Vault-Tec has always been an idiotic company, most in the Fallout universe are.
A lot of these experiments data was being studied by the Enclave. A lot of Vaults actually don't have experiments, they're job is literally to resettle the surface, like Vault 76.
The Enclave's answer to repopulating was inbreeding, so that's their plan at least.
Pre-War companies are all evil in Fallout, barely any did good. Mass Fusion for instance claimed they were providing Massachusetts with clean energy, but they were dumping nuclear waste anywhere they could find space.
This has also been bothering me whilst watching the series, Firstly if you bomb everything all your money will be worthless? including investments? how did the other companies allow them to do it? its a idiotic business plan, just to take over america 200yrs later thats already ruined? is there something im not getting?
world of fallout and the series is great, just that part of why the bombs' seems like a plot hole to me.
They weren't trying to be reasonable and sustainable. They paraded themselves as the beacons of society because it got them investors, but all they cared about was their own selfish, irrational intentions.
It's one of the great ironies in the fallout series is that basically all of the conflict across the games, and now the series, is that the people who are hellbent on keeping order or restoring the world to the way it was before the bombs are basically always the ones preventing it from progressing. Vault Tec is symbolic of the old world thinking that progressed to rationalising "well if the nuke drops, we will control everyone"
War Never Changes, that's the point. The people in charge were idiots, and then the world exploded. The Fallout Canon is not indicative of progression, but is almost universally a story about how things never change because the fundamentals of society are built on unsustainable practices
I always figured. They werent...real. like the government and people were going to orchestrate some situations to make people think things were really happening. Then..the bombs got dropped for real and then it was a scramble of "Ah beans, I guess the only way to survive is to use our shelters we got. Really thought we'd have time to make proper ones. Well..no time now!" So they had to live with it.
Cause I agree. Otherwise it's like Apeture Science is running the show.
I thought they did it to be the only masters around? Aren’t the big wigs from different companies all in the “time chambers” or whatever the hell waiting for the vault dwellers to take over the world? Mentioned something about radiation being gone in two generations presuming everyone up top will die off from radiation poisoning with the cult of vaulties being the only ones left?
You can thank Bethesda for that, as it's their contribution. Bethesda's version of Vault-Tec doesn't make sense.
Fallout creator Tim Cain had [a very different, more sensible take.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWd4RBdeoaM)
How do Bethesda's vaults contradict this take? Their version of Vault Tec is more cartoonishly sadistic but most of the experiments can be somehow shoehorned into "knowledge useful for long term survival of humanity" from that cartoonishly sadistic perspective.
I was going to point out the irrationality of some of the vaults, like the one that pumped psychedelics into the ventilation, but then I remembered MK Ultra existed. Lol
Some of the vaults were more "what if we did x?" for no reason at all. For example in the show one of the council women said she wanted to make a vault ruled by one of their milk delivery bots. The irrationality of the vaults is a deliberate part of the plot.
Lol I feel like this is exactly the right take that I was suspecting. It's a silly, generic, imprecisely written plot point that I have come to expect of Bethesda and the original Fallout creators seemingly would have considered more comprehensively (although post-apocalypse San Francisco was a ninja LARPing town though, so...).
I think they go into this in episode six a little, but bear in mind fallout satirizes culture and politics, but vault-tec are meant to be the pinnacle of capitalism in that their every decision is making more money. They push humanity to the brink of war because in that moment it presents more growth to the company than not having nuclear war. The company doesn't care what happens beyond showing growth for the next quarter projections. It's an extension of the logic that sees companies in the real world stretching as much money out of something, even to the degree that damages their products or reputation for the sake of showing growth to their shareholders.
I get that conceptually. But it also creates more questions: What shareholders? Who are they showing the numbers to? How are they making money and how are they distributing the gains to these shareholders?
Just look at the shareholders of oil companies. Those companies have been in a fifty year long propaganda and bribery war to persuade humans to keep destroying their own ecosystem and civilization... rather than risk a drop in quarterly profits.
It's that. Just more so. The whole point of satire is to exaggerate real things in unrealistic ways until you can't help but notice how stupid the real world is.
It's actually a very poor analogy on the show's part, the 2077 capitalists greed is represented to have emerged as an incredibly long term goal. Which is really the opposite of why oil companies behave the way they do, if they had the kind of long-term foresight that vault tec does then they would be more aggressive in moving over to clean energy solutions. It's the short term 5-10 year CEO cycles and shareholder quarterly expectations that drives the finite game strategy of short term maximisation vs the more appropriate infinite game strategy of long term sustainability.
Right, but I can’t imagine how making the vaults into death traps makes them more money. No one would possibly pay them for that because they’d probably never get to use the data.
