I doubt this is a spoiler since it was in f3 explained atleast but........



i never understood why the vaults where used to experiment on people?
whats the use of such a large scale experiment (that must have been REAL costly to setup) only for the data to be useless since everybody working on the experiment most likely died in de nuclear war?

i mean whats more important...the survival of the human race or some data gained by doing social experiments on people?

maybe i missed something but if tyhere a reasonable explenation for this id sure like to know.

ofcourse i do get that it makes exploring the vaults much more interesting (stead of all the vaults basiclly be the same) but is there any effort put in to making it also (gah i hate to say it) realistic storywise?


that beeing sad my favorite thing in fallout has always been exploring vaults

The thing is, the vaults were never meant to save the human race. They've only ever constructed 122 vaults (not including secret vaults) and each can only contain around 1000 people each at the very most.

We don't know much more than you do, really. Making the Vaults an Enclave "social experiment on a grand scale" was just something the developers of Fallout 2 decided was cool and threw in the game. It was supposedly going to be explained in Van Buren that the experiment was undertaken to anolyze a variety of scenarios in long term isolation for the Enclave's original plan to leave the Earth on space ships to colonize other worlds, but Van Buren was canceled. That plot line has yet to see the light of day in a final product, so at the moment we don't have a particularly good explanation for the Vault experiments.

hmm stil my question stands...why make an experiment that only yield results AFTER a defastating war or some other cataclysm?
even if the ppl running the experiments somehow survived they only get their results in a world that lies in ruins...what good is all that data you gained from social experimens when your wold has become post-nuclair ?

or maybe they never expected that a real full scale nuclair war would occur?
then if thats the case how would they lure all those thousands off ppl into the vaults?

ok im a lore noob but...the enclave was around from before the great war?
anyway your (partial) explanation makes more sence then anything i had come up with.

i know experiments like that ( well kinda) are beeing done in real live for the same reason (space exploration)

for example (i forgot where ) some 6 ppl locked them selves into a bunker for six months to see how the would cope socially, simulation a six month trip to mars or whatever. (well only the part where they are excluded from human contact anyway)


still my question from the post above yours stand.
it seems strange to make an experiment that only will work in the case of a world wide cataclysm.

To understand the whole dark humor concept of a social experiment on a grand scale, you really have to understand the 1950s Mindset. While a lot of modern day Conservatives talk about the 50s as if it were a time of carefree optimism, the truth was it was a lot of baseless paranoia and an absolutely certainty that Nuclear War with the Soviet Bloc was imminent.

In the world of Fallout - a world with dwindling Fossil Fuel Resources - Nuclear War was imminent from the minute China invaded Alaska. There could be no other outcome, especially since the Lore suggests that American T-51b Suits were conducting active operations in China, and the Deathclaws were developed for operations on the Chinese Mainland.

The Enclave saw the writing on the wall the same way Mister House in New Vegas did. This could only end one way. So they financed the Vault Experiments (For Canonically unknown reasons at this point) and sat back in their own isolated hidey holes (Like the Oil Rig) to await the inevitable. Indeed, the President at the time was relocated to the Oil Rig three months before it dropped in the pot. And it seems that many of the Vaults were activated and filled around the same time (Such as Vault 92 and Vault 112).

As for why conduct the social experiments...obviously observing peoples behavior in regards to different stimuli. The one thing I've never agreed with is how Fallout 3 "Weaponized" the Vaults, in regards to Super Soldiers, Drug Experiments, and Cloning. That really didn't gib with the general concept of the Vaults, I feel.

The way I see it is that towards the end of the pre-great war Fallout world things got nasty.Robots were replacing workers,the whole world was in hyperinflation and,of course,the threat of an atomic war caused everyone to be as paranoid as hell.I imagine hippies would have existed,staging protests about peace and how everyone should get rid of their bombs.

The government were probaly angry about this.I mean for over 100 years they have gave the citizens of America the American Dream and have fought to protect them and what do they do?Shove it in their faces.The government (enclave?) knew a nuclear war was imminent,and so they built the vaults...but as we all know,they were infact social experiements.I think the reasons behind this is because the government wanted to better understand their people,how they would react to certain circumstances and how the goverment could better protect themselves in the future.The government would then take this knowledge with them when they (the people who have a right to survive) colonize the moon/other planets so they know what to do once another great war happens or avoid this happening altogether.

