Okay I have one question about Dad which, to the best of my knowledge I have yet to receive an explaination for. His goal was to see the waters of life flow for everyone, freely, correct? Yeah okay, I can buy that he wouldn't want the Enclave getting their hands on his purifier, presumably all he knows of the Enclave (though were from is anyone's guess) is what their last plan was. He couldn't know that Autumn actually intended to distribute the water anyway; only Eden, behind the backs of everyone in the Enclave wanted to posion it (apartently, sometihng else I contest but that is niether here-nor-there for this discussion).

My question, however, is this. Why did he install a radioactive bomb, powerful enough to kill power armoured troops, into the purifying chamber of his purifer? I mean what the [censored]. It is clearly a method of rendering the purifier useless, contaminating it and therefore making it unable to be activated; kind of like a self-destruct mechanism. He can't of known that the Enclave would show any interest in his purifier, especially when nobody had heard anything from them aside from the radio in two decades; even the radio itself was not understood by most people who thought that it was pre-war and the BoS were surprised when the Enclave spawned so surely they didn't know either. What motivation did James have for building it in there? He couldn't have known that the Enclave would come so who was he expecting to attack?

I'm not sure it was so much a radioactive bomb as James screwing around with the controls in order to cause a "radioactive explosion" kind of thing.

However I kinda view his sacrifice as not worth much. James knew that the purifier wouldn't work without a GECK, so he could have played along with the Enclave and Autumn. Even if he killed himself to prevent the Enclave from gaining the knowledge about the GECK, it was a pointless because the Enclave found out eventually about it anyway, and at the end of the day the brotherhood still had to march on the purifier.

It would have made a lot more sense for him to relent and work for Autumn for the time being (and he could conduct subterfuge in that position) and waited until the Brotherhood man'd up and took back the purifier.

He could have pretended to work for the Enclave while secretly creating an Iron Man suit...

No bomb involved. Almost everything in the Fallout world is nuclear-powered so its hardly surprising that sabotaging the purifier involved releasing radiation.

Preserving food involves radiation here.

I don't think dad was a *psycho, I think they tried to show that in the end, he was human. He was very intelligent, and clearly had withstood a lot out of the wasteland, but in the end...the excitement of being able to finish his life's work, and the sudden confrontation with the Enclave, well, panic took over and he just reacted. His first instinct was to protect his work and by proxy, protect his child -- obviously, as Andronicus pointed out, it failed, though Dad couldn't have known that -- and in the end it, at least, bought them some time.

I do not think James was psycho. He sabotaged the purifier to shop the Encalve getting it and he probabely thought Doctor Li could fix it later.

The radiationis not at all surprising. Everything is nuclear. Transport, guns, weapons, batteries, even the food is named after nuclear things. There is even a drink witha isotope in, Nuka Cola Quantum.

They probabely have a nuclear energy source and some other nuclear things.

He did not install a radioactive bomb at all.

He just messed round with it stop the Enclave getting it.

I dont see how he was pyscho. He was just trying to protect you(lonewanderer) and not have to deal with the enclave to start with.

Might I remind us all that he acomplished this from a console composed of 9 number keys, the console where we activate the purifier from, you all saying that power and emergency radiation vent was donefrom it? And why would it vent into the chamber itself, when you are building a water purifier I would imagine that any part of a reactor designed to "release" radiation would be as far away from it as possible.

Perhaps the Brotherhood had installed it way back when, when they built it, as a fail safe?

^^win

Might I remind you that there were other consoles that you couldn't interact with, and those are probably the ones James was using? And yeah in the Fallout universe everything in nuclear powered, so im sure he just overloaded something in the chamber to release radiation into it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulvQn17N5N4&NR=1&feature=fvwp

3:50

He walks to the console with the numbers on it, perhaps you should have checked what you were saying, as can be seen when he steps away; something inside the chamber then explodes. Thank God the reactor was also controlled from the same 9 button keypad.

When you give Autumn the incorrect code, one of the Enclave soldiers gets injured/killed...some smartypants rigged it so the wrong code didn't just lock you out, it did something mean

Yeah dude and there were still other buttons around the keypad. And uhh ya, there was a explosion because he sabatoged something, not because of a dirty bomb or some kind of emergency vent.

Sure but he didn't press them, you can see he pressed buttons on the console with the keypad on it when he walks away. If he thought that putting something that potentionally hazardous (fine, as a reactor or whatever) and radioactive enough to kill power armoured troops in seconds next to his purifying chamber then I think my statement still stands; something that bad does not belong next to the "waters of life".

@At skirt, I think that may just have been the rads, suiciding his own men into the chamber for the sake of the [censored] purifier, got to remember that when I'm next in a discussion with Andronicus... you may just have given me something thanks

Again, almost EVERYTHING in the Fallout universe is nuclear powered, even cars. Would you put little Jimmy in the backseat a car that if it gets hit hard enough is going to detonate and blow up into a mushroom cloud? If you lived in the Fallout universe you would, so it only makes sense that the purifier has a reactor in it.


And why are we arguing about how big the controls for the thing are anyway, who cares if its only nine buttons on it or not? Even though there are more whether he used them or not.

Again, it is seriously radioactive and a massive hazard, he should know, or care, better than to put it into a water purifier. The pre-war cars and nuclear power stations were built and maintained by properly educated people. Whatever powers the purifier is 200 years old and maintained by James, presumably someone not aquianted with the inner workings of nuclear reactors. It's just common sense, why put it next to a water purification system, put it outside or nearby, if something went wrong the the ancient thing it could do untold damage to the water... again.

The controls arguement is because he walks over to the keypad which activates the purifier, presses some buttons. The angle on that shot isn't good and I don't have any kind of capture equipment, well I could do a [censored] phone recording of the TV I guess. My point is why would the controls to overload the power system, or anything to do with the power system, be on the activation locking mechanism?

My guess is there isn't any other way of powering the purifier other than the reactor. And its not like the water is getting filtered through it, its only powering it, so if something does go wrong with it then its not really going to matter whether its outside or not. Hell the radiation inside the chamber was strong enough to kill you when you turned it on at the end of the game, so its not like its leaking into the water.

And the control pad was probably just what they used to enter codes into the system, not control the entire thing.

Now I'm interested.

Is it something pertaining to the Eden debate?

I was just thinking of Autumn sending people into the chamber, and almost certian death, to activate his little pet project.

I think it just goes to show that Autumn didn't fully understand the implications of what he was doing. Acting on impluse and emotions rather than what was better for the Enclave.

Mate, The enclave has almost unlimited resources compared to the BOS at that stage. They could of simply desided to sit down on that vault with the geck, kill all of the super mutants using their vast numbers and simply just take the thing back and give everyone mutation aids through the water.