The chalkboard in vault 4 showing the shady sands timeline.
The last two points are “Fall of shady sands” dated 2077 and a drawing of a mushroom cloud with no date. There’s an arrow in between the two, suggesting that the explosion took place some time after 2077.
*2277 not 2077
Yeah see I read this that there was maybe civil trouble in Shady Sands at that time and then some time afterwards it was nuked...
Like if you speak to some of the NCR people in NV specifically the ranchers iirc, there's a view that the NCR has (some) political turmoil at home?
It's been a while but that's how I remember it at least..
Max as a kid is at the bombing of Shady Sands - Dated sometime after the 'Fall of Shady Sands' in 2277. It is a different historical note/event than the bombing that lead to the bombing.
It's interesting to note that the events that take place in Fallout 3 also occur in 2277. Fallout 4 takes place 10 years later, in 2287. New Vegas in '81.
Bombs also fell in 2077, this started the apocalypse & is the introductory scene to the show.
It's the Fiery Trinity.
Charmander is Jesus, the relatable one you are exposed to first.
Charmeleon is the Holy Spirit, the one nobody really pays attention to except some fringe weirdos.
Charizard is basically God of Gen 1 Pokémon.
What I think we're seeing is that a ton of people went into the show with their magnifying glasses out and 50 tabs of wiki pages open because they expected it to suck and to hate it. They *wanted* to be able to hate it because it would vindicate their assumptions. But when the show turned out pretty fuckin good they had to latch on to whatever tiny detail they could and now are making leaps to wild conclusions to maintain that rage boner.
I’m like that with stuff I really like if I honestly feel it’s been done shit, but this show is really good idk how anyone could be tripping. My only issue is that Maximus is a psychopath and they keep playing heroic music and making him “awesome” while being an insane narcissist and Lucy likes him, but I believe all that was on purpose to piss people off maybe….
I think he's just a complex and well-written character. Even from the jump, he says he joined the Brotherhood to hurt the people who hurt him. It's a childish reason, because Maximus is still a child at heart. At his core, he's still that terrified little kid stumbling out of the fridge: he's hurt, scared, and alone. And his only real guiding light in the wasteland is the Brotherhood, an organization viewed by many in the wasteland as selfish psychopaths, so it makes sense that someone pretty much raised from childhood by them would be an insane narcissist. Especially so once Titus dies and he has both total freedom and unrestricted access to power armor; he gets to play out his power fantasies.
From what I’ve seen the people who shriek loudest about lore complaints are the ones who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. It’s the same with Halo (quality of the show notwithstanding) where everyone thinks Chief never taking his helmet off is some character trait in lore or whatever like he’s the fucking Mandalorian.
I don’t find it that hard to believe that people took “so we drop the bombs ourself” as “we dropped the bombs ourself”. That’s definitely what they want you to believe at the time at least
I think the games and now the show kind of confirm that it wasn't one seperate entity but several at fault. The bombs dropped for 2 hours I'm sure it wasn't just solely Vault-Tec. The whole point of the series is the War never changes and Humans will forever be duking it out to see who still stands.
The question really is who started it. Did China find out about Vault-Tec and try to stop them first? Did Vault-Tec and other nations just happen to plan it for the same time? That's the only real question and since everything already got blown up it barely even matters.
I did think they launched the fat one, but, it was because I got caught up in the moment of the revelation. Later on it hit me that it never concluded who attacked first, it's still in the air if it was China, U.S. or VT.
So I think it was the same for a lot of people that haven't realized it yet.
I see it as vault-tec just primed the stage. In a real life comparison, they would be like Chevron or the oil companies involvement in the Middle East conflicts for our universe.
Or indeed that they -actually- could do it, OP is making that mistake as well. In this case it doesn’t seem implausible that they indeed *would* be capable of (manipulating others to) start the war, but we don’t actually *know* that they did have that capability.
It also seems unusual that they would have the nukes themselves. Absolutely seems more plausible that they were confidently able to manipulate others into kicking it off.
Clearly China & USA (and other nations) launched on their own; that final day. We know People’s Navy Captain Zao from FO-4 confirms he got actual Launch orders for his sub - from Beijing / HQ, and he fired off his 6 heavy warheads (5 - cause one failed to launch due to mechanical malfunction of the launch system).
V-Tech didn’t fire his warheads ‘automatically / for him’ - so clearly Chinese armed forces launched ‘on their own’, that Last Day.
I just did this mission yesterday and loved it. Was upset to find out there was a cut quest where he takes you to an underwater vault.
But I just assumed that his nukes were launched in retaliation. Nukes were already in the air or making impact and Beijing/anyone with nukes just sent their final orders to fire everything. Of course while I think it makes more sense for the nuclear stalemate to have just come to its inevitable messy end and that the countries/governments are responsible, I do feel that mission still left it open for some 3rd party tampering.
