We don't know when the Enclave came up with the idea of the vault experiments. Could be Vault 13 was not given its experiment till just before the war.

The vaults were a sick experiment. :S I read the wikia. They are the most disturbing thing so far. More disturbing than other things in the game.

Messing about with people when nuclear war could start and did. I suppose they were garanteed test subjects.

Maybe they started out as simpley fallout shelters and the Enclave hijacked them.

There's a vault with lots of Garys?! I did not know that. I found a dead Gary 23 in the Outcast place in the Anchorage DLC.

I have only had the Fallout 3 a bit btw. I ahve not played any other Fallout games.

Vault 101 is disturbing. Why would you lock them in together and NEVER open the door? In theory anyway, lol.

That is beyond cruel.

And the vault were they made Super Mutants and threw people and other beings in vats of Forced Evolutionary Virus and made Chimieras is terrifying.

The one with the faulty door that let in radiation is sick. That one made ghouls.

Are there any vaults that are just fallout shelters and nothing else?

Hopefully for their inhaditants sake there were. :S

It gives you chills thinking about it. Something you should not think about too much.

The thing is, when you look at the cost of the vaults ($645 Billion at the time of the war to save 1000 people in V13 {with Highwayman being $200,000, if we call that the same as a Ford Taurus at $US25,000, the adjusting for inflation thats about $US80 billion 625 million in todays money. Divide by 1000 puts each life saved at $US80 million, 625 Thousand real world dollars. The Russians will send you to space for $50 million}).

Then look at fact the country is supposedly on a war footing; Assuming that each vault costs the same as V13, thats a total network cost of 9 Trillion 836 Billion 250 Million. The real world US DOD has a proposed budget of only $525 Billion. You could operate the entire US armed forces as they exist today for 19 years, or you could save 122,000 people.

there where 17 control vaults I think 1 was vault 8 in fallout 2 I don't think we've seen any other contol ones

(There were 17 control Vaults, Vaults 3, 8, and 76 are the three we know about.)

regardless. 8 years between completeion and the great war.
Its still a sloppy tie in to have it be part of the experiments, and have that particular experiment invalidated due to an incomplete equipment manifest.

in addition as other have mentioned cost, i must chime in on that as well as being unrealistic.

Let's assume that the Enclave did see themselves as the best stock for repopulation of the planet.
Why spend all of the resources (having just had the resource wars) to build vaults for social experimentation?
Why would you not allocate those resources to fortify Enclave safe-havens?

Nefarious, the enclave are. But, the best answer we get as to why the above would even be considered is MCA saying the th FB that they arent the smartest bunch. Yet, they are able to mastermind the entirety of the vault experiments, without being so much as rumored of existing?

hmmmmm

Vaults were built to SAVE PEOPLE. The Enclave usurped Project Safehouse for their own goals.

Plant Zombies/Vault 22, was to create some new breed of plants that could easily survive terrible conditions.

Gary Clones: Support population problems.

The fiends/Vault 3, took over by force after they opened up peacefully.

White Noise: ??? To do something, I guess.....

Super Mutants, or the F.E.V. Vault: To make a Human Hybrid sutible for a nuclear holocaust.

And many other vaults were for the future survival of human kind, just some went ovverboard and the experiment failed, or...... they did it intentionally to see what the locals would do.

By my estimation, the Vault Experiments can be divided into two groups. I'm too lazy to look up all the numbers and I don't want to make other people do it either, so bare with me.

1. Those whose final aim was to hopefully allow people to survive better in the post-apocalyptic world. Examples of this include the NCR's diversity vault, the vault where stuff broke down, the plant vault, Vault 21's gambling system to resolve disputes, and the sacrificial vault (insofar as moral preparedness.)

and 2. Those whose final aim was to hopefully benefit the Enclave, who were involved in the project. Examples of this type include the Gary vault, the mind control-with-sound Vault, and the psychedelic drug vault.

Vault 87s FEV experimentation is sort of a mix of the two, I'm not sure where 101 fits, and Braun's vault is in it's own special category, but I think it helps to get an understanding of why the vaults are like they are.

On the subject of Gary, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug7jf75OiNQ&feature=related (It makes more sense when you watch the whole episode), I mean the similarities are pretty close? Both are a little slow on the uptake and both only say GARY.

Wasn't the vault experiments to prepare the enclave for their space jorney that they later scrapped?

Thats from Van Buren and not canon.

Oh, well most of 'em seem like they could be tests to see how people would react stuck in a rocket or such for a long time. Should be canon :sadvaultboy:

My personal theory is the roughly 50% cost overrun ( original budget 400 odd billion iirc) is the enclave skimming for their facilities. Also remember that (vb influenced stuff follows) the enclave conspiracy's pre war projections considered post war earth a complete write off - uninhabitable.



Except styles that makes no logical sense.

To save a mere 122 thousand people the government would have to spend the same as four and a half years worth of the real us governments income in 2010. Surely it would have cost less, and saved more, to build a massive house style anti missle system. The real world population of Vegas is 2 million. House did a better job at saving people at a much lower cost (as he financed it himself and I'm not aware of that many folks who can come up with 9 trillion).

The country is supposed to be gearing for an inevitable war (or fighting it) at the same time.

Project safehouse only makes sense if there's something else going on.

Nice... I love it as an explaination really, for the most part.

