in FO3, two vaults had people in them, so im wondering if more vaults will be populated

vault 21 is inhabited. no info on the others though

oh wait the jungle vault is uninhabited

Most of the vaults failed because they were supposed to fail. The failures were just more spectacular than Vault-Tec had anticipated.

Vaults are all experiments that resulted in the deaths of all involved for the same kind of corporate reasoning that has made Umbrella such a successful and profitable company.

Except of course for all the control Vaults, which all seem to be where our character conveniently starts out.

Trust me, all Vaults are empty tombs of failed (but thematically creepy or sinister) experiments, unless you personally have come from it, then it is a control Vault free from horrifically expensive and convoluted experiments already solved by first year university psych majors, but which Vault-Tec decided to spend billions of dollars to test anyway.

There is one exception - you may come from a Vault which was an "experiment" to act exactly like a control Vault, only maybe "not open", so that it still counts as an experiment, which is useful when people start questioning exactly how many hundreds of billions of dollars a company has spent on multiple redundant control Vaults, when only one would have been necessary.

Of course, all these Vaults would have paid off in research for the space program if the nukes hadn't fallen. That is why our space program is so pitiful in real life - NASA hasn't spent a trillion dollars locking people underground with no clothes or with annoying static playing constantly, and our space program has suffered for it.

:angry:

What? I'm not bitter or anything . . . :glare:

This.

Vault 21: inhabbited
Vault 22: uninhabbited
Vault 34: IIRC, inhabbited by the "Boomers" faction.
Other 2: Unknown

Just because a vault was an experiment doesn't mean everyone necessarily had to die or go insane, it just means you have a high chance of having that happen to you, heh.

After all, vault 21 seemed to do fine deciding everything by gambling, and vault 101 did semi OK with its crazy overseers.

The thing that got me about the whole Vault program was how in the world did the Second Generation of Overseers on out agree to keep the experiments running?

I mean sure, some Vaults collapsed before a second Generation (Vault 15, 92), but others like Vault 106 and 108 seemed to have "failed" relatively recently, what with them still being inhabited. Vault 101 leaked like a Screen Door on an Airlock, but prior to the Water Chip incident, the Overseers managed to keep Vault 13 shut without much difficulty.

It just baffles me why they'd adhere to instructions. Even the first generation Overseers, really. Once the Bombs fell, all bets were off. Yet these loons went ahead with their experiments anyway.

There may have been more to the vaults than has been said. Perhaps the overseers didn't know that bombs had actually fallen. They may have been told by Vault-Tec that the nuclear exchange was a ruse to allow them to start the experiments. I prefer to think that Vault-Tec somehow started the nuclear war in order to get people into the vaults and to start the experiments. The overseers might have been overseen by a secret overseer who made sure they carried out the experiment. Vault-Tec may have had a central vault controlling all the other vaults.

Actually, the only way the Vault experiments make even a little sense is if Vault-Tec never expected nuclear war to actually occur.

I get the impression from some of the terminal notes in a few Vaults that they were indeed occupied and sealed before anyone knew the nukes were coming. It would have been a simple enough thing for Vault-Tec to tell these people that were paranoid enough to spend vast amounts of money reserving a space in the Vaults that the bombs were on the way and they had to get inside quickly. Vault-Tec could claim advanced knowledge or sources for the info, and people would believe them, not being able to risk staying outside the Vaults.

The music Vault is a good example. It seems from the diary notes you read on one of the terminals that the person was offered a spot in the Vault and had time to mull the offer over and then pack up her cherished possessions (like a violin) and enter the Vault.

Vault-Tec is just as bad as the Umbrella corporation in the Resident Evil series if they truly jeopardized the future of the human race for some silly experiments. (Will Mormon's freak out if they have to live naked? Will children form a society by themselves with no advlt supervision or go all Lord of the Flies? What happens when we bore people with no entertainment? What happens when we entertain them with lousy comedies? Etc.)

I firmly believe that Vault-Tec never expected the Doomsday Clock to hit midnight. Some of the overseer notes seem to indicate that the overseers follow the experiments because they believe that no bombs fell and Vault-Tec authorities are standing by outside monitoring the activity in the Vaults. Maybe the best indication that Vault-Tec never expected the bombs to fall is that we find no Vault-Tec employees in any of the Vaults, and none seem to still be alive on the surface either - even Vault-Tec HQ is abandoned.

Mostly though, I think the Vault Experiments are a pretty stupid retcon based off of only 2 lines in Fallout 2 (one from the President and one on a computer terminal) and then taken and run into the end-zone by Chris Avellone in the Fallout Bible. The things that are considered official experiments are stupid. Penny Arcade's Fallout strip of one guy and a crate of puppets is considered canon?! I love Penny Arcade, but what the hell? Men, women, and one panther? One man and a 1000 women? Jesus, was the Vault-Tec CEO an 8-year old child?

