Been some years since I played Fallout 2, I was just watching the intro movie on youtube again and maybe it's just my hazey memory of the game but... I don't think this made sense to me back then either.

Why did the Enclave gun down those people who were coming out of the vault? they were pure human, no mutation... unarmed... surely useful to the Enclave for recruitment and breeding and any number of things, they would seem to be natural allies.

So did I just forget something, or did it never really make any sense and it was just the guys who made Fallout 2 thinking "huh huh, this'd be cool for the opening, [censored] yea! they'll just like, totally blow them away!" (sorry, I don't have the greatest respect for Fallout 2, I'm a Fallout 1 fan)

As far as I remember, the intro alludes to the Enclave which happens before the game even begins, assuming I remember correctly.
I suppose it makes sense, gunning down the first couple of people, to make sure the rest understands resistance is futile but yeah, it's the kind of intro sequence that is cool but you have to think real hard about it for it to make sense

That's actually the only remotely logical way I could justify it in my own mind, I'd had the same idea, that they were taking out the first few to send a message to everyone else in the vault that they mean business. Still seems like a waste though.

Well, they ARE the corrupt remains of the national government. Chances are they don't mind a bit of waste

I think in the end though, the intro is a result of the rule of cool. Having an intro showing Enclave troopers gaining access and everyone standing down peacefully just wouldn't have the same dramatic effect

Officialy, they were "resisisting".

Unofficialy, they were the steriotyical army trigger happy meatheads (Not that this steriotype has any basis in reality).

Yeah i thought that was supposed to be horrigan being his typical self?

The Enclave really makes no sense at all.

The whole 'vaults were an evil experiment' makes no sense at all either.

Hell if the world ever blows itself to hell and there is some sort of advanced technology group out there like the Enclave SIGN ME UP.

Because their ruthless [censored]s.

It actually makes more sense than you reallise. First of all, you cant sign up, this is more secret than the masons. The Enclave were the US's Illuminati before the war. If they thought you were membership material, you'd already be a member, you cant sign up. You pretty much have to be born into it.

The Enclave needed a way to survive post war. They planned for a situation where the US was a total write off. They needed to experiment on possible ways to surivive a generations long journey to some other planet. The vaults were a perfect way of doing this - put a bunch of people in a small space, set a few variables (is it better to be all in VR? Is it better to be all men save 1 woman, or all women save one man? What effect does the amount of entertainment stored have? What effect will the amount of cultural diversity have? etc).

If you were in charge of an illuminati style group, how would you plan to surivive a M.A.D. conflict?

I wouldn't spend it building billion dollar vaults with faulty water chips to see what happens.

I wouldn't send out eye bots in FO3 to play music while spying.

It just seems like an incredible waste of resources. Now we do have a historical example of a government conducting massive crazy experiments which had little real value at the expense of peoples lives so I'm not saying its not completely impossible, but its really a bit...odd.

The Faulty water chip was not intended.

Nor was that a part of the pre war plan. That came later

So, what you would do is if you were planning on leaving the earth is do no experimentation to see how poeple may cope with isolation? Fail to plan = Plan to fail. There is great value there.

Yeah basiccly they wanted to guarentee their own survival by playing every possible conclusion in the vaults before going through with their plan.

The Enclave are like the Russians in Call of Duty world at war remember right before you go into the flooding train ways? Those Nazi's trying to surrender? Enclave same way but for just the fun of it.

I always assumed that there were 2 factions that built the vaults. One was the Enclave and the other the true US government. At least this the assumption I've made after Fallout Tactics. Enclave built vaults with a secret agenda, US government tried to build them but failed to accomplish their goals almost completely (it is safe to assume that the Enclave sabotaged their efforts).

If you're interested in exactly what the Enclave was up to when planning the vaults, you can find a list of some of the vault experiments http://duckandcover.cx/features/bible/fallout_bible_0_pdf.zip. My favorite is:
Vault 56 - All entertainment tapes were removed except those of one particularly bad comic actor. Sociologists predicted failure before Vault 55.

You can find the rest of the Fallout Bible series at http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Bible. They're definitely worth reading.