Remember that the Fallout series has a strong element of satire/black comedy running throughout. It was more subtle in FO3 but it was still there. Not every element of the story is meant to be taken seriously. The vault experiment is intended to provoke a "dude, WTF?" response. It's one-half shout out to "Dr Strangelove" (particularly the last scene) and one half commentary on the military-industrial complex and bloated government bureaucracies.

Dark comedy is usually defined as topics or events being treated in an unusually humorous manner while maintaining their seriousness. This Fallout 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLphfppRIaU is a good example of black comedy. It is uncomfortably funny, but note that it is NOT silly. For black comedy to work, it must be treated in a serious manner.

Another example is the old man in Modoc who has lost his marbles and rambles a random sentence when set off by any word starting with 'R'. It is generally very funny, even though his a man with a mental illness. Then, while you are chuckling at the funny old man, it swerves right into the dark as he casually mentions "I played doctor with Miria when she was little". Miria is a possible companion and spouse in the town of 18-19, and the old man is in his 60s-70s. THAT is dark comedy, when something is making you laugh and then it continues and you stop so quickly you hic-up swallowed air.

Seriousness is a matter of tone, and is independent of the actual content. Within the context of the game, there is nothing funny about the vault experiment or how it was presented. An over-reaching, callous government killed thousands of people out of morbid curiosity. Where's the fun in that? But it's meant to be taken out of context and compared to contemporary politics and culture. When you compare the government responsible for the vault experiment with what people believe about their own real-life government there's where you find the humor. Jonathan Swift was never serious about eating Irish children, but you wouldn't know that if all you had to go on was a literal interpretation of "A Modest Proposal". Likewise, there's nothing funny about performing life-and-death experiments on unconcenting people and you wouldn't see the humor in it if you limited yourself to the Fallout canon.

Comedy is in the eye of the beholder and often a matter of personal taste. I found many of the Vaults in Fallout 3 to be quite disturbing. Now, I don't mean that they scared me, but the whole affair of entering a Vault, seeing the destruction and decay, finding bodies and reading journals and terminals that made you empathize a bit with the former inhabitants, was a fairly depressing experience for me. I looked forward to exploring the next Vault, but was always happy to leave by the time it was over. I didn't find them particularly funny, but I did appreciate their inclusion.

Frankly, you don't know what social experiments might or might not have been done in the Fallout universe prior to the Vaults. There are also other factors that are simply impossible to reproduce in the test subjects. For instance, the fact that pretty much every single Vault resident knows that the world outside and everything they've ever known, has been destroyed. That the world is functionally over, and they are all alone except for the people in their own Vault.

A mindset that would clearly be prevelant on a "Spaceship Earth" holding the last remaining pure humans as they venture into the stars. No simple experiment can truly reproduce that situation, because the test subjects will always know that eventually they're going home, probably with a paycheck.

The Vaults fit in fine with the universe, a universe where, if you try to nitpick and examine every facet under the harsh microscope of "logic", you'll find countless flaws and impossibilities that could ruin the experience for you.

This, this, and THIS. You know, I'm a pretty accepting guy of whatever wacky stuff they want to do with the Fallout universe (I played and enjoyed Mothership Zeta for example - if they consider that canon I'd be cool with it). But there's two things in the Fallout universe that stick in my craw and I just can't "get over": The fact that it's 200 years after the bombs fell and the world is still the way it is, and the Vaults meant to shelter humanity from the nuclear holocaust being just one grand social experiment that dooms them all anyway. That latter one, all the overseers should've been bright enough to just say "to Hell with this" the very moment the bombs ACTUALLY FELL, and worked towards making their Vaults a more survivable society rather than rigidly adhering to some ancient instructions left to them by some dead people they never met.

Except from that perspective, the vaults also do not make sense.

Lets take the Vault 13 Figures as our baseline vault, simply because its the most well documented vault we have.

Cost to build:
$645,000,000,000 (or $645 short/American Billion USD).

Current US Military budget:
$719 short/American Billion USD.

So, without inflation, if you didn't buy any ammo, tanks, nukes, aircraft, or ships and asked your troops and civil servants to work for free, you can afford build 1 vault housing 1000 people per year.

Inflation - the one item that we can both price at the time of the war is the family car. Cost of the Chryslus Corvega: $199,999.99. Price of a family sized new Chrysler - about $25,000. Inflationry Factor: about x8.

So, you can build 8 vaults a year, with the current US Military budget, and save 8000 people per year. A project to build 122 vaults (So 122,000 people saved will take 16 years) For a country with a poplulation of 310 million today (and obviously much higher at the time of the great war)is 16x your military budget to save 0.1% of your population feasable?