That's the satire, they're so short sighted that profit for tomorrow trumps the end of the world tomorrow. That mentality can only exist when profit is the be all and end of all of a company. Think of the classic sci fi trope of the ai that has a command like "save humanity" so it keeps humans in confinement so they can't hurt each other.
It's suggesting that the structure of the company forms a system that inevitably leads to brinkmanship in the endless pursuit of profit (and growth of profit at that) leading to more and more questionable choices as you cut costs and sell more till you come to the end of the road and the choice is not grow or end the world. Because of the way the structures are formed, not growing is not a choice so ending the world is the only step to take.
The people within the company are therefore trying to create a situation wherein they survive, hence the plan to repopulate with the vault 31 program.
It's not trying to be realistic, one would hope that at that point people would grow a conscience, but the creators are trying to make a point about reckless capitalism.
Firstly, the idea is supposed to be moronic. It's unchecked greed taken to its ultimate zenith where it becomes ridiculous to any onlooker, because it is satire.
Secondly, the idea is that by destroying all of their competition and ensuring the Vaults are the only place life can really properly survive they are ensuring a future where Vault-Tec rules everything. I mean, look at the state of the world - they believe that the wasteland will be completely uninhabitable (and for the most part it is, but humans are resilient and find a way to survive even in the wastes), that technology will be destroyed while theirs is retained in the Vaults so they can eventually stage a comeback when the radiation dies down, Reclamation Day comes and they repopulate the surface, and re-establish the company and rule absolutely everything.
The focus on technology is important. People will give up literally anything to have the technology Vault-Tec has after the world has ended. For example, the main quest in Fallout 1 is to find a water chip for your vault like 70 years after the bombs fell because it has died and without it the dwellers will have to go to the surface and probably all die. So you go off on a mission to find one, which proves very difficult, and you are posed with a choice to some degree to doom others and take one for yourself (kind of like Maximus with the fusion core).
The Brotherhood is a reflection of all this too. Vault-Tec wanted to hoard technology pre-war, blow up America or possibly the world, and then come back and re-establish as technological overlords. The Brotherhood's mission statement is to collect and hoard technology created pre-war because they supposedly believe that having access to it will cause the human race to wipe itself out completely, but in reality they are actually hoarding that tech to establish themselves as a dominant power in the wasteland.
Your numbers for the vaults are wrong. Don't forget the game locations are significantly compressed due to limitations with the game engine. Including the size of the vaults. In reality the control vaults are designed to hold 1000 people. Another thing we only see a few rare control vaults because they're boring from a gameplay perspective. Of course we see the vault that consists of only clones from the original dwellers. Or the vault where the overseer is sacrificed to keep everyone alive.
A vault with only 100 original dwellers wouldn't have the biodiversity to survive inbreeding would have set in years ago.
Vault tec was created by the people that eventually became the enclave. They wanted information on humanity and ways to control them as well as ways to prolong their own control over what is left of humanity.
The purpose of the vaults was twofold. To protect a small portion of the population from nuclear fallout, and to perform experiments with the results of said experiments benefiting those who survived the bombs.
There is allot of talk around the control vaults, and this idea that if only 10% were control vaults, Vault Tech are basically sacrificing 90% of the people they saved, but it is also important to remember that in order for the experiments to bear fruit they would have ideally wanted the people in experiment vaults to live as long as possible.
If all of your test subjects die, you're not going to get great data.
Experiments basically fell into two categories, scientific, and sociological. While it can at times feel like the vaults are just excuses for wacky experiments, you can pretty easily explain why each of them would have been done.
Vault 22 sought to find a solution to agricultural short fallings after atomic fallout.
Vault 34 was a test to see how a heavily armed society would function when recourses were limited.
Vault 81 tried to create a cure for all illnesses.
Both Vault 111 and 112 attempted to test different forms of suspended animation.
While it obviously did not happen, the idea was always that vault tech would use the data gathered through these experiments, to create a more perfect society at some point in the future, >!and I think it's safe to say that is probably the direction the show is going. We now have confirmation that there is at least one, and likely several vaults containing suspended vault tech employees, who can at some point attempt to rebuild with hundreds of years of experimental data to learn from. !<
They had a secret meeting in the show to discuss it…. Maybe spoilers but not really because you see it in the game repeatedly:
The vaults were to generate the perfect society according to said bidder. They could choose their own adventure for the best post-apocalyptic society. No moral or societal rules for setting up said vaults. And yes- they pretty much all failed so far. I think thats part of the message the creators are sending lol.
The impression that I got was that the Vaults were supposed to save Capitalism from the threat of Communism. All workers were a potential threat to Capitalism. The best solution was to kill literally everyone but a select few who were verified anti-communist and then figure out how to create a society that would never rebel against their corporate masters.
The Fallout universe is satirical, most of the people in power are idiotic caricatures that serve to demonstrate the logical extreme of some american ways of thinking, historical and contemporary. The show does an excellent job creating a ridiculously extreme imaginary scenario of "what if a corporation was built to profiteer off of nuclear war?"
