I think an interview with Bethesda explicitly said that irelurks are MD blue crabs. Which makes sense; mirelurks are blue and indeed look like blue crabs - take a MD blue crab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_crab), elongate the torso and make it curved so that it can stand erect, add bipedal legs, and you've got a mirelurk!

As for mirelurk kings, the Survival Edition book of concept art has a picture that looks exactly like a mirelurk king, but is labeled as a mutated snapping turtle. So there we go! Why they are called mirelurks, I don't know.

The mirelurks are an amalgam of both horseshoe crabs and blue crabs:



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



Some kind of symbiosis with the regular mirelurks?

What the hell are those Mirelurks Kings? They don't seem like Mirelurks are all. They look more like people who turned into somekind of Water Mutant Human or something. Too humanoid, no way those things are Mirelurks. I think they're probrably mutated humans who developed characteristics that enable them to live in the water.

Could it be explained like this? The term Mirelurk KING doesn't necessarily mean it's a mirelurk. It could just mean they are the king of Mirelurks. Maybe, somewhere the mirelurks accepted or maybe even worshipped them in a primitive way, whatever it is, them as their king and ppl assumed (falsely) it is some Mirelurk species and called them Mirelurk King? Makes kinda sense to me.

there is a terminal in fallout 3 that says mirelurks came from horse shoe crabs and this one other crab (dont remember the name i think it was like blue crab or something)

its in an enclave outpost


oh and the mirelurk kings remind me of the deep ones from H.P lovecrafts stories

ill quote a description of them

"I think their predominant color was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible."

Since its located at a shipyard, its probably safe to say that if the aircraft carrier wasn't a museum ship, it was being refitted. Either way, it would not be prepared to scramble aircraft. The nukes around DC were at least partly borne by bomber planes if the one in Megaton is any guide - that was definitely a bomb rather than an ICBM warhead. ICBMs certainly do exist in the Fallout world, so the only explanation is that planes were chosen because of some sort of ballistic missile defense. I think spaceborne ABM lasers were mentioned in a previous game. Perhaps the Chinese developed submarine aircraft carriers.

It also looks pretty old to me (Rivet City) not like a state of the art pre war vessel should have looked (even by Fallout 3 retro standards). I was sort of wondering if maybe it was some kind of monument like The Nautilus (world's first nuclear submarine). Brought in there very carefully and at great expense to become a monument/tourist trap. Oddly the way the drawbridge was set up made me think of this.

Oh and don't forget the Nukalurks. I much prefer the Caffinated version.

>>>----Therumancer--->

Mirelurk Kings could possibly be an advanced form of a mutated snapping turtle, or some form of a fish that has human-ish features. I don't know how it obtained the sonic/mind related powers, and the dominace over Mirelurks. That one will be mystery until discovered.

I would love to see the results of a mutated whale or shark. :fallout:

I'm sure it's said in the game somewhere that a tsunami washed up the aircraft carrier, can't remember where though.

According to The Vault (Fallout Wiki);

(Rivet City) is housed in an aircraft carrier that was docked at the Washington Navy Yard at the time of the Great War, and left stranded when the water level in the Anacostia and Potomac rivers dropped. The community was founded by members of the pre-War Naval Research Center, who moved to the vessel to make use of its onboard facilities and comparatively defensible position.

I was sure a Rivet citizen said something about it being sailed up the river post war. I guess I misheard.

They didnt have enough uses for the animations...
RoboBrain, Messmatron...

Just werent enough, thought they might aswell duplicate it abit more...

For the love of...
It's. About. Rivet City. Not. Mirelurks. Or. Yao. Guai. Sheesh!