Its not feasable in peacetime, much less when there's an almost certanty of war coming, and a recent war between Europe and a middle eastern coilition.

Simply, it isn't, unless you've got another motivation at hand.

Well, satire isn't meant to be laugh out loud funny. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Referencing Dr Strangelove again, here was one of the finest film satires of the 20th century, but if you were laughing at the end, you were one sick son of a [censored]. There were parts that were funny throughout the film, but the ending was definitely a downer. So while the vault experiment can be, and often is depressing and disturbing when viewed as satire it can be seen as being humorous or at least ironic.

well just going by what i read thruout fo3 in the various vaults and notes. vault tec was working for the gov aka enclave. the experiments ranged from using fev to make super soldiers to survive the upcoming nuke war to be used as soldiers. creating the mutants. other vaults were used to try repopulating the planet with pure non mutated specimens. via cloning vault 108. another vault was used to try mental control of a population via white noise vault 92. and of course you have to have a control vault thats just ment for basic survival to compare the data to aka vault 101. also its mentioned that the fev virus was intended to be a bio weapon used against the chinese to destroy them. so our new super soldiers could go in mop up and take over making us the victor in the war. this was the mentality of that era and time period. even in real life these things and experiments were conducted. lsd was used on troops in control groups to see the effect it had on them etc. so vaultec being a corporation with a government contract. ran said experiments as ordered obtained said data as ordered. and as in game it says after 20 yrs of experiments hence 20 yrs being the time period for said experiments to be done. the vaults were opened only the control vault 101 having seen that there was a nuke war and the world was not habitable decided to reseal the door . to live out there lives. its quite feesable some of the other control vaults around the globe made the same decission after they opened up there doors and reclosed themselves in like vault 13 etc. cus thru out all the experiments they had one common factor all were based in an isolation biodome type environment cut off from the outside. sealed away underground having no contact with the outside would have no idea there was a nuclear war above them. until they opened the door and looked out side and saw it. and the following generations of leaders would having grown up in the only environment they ever knew. would follow the jobs of there fathers without question. because thats what they know and all they know. as fars the experiments go the vault doors were timer sealed to open after 20 yrs. so if youve been to vault 106 you found they infected the air system with a mind control gas that drove people insane as a side effect. those effected went on a suicidal killing spree and killed everyone else inside. so now you have a dead vault sealed away with just a few if not one insane survivor left alone surounded by the dead. to eat the supplies etc. and having been nuts already probably killed themselves. so when vaulted opened up 20 yrs later all anyone who went in would find is a bunch of dead bodies and some notes etc. and again since each vault was isolated underground and running there own experiments noone outside knew what happend to them. just as noone inside knew what happened to those outside till the doors were unsealed and each other saw what took place.

Yes and yes. All that too. Though I suspect the $645 billion dollar figure for construction was pulled out of someone's ass. Hell, NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain took less money to build than that, and they had to hollow out a mountain and put an entire complex on springs and dampners to absorb nuclear strikes, and it has a giant vault door that seals, etc.

THere was intended to be a document locatable in Vault 8's datafliles that confirmed the story, but this was cut late in development.

I've always had a sneaking suspicion that a lot more would have been cut from Fallout 2 or changed if they had spent more than 10 months in development.

I think its the other way around - there's a lot that shows that FO2's development at the end was a rush job - lots of RTD errors, EPA, Shadow Who Walks (heck, the entire Raiders location), Cassidy's head, disipearing trunks....

moar Gary clones plz

I meant as far as story or plot revisions. Often a good plot or story in game development needs time to 'cook' and for revisions to be made. I don't think the FO2 team had enough time to separate themselves from the initial story ideas and look at them critically. They had to keep rushing ahead to make the release date. Like Frank Horrigan for instance - that just seemed to come out of nowhere, and made no sense for an organization focused on racial purity. The Fallout Bible seems to involve large chunks or sections just explaining reasons for stuff that happened in Fallout 2 or retconning them. :shrug:

I really don't think the Vault-Tec Experiments had to be made official in order to cause the tragedies.

Vault 15: Predates the concept of the Vault-Tec Experiment, and it failed due to severe overcrowding and people rushed to safety within it. A very real scenario.

Vault 12: Mechanical Failure prevented the Vault door from closing. Again, easy to occur without malicious oversight. Frankly, out of all the Vault-Tec experiments, Vault 12 made the least amount of sense, given the money and manpower that went into its construction if it was simply going to automatically fail anyway.

Vault 87: Experiments with FEV go out of control. No need for Vault-Tec/Enclave Scientists here. Just good old fashion "Science Run Amok".