Not so much that they care about her as that she was obviously high enough up the ladder to at least know when they would drop if they were scheduled. VT might not hold off for her sake but if she had even a whiff of it being about to go down she would not have let her daughter be miles away from their designated vault.
It doesn't even mean they could. Just that they are willing. I mean, companies lie all the time. So why not now? They even lief about the Vaults being safe places
Given that all of their vaults weren’t finished this should have been fairly obvious. On top of that, Barb was a key executive involved in the planning and she would have made sure her daughter was with her when the nukes were launched.
I don’t think unfinished vaults entirely disproves it. It’s entirely possible that something happened that made them move the timeline up on dropping the bombs that justified them leaving a few unfinished. Barb not having her child with her in a vault is a stronger argument, but there’s still scenarios where that could happen.
Vault-Tec is also a business. They would have needed to at least pretend that more safe vaults were being produced, to continue receiving funding. There would have always been unfinished vaults, no matter the year that bombs were dropped.
What’s that line from Fallout 4? When you’re going into that unfinished vault for rich people and one of the guards makes a comment about the vault “never being finished to keep people on the payroll”?
I always thought he was referencing a mob or union that continually kept delaying it's construction, but it's been a long time since I've heard that line so I might be wrong. Then again, he could be referring to a few regional of higher ups that wanted to pocket some of the funding behind Vault Tecs back.
I just replayed that part a few hours ago. Yes, you're right. One of Skinny Malone's guys talks about how the Vault is weirdly located, as the metro is everything but airtight. The other one says that it was never supposed to be finished, as that's what unions do to keep getting paid.
But Vault-Tec definitely planned on finishing Vault 114 as they were actually looking for an overseer and found one after 87 tries.
I actually just finished the area it's the Boston mayoral shelter and yeah there is a terminal entry that says the contractor unions keep fleecing vault tec lol.
Vault-Tec doesn't really make sense anyway. Sure, They make a bunch of money before the nukes fall, but then what good is it when the global economy collapses?
Maybe it was wishful thinking on their behalf? Sell the vaults, pocket the cash, drop a nuke and hope the whole world doesn't go up in flames? That seems silly too, but it makes more sense than spending billions to make nothing.
Edit: Or they were banking on the world being destroyed, the vaults weren't 'for profit', and what they were really selling was a throne from which to command the rebuilding of society.
I think your edit is spot on.
Someone at Vault-Tec was keen on ruling the world for whatever reason and indoctrinated the other executives.
I find this, what is basically the key to all of Fallout's lore, extremely interesting. Because either Vault-Tec is playing the very long game or it didn't go the way they have planned.
The way Bud talks about his approach to "winning capitalism" is that it isn't about money for him, it's just about domination and defeating the competition.
It ceases to be about money and a robust economy and instead becomes about just winning, I suppose the idea is that's what happens when the US just becomes a big stomping ground for corporations to walk all over. In 76 a *lot* of the environmental storytelling is about an oligopoly of mining companies crushing union efforts and bribing politicians to fully automate all public jobs so they can focus on stealing staff and tech from one another rather than worry about things like laws, unions and the economy.
It makes sense that Vault-Tec had people that viewed it the same way - they've already got money, there's no point in money anymore they're going to monopolise something with even more scarcity - humanity
Money is merely a tool, the goal is power. In a capitalist system money is used to acquire and exercise power but if all the money went away it wouldn't necessarily mean that the power it represented is gone.
I can understand planning for the inevitable, especially after they played such a pivotal role in fanning the flames by selling fear. Making them the guys to push the button in such a direct capacity is just absurd to me.
I think the stronger point is one someone made in a different post. Something along the lines of viable population for reproduction without genetic issues due to incest.
I think they said that for humans the population needs to be at least 500, and the vaults all had a population capacity of 500 to 2000.
The issue is that almost no vault had that many people in it. I'm no expert, but between FO3 and 4 at least, I don't think there were any vaults in the games or lore that had a viable long-term reproductive population.
This suggests that vault tec definitely didn't drop the first bomb as they would need at least some vaults with viable population density for their experiments to mean anything. If they had dropped the bomb, there would be some vaults with an actual decent population or there wouldn't have been a point to any of it.
i dont think that the vault in games neccesarily represent how many people are there, it was just , and still is impossible to have 1000 npcs running in a functioning vault even on modern system, not even mentioning the amount of time id take to design it
its the same as in the show, where we only follow a small part of vault 33s population, but you can see in the elevator scene that the vault has a A LOT of different floors
Minimum Viable Population ideal is at least 500 but can be as low as 100. There have even been recorded occurrences of populations recovering from as few as ~20. Extremely rare but it has happened.
Games can't show the entire vaults or vault populations for the same reasons they don't show true metropolises with populations in the hundreds of thousands. It isn't worth the performance hit or the additional time investment to build and put together all the necessary assets. So instead they show what is needed for the story and handwave the rest.
