So something I've been thinking, did Fallout 3 botch the concept of 'Vault Experiment' and just say 'MAKE 'EM SADISTIC'?

Now, the reason I'm asking this is, when I first got Fallout 3, I was confused why someone would do those things, since they seemed inextricably bound to fail. Vault 101 and 112 seemed to have some basis in the word experiment, the rest just seem sadistic. Then this past summer when I got Fallout Trilogy, I found out about Harolds Vault, Vault 8, Vault 13, and Vault 15. These have more base in logic to me, so do 21, 11, and 34. 22 is iffy. My point is, did Fallout 3 misconstrue the idea of the Vault Experiments?

As the topic sentence said, don't come in here bashing Fallout 3, this is a legitimate curiousity, so let's stick to the topic question at hand.

Yeah, and it and NV put too many vaults in too small of an area.

Well, I agree, but perhaps it's because Pre-War Vegas (Lore wise) was highly populated so they made a large quantity of them to full up the populace of rich who would buy a space in the vault.

First you have to understand the Vault Experiments were not meant to save anyone. Second there really is no failure. Enclave came up with 105 social experiments and the point was to sit back and watch.

Did Fallout 3 mess up the idea of the Vaults? IMO Yes and No. No being the two reason I already mentioned. Yes as in Vault 101 has the same idea as Vault 13 but it was to stay closed forever and not 200 years. Vault 87 messed with the lore behind FEV in that it was only to be at Meriposa/West Tek. Other Vaults like the one with Garry Clones is just stupid, they are crazy people and the vault is in bad shape and yet they are still living there and dressing themselves after 200 years.

The best Vault of Fallout 3 to me is Vault 106 but again having " Insane Survivors" 200 years later is just so stupid IMO.

I personaly take the stand that Vaultteck as it built vualts made the networks more and more regional, IE first it was "nation wide" then East/west then regional and probably finaly regional with some high population states haveing 1 or more complete regions in them.

also remember that at the time that Vualt 13 cost $645 Billion. . gas cost 7k-8k the corvega was 199,999.99 and buttercup was 16.999.99

so bascialy each Vualt was probably the modern equivelent of either 100 billion to build (based on the Corvegas price) (seriously 122 that would still be 12 Trillion nowdays) or if you base it on the price of gas, then Vault 13 cost roughly 645 million in current USD(or less) with a planned cost of the equivelent of 400 million (or less) per unit in current USD.

All the Vaults in total were 645 billion. Not 645 billion for a single vault. Ignore this post.

Gary clone was the end result of how bad the Cloneing(and aparetnly memory implantation tec was.

I think the mess up was that they may have mixed the purposes of 2 diferent vualts in that vualt,

that and I think they may have originaly planed on Fallout 3 being within about 200/240 months months after the start/end of the last war but then realised that causes a lot of problems with the lore (Ie its posible that what they planed in Washington was for the 2 "brotherhoods" to be US army/US Air force remnants and or USMC remnants, not actualy BOS remenants, to explain why the two groups did not work toghether)

I don't think Bethesda quite caught they were social experiments. It's one of those things from Fallout 3 that continue to haunt the series into NV with Vault 22.

Was there a list of experiments before with the above mentioned vaults?

I think the explanation for them is that those Insane "survivors" are actually raiders and other unfortunate wastelanders who wandered in to Vault 106 and due to the substance in the air, now believe that they are the inhabitants of the Vault (which is why they have begun to wear vault suits and that). They are not actually the original inhabitants of the vault.

Thats what I read on the wiki anyway, and I tend to believe it, regardless if its officially true or not, as it makes a lot more sense.



I wouldn't necessarily say it messed up the lore, its not like it contradicted anything (like for instance they didn't say that Vault 87 was the origin of FEV), its just that it added a new place that the FEV virus was located. To me, I kinda liked the idea of having the FEV virus in a vault, after all its probably the best place to continue the testing onto live humans, and I thought it made sense that the government would do it and Vault-Tec by that point had basically become a department of the government.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault#List_of_known_Vaults
Names, purposes, outcomes, locations of all mentioned vaults, for those interested. Vault 56 seems pretty sadistic :laugh:

The only vault I have a problem with is 87. FEV was a military project not Vault-Tec. It just didn't fit in for me. The rest are... well, fine. But what I noticed is that Bethesda seems to have taken vaults as science labs, rather than experiment groups. 87 is the obvious example. 108 and cloning experiments does have a social side I guess but doesn't really emphasize the sinister purpose of vaults. 22 is also an example to this. 11, 15 and 19 are more like what I like to find in a vault concept.

No, its 645 billion for Vault 13 alone (the section talks about Vault 13's statistics, not Project Safehouses') - http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault_Dweller%27s_Survival_Guide
(Otherwise one would be forced into the conclusion that the entire system only had 1000 occupants - which we know isn't the case)

back on topic, I don't think Fallout 3's experiments werent thought out as much as NV's and as fitting... But they do still fit between the limits of valid experiments as previously defined.

I find myself agreeing with the OP. All of the FO3 vaults save 101 weren't social experiments. They were military experiments. Cloning? Obvious utility in producing soldiers, no real utility for a social experiment unless you plan to clone your population. Using sound to turn people into killing machines? Obvious military utility, no real utility for a social experiment. FEV? Well, seeing as how it produced a race of super soldiers who plague the Capital Wasteland to this day, I shouldn't even need to comment. Even 112 was pretty bad on this regard, seeing as how the tech was basically a repurposed military simulation, as we saw in OA. The gas vault is arguable, but I'm suspecting it's also military.

