Hard Luck Blues has you seeking out the source of radiation contaminating the water supply for the NCR Sharecropping operation outside of New Vegas. It brings you into Vault 34, a vault that was overstocked with weapons and understocked in accommodations, resulting in a drive at violent population control. The armory is raided, groups fight through the vault, and eventually someone shoots the reactor cooling or something, resulting in radiation leaking out through the vault. You find the vault inhabited by crazed ghouls with shards of humanity, and it all leads up to reaching the reactor room where you find an SOS from a group trapped elsewhere in the vault. You are given a decision where you can either shut down the reactor, saving the sharecropping operation and dooming the trapped vault dwellers; or you can give full control over to the vault dwellers so they can open the door, dooming the sharecropping operation.

Now, for my problems with this quest:

1. How can a master terminal not have the ability to open the door to the area where you would be transferring control in the first place, thus allowing you to open the door and THEN shut down the reactor?

2. Why would a vault be designed where master control can be transferred or duplicated frivolously?

3. The existence of survivors in a broken down, highly radioactive vault suggests that the events within the vault happened recently. Yet ventilation required for life support within their area of the vault would mean they would be dead or ghoulified anyway. Yet you have the Boomers who have been established for decades, who originated as survivors who supposedly broke out just as this all began. The survivors shouldn't be alive.

4. It creates a mind-boggling situation for a moral dilemma just to have a moral dilemma.

I agree.

I don't think the boomers have any part of the breakdown, because there is also Chris Haversam. He isn't nearly as old as some boomers and he lived in Vault 34. I figure it did happen recently as the ghouls haven't been in repconn for that long so they picked him up, possibly with other ghould from vault 34 then traveled down to repconn and maybe there for a month or two.

I have come to believe that the Boomers left a while ago, while pearl and the old guy were younger.

But other than that I agree.

I also agree

There is a temporal mess going on with Vault 34. As the logs of the Overseer during the incident go, the group that would become the first generation of the Boomers broke out in 2231, which immediately led to the events where you had a standoff where-in the vault you had the guards moved to the entrance to prevent more from leaving as those that took over the armory came out and started shooting everything up. The generator was damaged, the air vents spread radiation through the entire vault, and the doors had been hard locked for some reason until they were set to automatically open again. New Vegas takes place in 2281. Chris and the survivors don't fit.

Perhaps the terminal is on it's last legs and has 'one last command input before it goes out'

Who's to say that they arent in a 'remote systems control room' sort of area.

Nellis was founded a mere 50 years ago, and based on the terminal entries in the Vault, the Boomers were a bunch of gun nuts royally angered that the Overseer wouldnt permit use of heavy weapons and explosives, then sometime after this, a revolution boils out when the Overseer forbids unscheduled sixual intercourse. Chris Haversome appears to be in his 30s or 40s, who's to say he didnt leave before the vault went royally FUBAR.


Stop getting pissy with a game's logic. Trying to put solid realism into a virtual game is a fruitless endeavor.