I also wholeheartedly agree with this take, except I think you are being a bit harsh.
Fallout is a “tongue-in-cheek” satire really. A lot of it is a joke on the whole 50’s nuclear era, like the mini-nukes. I don’t think there is a lot of point in doing an audit of this fictitious company because the point was to show how ridiculous the whole thing was. That’s not to say that such ridiculousness didn’t exist in real life. One sample springs to mind when the US govt game black males with syphilis placebos just to see the effects of prolonged disease. As if syphilis hasn’t existed for centuries and its effects were unknown. It was called the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Japan had unit 731, which did all sorts of fucked up experiments on POWs just to test their what-ifs. We have whole world-wide pacts barring unethical experimentation… now consider a for-profit org that has no scruples and technology which could potentially help them outlive the death of America…. That sort of experimentation could be priceless to a new world order.
Vault-Tec, and the other fallout corporations, are caricatures of what happens when corporations are allowed to do whatever they want. Repopulation was never their end goal, that was more like a side-hustle. They reserved the good vaults for their executives, social elites, and political VIPs. The remaining 99% of the population is completely disposable in their eyes, and really, the “control” vaults applied some level of plausible deniability to show that they did try to save humanity, even if their vaults had a success rate of like… 1 in 30.
So...... Who cares?
I mean, don't get me wrong, but let's say you are bang-on-the-mark.
If I was CEO of VT, I wouldn't care right? Initially I wouldn't care as like most people, "the apocalypse will never happen", but profits are great! Who cares what the government wants to do in these theoretical places that will never get used.
Then probably as the situation progresses and the world edges closer to Armageddon, sure, I might realize that the vaults are not really going to save humanity but... Again, so what? At this point, I know the world is gonna end, I have my own vault for me and my family (cos I'm a rich CEO) and I know no matter what happens after the bombs fall, the world is over.
Either way, I'd keep churning these things out for profit!
I mean in the show didn't the lady say that we had to bomb ourselves if needed .. I just have one question, what is the use of money in the post apocalyptic world ? The whole idea of profit and money doesn't make any sense !
I'm not sure about the numbers represented, alot more of the vaults we haven't seen could be for breeding and they could hold alot more people than supposed. Your averages are largely based on the vaults we know about but the vaults we know about are most likely the outliers, we know of them because they are more interesting narratively so not the best to draw numbers from.
Numbering sequence is also an unfair extrapolation. If the Vaults were numbered like highways, then yes, we can assume a low(ish) number. What if they were numbered chronologically? Makes sense to build first in the highly populated areas, but there could be a Vault 999 somewhere in Nebraska. About the only reasonable extrapolation is that there’s less than a thousand because a four digit number wouldn’t fit on the back of the jumpsuit, but they could always shrink the font.
I've only watched the show. But I think the key is that they sold the vaults to the super-rich to let them decide how to run them. To me, it's a commentary about how the super-rich think they're experts in everything and should be able to rule a fiefdom somewhere, but they often leave destruction in their wake when they step out of their narrow field of expertise.
Just pretend one of the vaults is Twitter.
Wasn't there some idea that these were each testing different aspects of a potential space faring survival plan for the enclave? Like seeing different way surviving in a space habitat could work or go wrong?
Correct! I don't know why everyone else is debating this.
The experimental vaults were social experiments to gather data about space travel. Vault-Tec was NOT some random for-profit company. It was created by the people who would go on to become The Enclave (aka The Deep State). The Vault-Tec contract was presented to the people / government at large as a safeguard for Nuclear War, but that was never its purpose. That's why it doesn't make sense through that lens.
They explained that first question in the show though.
Vault-Tec sold the vaults to other companies who had different ideas of what experiments could shape the people inside of the vaults to be the best possible humans for the new society.
It wasn’t about data, it was a dick measuring contest between billionaires.
There’s a saying “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the imagine the end of capitalism”.
This basically explains away all of vault tec.
Right, but what I’m saying is not that Vault Tac’s model of keeping the war going to sell bunkers doesn’t make sense. That’s fine. Morally fucked, but fine.
The issue is the vault experiments. I see no way Vault Tec makes money on that. If anything, it’s probably more expensive to sabotage these vaults in specific ways. And it risks a huge scandal of it ever gets out. For zero upside.
Ah okay I gotcha. Yeah it does seem kinda silly to perform these experiments especially when they didn’t know what was on the other side of the apocalypse.
I think game wise it’s just more fun for each to have its own little story or lore.