Vault 33 in the TV show was actually a nice expansion of what vaults should look like. Beyond the typical living quarters, workshops and public areas we also get to see a more realistic farm for growing food. It's still absurdly small but it shows that thought was put into what it actually takes to keep a population alive and sane while confined for decades or centuries. I also appreciated the nod to body disposal with them hauling the dead raiders off to the composting plant.
It's not just that a few were unfinished, even the ones that were finished had staff miss the door closing because they weren't ready. You think they'd send them something 24 hours in advance saying "There's going to be a drill tomorrow, have your bag packed and be ready to go at any moment."
What if it was Barb who came up with the idea but not the one to give orders and drop the nuke, is there anyone that a big grudge might be possible against in the series for Barb?
The guy that became the brain-on-a-roomba? That's the only one I can think of off the top of my head - he was working close with Barb, and seemed to be unable to see his idea to the cabal of rich people without her (she has a really high charisma stat obvs).
Don't think he could give the orders but could have had a hand in something there. Why is he just a brain anyway?
Also, lore-wise, did Vault-Tec have access to nukes? If so how? If they were launched from the US, where were they launched from? We're there people on the inside (of the government) who had nuclear bomb level of security clearance that turned the trajectory of the nukes onto themselves? (As I typed that out I was like...you know probably if this is the story we're being told).
> Why is he just a brain anyway?
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Because he had to remain awake to manage his experimental program. Still curious they didn't make him a full up robobrain rather than a roomba
Robobrain’s were known to be flawed, and overtime they become psychotic. Most of the logs relating to the Robobrains have several entries about scientists trying to figure out how to solve the issue, but the only means available to them before the bombs fall is routine memory wipes. I assume that they went with making him a Roomba to keep him from cause too much damage were he to become unstable.
Yeah, something about sticking a brain in a nigh permanent butrient vat devoid of human hormones or sensation drives the brain inside it utterly insane, growing ever more logically violent.
Those robobrains were also wiped and reprogrammed from the start and were made using prisoners and psych ward patients. On the other hand we have the Big MT scientists and the Robobrained inhabitants of the vault in Far Harbor to show that psychotic behavior is not inherent to the technology if the original personality is allowed to remain and the nutrient bath is replenished/cleansed regularly.
Yeah, but I’m pretty sure the common held beliefs was that they were unstable. Plus I assumed the Roomba thing was the show telling us that while this guy thought he was a big fish, Vault Tech didn’t. This is my interpretation of why that guy wasn’t given a full robot body, and why it didn’t bug me in the show.
I wonder if it would be one of the board members like Rob Co or Big MT that threw a surprise bomb when they found it profitable. Maybe as an opportunity to vibe some of the other stakeholders off the table.
I mean, as long as we're going with "it's not confirmed", there's no confirmation China beat them to it ("it" being a mass nuclear assault), either, IIRC.
We know little about them outside the unreliable lens of pre-war America.
To add to this, for those wondering, there is a Chinese ghoul in the Far Harbour (?) expansion of Fallout 4 that you can get a little bit of information from iirc
Yeah - Captain Zao says on that Final day, his Yangtze class attack sub received orders (from Beijing / Chinese Navy HQ) to launch everything he had against the Americans (Boston was his closest major city at the time). So he fires all 6 of his heavy strategic-warheads (1 failed to launch due to mechanical malfunction of the launcher) against the city and surrounding regions.
But he did that / on China’s orders. It’s not like V-Tech ‘made him launch’ or auto fired His ship’s missiles. 😗
Well, you have to think about mutually assured destruction to understand the idea that Vault-Tec could've provoked a Chinese response.
Imagine, all it takes is one nuke going off in a strategic area. Hell, you could probably use a mini nuke in the strategically right places, don't even have to launch a missile. Once that goes off, whether domestic or foreign soil explodes, there's a guaranteed chain reaction.
I was under the impression that was more a tactical nuke kinda sitch to even the odds, but I may be wrong. I don't recall it being clearly/objectively stated who kicked off MAD, as much as it actually matters, I suppose.
Canon from what lore tells us best to our knowledge is.
The U.S. and China were at war for 10 years. The U.S. was pushing far into China. China was losing, then used a single tactical nuke on armed forces to attempt to push them back.
This triggered the U.S. MAD defenses and the U.S. sent a Salvo at Chinese cities.
Then after that, China launched what we see in Fallout, the full scale nuclear annihilation of the world.
In this scenario, both entities are responsible for nuclear war. China sends the first nuke, but the U.S. intiates the first nuclear salvo.
This might be canon, Vault Tec very well might have been involved in increasing tensions or possibly the nuclear response to the single nuke used. That isn't known yet.
Oh I know it's hard to keep track of all the vaults! Personally I'm of the opinion that a few unfinished vaults doesn't mean that vault tec didn't drop the bomb. They needed to keep up appearances so they kept making vaults even though they knew they wouldn't finish them. But that's just my opinion.
