I'll preface this by saying that all I have as far as concrete evidence is that Vault Tec is a shady company/organization

I've arrived at this hypothesis only because.. and I know this is circumstantial at best, but the Vault Tec rep at your door in the beginning of the game definitely knows something is going down and they 'need' your family.

From the moment you open the door.. there's a tinge of nervousness/lets get this done asap to his voice, it defintely makes me think something is happening and soon. It's something you'd expect from someone who's 'in the know' not sayin this Vault Tec guy is in particular.. be he definitely knows your family's importance to the vault. notice how at the gate they don't check off names rather.. advlt male.. advlt female.. infant.

Vault Tec are bastards.. seriously.. they're the type who come off as trying to help people for the greater good but the more you dig the more your realize it's just a front. I haven't been in to one vault (granted I started playing in FO3 so true vets may call me on this) but not a single vault that I've encountered has had a 'good' objective. By that I mean Vault Tec used all of their vaults for social and psycological experiments.

With this in mind you have to question. They spent all this money building all these vaults..... and the threat of war dwindles.. a resource war is so unliekly it makes the premise unbelievable.

Just so we're clear.. our world and Fallouts timeline diverges after the second world war 1945. They went for nuclear energy.... combustion engine technology still existed and we still svck up fossil fuels with reckless abandon today. The war was never over resources.... power is a non issue in a nuclear fueled society.

These so called 'resource wars' are a farce. Vault Tec was building vaults before this was even a forethought. It's impossible to complete as many vaults as they did unless they had some knowledge prior to when 'stuff' was gonna go to happen.

So what exactly was the war over?

Another thing to consider... ever heard of MAD?

It stands for Mutually Assured Destruction if all countries possess nukes fighting wars is moot. The US used 2 nukes in war time and it's never happened again because we as humans realize that we will destroy ourselves with them. Why would fallout humans think any differently?

In the canned fallout movie the vault overseer launched the first nukes to gain followers in a small population.

the vault tec rep didn't know anything. go to the hotel in goodneighbor and you'll see

I suggest you either play Fallout 1 and 2 or watch a let's play or read a plot summary on a wiki just for the plot points in the first two games.

if you play I strongly suggest getting fanmade patches and use Falche or whatever people are using these days to beef up your character as both games are old school and prime examples of why we gave up on old school mechanics and started doing things new school.

F2 in particular is severely nerfed compared to F1.

I you like F3 and F4 then you might enjoy F1 but if you destested NV then you will most likely also loathe F2 because Avellone is the worst.

If you adore NV then you will almost certainly love F2 because Avellone is the worst.

*Spoiler alert*:

Check the Penny Arcade pre F3 comic with the puppet Vault, Vault 77.

The Vaults were never meant to save anyone...

They were mainly used to do social experiment on people to determine the viability of long term space travel and recolonization on another planet.

Others were meant to produce super soldiers or were control vaults where the people weren't being subject to horrible fates.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault

With Mothership Zeta some have speculated that it was actually the aliens who started the Great war, possibly because they didn't want those Enclave muppets polluting their precious parts of space.

A preemptive strike to blow up potential rivals before they could become a threat.

Dunno how accurate it is but it sounds plausible to me and would explain quite a few things in the lore.

Probably not true though.

My friend says after closing the door on the sales man look out the window half way down the road he starts running towards the vualt. Suspicious

Maybe because he said he was going to go run this information over to the vault?

ftfy

Anyways...

The Vault-Tec Rep is in the dark. He only knows what he's been told. We can learn that Vault 111's experiment wanted you and your family based on the terminal entries inside the Vault. However, the Rep knows nothing about the shadier side of Vault-Tec nor does he have any information as to what's going on behind that massive vault door.

No, not in the way you think, at least. There's an NPC in one of the earlier Fallout games that actually suggests that the Resource Wars was due to an error in calculation; that plenty of resources were still available. However, the Resource Wars were still fought over Resources.

Um. The Resource Wars began in April of 2052. The UN was officially disbanded shortly after. The fighting was heavy and the possibility of Nuclear Weapons being utilized certainly wasn't outside the realm of possibility. The first recorded construction of a Vault was in 2061. It's also important to note that Vault-Tec is tied to the Enclave. This pre-war organization embraced the inevitability of Nuclear War and sought out ways to try and figure out how to survive nuclear condemnation. Vault-Tec was one of their tools for learning how to thrive post-apocalypse.

