All I have to say is wow. This series needs some real answers about what the [censored] happened with my country before the war.

I don t care what it was, but I need to know. If we had the Chinese backed up so far that they launched then we should have only done tactical stikes on China, because pa can operate in nuclear fallout.

They should have tacted China where our men were not and let them take China. Chinas government went into holes Im sure , but our pa men were destroying the Chinese army. With tactical nuke support from tridents on missle subs we should have China.

We could have won that war and we don t even know it.


If we had 750 000 men on Chinese soil and were beating their asses so bad they had to nuke out we are not going to nuke our own men.

We would let them finish China and our government would probably move there once the dust settled. Then thdy would worry about the states from there.

As far as I understand it the pa was whipping some ass.

@ Styles so Tactics says that Enclave did kill the real us government?

It was a spur of the moment thing as I understand it though (I personally don't believe the majority of nukes were dropped by bombers, and thus were bombs, I think most were ICBM's) they detected incoming Chinese nukes and acted accordingly with a "FIRE ALL!" command. Richardson implies that even though they were prepared for war (going to the Rig ) they didn't expect it when it happened ("and then those damn Reds launched"). Targeting nukes takes some time, and they probably had pre-set coordinates. The mindest then was "those men in China are making a great sacrifice".



Whoa hoa lets not jump the gun here. Styles statment didn't imply that.

From Fallout Tactics we learn Vault Zero was a place for, note worthy people and government officials. Not that all the none Enclave government went there but it is possible they would send them there. The Vault was built as the nucleus of the Vaults. It was to be where the government would coordinate the Vaults in the rebuilding America effort. There were many cut backs to the building of Vault Zero. Drastic ones. This is the reason why the Calculator and therefore the Vault failed. They never were taken out of stasis. When the Calculator finally turned on because of Super Mutants attacking the Vault entrance, a number of systems and life support failed. It caused many people to die out right and others to be brain damaged.
The Calculator was a very advanced AI, Human brain machine and there was a army of robots to deal with any mutants and raiders.

This part is speculation:

Now we know the Enclave were behind the Vault experiments. We know they had high level people. We know they had the Rig and their own secret plan to survive the great war and rebuild. The Enclave still had to play the role of carrying public servent. Now the Vaults were sold to the American people as places of safety. There had to be a place to coordinate all the Vaults aka the "Public Face" for the Vaults. For Project Safehouse. So there was Vault Zero. The Rig "Enclave" was secret and not the for the public to know about. Enclave memebers would have been the ones making cut backs to Vault Zero.

Enclave don't care about the rest of Americe or any one not them. So they build the Rig, possibly with money taken away from Vault Zero. They don't care if it fails. After the War Enclave lose contact with it or ignore it. At some point they lose contact with it becausse the Midwestern BoS take control of it around 2197.

Hmm interesting. Still though, it doesn't mean that there were "two governments" of America. The Enclave in the Oil Rig, and the "real one" in Vault Zero. Its possible that (like you said) the population of people in Vault Zero were made up of important people not "in" with the upper echelon of the governments plan to move to the Rig. In other words, Vault Zero could be "lesser officials" (governors, state governments, lower executive officers and possibly some House members) and the Rig could have been the "upper officials" (the President, executive staff, and most of Congress).

I trust you'll understand though, that I take tactics information with a pinch of salt, since we still don't know what things are and aren't canon. The high level events are, but details such as who created/inhabited Vault Zero are up in the air.

So basically Enclave killed the U.S. government. I always thought that about them. The U.S. system has too many checks and balences even during a doomsday event to let something like Enclave occur without a lot of government dieing first. They would have impeached the acting pres if he started talking about pure humams and genocide of our own people. 40s and 50s United States was fighting other peoples wars for them IRL. (besides the japs) There is no way our government even in fo world would go for wiping out all the people of the United States but them selves.

That sounds like the thoughts of a few like minded people that knew the real US government was out of the way.

I get the point that since the Enclave were the puppet masters and everyone their puppets, they technically are the government. Still until the bombs dropped there was only one government and the Enclave a secret group (cancer IMO) within. They had a plan to save themselves and send the rest to a place that would most likely fail and cause them to die (Good for the Enclave). When Bombs fell the Enclave memebers rebuilt the government in their own way. Appointing new members to replace those that died or going to die.

