top of that, the courier had the advantage in physical strength, he could go toe to toe with deathclaws, who can throw around two ton cars with ease, and with power armour, he can withstand the force of a rocket ignition test, which would equal well over 60,000 newtons, which is stronger than V would be able to achieve by ramming into someone full speed with any of his vehicles, the strongest of which only having about 14,000 newtons of force behind it. 

Then there's the matter of raw power, who can knock who down doesn't particularly matter when grenades and nukes are involved in the equation. Firstly, V. This blog places Adam Smasher at 577kg of TNT, a tall order indeed, more than enough to obliterate a house or a small office building. However, I take issue with the assumptions this calc makes. To start, it uses the wrong cross sectional area, according to them smasher was above the explosion, not facing it, so the CSA, and therefore the amount of energy tanked would likely be 4-5x lower than previously assumed, but it doesn't end there. In my opinion, the poster makes a crucial error by assuming that smasher was even there by the time the bomb went off. The sequence of events we see is: bomb gets planted, Johnny gets caught by Smasher while on roof and trying to escape, Johnny wakes up, a few miles away, watching the fireball engulfing Arasaka tower. The speed of the average helicopter, Johnny being indoors and already restrained, and Arasaka's calm demeanor together all imply it took at least 2-3 minutes between the final two steps, and during that time, I think it is very unlikely that smasher wouldn't have been airlifted out alongside Johnny, he is a multi million eurodollar weapon of war, there is no reason for anyone with agency in that situation to leave him to get hit by a fucking nuke. I am 100% certain that he wasn't even there, and that is this game's best feat. The game is not without its other feats, of course, the grenades have a 4m radius, giving them a potential yield of 2kg of TNT or so with the right perks, and many significant enemies can tank over a dozen of them, so that brings V up to around 24kg of TNT. This level is relatively consistent as well, someone his size moving at 4x the speed of sound would produce a kinetic energy of around 23kg of TNT and the GASH antipersonnel grenades, in totality have a yield of about 16kg of TNT, assuming the beams are about a centimeter wide and have the energy density of plasma, of 10 billion joules per m3.

Then, the Courier: This blog suggests that mini nukes, and therefore the strongest characters in the fallout verse, sit at around 380kg of TNT, but I am inclined to disagree with this user as well, as they assume mini nukes have a radius of 20m, with seemingly no frame of reference for how big that actually is, considering your average mini nuke only explodes with a radius of around 5 meters, and putting that into the same equation they used gets us a whopping 5.7kg of TNT, pretty unimpressive, even compared to V. This blog is even less reliable, claiming mini nukes have a yield of 10-20 tons of TNT because the closest real life equivalent, the Davy Crocket launcher had that kind of yield. They're different weapons from different universes, not applicable. More reliable estimates come from calculations to do with energy weaponry. This blog put the energy needed to vaporize a 63kg person at around 300 megajoules, or 72kg of TNT, already higher than any of the numbers I consider actually applicable to V, but it doesn't stop there. The courier can vaporize all sorts, and assuming the same energy/kg of creature disintegrated, a 1100kg cattle like a brahmin would have a yield of 1.25 tons of TNT, and a super mutant behemoth is around 20ft tall and probably weighs far more than just a cow. But ok, let's dismiss that one, because there aren't any behemoths in New Vegas any way and estimating their weight is going to be very flawed. Lets also ignore the giant roboscorpion the courier absolutely CAN vaporize in the old world blues DLC, because we don't know exactly what its made of and in what quantities, even though an assumption of it being mostly steel, with a  few hundred kilos of rubber, copper, aluminum and carbon fiber respectively probably wouldn't be far off. Euclid's C finder, however, collects a full day's worth of solar power, in the middle of a desert, this website claims that domestic solar panels produce around 2KWH of electricity per day, and Helios one has around 360 mini solar arrays, all around 4x the size of your average domestic solar panel, and positioned optimally in a solar farm, meaning this estimate is probably a low ball. But, this plant probably produces around 2880KWH per day, all of which is transferred into the courier's enemies, and felt in the form of 2.48 tons of TNT. This is how strong I reckon mini nukes are as well, for the record, given the only weapon in the game they're really comparable to is the C-finder.

These are all raw numbers as well, without the boosts the courier would get from psycho (25%), being bisexual (10%) and the bloody mess perk (5%). And its worth noting that, while the higher of the two numbers is exclusively from late game weapons, the lower of the two applies to all energy weapons. There is a laser pistol in the first room of the game, that's how base level this is for the courier, and it is STILL over 50x stronger than the highest estimate I'm willing to give to V which, mind you, is tanking a DOZEN grenades all at once. That kind of generosity applied both ways would only widen the gap. This number is still more than twice as big as the completely unreasonable estimate for V as well, so even the wanked version couldn't win.

The courier also had better healing, the most healing items in cyberpunk are able to heal from are cuts and bullet wounds, basically, but in fallout, a single stimpack can put together a crippled skull or heal a broken spine, and a doctor's bag can fix every bone in your body. V's bio monitor and second heart would certainly be useful, giving him a chance to at least survive a hit or two, but automatically activating health items are available to the courier too, in the form of the handmade auto-inject stimpacks he has access to at basically all times.

