When did the split in the timeline occur and what caused it to happen?

Space Ninjas created a rift by assassinating dike Nixon's beloved dog. This tore time and space in a.... ummm...

Seriously though.... The timeline is about the same as ours until roughly the end of WW2. But nothing "caused" it other than the imaginations of some game developers...

I mean in lore, what happened to cause time to split into two "rivers", so to speak. Science experiment gone wrong? What? There must be a reason for it in lore, it's such a big thing.

We don't know, something must have happened by the end of the 1950's. In short we don't know and I hope we never know.

That's odd. You'd think such a big event would have some lore behind it.

Might not have been a big event. Have you heared the saying if you go back in time and step on a butterfly you could drastically change the future? Something really small could have happened. Someone that was to play a key role could have died or just lost an election.

It's alternate reality/parallel universes... there wasn't anything that caused the timeline split.

This.

Honestly, I think too much has been made of this "timeline split" since Fallout 3 came out. There is essentially one confirmed fact (above all others) that is relevant to this - and that's that in 2077, when the bombs dropped, the world looked a lot like the idealized techno-utopia popularized in old pulp comics, television, novels, etc. How we arrived at that end result is kind of besides the point. Fallout wasn't created as some hard science fiction attempt to logically determine the effects of a specific event. They simply thought it looked cool to have vacuum tubes and an Inkspots song for the opening credits. (Beyond events and trivia specifically set out and discovered in-game) there's really nothing more to it than that, and anything more is just rationalization on our part. (For example - I kind of prefer the view that culture went through it's normal cycles and simply arrived at a retro-retro style and mentality somewhere around 2077. Others feel comfortable with the idea that society stagnated for 120 years. But either way it's all rationalizations on our part, with no specific backing from in-game lore or canon.)

When Fallout 3 came out, they went a bit further with the iconic "retro" theme, than what you really had going in the previous games. (I'm rather fond of the move, myself.) And they felt the need to try and "explain" the situation to newcomers. But the fact remains that Fallout was designed with a specific style in mind and not a ton of thought went into "why" that was the case. So trying to hold it up to a different standard means it's obviously going to fall apart at the seams. Simply because it was never intended to hold up to rigorous scrutiny.

Frankly, there's no real reason there even has to be a "timeline split," beyond an obsessive need to justify vacuum tubes, black and white tv, and retro computer screens.

farely simple answer could be this one. franklin never died while in office, he lived 10 more years than in reality creating the world of fallout, possible yes, likely to be in lore, No.

Wait,the mysterious stranger could be part of a time traveling agency like FBI or something so he could be the cause of the split and he's trying to put it right by helping the lone wanderer. I mean it could possible but who knows?

As the split was supposed to have happened at some point after WW2 and in the midst of the Cold War, I'm rather partial to the theory that instead of the Democrat the Republican won in 1960. Arrooo.
There's only one slight tweak you'd have to make for Fallout 3, include some sort of commotion before that to fit the new name for the space administration in.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence




I agree its a likely effect, but not the cause. The Transistor, invented in 1947, was not invented until very late in Fallout's timeline.

Really? Hmm, that is interesting. Where does that come from?

Its mentioned on the vault, and is shown in game by all the valves/tube things in big electrical devices.

FDR died before the end of WW2, the change occured after WW2. So he could not have lived 10 more years unless the game developers contradicted themselves....

idiots did you even read? i said he lived 10 years after WW2 so 1955 perfectly within the limits of the time split.

Hey now, let's not start name calling, m'kay.

I do know how it shows, but could you give me a link? Would help a little. As for now I only thought this crazy new transistor thingamajig just never got off to a good start.

The Fallout world changes after WW2. Not before it ended. FDR died before it ended, so he did so in the Fallout world.

Same link as in first post.

I'm thinking the run-up to A Boy and His Dog along with Korea and Vietnam never happening after WW2.

If you read all the holotapes in the FO series, you find the real cause of the FO timeline. Many key advances in techology such as miniaturization of components, modern CPU's, etc. didn't happen at all or were intentionally stalled to corner markets. That's how the FO universe ended up with technology that the people of the real 50's would've considered "cutting edge" by the FO canon.

I also suspect that instead of playing Santa Claus after WW2 to everyone we defeated or were allied to, along with not keeping tinpot 3rd world dictators in power with food aid, the United States became a protectionist capitalist oligarchy with diplomacy and military action being dedicated to consuming resources in its interests.

I wouldn't say that that is the cause of the split - it doesn't explain a lot of the social changes that did or didn't happen, or design changes. A lot of these would be independent of technology.

When it comes to divergence, its easy to confuse cause with effect...

The easiest answer is simply, that there was not one cause, one split, but multiple.

Huh. I'd really like to know where they got that info from. Anyway, I can let that rest for one week. ^_^

I've asked on the Divegence talk page for you:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Divergence#Transistor

The computer game Red Alert takes place during an unspecified period in the 1950s of a parallel universe, which was inadvertently created by Albert Einstein in a failed attempt to prevent the horrors of World War II. Perhaps you can imagine that something similar happened in the Fallout universe.

If memory serves me, I think its possible it was something to do with Sierra Military Depot, or at the very least, it was suggested it was something like that.