This leads to a relatively recent theory that, while the Resource Wars were fought between America and China, the nukes were only launched because China learned of the Enclave's existence. This theory is substantiated by the fact that places that housed FEV were targeted along with installations that served purpose to the Enclave, rather than purpose for the US. In addition, the symbols of America were left standing. It's still just a theory, but an interesting one to ponder - Chinese intelligence operatives learning of the Enclave's plan to survive Nuclear War, so they had to fire nukes first in order to stop them from achieving their goals.

In addition, we know Robert House was able to predict the probability of Nuclear War and make preparations in 2065. The Enclave had access to much better resources than House did, so it's likely that they knew before he did. Thus, "prior knowledge" isn't exactly a shady thing. Those in power knew what was coming.

Resources. Whether or not the War was necessary is another thing, but the war was definitely fought over resources.

Vault-Tec was contracted by the US Government to build the Vaults. Vault-Tec's main goal has been known for a long time and colluded with the US Government in the creation and implimenttation of the experiments. Also a number of the Vault actually did work as advertised and contained no malicious practices, not to mention that not all of the Vault experiments were designed to cause societal collapse within them (see Vault 21, Vault 111, Vault 101, Vault 13, Vault 15, Vault 34, Vault 22, etc.).

The Chinese were losing the war, US troops held Shanghai (one of China's most important cities) are were looking to starting carving swathes through their land. They'd also lost the Oil from Alaska which was the reason for starting the war in the first place.


The Enclave was the post-war shadow government that would have operated in the after-math of a nuclear war. Nothing more. And it would have been safely assumed by the Chinese that the US Government had a plan to survive the war (the Enclave) because every major nation on Earth has such a plan and the concept predates nuclear weapons.

What "Enclave" facilities exactly were targeted? I mean they're aren't any actually but you think that there are some.


Consider that it was House whom made the computers for the US Government they had the same level of knowledge. And we actually know now from Fallout 4 that the President left for the Oil Rig 6 months before the war whilst House claims to have predicted it over a decade prior.

dp

He's just a salesmen not an executive who would know.

Not according to what I've read.

In addition, the Boston Bugle wrote an article on the Enclave, the President, and the Oil Rig, as revealed in Fallout 4. The Enclave, in it's current form, obviously didn't 'exist' until post-War, but the Enclave was more than just what it is post-War.

They also used influenced Vault-Tec before the War to change the direction from Project Safehouse to the Societal Preservation Program.

The Enclave wasn't your typical contingency plan.

I didn't say Enclave facilities. I said "places that housed FEV were targeted along with installations that served purpose to the Enclave."

https://www.reddit.com/r/falloutlore/comments/3ho5uo/theory_china_knew_about_the_enclave_and_foiled/ along with https://www.reddit.com/r/falloutlore/comments/3t5c4e/the_west_tek_theory_new_evidence.

Uh, ZAX advanced supercomputer systems?

I don't see how the date the President left the White House for the Oil Rig is evidence of prediction. We know the President was a member of the Enclave. We know the Oil Rig was established in 2073, and according to what I've read, this wasn't an ordinary oil rig, which leads me to think that the Enclave knew what was coming and had ample time to prepare for it

The notion of which comes from the Fallout Bible, a defunct document with zero canonical influence. The Boston Bugle quote is literally the only mention of the Enclave existing before the war in any of the games and it describes the Enclave as the "rumoured" shadow government that would perform the administration of the United States after the war. Loading screen also says that the X-01 Power Armour was made by "remnants of the US Military" after the war, not by the "Enclave". President Eden talks about how, as a communications relay, he oversaw the migration of people from government bunkers to which he was connected to the West Coast after the war.

I really don't understand this theory your making out and I've read your links. So the Chinese launched a pre-emptive strike against the United States, intentionally targeting FEV installations to poison post-war America further and it did this so that the post-war American government would have to deal with the FEV contamination as-well as the radiation.

Why does any of this exactly require some labyrinthine Enclave conspiracy? The Chinese nuking enemy positions that would create the most difficult recovery conditions is just an obvious tactic. It doesn't even require the Enclave to even exist (which funnily I posit that they didn't as anything more than a list of names of people assigned to the Oil Rig).

EDIT: And how is White House being abandoned and key staff relocating, before events have transpired, not evidence for prediction? I can't see any other reason to give up living in the White House for an Oil Rig personally.

The Enclave actually existed Pre-War as well. There was mention in the game that they "funded" a senator to get to a certain vault (will provide more details when i recall where I read them) but that the Enclave made up the highest echelons of power. The US government knew that one day all the resources on Earth were gonna be depleted and began racing around trying to find what would happen in "what if" scenarios. Hence where Vault-Tec stepped into the picture.