You are not thinking like a politician.

The World is falling apart every nation is at one anothers throats. Nuclear war is a very real threat! You people turn to you (the governmnet) and say "What are you doing to save us!"

So you come up with "Project Safehouse" a large showy project to calm the people into thinking you are doing something to save them. Much like "duck and cover," which in truth, was stick your head between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye. Some Vaults could save more the just 1000 people but you are right there is no way 122 Vaults could save 400 million. There were never meant to save that many. Just enough to keep America going but the main reason is to show the people "Hey we are doing something."

Enclave having ther own goals usurp the project for their own goals. They have to make it look like they were saving people. Really do you think the American government went around saying "Take shelter in our vaults that will most likely kill you?! And by the way we spent 9 trillion doing it"

In a Nuclear War the only real way to "win" is to be the last man standing. 122,000 may not be alot when you think 400 million but its better then Zero. Sure there would be people that survive without being in a Vault but the Vaults were built to show the people that "Something is being done." Also when the world is going to hell, you'll just end up printing money. Much like is happeneing now. The Vaults started being built in the 2050s I believe.

Which would also expalin Vault Zero. The Vaults would need to have a Hub, a place where all the Vaults can be linked which would help rebuild. Enclave not caring about saving people made the cut backs to Vault Zero which caused it to fail. Which killed many governement people not apart of the Enclave.

So, even knowing full well that Nuclear War was a certainty and that anything they owed would be written off, they thought they'd draw the line at ￡9 Trillion?

No not 9 Trillion pounds, 9 trillion Dollars. America's Bugdet this year is something like 3.7 trillion dollars so is it really that hard to believe? $9 trillion form start to finish, so sometime in the 2050s to 2077. I can see $9 trillion over 27 or so years. Also think of all the money America was saving by replacing human workers with Robots.

Also, I am not sure what we are talking about. Are we just debating the cost of the 122 vaults or are we still debating wheather they were meant to save people?

2.1 is the revenue 2010, 3 trillion was spent.

I was thinking like a politician " what am I doing to save you've I'm building a big anti nuclear missle defense systemthat will save you and your homes, unlike my opponent who wants to spend even more to save just a handful of his friends"

We're debating both. You don't spend 4 and a half years revenue (or 18 years worth of defense budget) to save a handful of people if your goal is to really save people. You find a better way, cheaper, that gets you the same political outcome.

You can only print so much money before it becomes worthless.

I only used pounds from a force of habit, I was arguing why would price matter when the Enclave knew that the war was coming, why would they underfund Vault 0.

Thing is they went with Vaults. We have to assume there was way to many nuclear weapons out there to stop, which is the case. There were ICBMs in Fallout. Even Mr.House could not stop them all, what was it something like 77 nukes for the Vegas area alone? Vaults were built to show the people America was doing something. Again they could have an most likely just printed money. "We need another Trillion, fire up the printers!"

Vaults we mostly built long before the Great War. They had Years to build them. They were not built in the few years just before the War. The money spent was spent over years. Also Vaults were not just for Nuclear War, they were also incase there was another out break of New Plage if I remember right.

As I said in another post 122,000 may not seem like alot but after a nuclear war you would be lucky to have even ten thousand without Vaults.

Reason why China had such a huge population boom in the 1950s and 1960s to the point they are at 1.3 or so billion people was because the threat of nuclear war. The theory was "If there was a globel nuclear war, USA and USSR would have a few thousand survivors, while China would have hundreds of thousands if not millions of survivors.

Well if you go by Fallout Tactics the reason why Vault Zero was underfunded was because the threat of nuclear war seemed to have passed. Which makes sense, because America was winning the war in China. Still Vault Zero was to be the public face of the Vaults. The Hub where they can plan the rebuilding. Enlave having their own plans for the Vaults and having the Rig would take money away from it. They don't want it to work, so they would use any reason they can to underfund it. Plus there is the bonus of sending none Enclave people there where they would die or remain in cryo-sleep till after Enclave rebuilt America.

Over the entire US? No. You'd have a lot more.

Threads (BBC DocuDrama 1984, available on Google Video) estimated after a nuclear war with the USSR 4 to 11 million alive in the UK a few years after the bomb based on the population in 1984. This is using nothing more than the Civil Defense information available at the time - Improvised shelters in homes, limited stockpiles of food and medicine, unprepared local authorities, etc.

Is Threads really all a credible source though the society doesn't even completely breakdown, hell the government imprisoners "looters" in Tennis Courts and such.

Damn didn't notice that you actually said it was Threads (wanted to sound clever ), a very underated piece of nuclear fiction.

As it was a BBC educational/public affairs piece that was there to explore the horror, I'd say yeah, its fairly reliable.

(oddly the figure that shook me was how the health system would collapse. The entire countries pre war health system combined would not be enough to meet the needs of a single city in the immediate aftermath.)

I think the post blast society is realistic. There would be some semblence of attempted order. The folks who make up the Police and the Army are still going to do their jobs and take orders from someone, the people in charge of the food depots and ammo have real power. "Government", albeit only local government, still would exist in some form, as it has since time immemorial when it was triabl cheifs and elders. Those who work get fed (on every other day) those that don't... Don't.

Some habits of the old world will be hard to shake. People will still try to form communities. The communities will have rules. People will enforce them.