So why excatly does no one ever enter and no one ever leave? Is that the same for all the other vaults? What makes 101 so different? I realise i proberbly could of googled this for an answer but i really would like to hear everyones opinion on the matter and what better place to ask then to ask all the hardcoe fallout fans

So yeah i was just curious what made Vault 101 so significant, i mean how many people did they allow in there before closing it up? How long has it been around for and was it first come first served or was there a very though application to pass before entering?

Thanks guys Im really intereasted in learning, i feel it would make my fallout 3 experience so much more, fulfilling.

It's just another Vault experiment to test how people would react on the fact that they would end up living in that Vault for the rest of their lives, and their children, and their children and so on.

Claustrophobia testing, is my best guess for Vault 101. It wasn't anything special compared to something like Vault 13 (intented to be closed for 200 years) or any other minor-scale experiment Vault.

All vaults were filled when Nukes started hitting. You can hear the few holotapes (Keller family or something), about a family trying to seek shelter in 101, 87 and others, but failing to do so.
"We couldn't get into a Vault. 101, 87, didn't matter -- all full to capacity."
- Keller family transcript 2.

Vault 12, from Fallout 1, failed because no matter many people found shelter there, but the door actually never closed, resulting in Ghoul city of Necropolis.

All vaults besides some few had 1000 inhabitants.

EDIT: Vault Wiki states 101's mission as "Evaluation of performance of an omnipotent Overseer in a closed community "
I find it odd since it's impossible to predict that a omnipotent Overseer will succeed the first one.

This confuses me somewhat, though it was probably an oversight on Bethesda's part. Many of the vaults weren't full to capacity because of 'cry wolf' mentality of the constant siren drills prior the actual bombings, so when the sirens did sound for the official alert, many people stayed put, there's not a chance they would have been able to reach a Vault once the bombs dropped, Fallout 3's world map is (understandably) misleading, it would take days to travel between locations. Vault 13 was probably the only vault that was exempt from this cry wolf mentality, because it was the very last to be constructed, even later than it was planned to be finished, and so the drills for that vault were considerably less before the bombings.

Update/Sources: Fallout bible 3



Well I get the general idea that the vault experiments were destined to fail, I think the real experiment was in the severity of the results, rather than the actual experiment itself. There is a mention of this in the Fallout Bible, albeit a very small one, that one vault's experiment, similar to another, was destined to fail before the other, which implies they were both expected to fail, you could then extend that logic to many if not all the other experimental vaults. There were only 17 vaults that were made to work the way they were designed, and these I think, were the only vaults expected to succeed in any positive way.

Update/Sources: Fallout Bible 1

I always thought the "No one ever enters, and no one ever leaves" bit to be rather stupid. Obviously this policy came into place AFTER James' arrival...Otherwise he would have never been in there. So the "No one in and no one out" policy couldn't have been a Vault Tec experiment, since it wasn't enacted from the beginning...I can't imagine the experiment being "Wait until a doctor comes along asking for entrance with an infant, then seal the Vault FOREVER!" lol....

It is upto the overseer to adhere to the experiment, after 200 years there would have been more than 1 overseer, possibly 3. Vault-Tec give them their orders, and they were expected to follow those orders to the letter, they use fear and power of suggestion to make sure these orders are adhered to, letting them believe that the world above is still uninhabitable (the Vault 101 PA system uses this as a foreshadowing) it was also an oversight that all comunication between the Vaults and Vault-Tec would be lost after the bombs dropped, the Vaults were designed to be under supervision by Vault-Tec. Original overseers could have been former Vault-Tec employees themselves.

We are aware that the current overseer of Vault 101 knew that the world above had at least a degree of safety after sending out his scout parties, though this just strengthened his resolve in keeping residents in, and wastelanders out. James is an educated scientist, if he had found this scouting party, he would have been considered useful for the Vault's survival and progression. But I imagine people had left before these events, on previous scout runs possibly.

LOL. Well, I didn't think it was pretty bad at first. I remember getting excited about the story and thinking the premise was pretty cool. That was until it was repeatedly undermined by various logs and NPCs, so now Ron Perlman ends up sounding like a big fat liar.

It was said in-game that the east coast was hours bombed after the west coast, which gave them more time to confirm the attack and take refuge.

My guess is that The Overseer rebelled against the experiment once he learned that the radio broadcasts were fake information and were meant to deter people in that Vault from going outside as part of the social testing. The scouting missions lead to deaths and so he closed the Vault right after James came in. The Scouting Dossiers on his computer match up with this theory, as do the Megaton residents' dialouge claiming several people left the Vault over ten years ago. It is just a guess though.