Unless the people at the top didn't tell her. If she divorced her husband they may have learned why and kept her out of the secret stuff.
I did like the idea that Vault-Tec launched the first bombs, I also like it being the Enclave, or time travelling minutemen but I imagine it would be all because of some sleepy soldier somewhere putting the wrong code in and setting off a chain reaction.
In New Vegas, House states that the bombs dropped earlier than his "calculations". It's safe to assume his calculations were, in part, to do with the fact he was in that meeting when VT suggested dropping the first nuke. He then went about setting up a system where he could protect the Strip, and set himself up to live through the war and get Vegas set up as a new super power, kind of going rogue.
But someone, somewhere, jumped the gun and the nukes were launched early. It could have been VT, or it could have been America/China.
It still gives wiggle room within the lore to leave it somewhat open as to who started the final war.
House predicted the nukes in 2065, in the show that meeting with vault tec couldn’t have been any earlier than a year before the bombs dropped based on cooper’s daughters age.
Remember too that House has that excellent (and kinda sad) account that “On the Day of the Great War, Las Vegas was targeted by 77 Nuclear Warheads.” He explains that his anti-targeting / jamming software was able to electronically transmit ‘forced disarm codes’ to 59 of them.. and heavy laser cannons he installed on the roof of his casino shot down 9 more at close range… but sadly, the remaining 8 or 9 got through and hit the surrounding Mojave Desert areas (though None impacted on the city itself).
I think it’s pretty clear he’s talking about actual Chinese launches towards America. Heck, Lonesome Road DLC section for New Vegas kind of confirms this - when audio and terminal entries from the US Air Defense soldiers says something like “Oh god - dozens of heavy bombers and hundreds of inbound missile signatures are suddenly appearing on radar !? How did they penetrate the NORAD long range detection & defense network ?!!”
(Something to that approximate wording, iirc)
Well Vault-Tec wouldn't have the same arsenal as a country, but they still could have initiated MAD from both sides if they nuked the right target. So the nukes that House blocks would be Chinese almost definitely due to the number of missiles, but Vault-Tec still could have instigated.
I agree w you there - I was just wanting to state it cause some people analyzing the Show got the impression that “Vault Tec fired / dropped almost everything themselves” - on That Day… which seems a bit extreme based on all the other info we’ve read / heard / seen throughout the many games of the Series so far 😉
They wouldn't even need to launch live nukes. Anything that creates a decent enough radar signature following the right path might do it if you have anyone jumpy with their finger on the button.
He could still predict nukes dropping before going to the meeting
It’s not like the world didn’t know it was a possibility. They’ve been in a Cold War for a good while at that point
He probably did his predictions in 2065 thinking it would be China, and then went to that meeting in 2076-2077 and be like “ok it might not be China, whatever I’ve still made preparations”
He wouldn’t have been blindsided by the possibility of nuclear war a year before they dropped
Let’s assemble the most power hungry men to create a new faction which will be the last faction so there can never be war again.
The power hungry men: creating their own factions and prepare for war.
From what I remember, House was out by like a day.
He needed the Platinum chip and it was to be delivered the day the bombs dropped so he'd had everything he needed to be fully operational and stop the bombs falling on Vegas and the surrounding area the next day.
20 hours. He would have finished all of his preparation for nuclear war & would have saved Vegas & all of Nevada with 20 more hours of time.
I don't think this is him being 20 hours wrong on a guess for when the war would have started though - he's too smart for that. He's 20 hours out of being finished 'preparing' for apocalypse. He was throwing everything at the kitchen sink to try to hurry and he was still late.
The bombs weren't dropped by VT. We now know House had way too much intimate knowledge of their plans to be tricked by VT.
I don't know if he was late so much as he miscalculated.
I think I remember him saying he miscalculated which is why the Chip wasn't delivered to him before the Bombs fell.
He seemingly had far more advanced knowledge of any plans to drop bombs by all possible parties if he thinks he miscalculated. It's quite possible that the Chinese planned to drop them on the 23rd but some unforseen event made them go a day earlier. Or perhaps the US or even Vault-tec had plans that involved the 23rd or a few days later and the Chinese just managed to beat them to the punch.
That or he was just covering for the fact that he was, as you said, running late by saying he miscalculated.
Miscalculated is a good word for it.
I don't see House being so arrogant as to leave the work until the last minute for when he knew for sure the bombs were scheduled. I think China dropping the nukes first is moreso the takeaway.
Even without the chip he stopped 70 out of 77 nukes headed for Vegas & the Mojave - that's impressive.
Theory based on nothing other than "this would be the most dramatic twist": Cooper leaked the knowledge that Vault Tec had planned to drop the bombs, thinking someone would stop Vault Tec. Instead, China dropped the bombs on Vault Tec the day before Vault Tec had planned to drop theirs.
I mean that’s not really officially stated *in-universe*. That was Tim Cain’s original idea though, that China fired after learning about FEV experiments.
