*Disclaimer* I never played any of the Fallout titles prior to F3 so if I am missing relevant pieces of the Fallout lore then I apologize outright for wasting everyone's time.

So I got to thinking... Where is post-apocolyptic Vault Tec? I mean the antagonist in every Fallout game Bethesda has made is a faction other than Vault Tech. I mean here you have a private corporation that has reached the penacle of the war-industrial complex. They have highly advanced tech, are extremely secretive, obviously had a well organized and successful plan in place for multiple vaults all over the country. Were committed to doing vast experiments in supposedly thousands of vaults. There is absolutely no way they were caught off guard by the bombs. It's what they were counting, or dare I say, planning on. They obviously have a vested interest in making certain the bombs do actually drop and that a nuclear war happens. So why has Bethesda never saw the need to include them in one of their games? I mean with everything Vault Tec pulled off they would make the institute sit at the kiddy table.

Why not have a Vault Tech protagonist that is only defeated in part and not destroyed for the final DLC that leads to a huge Vault Tech villian in the next big Fallout game? The potential here is so story and lore rich that it allows for all sorts of options. We finally get to learn why Vault Tech wanted to conduct these experiments, what their role may have been in dropping the bombs, and what they stood to gain from all their nefarious plotting. Perhaps they were secretly allied with China or Russia and were promised control of the US for helping destroy it? Perhaps they have a civilization off somewhere in North Dakota that is unaffected by the bombs and still a very pleasant place to live? Perhaps their leaders found a way to preserve their life like the Cabots did, or willingly froze themselves as well so as to continue their research into the future?

So where is Vault Tech?

I expect Vault Tec will one day turn up in the Fallout series.

Vault-Tech was contracted by the Pre-War US Gov't for... well, exactly what they did with the Vaults. This is why the Enclave in FO2 and FO3 had codes to get into the vaults.

Additionally, all available evidence points to China starting the war. US troop had invaded China by that time, and unless what we get was horribly, horribly untruthful propoganda, the US had Bejing under seige for the few days before the nukes were dropped.

Furthermore, as evidenced by the terminals in Vault 111 and Vault 114, as well as the half-populated vaults on the west coast, Vault-Tech was caught off-guard. Hell, Vault 114 wasn't even close to finished when the bombs dropped. If they instigated the war, why wouldn't they have waited unyil they were ready? It's not like they have to save face- the US Gov't would be more concerned about dealing with the aftermath than going against Vault-Tech in revenge, and nobody in the Vaults would second-guess them.

I don't disagree with this, though I will say that it is very unlikely that they have a portion of the world that is completely preserved. Best case scenario with something like that would be a part of the world that all the raiders were gunning for. It's also pretty apparent that pretty much all of their experiments, while the majority of them have gone terribly awry, are geared towards making weapons, sustainable resources in preparation for the apocalypse, or the militarization of the unknowing inhabitants. Having said all of that, they could make a damn good super villain, presuming some straggler crawling out of the vault would even register on their radar considering that BOS and the institute don't seem to.

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While china may have started the war it does make me wonder what the first vault looked like. I mean obviously they got contracted by the government but they had to have something to pitch to them and you know that high ranking government officials as well as Vault-tec CEO's would be the first names on the list for the biggest and best vault ever. I'd love to see what they're doing now, even if it's that they all died off in a terrible [censored] storm of whatever.