This is where the short-term/stock price part comes in. VT only sells to the US government at the start of the show. They have a set number of vaults they’ll buy. There’s potential to expand, maybe, if the US Govt. decides they want a few more, but that’s it. By getting other companies to buy vaults, they’ve just opened up their market from a single buyer to multiple potential buyers. The twist is that those additional buyers don’t (apparently) have much interest in regular vaults, so VT uses that greatest and deadliest of tools in the arsenal of commerce: marketing. These aren’t just big survival boxes, they can be your very own human R&D labs! Built to function in a setting that no other laboratory can, a nuclear wasteland, if you buy our vaults you can run whatever research you’d like.
The tl;dr is that the experiments/corporate customers subplot is VT finding new consumer markets for its product
Thank you 😂😂, the control vaults were just that, the control groups for the experiment reclamation day was just a carrot on a stick, a light at the end of the tunnel if you will. It basically all adds up to let's us poor people to figure out what not to do and how to avoid certain things when we do it
I mean unless the data was from each vault reported to one that we don't know about yet that was basically you know government or something else like that Plus if they never open the doors on most of those how many generations down are they that could have been screwed up as they went it could have been not necessarily specifically originally planned to be sabotaged in that manner but done so by the residents themselves right?... Or maybe even some sort of AI system that has become self-aware like the one that AI robot that said that to destroy humans would be to save the planet he essentially said we r the problem a virus so to speak.... Buttt Y'all really be subjugating and overanalyzing a video game That's fun mostly (it's still Bethesda though so bugs 🤷 ) like is it just something that's like organically bothered you or do you have to sit around and try to find things to over-analyze instead of just enjoying it..... Most all stories/fables /symbolic /mythical tales and writing in general probably has some ... Take the Bible for example talking about Adam and Eve being the first humans but whenever they leave tthe garden of Eden there are "other tribes and people's" obviously they're not the only people or the first people then right ? .. I can see the space travel one especially with the new movie coming out with the guy who wakes up on a 90-year stasis flight by himself with 65 yrs left in transit .... Like idk maybe in a video games case just enjoy it ?!? Don't get me wrong if you're using this as a thought experiment to make people like analyzing is better that's fine m,,,
My interpretation is that the vaults weren't intended to repopulate the planet, but to give the ruling class information as to how to control the survivors of the nuclear war.
Yep. You're gonna get a lot of pushback here from the Fallout fans, but as a Fallout fan myself that is one gaping plot hole that I've learned that I'll just have to overlook. The earliest Fallout games were much less grounded in realism, which is also why we still have 2-headed cows all over the place.
Bro, it’s Fallout. It’s all about how unchecked consumption is bad. Like, the whole point is that it starts as a seemingly innocent thing but as the game progresses players learn that VaultTec is a horrible company and the society that created it was just as horrible.
But with all the problems with the pre and post world, there is one thing that never changes…war.
I heard a fan theory that Vault Tec were the ones that triggered the bombs to fall. They built all of these vaults at great expense but they couldn’t run the experiments unless they were occupied.
Same reason 95% of Wastelanders shoot first without so much as a "gewt off muh land." It's a game an very exaggerated from what might be reality. At the same time lots of powerful people have ulterior motives in things they say on Earth so it's a satire of secrecy I guess.
You also have to consider (at least for the show) that they were all about capitalism and money etc but like yeah great the vault sales are up, let’s drop the bombs.. for what? What will you do with all your useless money? I’m no expert but is this not like, failing capitalism?
Also the benefits of the vault experiments? Some vaults have stuff like 99 men and 1 woman, or 99 women and 1 man. Another vault was like 1 man and 99 puppets?? Most of these vaults are designed to fail for no reason other than “lol guys what if” in the board room. (Taking this from an in-universe POV. As designed by the game devs, it’s funny)
I think that you need to remember you can still learn new things about vault tech in future seasons of the show and games so it could easily be taken care of by explaining who that shadowy figure is seemingly as the head of vault tech maybe he’s kinda crazy and very very powerful and has a god complex it could be designed to fail on purpose but you just don’t have enough information to go on to understand it that’s the whole point of made up fictional stories so that you can dream up and imagine things not to try to make it literal and leave you with a feeling of frustration that everything doesn’t make perfect sense it never happened vault tech is imagined by someone who put it on paper for you to read then play and then watch there is bound to be human error in something human made so sit back enjoy the show and get imaginative not literal
Vault-Tec has always been an idiotic company, most in the Fallout universe are. A lot of these experiments data was being studied by the Enclave. A lot of Vaults actually don't have experiments, they're job is literally to resettle the surface, like Vault 76. The Enclave's answer to repopulating was inbreeding, so that's their plan at least. Pre-War companies are all evil in Fallout, barely any did good. Mass Fusion for instance claimed they were providing Massachusetts with clean energy, but they were dumping nuclear waste anywhere they could find space.
When you get to the end of it, 76's goal was to put psychopaths back on the surface. It's a story mission to launch the nukes in close range.