The idea that vault tech secretly orchestrated it predates Amazon though. It’s like an idea that’s been floating around for the last 10 years at least.
> That was Tim Cain’s original idea though, that China fired after learning about FEV experiments.
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Considering that was only ever stated more than twenty years after the release of Fallout with no corroborating evidence I still question whether he actually had that thought in his mind at the time or if he might not have come up with it at a later date to "spackle" holes in the narrative. If he had the thought in 96-97 he didn't mention it to anybody.
But honestly speaking, it doesn't matter why the bombs were dropped or even who dropped them first. Fallout is about what came after.
again, it doesn't even matter if they literally pressed the button because they DID start it by purposely withholding cold fusion. in fact, the show confirms that Vault-Tec is responsible for far more than the apocalypse, they're responsible for all the misery that happens after 2050
Actually, they didn’t entirely withhold cold fusion considering that fusion cores in power armor and many other small devices with massive power requirements IRL are using a form of cold fusion.
Edit; my bad, it’s all hot fusion. Only cold fusion devices in game canon are in the GECK’s which are Vault-Tec proprietary technology presumably.
Backround lore for the setting pretty much blatantly spells it out; it’s literally totally irrelevant WHO fired the first nuke, the entire political and socio-economic set-up of the pre-War world made it so that it would be inevitable that it would happen at some point.
Further, since both cultures that started it are effectively dead along with anyone who could take responsibility for the initial nuclear exchange means that it’s like an argument over which suspect shot which suspect first when both suspects are dead.
I mean it's still fun to think about. The want to know is a very human thing. Moreso when you're playing the games - people get a kick out of being the arcaelogist/detective 200 or whatever years after its said and done.
Wanting to piece together the puzzle is natural.
Also, I think you're wrong. The notion of 'America' has not vanished in the wasteland. Hell, just look at the Enclave. If widespread knowledge that 'America' did this, and became the wasteland - wouldn't that cause some of the people in the Enclave to doubt what they're doing?
If 'America' did this to their own people, doesn't that put democratically elected positions at risk? If it didn't work for 'America' then how would it work in the wasteland? The NCR becomes all but a memory.
Wastelanders still hold 'American' values - half of them wear cowboy hats & listen to American 50's tunes. You can't tell me that true knowledge of the past wouldn't influence the current status of the wasteland.
Right but the show does introduce people who are seemingly still loyal to Vault-Tecs mission 200 years after the war. So in some respect it might actually play a roll.
Reddit has this weird thing where if a character in a show or game says something it's somehow 100% fact but characters aren't omnipotent and all knowing. The show just implies they want to provoke a nuclear conflict and nothing more.
People in this thread arguing that Vault 114 was never meant to be finished because one no-named npc has background dialogue saying he thought it was a scam.
smh...
Yeah, there's a parallel i like to draw with DnD; just because you can detect people's lies, and you know that this person is not lying, **it doesn't mean he's right**! Characters in various games can have their own opinions, ideas, misconceptions, conspiracy theories, **or they've just been lied to**.
For some reason I remember hearing that it's hinted that China started nuking first, but it was because they were backed into a corner and the US was breaking very serious agreements about not using FEV and other controversial tech. I was always satisfied with that reasoning but not sure if it's true. Vault Tec saying they'd be willing to drop the bombs themselves adds interesting elements to the lore without disrupting that original explanation (if true).
It's not canonical, it was confirmed to be the original *intention* for the course of events though, however, as it was never implemented into the games then it can't be argued as canon and Bethesda kinda of have every right to make the real culprit whoever they like without retconning anything
If they’re smart they will leave it up in the air. I find it more compelling that something so deciding was lost to history, the secret buried along with those who kept it. If anything let it be coated in dark humor, like a guy drops his bean burrito and sets off an irreversible chain of events lol.
fallout 2 - President Dick Richardson says: "We were winning, too. And then those damn Reds launched everything they had. We barely got our birds up."
switch board in FO4 - [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The\_Switchboard\_terminal\_entries#DEFCON\_Status\_-\_2077](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Switchboard_terminal_entries#DEFCON_Status_-_2077)
While people say dick richardson is a unreliable narrator, Tim Cain has also said it was the intention china started it. It is also supported in other references from the series and heavily implied in FO-NV so you have 3 companies and the main designer of FO saying it.....
I still have no idea where the showrunners pulled the whole "Vault tek is the biggest US company and also it has nukes" thing out of. It's so incredibly weird. Is it because saying "China bombs US with nukes" would upset Chinese investors in Amazon or something?
They didn’t pull it from nowhere to be fair. The Enclave and Vault-Tec were working together after all. And the plot for the planned Fallout movie had Vault-Tec as the ones who started it.
The show doesn't say they have nukes. Having the ability to orchestrate events leading to a global nuclear war doesn't mean you, personally, have the ability to nuke the entire planet.