I've thought the whole vault project was kind of dubious to begin with, but I could sort of see the logic. Then FO3 comes along and Vaults are basically made for military purposes. Problem there is that the military already had plenty of labs for running its unethical experiments. Mariposa and West Tek, for instance.

The wiki/fan explination makes sense yes but I would have been nice if Bethesda made it clear. Like having normal raiders in the Vault or raider clothing on the beds and such.

Vault 87 did mess with lore. First place to have FEV was West Tek but it was moved about 10 months before the Great War to Mariposa where human testing got started. Mariposa having survived the great war was a great place to move it to so why a Vault? Also the Virus in Vault 87 is a different type and having a different type would be best kept along side the original at Mariposa. It was top secret testing under FEV. Anyone that knew about it/worked on it, you would want them in one spot.

Then there is Vault 101 which was just a total copy of Vault 13 but insted of 200 years like V13, V101 was never to open, what is the difference? There is also Vault 122 which was not really an experiment it was just a way to test a different means of surviving.

Well, to be fair I think vault 112, or whatever it was the one with the psychedelic gas, was actually in the bible first. Vault 29 wasn't exactly a social experiment either.

What I don't get about the vault experiments is who did they think would benefit? The instigators are usually trying to create some sort of super soldier but who were they going to fight for?

(I think the plan was for the information to be used for the Enclave IMHO, so that they could be used for the ultimate soldier, but that went horribly wrong, and for example in vault 92 most of them went psycho instead Bwilder and they killed each other off or escaped to be Deathclaw snacks.)

There's a few things about the vaults that have bothered me. I expect the reason that they they are starting to lose focus is just that we've seen them in 3 games after the first, so the concept has been diluted by the necessity of making things fresh for each new game.

Here's a few vault-related observations of mine:

Massive expenditure on civilian vaults: does this make any sense except as a PR bonanza? As bewilderbeast (Heh, Confuse-a-Cat) points out, who benefits from the creation of super soldiers? The Enclave?
My Anne Elk theory is that the Vaults were never really about the people -- they were about real estate. Hundreds or thousands of secure bases scattered around the country. Clean out the survivors, if any, and move right in.
I also think that the sheer number of civilian vaults indicates that the Fallout world still harbors a great secret -- somewhere there must be a large number of survivors descended from the Military/Government/Industrial (the V.I.P.s) complex who were provided safe, non-experimental vaults. This may explain why we occasionally encounter lone scientists with no faction affiliation; it could also explain Talon Company and it's mission of keeping DC chaotic (That Talon could be an American Eagle's talon, couldn't it?)
Why were vault-dwellers, and no one else, fitted with Pip-Boys? Is every PB transmitting on a secret frequency to a monitoring station somewhere?

I'd prefer if the nature of the vaults wasn't warped too much, but a plot twist wouldn't be too unwelcome if it's done well. Also, anything that explains the nature of why the employer wants Talon Company to maintain chaos beyond "fur da lulz" is welcome.

I get that but did the government of the time really think that they could create these isolated vaults and after 200 years turn up saying "you probably don't remember us but we're the government and you all work for us"?

And super soldiers to fight who? Surely a race of super relief workers would have been a better idea.

As President Richardson made clear, the people in the vaults were irrelevant. In the Enclave's eyes they aren't *people*, they're subjects.

( They did not know, for all they knew, the Chinese would have survived and we would have needed the soldiers? After all, this is the Enclave were talking about, and they were thinking anything.)

Truth. The following is taken directly from Fallout Bible 0...

"...the federal government (or whatever branch of federal government was responsible - it was not necessarily the Enclave) may not have ever considered the Vaults as society's best chance for survival - the government may have considered themselves the best candidates for rebuilding the world and already had their asses covered in the event of a nuclear or biological war by relocating to other remote installations across the nation (and elsewhere) that weren't necessarily vaults. The Enclave certainly didn't seem to be devoting much effort to digging up any other vaults and trying to use the human stock there to rebuild civilization."

"Nonetheless, even members of the Enclave probably could not answer the question of who created the Vault experiments and their reasons, as many of the people responsible for the creation of the Vaults died long ago, and many records were lost in the great static of 2077. President Richardson was familiar with the purpose of the Vaults, but he never saw them as more than little test tubes of preserved humans he could mess with."

"Basically, the Vaults were never intended to save the population of the United States. With a population of almost 400 million by 2077, the U.S. would need nearly 400,000 Vaults the size of Vault 13, and Vault-Tec was commissioned to build only 122 such Vaults. The real reason for these Vaults was to study pre-selected segments of the population to see how they react to the stresses of isolationism and how successfully they re-colonize after the Vault opens"

Also in the bible is stated that in Fallout 2, with a successful skill roll, the player is able to uncover classified files on Vault 8 and Vault 13's intended purposes for vault experimentation...

"The player was also intended to apply his Science skill to the central computer in Vault 13 to obtain a history of Vault 13, the Overseer's involvement in the Vault Dweller's expulsion, and even worse, the true purposes of the Vaults. The Overseer was conscious of the true purpose of the Vaults as social experiments on a grand scale, and he drove out the Vault Dweller because he was afraid that he would ruin the experiment... or uncover it."

Yep, they're all a bit mad and we know that various governments tried, particularly in the 50s, went in for very odd psychological experiments.

This was actually cut. But readded with the restoration project