The "representative" at the beginning of the game though was kept in the dark. "Vault-Tec told me nothing. Just to get everyone to sign their forms. I was supposed to win a pack of steak knives" tells us he was told nothing except that if he got enough signatures he would win a pack of steak knives. He was deliberately lied too.

Course the Vault-Tec "Regional" HQ was a massive let down.

So what is it? The "Enclave" as some-kind of Illuminati or the US Government proper. Make up your mind.

The Enclave was made up of the highest echelons of power, it was a shadow government of people pre-selected to run the US after a debilitating attack against the USA. Exactly like the US and most countries have now. That's all that is known and all that is posited in any of the games.


He was a door-to-door salesman, expecting him to have knowledge at the highest echelons of the company is as crazy as expecting you to have those of your workplace.

It's explicitly stated in the Fallout Bible that the President and other US government officials joined with the Enclave on the Oil Rig, true, which isn't necessarily canon. However, It's implied in other areas of the lore which are canon. I believe Josh Sawyer explained it in one of his formspring answers, which unfortunately aren't available anymore. In addition, Quaere Verum, the pre-War organization dedicated to exposing the vast Conspiracy that eventually (if not already) founded the Enclave, was established in Fallout 3. The Boston Bugle, the pre-War newspaper as mentioned previously, mentions rumors of the Enclave, established in Fallout 4. There's implications with the construction of the Poseidon Oil Rig (named Control Station Enclave), which was established in Fallout 2. According to the President of the Enclave during Fallout 2, they influenced Vault-Tec and designed the Societal Preservation Program before the war ended.

The Enclave had to have existed as a pre-War organization, they just didn't exist in the form that they became after the War. They were, in my interpretation of the lore, Fallout's version of the Illuminati.

Poor wording on my part. I was trying to convey that just because they left at that time, it didn't mean that's when they predicted it. They could've predicted it prior, which is what I'm leaning towards.

The Fallout Bible isn't canon and Josh Saywer's formspring is also not canon; I actually asked him once what he thought the Enclave conspiracy was and he said is was like a PNAC (Project for the New American Century) style Neo-Con think tank that influenced government opinion - that's not even keeping with the Fallout Bible either.

There's no mention that the Quaere Verum were discovered the "conspiracy" that was/would-be the Enclave and the wikia. The conspiracy is the cover-up of the existence of aliens. But you think it was? You think that the Enclave Illuminati operated their own private research facility to reverse engineer alien technology to create energy weapons? For what purpose? Also what's the point of them holding key positions of power if they don't use them but still do things outside of government channels? Because that's what you are implying with your interpretation. That the QV stole this directly from the Enclave and that was who they were fighting.

What implications with the construction of the Oil Rig about which no information exists outside of the canonically redundant Fallout Bible?

The Boston Bugle mentions that the "rumours" about the organisation known as "the Enclave" was that it was a shadow government designed to take control, by the government, after a nuclear war. Such plans exist within every major nation on earth, it's what the IRL Raven Rock, Mount Weather etc facilities are for. It's just standard government policy.

Actually President Richardson says that it was the US Government that designed the programme. Pro-top, President Richardson refers to the Enclave twice in his dialouge files and both times it just refers to the Oil Rig. Everything else that they are doing is done as the United States of America, not the Enclave.

No they didn't. They were the group of people chosen to perform the functions of the government in the event of an attack, they were relocated safely before the bombs fell and have simply continued thusly since. The US Government built the Oil Rig to function as the executive command center after the war. President Eden makes reference to bunkers evacuating after the war and relocating themselves to the West Coast. There is nothing in the Enclave nor any game that requires them to have been an Illuminati style organisation, in-fact everything points away from that.

If Bethesda had intended the Enclave as-such then the Bugle article would have been the perfect opportunity to make it canon. They could have written anything they liked. They didn't say that the President was suspected to be apart of a cabal of military and business leaders that were secretly ruling the country. It said that the Enclave was a shadow government to administer the USA after a nuclear war. Which is both perfectly rational and inline with everything else about the organisation in the games,.

Suspicious, yes at first glance. I agree that you should check the hotel in Goodneighbor, it may clear things up for you though.