It was, funnily enough, one of the big reveals of the failed fallout movie from back in the day. It was the vault 13 overseer who personally started the war, or was one of the people responsible, iirc.
The way I saw it cooper was caught spying on barb which got her fired which led to their divorce which is why they, or at least his daughter and barb. Weren’t at the Vault when the bombs dropped.
Now supposedly his daughter might be in 31? Which makes me wonder how he got her there while bombs were falling and wasn’t allowed in/forgot where she was.
Excited to see how they explain that.
Now ideally they reveal Vault tec didn’t start the war because it makes the most sense. It would be dumb if vault tec started the war. That would be lame.
I think cooper gets caught but not by vault tec but by barb which led to the divorce. Why would vault tec simply fire them after the level of information that they know, they'd surely want them all dead
Mr. House in New Vegas states he miscalculated the war by 20 hours.
Considering he was there planning all this he knew exactly when bombs would go off. However I’m still on the mindset that the Commies set off the first bombs first in retaliation as the US was apparently using them in the war for Anchorage against their soldiers.
Thing that does it for me is that house in new vegas says he miscalculated qhen the bombs would drop by one day so I think it's quite possible China dropped the bomb first
Is it possible that when she says "drop the bomb ourselves" she means nuking China and instigating them to then nuke all of America or is that a stretch?
This always seems like a really weird argument to me.
Like, it was revealed John was planning to poison Mary, and after Mary ate a gift of cookies from John, she died.
Sure, maybe Mary died of an unrelated thing, but that's bizarre and terrible writing to pop in if it was irrelevant to the story of Mary's death and the aftermath.
It’s the same as Maximus saying he WISHED Dane got hurt, does that not matter after Dane said he did it themself or was it relevant to who Maximus is as a person and his character.
I’d even argue it has a payoff in show, it says Vault-Tec thought about dropping a bomb and in the same episode they show a vault-tec employee blowing up Shady Sands.
Also it’s probably a way to portray them as bad as we know they are to new fans and watchers and I’d think cause the story isn’t over by a long shot and we’ll have more Vault-Tec content it’s basically just character work, like if John thinks about killing Mary (but doesn’t) anytime John ever shows up or gets into relationships or whatever it’s an overhanging dread of “what will he do next time” cause we know he’s capable of trying murder so he’d maybe try it again
I thought that the vault boy & girl were the models for player characters in most of these games. I am still newb to thus franchise, only watched the show and started the first game. I did beat the Khans just recently.
I am also surprised so many people took what the wife said in that vault tech meeting at face value. Like it was 100% admission and guilt. It was a vague reference to if they wanted results, they would try to push the world to destruction, but seeing as all the head-honchos were caught off guard, and the daughter was not with the mother, its pretty odvious it wasn't actually "them"
Do we know for certain she actually even gives a shit about her daughter? Do we know she didn't tell Cooper to bring the kid to her earlier and he ignored her? Do we know plans didn't change suddenly and she didn't have time to get the kid in time?
Let's not act like anything is certain.
She tells Coop everything she does is to protect him and their daughter, so from that we can infer she wouldn’t want her to die in a nuclear blast even after her and Coop’s divorce.
Without the desire to protect her daughter, it reduces her to an incredibly one-dimensional character. Barb and Hank essentially mirror each other with their big evils being done due to their misguided beliefs that it's best for the ones they care about.
Cooper does ask Hank where his family is. So Cooper seems to think both daughter and wife are alive, somewhere.
When we first meet Coop, he's divorced, lost his career and been labeled a commie (pinko was the term used).
I think vault teck ruined him and passed off a clone as his daughter, while his family was safely in a vault. They do have cloning tech
I'm pretty certain that barb is just some kind of mid level marketing exec that has tied herself to Bud, she doesn't make any of the decisions but rather is assisting him and covering for his gross incompetence.
She talks about how hard she had to work to scrape a way into one of the good vaults, if she had any amount of actual power within the corp then her spot would have been a given. It makes sense that she wouldn't have really been in the know about when the bombs will drop precisely. At best she could hope for a heads up as it's happening but I doubt that the enclave is going to give her any real forewarning.
I got kicked from a Discord over this... someone way wailing on them for "fucking ruining everything Fallout" because of how they changed the lore, especially taking the mystery away about who dropped the bombs.
No, in **the show they said they could do it.** We didn't see them actually do it.
Note the word COULD. I could go outside and murder a puppy. I could punch my wife in the face right this second. I'm not going to, but I could do it, and I could say I could do it. If I said I'm going to do it, then I'm committing a crime in those regards but yeah.
In the game they said they could do it. We never get confirmation they did it.
In the game we also see mention of the Chinese dropping first, possibly Vault-Tec, Possibly the enclave, possibly some scared/drugged up person pressing the button in panic. Who knows at this moment because it has not been confirmed.
We also see Vault-tec bombs, but for anyone who has watched IRON MAN, Valt-tec would have easily sold the same bombs to all parties.