Same with the other Vaults. Experiments happen, go out of control, and cause chaos. No Shadow Organization required.

Most were programmed to fail, the rest were opened by the Enclave or their Overseers. I wouldn't call Vault Dwellers sane, why they'd never figure that it'd be safe to walk around 100 years or more after the bombs dropped is beyond me.

Problem is that when running experiments on people, you're supposed to have ethical protocols in place so that "accidents happen" doesn't translate into "everybody dies". These protocols didn't exist in the vault-tec experiment. There weren't trying to kill people, they just weren't that concerned if they did.

Which just strikes me as a terrible waste of money and manpower. If these were social experiments on recolonization, then Vault-Tec/Enclave did more to sabotage their own results due to simple avoidable occurrences. Really, if any Vault was going to fail, you'd have thought it would be the Test Vault under LA, since it was just a demonstration model and not build an entirely new Vault that would be "designed to fail".

Still, in spite of everything, Vault 101 (Depending on your choices), Vault 13 (To an extent), and a thus unknown New Vegas Vault are still active and serving their function. So I suppose that's something.

Vault 15's experiment also had a multcultural society element.

But that was retconned in. In Fallout 1 Vault 15 was an otherwise normal vault with overcrowding issues resulting from panic whose children founded Shady Sands.

You know something? That's a damn good point. If Vault-Tec never sabotaged their own vaults, they (or the Enclave) would've been a major leading power in the Wasteland. Vault-Tec had it all for themselves: preserved technology safe from nuclear explosions; a healthy, un-irradiated, unmutated populace with the full level of education available prior to the bombs dropping; and both those things at the command of an Overseer taking his orders from Vault-Tec or any other government "official". With access to technologies like the GECK and a healthy populace with the guns and resources to rebuild, things would've looked much different (take Vault City, for instance, but multiply that by... a lot). However, as we all know, it didn't turn out that way because "HERP DERP LETS DO SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS THAT ARE GOING TO KILL OFF AND DESTROY ALL OF OUR OWN RESOURCES THAT WE HAVE SAFELY TUCKED AWAY!!!" :wacko:

No wonder I'm okay with aliens motherships that have massive death rays but I hate the notion of vault social experiements. :ahhh:

well what im thinking is the vaults were experiments but vaulttec didnt antisipate when the nukes were coming down as in how soon they figured they had time to run there senarios get there data from them and then build a vault that would take all that into consideration for repopulation and then build it but unfortunatly they ran out of time due to china pushing the button on em causing them to die before there ultimate goal was complete or it could be that some of the experimenst were being ordered into the vaults by a nutcase or a chinese operative to simply kill off the vaults so when they did nuke em we didnt have the people and the gear to survive afterwards creating what we have now as each vault recieved there overseeers sealed orders from the vaulttec computers its quite possible a cinese operative implanted a worm virus alternate orders into the system and those orders were sent to the vaults prior to there closing for there 20 year cycle once the vaults were closed the chinese enacted phase 2 of there plan n nuked us now theres noone left alive in vaulttec to stop the programs running and fix the computer hack so the vaults run the programs there ordered to and were now left with the aftermath but what i dont understand is the od folks senario the ydidnt add to teh game like the cuban missle crisis in the 60's had people making makeshift bunkers in there back yards why havent we seen any of those thruout the wastelands the closest ive seen was in fo3 with the family that hid in the national guard armory bunker i mena wouldnt you think alot of families tha tcouldnt get into teh vaults would have built there own bomb shelters on there lands and stocked em wit hsupplies for there families instead of just saying ok screw it were al lgonna die common jimmy walk wit hdaddy and mom into the nearest mushroom cloud instead of get into theshelter now close the door

I've never been a fan of the "vaults are experiments" thing that was revealed in Fallout 2, but it's not really fair to blame Chris Avellone for that. From what I can tell it was a concept and idea promoted by Tim Cain and other key creators of the setting. Though you can argue that Fallout 1 seems to contradict the idea. According to the Fallout bible Vault 13's experiment was that it wasn't given a spare waterchip, but somehow the first one lasted 90 years? Sure, whatever. So to some degree I think the "experiments" thing was retconned into Fallout 2, but was an idea that Cain and the others came up with. In their minds it contributed to the absurdist humor they wanted to pursue.

At any rate, since Fallout NV takes place over 200 years after the nukes, all the vaults at this point will have presumably opened by now.

The fewer the better, the insane are so much more entertaining.

The Multiculrual bit isn't retconned.. Go talk to Aradesh and Tandi in FO1. Theres very clear non american influences there.