Any particular reason you feel that being an [censored] was called for? I simply stated what I read and you feel the need to be disrespectful ] about it. "The Enclave" since you want to be rude as all get out, existed Pre-War and included high level ranking Generals, the Department heads, numerous senators, and the President of the United States. During the "Resource War" they knew that the world could not sustain itself at the consumption levels that were going on at the time. To this end, the Enclave contracted Vault-Tec to make a series of Vaults that were intended to conduct social experiments on the people in them to see how the human reacts under certain stimuli. As you can see from the previous Fallout games, pretty much that ended in complete failure. But if you have ever played any of the other Fallout or even read up on Fallout, Vault Tec made numerous references about the Enclave. How could that be? The Enclave was supposed to exist post-war. Or how about when the Enclave sent an All-Clear Signal to Vault 8? And if you bother to read the Wiki at all, you would realize that the Enclave existed PRE-WAR. They bided their time on their oil rig, til it was blown up later in Fallout 2 by the Chosen One, when they plotted to poison the mainland through the jet streams. And the Senator was Todd Peterson. Now that you attacked my reply and pretty much said the same thing I did albeit in a very disrespectful and rude way, here is a better explanation

Also I wasnt saying that the Representative was in the know. I said he WAS NOT as evidenced by in game comments. Now that you made yourself look like an idiot and an [censored]...here is a reply pretty much stating exactly what I said AGAIN and thanks for feeling the need to "agree" to my reply by attacking it. Makes no sense whatsoever

While I wouldn't put anything past Vault-Tec your argument is meaningless.....the Vault-Tec rep that comes knocking at your door in the beginning lives on as a ghoul and you can bring him to Sanctuary later in the game....he doesn't know anything. He was doing some meaningless forms for Vault-Tec because he was promised some crappy rewards, I forget exactly what but it was something stupid.

Pack of steak knives.

I really wasn't being rude, just asking you to decide whether you were taking about the Government or the "Enclave". And as for the rest of this paragraph all of that comes from the Fallout Bible which is no-longer considered canonical. The only remaining mention of pre-war Enclave was in Fallout 4, stating that it was the rumoured shadow government that would administer the US after the war. It's mentioned that the President was aboard the Oil Rig and that the White House had been abandoned; that's all. Had Bethesda intended the Enclave to have been some vast conspiracy then they could have had that be the article in the Boston Bugle, about how the President was in-league with business leaders to control the country. But no, it just says that the Enclave is the group rumored to administer the United States during a time of nuclear war.

They are what George Bush did IRL after 9/11, where pre-selected government officials were evacuated to pre-designated locations to ensure that they wouldn't be attacked and that the country's leadership was not in danger of being wiped out.

The Enclave is the remnants of the United States government, not the Illuminati. President Richardson never even refers to the organisation as the "Enclave", he calls the Oil Rig Enclave twice during your massive conversation with him but always refers to themselves as the USA.


Identify such sources. Because I remember a lot about Vault-Tec talking with the United States government but never "the Enclave".


Yeah, when the Government built the Oil Rig they gave it the capacity to communicate with the Vaults. The government having also been responsible the Vaults experiments.


Yeah it exist pre-war as a plan by the United States government to reorganise after a nuclear attack, not as some pre-war American Illuminati.

That would be Todd Peterson from the cancelled Fallout Van Buren that was never made?
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Todd_Peterson

Dont bother with this troll guys. He will only pick apart everything that is said and think it makes him smart. Go back to ES where ya belong

And you dont consider the first sentence rude? Wow. Hate to learn what you think is rude.

I think it was Vault-Tec too, but I'm not married to the idea. I think the salesman angle is interesting, but I also know that enough people speak with utter conviction about things happening today that they could not possibly know for sure. It makes sense in the narrative of the story, why build the vaults to do experiments that you'll never know for sure that you'll use. You don't make that kind of investment without knowing if you'll use it. That's my thought process.

If you don't have a response to his valid points, its okay to admit it.

Yeah, he knew nothing. Otherwise he wouldn't have been selling spots at the last minute. He would have been trying to get into the Vault before the mad rush came.

I felt bad for the guy when I met him in Goodneighbor. Despite my usual reservations towards ghouls, I comp'd him a nice place at my town and gave him a job as a store owner. He deserves a break after the [censored] he went through, and he is basically the only person that recognizes me from before the war. That alone makes us comrades-in-arms.

Love how being "Patriarch" makes you guys think you know everything. Actually simply playing the games if you can ever be bothered too is all it will take. Actually read the "terminal" entries and that is all you have to do. Oh wait a minute, you'd rather troll posts rather than actually add to them.

Given the size of of the experimentation, the researchers needed to have some control groups to compare the results against. That is what those Vaults were: control groups.