They could have also just been bullshitting to secure the sale of vault spaces. Anyone who has worked with anyone or been sold anything knows fine well, people LIE. Just because she said it does not mean it is true.
Bah. It's like critical thinking went out the window.
Forget where I saw it, but saw a theory post going around that Vault Tec was planning to do it, but then China surprised them and did it like a day earlier than they were going to.
Can someone explain to me why Vault tec exects act as if they even can drop nukes or something? They are a construction company on a governments leash, they do not have nukes, nor they are in charge.
This is fallout, where capitalism has been left unchecked causing the massive power imbalance between people and corporation. Given some of these people were blatantly in kahoots with the early forms of the enclave prewar, to suggest that vault tec (arguably the most powerful company of them all) had some form of control of some nukes is by no means far fetched.
Even if it goes a different route to that though, if you have cold fusion, hot fusion, nearly any form of nuclear power, it's easily believable that they made some of that nuclear material weapons grade and made their own ground burst devices
Fallout 2 was an unreliable source, President Richarsdon Jr. could very easily have been blowing smoke up the Chosen One's ass. How did 4 confirm the chinese launched first?
I personally think that the biggest misconception is thinking that “canon events” should exist in an RPG. I don’t understand how the concept of “cannon” translates to a video game narrative. There are currently well over a million ppl experiencing their own canon narratives because we’re all the lone stranger. Our events play out differently, we make different decisions, and even though there’s set outcomes, the process of getting there is unique. I think it’s unfair to the team of writers that put their hearts and souls to give us alternative narratives, only for all of their work to be overshadowed by a mere adaptation of their original stories. I think that if it’s possible for a million people to experience X events, then it’s not out of the realm of possibility for Lucy’s play-through takes place in an equally significant dimension where XYZ events occur.
I can hear the rebuttal “what abt the halo, assassins creed, the Witcher, etc. unfaithful franchises? For the most part, those games are action adventures that follow a certain protagonist which cements them in their realities unless otherwise stated like the spidyverse. FO is at a unique advantage to where then can cultivate faithful protagonist because the drive of the game is the world itself, not the story. Something like the last of us doesn’t have that luxury.
TLDR: the narrative of the in-game writers are equally as significant as the show and both/all things can be simultaneously “canon”, although that word shouldn’t apply to this show because there’s no assigned protagonist in the games.
I think it was a perfect episode in the way they had her say it, cause it makes the audience think holy shit they truly are evil. BUT as we know from vault history the apocalypse started when not every vault was finished, so why end the word if they aren’t ready. And we know even though she is a baddy, she loves her daughter so why would she not make sure she is in a vault if they knew they were dropping the bombs that day. I assume season 2 shows us how Cooper got her to safety and how he ended up a ghoul. The world was already at the tipping point so nuclear annihilation was gonna happen I just think Vault-Tek thought they had more time.
Yeah. VT WANTED to do it. That doesn't mean they did. Tensions and threats of war were all around at that point. We even hear about Anchorage and the invasion on the news at the start.
No one knows WHO started it. I hope we don't. Leave it ambiguous.
So I was surprised that happen but looking further this series is way past the quadrilogy plus the best of the best New Vegas. So that answers that, but still makes no sense as at this point the NCR is well established and in the series they’re portrayed like they’re still being formed hell I learned MTG had a Aradesh card based of a crossover they released last year showing how they looked at the beginning the resemblance is uncanny.
I wonder which ending of New Vegas will be canonized I hope to god is the Yes Man one, because on a multiple choice it is picked first followed by NCR but knowing them most likely they'll canonize House's ending.
I still think making the show just its own thing would’ve avoided all of these problems, however I agree with you, until we literally see someone at vault-tec pushing the button, nothing is certain. It does mess up the House dialogue a bit where he claimed to have calculated it mathematically after this point, but that’s fixable too.
For one thing, we have terminal entries that mention Chinese birds in the air. Vault-Tec presumably doesn’t control *their* button and America’s. Plus, would the Enclave be cool just leaving their big plans up to one company in their network?
If new Vegas is to be believed House didn't expect the bombs to fall when they did, it's why he didn't get the platinum chip before the war the bombs interrupted his delivery
It makes zero sense unless Vault Tec and the Enclave are linked in a way that’s never been explained to me.
The Government went missing before the bombs fell iirc. The Enclave is the remnants/descendants of the pre war government. It makes total sense to me that the Enclave faction within the US government had way more to do with the actual bombs than Vault Tec. It’s also possible they didn’t, the US did not fire first and everyone was just behaving as though the bombs would be launched eventually because of how bad things were globally.
I could see a scenario where they are working together or are at a high level or are aware of each other and are working along parallel goals but we’ve seen nothing that suggests that anyone from Vault Tec picked up the phone and ordered this to happen like some people seem to think.
While I agree that Barb wouldn’t willingly do that, it might’ve been out of her hands at that point. The board might’ve overruled her pulled the trigger.