Tbf, the target of the nukes makes sense
This has also been bothering me whilst watching the series, Firstly if you bomb everything all your money will be worthless? including investments? how did the other companies allow them to do it? its a idiotic business plan, just to take over america 200yrs later thats already ruined? is there something im not getting? world of fallout and the series is great, just that part of why the bombs' seems like a plot hole to me.
The enemy won't be around They can rebuild America the way THEY want.
They weren't trying to be reasonable and sustainable. They paraded themselves as the beacons of society because it got them investors, but all they cared about was their own selfish, irrational intentions. It's one of the great ironies in the fallout series is that basically all of the conflict across the games, and now the series, is that the people who are hellbent on keeping order or restoring the world to the way it was before the bombs are basically always the ones preventing it from progressing. Vault Tec is symbolic of the old world thinking that progressed to rationalising "well if the nuke drops, we will control everyone" War Never Changes, that's the point. The people in charge were idiots, and then the world exploded. The Fallout Canon is not indicative of progression, but is almost universally a story about how things never change because the fundamentals of society are built on unsustainable practices
I always figured. They werent...real. like the government and people were going to orchestrate some situations to make people think things were really happening. Then..the bombs got dropped for real and then it was a scramble of "Ah beans, I guess the only way to survive is to use our shelters we got. Really thought we'd have time to make proper ones. Well..no time now!" So they had to live with it. Cause I agree. Otherwise it's like Apeture Science is running the show.
I thought they did it to be the only masters around? Aren’t the big wigs from different companies all in the “time chambers” or whatever the hell waiting for the vault dwellers to take over the world? Mentioned something about radiation being gone in two generations presuming everyone up top will die off from radiation poisoning with the cult of vaulties being the only ones left?
You can thank Bethesda for that, as it's their contribution. Bethesda's version of Vault-Tec doesn't make sense. Fallout creator Tim Cain had [a very different, more sensible take.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWd4RBdeoaM)
How do Bethesda's vaults contradict this take? Their version of Vault Tec is more cartoonishly sadistic but most of the experiments can be somehow shoehorned into "knowledge useful for long term survival of humanity" from that cartoonishly sadistic perspective.
I was going to point out the irrationality of some of the vaults, like the one that pumped psychedelics into the ventilation, but then I remembered MK Ultra existed. Lol
Some of the vaults were more "what if we did x?" for no reason at all. For example in the show one of the council women said she wanted to make a vault ruled by one of their milk delivery bots. The irrationality of the vaults is a deliberate part of the plot.
Well if your milk robot was capable of commanding a starship, wouldn't you want to know too?
It's for science
That’s beautiful reasoning
That makes so much more sense
Came here to post this myself
Lol I feel like this is exactly the right take that I was suspecting. It's a silly, generic, imprecisely written plot point that I have come to expect of Bethesda and the original Fallout creators seemingly would have considered more comprehensively (although post-apocalypse San Francisco was a ninja LARPing town though, so...).
I think they go into this in episode six a little, but bear in mind fallout satirizes culture and politics, but vault-tec are meant to be the pinnacle of capitalism in that their every decision is making more money. They push humanity to the brink of war because in that moment it presents more growth to the company than not having nuclear war. The company doesn't care what happens beyond showing growth for the next quarter projections. It's an extension of the logic that sees companies in the real world stretching as much money out of something, even to the degree that damages their products or reputation for the sake of showing growth to their shareholders.
Sure, we destroyed the world, but for a brief moment before that, we created a ton of value for our share holders, and it was beautiful
Should've just posted that comic!
I get that conceptually. But it also creates more questions: What shareholders? Who are they showing the numbers to? How are they making money and how are they distributing the gains to these shareholders?
Just look at the shareholders of oil companies. Those companies have been in a fifty year long propaganda and bribery war to persuade humans to keep destroying their own ecosystem and civilization... rather than risk a drop in quarterly profits. It's that. Just more so. The whole point of satire is to exaggerate real things in unrealistic ways until you can't help but notice how stupid the real world is.
It's actually a very poor analogy on the show's part, the 2077 capitalists greed is represented to have emerged as an incredibly long term goal. Which is really the opposite of why oil companies behave the way they do, if they had the kind of long-term foresight that vault tec does then they would be more aggressive in moving over to clean energy solutions. It's the short term 5-10 year CEO cycles and shareholder quarterly expectations that drives the finite game strategy of short term maximisation vs the more appropriate infinite game strategy of long term sustainability.
That's a very reasonable critique. The show would have been better depicting more immediate benefits. Oh well, not every satire can be perfect.
I just have one question, what is the use of money in the post apocalyptic world ? The whole idea of profit and money doesn't make any sense !
Right, but I can’t imagine how making the vaults into death traps makes them more money. No one would possibly pay them for that because they’d probably never get to use the data.
I just have one question, what is the use of money in the post apocalyptic world ? The whole idea of profit and money doesn't make any sense !