Not to mention Vault 15. Most of the Founders of the NCR trace their roots to that vault.


The Penny Arcade vault isn't canon (well the number is, but the effect isn't) until or unless its shown in a game (and byt that I mean more than just a jumpsuit - that just proves there is a vault with that number, and given that Vault-tec can count, thats no revelation.

As for why there are no Vault-Tec employees - how do you know there arent? Most of them probably were in the vaults - most of them didn't know about the experiments. Those that did know about the experiments were members of the Enclave Conspiracy, and lived the last days of their lives in the Enclave Facility near San Fransisco.

If Vault-tec didn't expect a war, then what function did the experiments perform - none. The experiments make limited sence without the New World Colonisation motivation.

i didn't think the ones mentioned in penny arcade were cannon.

does vault 21 count as one of the vaults? because I hope not

How is it convenient? If he weren't in a control vault he'd have died before the game started and not been around for us to play him. There is nothing convenient about that, it's the only possibility.

no idea, but people believe what they are told. Like in FO3, you believe you were born in 101, and that no-one has ever gone in and out of the vault. That's what everyone says, why would you believe otherwise.

I have no idea how a new Overseer is decided, but the next generation will believe exactly what the previous one has told them (with a few exceptions). If they have been told to keep the door closed at all costs, instant death if they open it, and they must keep music playing because that's what happens, then that is what you will do. "What you do mean, turn the music off? No-one has ever turned the music off. Can you imagine life without constant music? Too weird..."

There has been no player character from Vault 8. PCs in Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics were not born in vaults. Van Buren would also not have contained a vault dweller.

Well, there were 17 control Vaults, which means that people in them were actually supposed to stay okay and not undergo some crazy experiments, but the experiments still were conducted, not crazy

Most of the vaults were designed to fail, so the ratio of failed vaults is actually reversed, (such as, instead of only one vault failing, only one vault did not fail.) Vault 21 has been turned into a sort of themed hotel, (like if there was a placed called pirate town, the hotels there would be pirate themed), and there has been five confirmed vaults in game, however, even if the vault has survived this long being closed off, there is a high chance that the people in the vault have run out of people to breed with, and have started to inbreed. So pretty much by this time in the fallout universe, Every Vault has failed.

Garyyy~~~.

Don't care what kind of population they have as long as the backstory is really tasty.

There is enough genetic diversity between 1st cousins to be able to breed them for about 10 generations before anything weird starts coming up.

The Vaults were created with every intention that the nuclear bombs would fall. As evil as the experiments might seem, the desired result is somewhat noble given the circumstances. It was the plan of the shadow government that would later form the Enclave, to use the Vaults to perform a wide and in some cases deadly range of social experiments, all with the purpose of gathering data so that they could, in theory, leave the decimated planet Earth and hopefully colonize a new planet or world of some kind eventually. You have to keep in mind that all of Fallout is rooted in 40's and 50's sci-fi, and that there was always a popular element of conspiracy and paranoia in many such genre films of the time. It fits with the universe, and I rather like the whole idea. Everyone loves to nitpick though.

I know all that. I would have no problem with the experiments if they WORTHY of being conducted.

All the experiments that are canon are pointless and stupid and experiments proving the effects of such things had already been done by universities in the 1940s and 1950s. It would be like Microsoft spending 200 billion dollars to build a large underground facility to hold 1000 people and test whether or not cigarette smoke caused lung cancer.

Nudist societies have been around since the 1920s and there was even a medieval religious cult called Adamites that worshipped in the nvde. Yet Vault-Tec spent billions to see if people could live naked in space, even if those people had previously had a nudity taboo? What the hell?

THAT is my main problem with the Vault Experiments. Even the confirmed canon ones sound like an adolescent joke. I don't think it is a nitpick, either. Before FO3, we saw no evidence of Vault Experiments in the previous games (aside from a Vault-Tec monitoring vault in Tactics). I just want my shadowy conspiracy company to have sane goals and agendas and methods of achieving them.

Except President Richardson's statement on the matter.

In all fairness Richardson may have had been wrong, and even if he wasn't the Fallout Bible is what presented many of the inane experiments. To be perfectly honest I would have preferred if Vaults had remained as what they were originally intended to be: massive nuclear fallout shelters.

I specifically said evidence. Most of what President Richardson said was goading the player on. Hell, the President was trying to make himself a martyr, saying the country would go on, etc. I meant that we saw no evidence or indication of Vault experiments in any of the Vaults we visited in FO1 or FO2, regardless of the President's assertion on the matter.


As would I. Yes, the Fallout Bible is a funny case. It is considered canon except when contradicted by a game, and sometimes it even contradicts itself. Not to mention that Chris Avellone has gone back and changed his mind and reversed some things previously stated in the Fallout Bible.