Hey
I've been wondering how the ?Lone Wanderer? can swim, since there are (extremely likely) no pools in vaults due to the huge drain on resources it takes to maintain one. So how canthe , as Three Dog calls him/her ?Vault 101 Kid?, swim? I'm guessing it has to do more with gameplay, seeing as you can swim in heavy armor in Oblivion, but still: Are there recreational water facilites in the Vaults?

There were no recreational water facilities installed as far as the original Fallout developers were concerned, the topic was never raised and thus was never covered, you're probably the first to ask

If you want there to be a swimming pool, then there was, there's no evidence to support or condemn it either way.

I'm not sure about a swimming pool takes a lot of water, I might think a typical vault would have a Gymnasium.

there could have been a pool if the water used for it was seperate from their drinking water, and actually cleansed on a regular basis.
it's not that hard to maintain an indoor pool as long as you have the water to fill it up.
there are also many advantages to having a pool, afterall it's one of the best ways to train your body.

and for all we know they could have had an entire basin full of water, to use for the pool, so it's plausible.

perhaps a little bit unlikely though since swimming would not have been a vital skill in the vault.
(and there might even be a vault that expressly left the pool out so that when the basin empties into the vault lots of people will drown just to test out their reactions)

With swimming you have to check realism at the door, just like everything else in the game. Swimming in power armor and a mini-gun strapped to your back is just plain silly. Maybe they should have included scuba gear into the power armor, then you could walk across the bottom like a deep sea diver.. :rolleyes:

Agreed in a game where you can stand 20 feet away from a mini nuke hand grenade going off and then pop some rad away, your worried about the idea that he shouldn't be able to swim...

There is nothing to say that you can't breath underwater with power armor. It obviously has filters for air, and it may be able to filter air out of water. However, it would have been good if they had forced you to the bottom with power armor on.

Didn't the Bishop family in New Reno have a swimming pool on their rooftop?

Aside from that, I don't recall any instances of vast quantities of uncontaminated water in Fallout 1 or 2, period. Only radioactive waste. You can venture down to the shore in Fallout 1, but it doesn't look too pleasant...

They probably could. Vaults have clean water chips, so they could most definately make pools.

I think a pool would take up too much of the vaults limited resoruces, and limited space.

We never saw swimming pools in any vaults, and they were never mentioned, so we have no reason to believe that they were installed in vaults. It was never covered, and we're not really given a reason to assume pools were part of vaults.

On the other hand, I doubt what we could see of vaults in the games are really all the parts of them, it seems a little too small to house the kind of population they have, and of course, it's never clearly stated that there are no pools in vaults, so I don't think it would actually break continuity if in a hypothetical Fallout 4 you started in a vault which had a pool in it, or one of the characters in it mentioned going to the pool, it's one of those things we can safely say "We don't know" about.