Also, the specific weaknesses that the courier has are rendered somewhat insignificant with this kind of gap as well, for example, when in power armour, the courier takes 9x more damage from EMP attacks. Assuming V had an arsenal of pulse attacks, pulse attacks as powerful as his regular attacks, and he was able to hit the courier with a dozen shock grenades, it'd still only be 0.2 tons of TNT, less than a sixth of what would be needed to actually scratch him. The two countered each other a lot as well, with V's arsenal of resistances and the courier's more exotic weapons matching more or less perfectly, and V did end up with the advantage in that regard as the same could not be said the other way around, necessarily, for example, V's arsenal of bio toxins also wouldn't come in handy all that much either because the courier, while not necessarily being immune, has demonstrated a resistance to poisons and biological weapons everywhere, from the Sierra Madre's cloud to Vault 22's spores to cazadore's poison. And, if the player keeps the mechanical heart from old world blues, the courier is completely immune to poisons as well, so that becomes a completely moot point, regardless, the courier has never shown any specific resistances to bleeding or being set on fire though, even if the regenerative implant and the automatically injecting stimpacks would definitely help in that regard. In some areas, however, they countered each other pretty perfectly, such as both being able to turn completely invisible, and both being able to spot invisible enemies, and both having weapons that can melt through other weapons.

Other factors were a little more complex to determine, such as intelligence, while V's brain, thanks to lots of cybernetics was undoubtedly capable of more complex calculations, I'd argue the courier was more intelligent, tactically speaking, as well as socially, he is capable of convincing the great Legate Lanius to turn around and retreat with a mix of tactical thinking and genuine social charm, and examples of this uncanny ability to solve problems with words rather than violence is present throughout almost all of new Vegas. Of course V is not without his own quick wit, he was able to broker a series of deals and concoct a series of plans to get into and out of various heavily guarded locations like Arasaka tower and the Arasaka's penthouse suite, but these plans go wrong far more often than the courier's do, and his, in my opinion, lower intelligence leaves him in situations where the only option is fighting more often than not. There's also the matter that the courier is likely more experienced, V only spends a couple of weeks, maybe a month at most doing big-league gigs, based on the given life expectancies doing dialogues and the fact that paying rent in the game is effectively a one time purchase, and it seems like V is in his mid twenties, just based on appearances and relations to other characters. The courier, however, is implied to be well into his thirties, as he indicates he may have a seventeen year old son at one point, and in one of the endings for the Old World Blues DLC, it's implied the timescale of his overall story was years long. This is on top of the fact that he was probably fighting and killing from a much younger age than V, as basically the only inhabitants of the wasteland that don't start fighting for survival super young are vault dwellers, something the courier is not. Johnny, however, is considerably more skilled than V, and he's in his mid thirties, potentially putting him on par with the courier in terms of experience if he were to take control at any point, but he's also far brasher, and easier to exploit.

Then, there's the factor that I went back and forth on the most. Could V hack the courier? For certain gadgets, I think the answer is a resounding "no", such as all of the courier's implants from the medical clinic, as they are mostly self-contained computing devices or purely mechanical devices, it would be like trying to hack a calculator or a piston without being able to touch them. For others, it was less clear, namely the pip boy, it has been hacked before, most notably by father Elijah, but he was able to get up close. Would V be able to hack it without even touching it? Personally, I doubt it. The pip boy is so antiquated it would work on a completely different architecture to the one V is used to, considering computing technology stopped developing in fallout in the 1970s or so, he'd be trying to interface with tech over a hundred years out of date, that isn't connecting to any of the networks he usually sends viruses through, that isn't using any of the protocols he normally takes advantage of. It's sort of hard to overstate how old the pip-boy would seem, it's most complex communications network is a radio and it still stores its data on magnetic tapes. Hell, there's contention in the lore over whether transistors were ever developed in the fallout universe, implying it might not even run on a binary framework, making it completely inscrutable to any of V's daemons. V actually had trouble getting a crane to do what he wanted it to in an Aldecados storyline because it ran on punchcards, and it wasn't connected to the net, and I imagine a similar problem coming up here. But, for the sake of it, lets imagine he could compromise the pip boy, maybe he can run up to it at super speed and plant a daemon in it before the courier can react. Basically the worst thing that happens is the courier loses access to VATS and there's a small explosion on his wrist. Hardly a win condition.

This was all without mentioning another genuine disadvantage V has, he's terminally ill and it shows. He spends a LOT of time coughing and sputtering and retching up blood during the story and he passes out multiple times purely because of the effects of the biochip. It frequently blurs and distorts his vision and it can weaken him dramatically, often right before climactic fights, and while V performed some of his greatest feats suffering with this illness, it doesn't change the fact that he simply does not have the capacity to recover, he can ONLY get worse, and based on how its been going for him, a coughing fit or temporary blindness would be very likely to rear it's head during a fight like this.

TL;DR

So, to recap, the courier has a 50x strength and durability advantage, which grows to over 100x if you accept the numbers for higher tier weapons in the fallout universe, he's over 4x stronger than V's most powerful car, he's smarter, more experienced, immune and resistant to most of V's special weaponry, he's too old school to be thoroughly hacked, he has better, and more available healing and he's not suffering with any terminal health problems. V can move a bit faster though, 1.3x-2x, depending on how much either man is amping up their abilities at the moment, he has more vertical mobility, arguably more skill in melee combat, and his reflexes are fast enough that he'd be unlikely to miss a single shot.

Doesn't change much when a couple of stray lasers, punches, bullets or grenades from the courier could vaporize him in an instant and that speed gap is far too small and inconsistent for him to feasibly avoid everything.

The courier wins.

No idea what the next time will be I guess I'll just wait and see.

Addendum based on Cyberpunk Edgerunners:

https://urbanplanningexpert.blogspot.com/2022/10/courier-6-vs-v-addendum.html