I've gotten as far into Still in the Dark as where I need to start scouring the Vaults for air filtration parts, and it seems to be extremely complicated from what the Vault is telling me. The simple way to complete For the Republic without having to do all of this is, of course, to simply massacre the Hidden Valley bunker (or blow it up), but I don't want to do that for two reasons:
- I've got Veronica as my companion, and I don't want her leaving (this may not happen at all; I've completed I Could Make You Care by convincing her to leave the Brotherhood, however I'm guessing that she still won't be too psyched about me slaughtering her "family").
- Given the difficulty I had in killing the three or four angry paladins in the Followers outpost, I'm not sure going up against a whole bunker of them is going to be preferable.
It occurs to me that ousting McNamara would prove an easy way to finish this, but after practically scouring the Vault for information on this, I find only one subtle hint in the article on Hardin:


Does this mean that I can oust McNamara, and then talk to Col. Moore, and after that I can offer the truce? Or is it more complicated than that (given what Moore is like, I'm guessing so)? I saw something about console commands on the quest page, but that isn't an option for two reasons (one, I'm on the Xbox; two, I don't want to cheat in that manner (using the Vault for quest info the way I do might count as cheating, but not in my book)).

I'm getting very confused by all this, so some help would be much appreciated.

My suggestion would be to just play without using a walk through to find the "best" action. Just play it and live with the consequences of your actions.

From my guidebook... there's a simple rule.

McNamara is peaceful. Hardin requires destruction of the bunker. Sounds like what the Wiki is suggesting is tricking the game into thinking you haven't ousted McNamara.

Also, from the wiki page...

Yeah, I just did as the above poster advised and played a trial-and-error run. Once Hardin was installed, there were no dialogue options to do with the NCR, even when I'd completed Tend To Your Business and joined the Brotherhood. Guess that note was misleading and/or referred to using console commands. Alternatively, it might have been something that a recent patch made impossible; the article says you have to wait a few days outside the bunker for Hardin to formally become Elder, but when I played through the quest the screen just faded to black and Hardin became Elder automatically.