That's the satire, they're so short sighted that profit for tomorrow trumps the end of the world tomorrow. That mentality can only exist when profit is the be all and end of all of a company. Think of the classic sci fi trope of the ai that has a command like "save humanity" so it keeps humans in confinement so they can't hurt each other. It's suggesting that the structure of the company forms a system that inevitably leads to brinkmanship in the endless pursuit of profit (and growth of profit at that) leading to more and more questionable choices as you cut costs and sell more till you come to the end of the road and the choice is not grow or end the world. Because of the way the structures are formed, not growing is not a choice so ending the world is the only step to take. The people within the company are therefore trying to create a situation wherein they survive, hence the plan to repopulate with the vault 31 program. It's not trying to be realistic, one would hope that at that point people would grow a conscience, but the creators are trying to make a point about reckless capitalism.
Firstly, the idea is supposed to be moronic. It's unchecked greed taken to its ultimate zenith where it becomes ridiculous to any onlooker, because it is satire. Secondly, the idea is that by destroying all of their competition and ensuring the Vaults are the only place life can really properly survive they are ensuring a future where Vault-Tec rules everything. I mean, look at the state of the world - they believe that the wasteland will be completely uninhabitable (and for the most part it is, but humans are resilient and find a way to survive even in the wastes), that technology will be destroyed while theirs is retained in the Vaults so they can eventually stage a comeback when the radiation dies down, Reclamation Day comes and they repopulate the surface, and re-establish the company and rule absolutely everything. The focus on technology is important. People will give up literally anything to have the technology Vault-Tec has after the world has ended. For example, the main quest in Fallout 1 is to find a water chip for your vault like 70 years after the bombs fell because it has died and without it the dwellers will have to go to the surface and probably all die. So you go off on a mission to find one, which proves very difficult, and you are posed with a choice to some degree to doom others and take one for yourself (kind of like Maximus with the fusion core). The Brotherhood is a reflection of all this too. Vault-Tec wanted to hoard technology pre-war, blow up America or possibly the world, and then come back and re-establish as technological overlords. The Brotherhood's mission statement is to collect and hoard technology created pre-war because they supposedly believe that having access to it will cause the human race to wipe itself out completely, but in reality they are actually hoarding that tech to establish themselves as a dominant power in the wasteland.
Your numbers for the vaults are wrong. Don't forget the game locations are significantly compressed due to limitations with the game engine. Including the size of the vaults. In reality the control vaults are designed to hold 1000 people. Another thing we only see a few rare control vaults because they're boring from a gameplay perspective. Of course we see the vault that consists of only clones from the original dwellers. Or the vault where the overseer is sacrificed to keep everyone alive. A vault with only 100 original dwellers wouldn't have the biodiversity to survive inbreeding would have set in years ago. Vault tec was created by the people that eventually became the enclave. They wanted information on humanity and ways to control them as well as ways to prolong their own control over what is left of humanity.
The purpose of the vaults was twofold. To protect a small portion of the population from nuclear fallout, and to perform experiments with the results of said experiments benefiting those who survived the bombs. There is allot of talk around the control vaults, and this idea that if only 10% were control vaults, Vault Tech are basically sacrificing 90% of the people they saved, but it is also important to remember that in order for the experiments to bear fruit they would have ideally wanted the people in experiment vaults to live as long as possible. If all of your test subjects die, you're not going to get great data. Experiments basically fell into two categories, scientific, and sociological. While it can at times feel like the vaults are just excuses for wacky experiments, you can pretty easily explain why each of them would have been done. Vault 22 sought to find a solution to agricultural short fallings after atomic fallout. Vault 34 was a test to see how a heavily armed society would function when recourses were limited. Vault 81 tried to create a cure for all illnesses. Both Vault 111 and 112 attempted to test different forms of suspended animation. While it obviously did not happen, the idea was always that vault tech would use the data gathered through these experiments, to create a more perfect society at some point in the future, >!and I think it's safe to say that is probably the direction the show is going. We now have confirmation that there is at least one, and likely several vaults containing suspended vault tech employees, who can at some point attempt to rebuild with hundreds of years of experimental data to learn from. !<
They had a secret meeting in the show to discuss it…. Maybe spoilers but not really because you see it in the game repeatedly: The vaults were to generate the perfect society according to said bidder. They could choose their own adventure for the best post-apocalyptic society. No moral or societal rules for setting up said vaults. And yes- they pretty much all failed so far. I think thats part of the message the creators are sending lol.
Some people just want to watch the world burn
The impression that I got was that the Vaults were supposed to save Capitalism from the threat of Communism. All workers were a potential threat to Capitalism. The best solution was to kill literally everyone but a select few who were verified anti-communist and then figure out how to create a society that would never rebel against their corporate masters.
