Something that occured to me recently...

There's a lot of mods to add night vision or thermal vision to power armor, but no lore to support power armor actually having either function (to my knowledge). Night vision is only known to exist in a select few pieces of gear (NCR Ranger headgear, Ghost people cowls, certain scopes) and thermal vision, to my knowledge, does not exist.

Then it occured to me that rather than simply being ignorant to it's existence, thermal vision may truly -not- exist within Fallout. Why? This makes sense because the US-Chinese conflict eventually boiled down to stealth dragoon armor vs. power armor, and if power armor were simply equipped with thermal vision, the chinese advantage would be absolutely meaningless.

So am I wrong? Is there any recorded incident of thermal vision existing within Fallout? Or could it very well be that thermal vision was never researched in the Fallout universe, and even night vision had limited support?

Well, versions of it were around in one form or another since the forties. The German's had a prototype rifle mounted with a thermal scope called the Vampire (I believe) So it's not a tretch to believe it could have been develoiped further before the 'spilt'

Plus Power armour always looks like it has it in some form anyway.

Obviously night vision technology exists in the Fallout Universe because the Varmint Rifle in Fallout New Vegas can be equipped with a Night Scope which looks similar to the old Starlight Scope that the United States Military used in Vietnam but it was a very crude night vision technology. The T54-D and the T51-B Power Armor both have what appears to be flash lights mounted on there helmets, so that makes it unlikely that they would have night vision then because if they possessed night vision why would they have a flash light that clearly makes them more obvious to the enemy that they would be attacking. Night vision technology was probably in its infant stage when the bombs fell. The Hazmat Gear probably has night vision so the crew could work 24/7 to deal with radioactive materials. The Desert Ranger armor was produced for the USMC during the Great War for combat in the Gobi Desert. It had incorporated low light and IR (Infer Red) optics, a built in communications package, and gas mask. So there was night vision and IR being used in the Fallout universe, and if the Marine Corp had high tech gear that military's now a days would die for. Than I'm sure the rest of the US Military had better gear because the United States Marine Corp is know to get everyone elses "hand me downs." Other than that I can't think of any other instance of night vision technology in the Fallout universe even though I'm sure its there. I hope this helped you a little bit even though most of this is just speculation. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Prizrak