As I said, some of you are missing the point. Sure, the future as depicted in the Fallout series is not how any realistic timeline divergence would look like. But the point is that it isn't supposed to be a realistic divergence from our standpoint. It's supposed to be based on how people in the 1950s imagined the future would be like. And it very much is.

Ausir, you ever thought about just putting that in your sig and hoping someone actually bothers to read it? LOL.

the american public finally realized that the 50's was the hight of civilization and wanted to re-create it. plain and simple.

I think it's a little difficult for folks who didn't play the originals.

I think it's pretty damn obvious in FO3 too. Not to mention I already said it at least once in this thread.

It's actually more obvious in Fallout 3 since the game world is more detailed.

That is priceless...poor ole' Ausir...probably doesn't get the cred s/he deserves

Back on topic:

I think the willing suspension of disbelief would go a long way towards enjoying these games...does the timeline make a lot of sense? No, not really from our point of view. The Fallout timeline is one where what people in he '50s believed the future would hold actually came to pass infused with their contemporary notions of nationalism and Cold War paranoia. Throw in some modern references just for the hell of it, and you've got a fun and interesting universe that ultimately serves as lesson to be learned. I'm sure in the year 2050, people will make fun of our ideas of what the future held...it's no different here. It's not suppose to be realistic, but entertaining...sorry if that drives you nuts in the process or ruins your sense of realism

edit for clarity

Yeah, it's not like Fallout has ever really qualified as "hard" science fiction. There's some trappings of some hard science, but it's only ever been for atmospheric purposes (reading the descriptions of the FEV experiments in the old Fallouts, for example - just a bunch of scientific terms to give the semblance of actual science without actually doing so.)

The entire premise of the universe, from the state of the Wasteland, to the retro stylings of Pre-War civilization, is firmly grounded in the principles of "soft" science fiction (like Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) Where you take the end result and atmosphere you're looking for, and then work backwards from there to come up with supporting details. (ie, you need spaceships that can break the speed of light and travel great distances for the purposes of the story - so you say it's all done with "Warp Drives" and the like and leave it at that.)

"Hard" science fiction generally works forward from a scientific principle and works forward from there to determine the realistic results of said science, and the stories that could unfold from that concept. Like Arthur C. Clarke envisioning what spaceship sailing on the solar winds would be like, and then coming up with a story about that. The differences get a bit more complex than that, but as a gross oversimplification...

"Soft" science fiction breaks down when you try to apply the standards of "hard" science fiction to it. If Luke Skywalker actually travelled faster than the speed of light on his way to meet Yoda at Degobah, he would have arrived decades after the Empire had totally destroyed the Rebellion, for example. And then we wouldn't have even had a story to tell.

And anyway, none of that really matters anyway in regards to this subject. The only firm details we know of Pre-War Fallout (besides what timeline events have been previously laid out and can be perused in the Wiki) is that by 2077 the world looked remarkably like an idealized version of a 1950's vision of an Atomic Age Utopia. There's never been any details that pointed at society remaining stagnant and watching Leave it to Beaver for 120 years and not advancing in any way or experiencing typical cyclical changes. So to say that there's a problem with a detail that isn't even delineated within the Fallout universe in any way is sort of irrelevant, isn't it?

If you think it's unrealistic that society didn't change at all in 120 years, then you don't really have a problem, right? Because that's not what happened, it's never been said in any of the games that's how things worked out. All we know is the end result, not the specific road the world took to get there.

Exactly, a lot of the Fallout world's background is up in the air. The Fallout Wiki may imply that society never left the 50's mindset, but we don't actually know for sure and whether it did or isn't is fanon at best at the moment. I believe they did, the technology and military customs certainly imply that they did (women in the military during Operation: Anchorage definitely suggests this), 70's and 80's style computers also imply this. Music and black and white TV's? I'm quite sure music did "evolve" much like it did in real life (Elvis portraits lying around in Fallout 2 for example), but society may have decided that the 30's-40's were the best era for music and transferred only those to the technology that plays them in the Fallout series (holotapes?) leaving stuff like rock and roll, and heavy metal to fade into near non-existence. Black and white TV's may be a product of the switch to "pure radiation powered TVs" or whatever. Maybe TVs could no longer support color after the switch. :shrug:

Regardless, I think it's best to leave most of the details of the pre-war Fallout world in the dark so that the fans can decide how everything played out before the bombs dropped. It's true that the Fallout world is modeled after what the folks of the 50's believed it would be like, but that doesn't mean that society remained frozen for 120 years, there's good arguments from both sides of the court.