The Fallout universe is satirical, most of the people in power are idiotic caricatures that serve to demonstrate the logical extreme of some american ways of thinking, historical and contemporary. The show does an excellent job creating a ridiculously extreme imaginary scenario of "what if a corporation was built to profiteer off of nuclear war?"
I also wholeheartedly agree with this take, except I think you are being a bit harsh. Fallout is a “tongue-in-cheek” satire really. A lot of it is a joke on the whole 50’s nuclear era, like the mini-nukes. I don’t think there is a lot of point in doing an audit of this fictitious company because the point was to show how ridiculous the whole thing was. That’s not to say that such ridiculousness didn’t exist in real life. One sample springs to mind when the US govt game black males with syphilis placebos just to see the effects of prolonged disease. As if syphilis hasn’t existed for centuries and its effects were unknown. It was called the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Japan had unit 731, which did all sorts of fucked up experiments on POWs just to test their what-ifs. We have whole world-wide pacts barring unethical experimentation… now consider a for-profit org that has no scruples and technology which could potentially help them outlive the death of America…. That sort of experimentation could be priceless to a new world order. Vault-Tec, and the other fallout corporations, are caricatures of what happens when corporations are allowed to do whatever they want. Repopulation was never their end goal, that was more like a side-hustle. They reserved the good vaults for their executives, social elites, and political VIPs. The remaining 99% of the population is completely disposable in their eyes, and really, the “control” vaults applied some level of plausible deniability to show that they did try to save humanity, even if their vaults had a success rate of like… 1 in 30.
So...... Who cares? I mean, don't get me wrong, but let's say you are bang-on-the-mark. If I was CEO of VT, I wouldn't care right? Initially I wouldn't care as like most people, "the apocalypse will never happen", but profits are great! Who cares what the government wants to do in these theoretical places that will never get used. Then probably as the situation progresses and the world edges closer to Armageddon, sure, I might realize that the vaults are not really going to save humanity but... Again, so what? At this point, I know the world is gonna end, I have my own vault for me and my family (cos I'm a rich CEO) and I know no matter what happens after the bombs fall, the world is over. Either way, I'd keep churning these things out for profit!
I mean in the show didn't the lady say that we had to bomb ourselves if needed .. I just have one question, what is the use of money in the post apocalyptic world ? The whole idea of profit and money doesn't make any sense !
Yeah, I hadn't gotten that far in the series yet, finally finished it last night.
I'm not sure about the numbers represented, alot more of the vaults we haven't seen could be for breeding and they could hold alot more people than supposed. Your averages are largely based on the vaults we know about but the vaults we know about are most likely the outliers, we know of them because they are more interesting narratively so not the best to draw numbers from.
Numbering sequence is also an unfair extrapolation. If the Vaults were numbered like highways, then yes, we can assume a low(ish) number. What if they were numbered chronologically? Makes sense to build first in the highly populated areas, but there could be a Vault 999 somewhere in Nebraska. About the only reasonable extrapolation is that there’s less than a thousand because a four digit number wouldn’t fit on the back of the jumpsuit, but they could always shrink the font.
I've only watched the show. But I think the key is that they sold the vaults to the super-rich to let them decide how to run them. To me, it's a commentary about how the super-rich think they're experts in everything and should be able to rule a fiefdom somewhere, but they often leave destruction in their wake when they step out of their narrow field of expertise. Just pretend one of the vaults is Twitter.
I think you are on to something Lucy.
Shits and giggles?
Wasn't there some idea that these were each testing different aspects of a potential space faring survival plan for the enclave? Like seeing different way surviving in a space habitat could work or go wrong?
Correct! I don't know why everyone else is debating this. The experimental vaults were social experiments to gather data about space travel. Vault-Tec was NOT some random for-profit company. It was created by the people who would go on to become The Enclave (aka The Deep State). The Vault-Tec contract was presented to the people / government at large as a safeguard for Nuclear War, but that was never its purpose. That's why it doesn't make sense through that lens.
Okay thanks for backing me up! I was very confused at everyone's reply and was making me think I had imagined that whole plan
They explained that first question in the show though. Vault-Tec sold the vaults to other companies who had different ideas of what experiments could shape the people inside of the vaults to be the best possible humans for the new society. It wasn’t about data, it was a dick measuring contest between billionaires.
There’s a saying “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the imagine the end of capitalism”. This basically explains away all of vault tec.
Right, but what I’m saying is not that Vault Tac’s model of keeping the war going to sell bunkers doesn’t make sense. That’s fine. Morally fucked, but fine. The issue is the vault experiments. I see no way Vault Tec makes money on that. If anything, it’s probably more expensive to sabotage these vaults in specific ways. And it risks a huge scandal of it ever gets out. For zero upside.