The Enclave,they were not called that, they were just the people in the know in the US, heads of industry, military officials high ups in the white house ect (for the guy that asked), Had a plan for what would happen after the war. They wanted to remake the world with them in charge. A good number of them looked forward to nuclear war, and many had been advocating it for years. The people they felt would be needed after the bombs fell were not part of the experiment. They were safe either in control vaults, or were secure in places we have not yet heard of. It seemed they had ways to direct were the bombs fell (see Mr. House).

Think of the hubris of these people. They didn't want these peons in the new world. Or best case they were just going to be the slave class the new world was built on the shoulders of. So they tested, they ran the Machiavellian experiments. They had helped to kill billions, what was a few thousand more? The data would be something that would never be able to be gathered ever again.

So If you discount the "We were testing to see what problems may occur in a long term interstellar spaceflight." It is not that huge leap to see that these people who helped usher in the end of the world were never right in the head. That they would do it just for the data and the value of the research should not be a huge leap for anyone.

I, on the other hand like the spaceflight reasoning, it makes the Enclave less like the comic book villains (I will scourge the earth and repopulate it with my minions muhahahahha!). And it just sounds like what a 1950's society would come up with as a way to avoid mass extinction.

Yup kind of like how "Ducking and Covering" under your desk if a nuke dropped while you were at school would save your life. There are a lot of weird WEIRD things on how to survive a nuclear blast which included ducking and covering under objects like desks, tables, etc... . People didn't have the knowledge that if a nuke gets dropped that's pretty much it game over unless you are in a fallout shelter.

As with the vault experiments I am in no way a lore expert, but to me this hearkens back to the 50's era where "Americans" were to "Trust" in the government blindly and faithfully. If you did not trust in the government you were considered a communist and a traitor which is why no one brought these things into question. Ontop of that the government wanted to know possible outcomes with different types of experiments seeing how they could further themselves as a government. Example that comes to mind in FO3 was vault 87 I think maybe wrong *The vault where you retrieve the Stradivarius violin* and they were conducting experiments into hypnotic suggestions through different harmonic frequencies. Good way to make sure you are prepared for a war is having berserker units ready to attack at any moment with a simple command.

I don't know for sure, but I think at some point the reason behind them doing the vault experiments instead of just trying to save humanity was because either:

The Enclave didn't really believe a nuclear war was going to happen, but knew that most of America thought it would, so took the opportunity to do some social experimenting.

The Enclave knew that the world was going to get nuked, so figured they'd keep themselves safe in their own personal bunkers and in the meantime would have some vault experiments to look into while they set up their new world where only the government of America survived.

I'm not entirely sure which one is accurte, but I think I've come across references here and there that show that certain vaults were made with the first intention in mind and others made with the second one in mind. Whiile some of the expirements can be explained away as them trying to figure out what does and what does not work (like vault 92 in Fallout 3, where they were trying to make super soldiers by making people listen to some frequency day in and day out) others just seem as if the Enclave wanted to pull some kind of sick prank on people like the vault with 999 men and 1 woman.

While I agree with the people who state the experiments where tests for space flight... I don't think the Enclave thought the big war would happen so soon.

I view it like a chess master playing a noob. The 'master' sets up all these plans, and counter plans. Knows how the enemy should move... Then the 'noob' up and sacrifices his queen to capture the 'masters' pawn. A move no 'normal' chess player would ever do. It throws one hell of a wrench into the system, and now the 'master' rushes to get things done making one mistake after another.

The Enclave knew the attack would come, but never thought it would so soon.

The Enclave is what is left of the US federal government from the pre-war era. More accurately they were a conglomeration of the heads of the military-industrial complex (companies like West-tek and Poseidon Energy, and of course Vault-tec) and the executive branch of the federal government.

It's obvious that the Enclave had their own means of survival, they had a VAX control unit put in the presidential bunker at Raven Rock, MD (IE Raven Rock Military Base in FO3, the real-life location of the president's fallout bunker and the "underground pentagon" military backups), they contracted with Poseidon Energy to put a bunker in an oil rig. Non-cannonically they built Boulder Dome as well.

Plus I think it's safe to assume that like Hidden Valley, most BoS bunkers were US facilities for military or governmental use, and seen to be quite well equipped. A terminal even talks about how hard it would be to hit Hidden Valley with a missile.

They had the means to survive with at least a breeding population, plus from the West-Tek facility in Northern Nevada (centeral California? where was The Glow?) we know they were experimenting with other means of survival such as cryostasis.

Plus some vaults were straight-up vaults, "control samples" as it were, and they did their job. Vault 3 was that way and so was Vault 34, sort of.