Now here is the kicker about Tactics and it being canon. Bethesda said "high level events are canon." The highest level event in Tactics is Vault Zero and the battle against the Calculator. So there was a Vault Zero and Calculator. Which means it was apart of the Vault program, which means the Enclave would have been involved. It failing and it just so happened to be a place to coordinate the Vaults and rebuild would be right up the Enclave's ally.

They needed a public face of the Vaults. They need a place to send unwanted government people. Kill two birds with one stone. Make a big showy HQ Vault and stick the people in there, make it fail. Take the money meant for Vault Zero and spend it on other things, secret things like the Rig or Raven Rock.

Edit: just to be clear to everyone: Enclave are not talked about in Tactics. Tactics timeline wise takes place before the events of Fallout 2.

Wait what? No. This doesn't mean that the Enclave "killed" the U.S. government. Again, you ignore the fact that the President of the United States as well as the upper echelons of the government i.e. the important people in the government, went to the Rig. The senario Styles describes, would have the Government having a "throwaway point" so to speak, of lesser members that were not like minded. Also, I don't believe that Vault Zero was "intended to fail", where does it say that? Given the amount of tech and effort put into that control vault, it just doesn't fit.

Besides, if the official U.S. government could be goaded into going to a supposed "intend to fail vault" then they are not the ones in charge are they?



What checks and balances specifically. Please elaborate, and don't skimp on the details.

The irony is that you are partially right. The Enclave didn't emerge from the government because they are the government.



What are you talking about? The Enclave didn't impeach Richardson did they? and such talk only came after the great war, when the wastelanders were declared mutants. Not before.




Yes but again, a simple detail like who built and lived in Vault Zero could be changed easily. "High level events" to me mean events that can't be changed without fundamentally altering the storyline. Say Vault Zero was instead built soley by Vault Tec. Does that change anything in the story? No. not really.




Also I would like to point out, that what you did is very clever there Rook. By connecting the idea of the Enclave as being the Government to the assumption that "Enclave are out there" you associated one well founded idea with a completly ridiculous one. Thereby cancelling out the reasoning behind the Enclave as government idea. By saying "if you believe that the Enclave was the government, then you'd be stupid not to believe they are still out there" you made it seem as if the Enclave could never be the government, because that would mean they are overseas. However, these ideas are in no way associated with one another, and I have yet to see and adequate explanation which is grounded in hard evidence, that the Enclave was not the official government, and why the President went to the Rig, and why Raven Rock was not occupied.

Your probably going to have to explain this better IMO Styles, if it was just a cheap thing designed to murder the rest of the government then why all the callculator nonsense; that seems pretty complicated for a simple 'murder plot' and apparently only one of it's eight brains was from a politician.

@Rook this speculation; knowhere is the Enclave ever said to have murdered the government, nor were they even referenced in Tactics. Not that it really matters a whole lot to me, it would take a completely different kind of crazy to defend the pre-war Enclave.

Indeed. I think Rook is missing the point here. Even if the "Enclave" was not the official government, even if they were just a secret society of backroom-fatcats or something, whoever the "official government" was, they created the Vaults (with their experiments), developed FEV and tested it at Mariposa, and let companies like Nuka Cola get away with sometimes killing their employees. These sorts of things cannot simply be attributed to a "secret society" doing things under the governments nose.

This is something that can't be denied, either way you want to look at it, the U.S. government in the Fallout universe is not a very good entity.

Yeah we can actually think Fallout 3 for making Vault 87 into a military experiment that was conducting the FEV tests before the bombs even fell as one of the terminals makes reference to increasing pressure from Vault-Tec and Mariposa.

Given the preperation and all the work, I sometimes wonder did the Enclave intentionally trigger the great war? Did they believe they could wipe the slate clean and rebuild the world in there vision of America. I realize there isn't any proof to really support this theory but


I'd say the Calculator was the high level event. Vault 0 was simply where it was located and easily eliminated from the equation. Speaking of which the Calculator and Vault 0 was actually located in Colorado which is now the very heart of Legion territory.

I don't think that the Enclave members really thought that trading their homes, money and power for a bunkbed on an Oil Rig just so that one day their decendants could build America in their image was worth it.