During my various play-throughs of my favorite series I have become increasingly aware and unhappy with the design flaws of vaults. I'm sure that I'm not alone in this unsatisfactory feeling towards vaults. This is a list of flaws that I find the vaults have.

First off you have to realize how big one of these would be. They would be mega projects. Ones on the size and scale of entire communities enclosed in in a protective shell off bedrock, concrete, and lead. Imagine as if your town was underground right now with farms, schools, grocers, power plants, libraries, bars, gyms, recreational facilities, homes, police stations, treatment plants, theaters, and even government buildings. Of course no ones expecting a complete working town with rooms for each and every resident. That would be insane. I understand that
most vault were to accommodate roughly five hundred people with hot-bunking for one thousand. I would never want a vault that size because it would be endlessly big; too big to explore and too big for a designer to create. Although they're a bit small no?

This brings me to my first flaw, the entrance and its tunnel. Entrances to the current vaults do not show me that I'm about to enter one of the largest undertakings in human history displaying the power of the long dead civilization that built it. They are puny and usually found in a small cave. To me this does not make sense. I think they would be more like this... http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7203/6877282431_bc760470e4.jpg And behind this doorway would be a large tunnel. A tunnel large enough to bring say a reactor through as that would most likely be the largest structure. Like this http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7205/6877333627_a9fc21046d.jpg and http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7187/6877330185_344133a337.jpg and http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7065/6877314013_64820de251.jpg or http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7039/6877312047_69cb8f1897.jpg.

My second big flaw is where's the food???? I mean there's concept art with hydroponics, but that's about it. http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7064/6877331403_e7d5b82cf1.jpg I mean, Hey! You know a tin of cram and a nuka cola ain't gonna do much for ya!! It wouldn't hurt to throw in one room where they grow some food. Or at least show us an endless warehouse full of fancy lady snacks and potato crisps.

After that I don't per say have any major issues other then the fact that I find most vaults are a carbon copy each other and that there's pretty much no personnel touches to each room or living space that makes it unique. Sure maybe the beds in a different place or the filing cabinet been knocked over but to me and I'm guessing everyone it gets boring. I also understand that it takes time to build things in the game but you know a little uniqueness to each and every vault room would make it so much better. I mean come would it be fun to explore a vault that looked like this... http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7051/6877281023_005a2c530a.jpg or http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7054/6877323923_53302b56b7.jpg. Maybe instead of five vaults in an area you do one really big one displaying the true size of a vault with all possible services a real town has. With tones of unique people working as a city should or who knows really considering most vaults were a gruesome experiment it could be anything. Just put a bit more detail into it.

Anyways I wanna hear from you guys!! What do ya think??? And I wanna know what you hate or would you like to change about vaults.

I like vaults the way they are lore wise, their size makes you think more about the society and how crazy it was rather than the vault itself. As for food, I assume most was in packages and storage units, seeing as most of the vaults were social experiments and only a handful were actually meant to save anyone. As for their design ingame today, with Bethesda they were copy paste, NV was an improvement with the different types of vaults such as the one overgrown and the fiend's vault. But I agree that I would love to see more variation. They seemed alot bigger in the past games though. I really am hoping for larger vaults in the future.

I kinda have faith in Bethesda since Skyrim's dungeons were all unique, to what I have played, and that has been a big thing for them, so they say, stepping away from the copy/paste that was in Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

A very worthwhile read indeed, good sir or madam. But as Roughnecks stated, the vaults weren't made to save anyone. And while I typically hate the copy-paste of Bethesda, in ways it actually makes sense lore wise to occur. We see this in developments all over America. Especially the older ones, the cookie-cutter housing of the 1950's when suburbs were first being built... I would consider it likely that Vault-Tec was simply in a rush to build these things (never even thinking that nuclear war would happen) and get their government money. In this case, they would easily dish out small vaults that all look the same in order to save time and money. But I still agree that real vaults should be massive and lore-wise these things should be a lot bigger too. It is worth noting that in the older fallout games, all the people you see are just a small representation of all the people that actually live in whatever town they live in. With that in mind, vault populations should still be much larger than they could actually house...

The problem I see with this is to remember the Vaults are insane.

They're not meant to be comfortable, pleasant, or a continuation of civilization. They're a social experiment to basically gauge how people would continue to exist on spaceships.

Furthermore, it's important to remember they're effectively just bigger versions of Bomb shelters.

People were expected to live in those for decades, recall. It's entirely possible the Vaults have enough food stored in them for 100 or so years for 1000 or so people.

You gotta remember a few things about the Fallout World though:

1. Massive Earthquakes changed the structure of tbe planet: The Vault Doors would more than likely been Exposed to the surface, making construction easier. The Earthquakes probably burried the entrances to some degree, leaving the small caves as openings.

2. U.S. technology was extremely advanced in some fields: Food recycling and production are not that hard. Hydroponics can provide fresh plants of all types, and would be well within the Fallout World's capabilities.

3. The Vaults in many cases were not intended to last: Most were meant to conduct horrid experiments, killing the inhabitants shortly after the Vaults were sealed. The 'successful' projects, or control vaults, were more than likely under strict rules about "defacing" the vault.

There are some discrepancies though. But you have to remember, many of the features about the vaults were probably "sealed off" from players, only because it was not essential to the game.

The size of the vault living spaces is very plausable. Look at the NORAD facility in Colorado. If converted into a shelter rather than a Command and Control center, it could easily hold 1000 refugees. Other facilities would have to be build to sustain this population for a significant amount of time, but it is quite possible.

Size- Maybe there is more to the vaults, but they just didn't make them completely available in the games. There are allot of things that would probably be in something like that, but aren't needed for the game. It would be cool if they were added though. The entrance would be about as big as it is in the games. They wouldn't carry a fully assembled reactor down there. It was likely constructed inside the vault, so the actual door wouldn't need to be big.

Personalization- Pictures and stuff would be rare. People weren't prepared for the nuclear war. They were at home, at work, or just doing random things. Then if they were lucky the alarms sounded, so they could go to the vaults. Those that did prepare would pack essential things. Cameras, and decorations wouldn't be essential. And I doubt vault tec would supply them.

Copy- Its a high cost social experiment. They don't care much for the actual accommodations, unless its necessary for the experiments. So they would use, cheap, common, and easy built items, to build the vaults. Also, it could cause problems with the experiment. They need everything to be similar as possible, to keep it consistent.