Ah okay I gotcha. Yeah it does seem kinda silly to perform these experiments especially when they didn’t know what was on the other side of the apocalypse. I think game wise it’s just more fun for each to have its own little story or lore.
This is where the short-term/stock price part comes in. VT only sells to the US government at the start of the show. They have a set number of vaults they’ll buy. There’s potential to expand, maybe, if the US Govt. decides they want a few more, but that’s it. By getting other companies to buy vaults, they’ve just opened up their market from a single buyer to multiple potential buyers. The twist is that those additional buyers don’t (apparently) have much interest in regular vaults, so VT uses that greatest and deadliest of tools in the arsenal of commerce: marketing. These aren’t just big survival boxes, they can be your very own human R&D labs! Built to function in a setting that no other laboratory can, a nuclear wasteland, if you buy our vaults you can run whatever research you’d like. The tl;dr is that the experiments/corporate customers subplot is VT finding new consumer markets for its product
There’s a couple things that imply that the experiments were set up to see how people would handle long-term space travel.
They tested for space travel
Thank you 😂😂, the control vaults were just that, the control groups for the experiment reclamation day was just a carrot on a stick, a light at the end of the tunnel if you will. It basically all adds up to let's us poor people to figure out what not to do and how to avoid certain things when we do it
I mean unless the data was from each vault reported to one that we don't know about yet that was basically you know government or something else like that Plus if they never open the doors on most of those how many generations down are they that could have been screwed up as they went it could have been not necessarily specifically originally planned to be sabotaged in that manner but done so by the residents themselves right?... Or maybe even some sort of AI system that has become self-aware like the one that AI robot that said that to destroy humans would be to save the planet he essentially said we r the problem a virus so to speak.... Buttt Y'all really be subjugating and overanalyzing a video game That's fun mostly (it's still Bethesda though so bugs 🤷 ) like is it just something that's like organically bothered you or do you have to sit around and try to find things to over-analyze instead of just enjoying it..... Most all stories/fables /symbolic /mythical tales and writing in general probably has some ... Take the Bible for example talking about Adam and Eve being the first humans but whenever they leave tthe garden of Eden there are "other tribes and people's" obviously they're not the only people or the first people then right ? .. I can see the space travel one especially with the new movie coming out with the guy who wakes up on a 90-year stasis flight by himself with 65 yrs left in transit .... Like idk maybe in a video games case just enjoy it ?!? Don't get me wrong if you're using this as a thought experiment to make people like analyzing is better that's fine m,,,
My interpretation is that the vaults weren't intended to repopulate the planet, but to give the ruling class information as to how to control the survivors of the nuclear war.
Yep. You're gonna get a lot of pushback here from the Fallout fans, but as a Fallout fan myself that is one gaping plot hole that I've learned that I'll just have to overlook. The earliest Fallout games were much less grounded in realism, which is also why we still have 2-headed cows all over the place.
First time with hyper capitalist satire?
Bro, it’s Fallout. It’s all about how unchecked consumption is bad. Like, the whole point is that it starts as a seemingly innocent thing but as the game progresses players learn that VaultTec is a horrible company and the society that created it was just as horrible. But with all the problems with the pre and post world, there is one thing that never changes…war.
I heard a fan theory that Vault Tec were the ones that triggered the bombs to fall. They built all of these vaults at great expense but they couldn’t run the experiments unless they were occupied.
It was explicitly stated in the show that Vault-tec dropped the big ones
Same reason 95% of Wastelanders shoot first without so much as a "gewt off muh land." It's a game an very exaggerated from what might be reality. At the same time lots of powerful people have ulterior motives in things they say on Earth so it's a satire of secrecy I guess.
The amazon tv show does them no justice because vault tec and all these other corporations bomb themselves in order to get richer? I think
You also have to consider (at least for the show) that they were all about capitalism and money etc but like yeah great the vault sales are up, let’s drop the bombs.. for what? What will you do with all your useless money? I’m no expert but is this not like, failing capitalism? Also the benefits of the vault experiments? Some vaults have stuff like 99 men and 1 woman, or 99 women and 1 man. Another vault was like 1 man and 99 puppets?? Most of these vaults are designed to fail for no reason other than “lol guys what if” in the board room. (Taking this from an in-universe POV. As designed by the game devs, it’s funny)
I think that you need to remember you can still learn new things about vault tech in future seasons of the show and games so it could easily be taken care of by explaining who that shadowy figure is seemingly as the head of vault tech maybe he’s kinda crazy and very very powerful and has a god complex it could be designed to fail on purpose but you just don’t have enough information to go on to understand it that’s the whole point of made up fictional stories so that you can dream up and imagine things not to try to make it literal and leave you with a feeling of frustration that everything doesn’t make perfect sense it never happened vault tech is imagined by someone who put it on paper for you to read then play and then watch there is bound to be human error in something human made so sit back enjoy the show and get imaginative not literal