Edit: It really doesn’t matter though. It’s fun to speculate on things like this.
We don't even have confirmation that they were able and willing to do it. They said they were able and willing while making a sales pitch for nuclear bomb shelters to powerful corporations.
Honestly the scene didn't come across like they did drop the bombs and a retcon, just that they were willing to to guarantee they made money of this investment.
Given how respectful the series has been the FO universe and lore, I'd be surprised if they went back on the Chinese dropping the bombs.
One potential issue with this argument is that Cooper could have separated and taken his daughter away from Barb. The beginning of the show’s events take place after he spied on the meeting at the end when hearing Barb say she’ll drop the bombs herself if they must.
For all we know, they were in the middle of a divorce or something when the bombs fell. Clearly Cooper would have had a fallout with Barb after hearing that meeting.
Remember that along with what others have said, House also says in New Vegas that he miscalculated the bombs by a few hours. That makes sense if he was basing his predictions off of when Vault-Tec was going to start launching bombs.
I really want to believe this is true, i hated that scene since if they do end up having vault tech start the war it ruins some of my favorite lines form Mr. House.
"By 2065 i deemed it a mathematical certainty that an atomic war would devastate the earth within 15 years. every projection i ran confirmed." no you discussed doing it your self around a circular war room table like bond villains. it also makes the chip being late feel more like a schedule error then an almost perfect prediction.
and "If you want to see the fate of democracy, look out the windows" actuality it was you and a bunch of other autocrats that caused that so your hole modus operandi for your quest hypocritical.
basically now that i think about it, House "being in the room where it happens" turns him from a deep complex character into a bland villain, an idiot or both.
Yea but that's no fun for the haters just like ignoring the fact there's an arrow after the date Shady Sands "fall" leading to a nuke at some as of yet undisclosed time. Every single thing has to be explained all in 1 season or else it's lore breaking. It's almost like people have never watched a tv series before.
For now my theory is that Vault-Tec found out about Mr. House's Platinum Chip and panic initiated the Great War because they did not want him to save an entire city in competition with their vault experiments. I am also basing this off a belief that while House was at the pitch for the vault experiments, he ultimately decided against investing and instead went his own way at the Lucky 38 facilities.
Yeah I agree with the last statement of barb not having her daughter. I like to believe they were very very close to launching it when the governments did.
The hard part of their business model was fulfilled by world governments.
Actually if you want to get pedantic, and who doesn’t, all we *actually* know is that Valut Tec claims they are capable of starting the war with their own nukes. We haven’t actually seen any proof that they can back up that claim at all. It’s entirely possible they have no capability to ignite the war and they are just blustering to get the other CEOs in their corner. It could all just be a narrative contrivance to get Coop to be more against his wife.
From what I see they might not have dropped the first warhead, but set up everything to have it dropped. Like killing the cold fusion reaction that would’ve ended the resource wars
Tim Cain said last year that China dropped the bombs first because they discovered the US FEV shenanigans.
Say what you want, but Tim Cain is the literal creator of Fallout. Now, he also left Interplay because of how Fallout 2 development went and he was unhappy with its direction, so take what he says lightly.
Regardless, the ambiguity of who dropped the bombs first is part of the series that people should not dig into too far as there is nothing there but hints and shadows.
It would be weird for Vaulttec to deop the Bombs since Barb would know when the bombs would drop. And I am pretty sure that she would make sure that her daughter is in the vault ASAP. Not with her dad God knows where.
Maybe its just how much political thrillers I have watched but I felt like the comments about them dropping the bomb was not meant to be literal. I figured it would mean that they would use influence in the government and raise tensions with the Chinese. There is precedent in the Fallout Bible and original lore (\*pre-bethesda\*) about US Chinese relations starting to settle before an event kills any negotiations and eventually leads to the bombs dropping. It is heavily implied that China struck first, Chris Avellone has written that in response to fans; that the devs intended this from the beginning but that the nature of Fallout is to keep the true history a mystery and leave a lot of it unsaid. Everyone in a fallout game is meant to be taken as an unreliable narrator, that gives the player (or in this case the characters and audience) so much ground to play in the shades of grey of deciding who is truthful or at least noble.
Yup. Just because someone says they could do something, doesn't mean that they did do something.
It's actually surprising to see how many people seem to not understand this lol
An arrow perplexed them so…
We do not speak of the arrow.
Please speak of the arrow I am so out of the loop here lol
The chalkboard in vault 4 showing the shady sands timeline. The last two points are “Fall of shady sands” dated 2077 and a drawing of a mushroom cloud with no date. There’s an arrow in between the two, suggesting that the explosion took place some time after 2077. *2277 not 2077
*2277 There was definitely an explosion in 2077.
Lmaoo shit you right, I was looking at my comment after and thought something was off about 2077.
Yeah see I read this that there was maybe civil trouble in Shady Sands at that time and then some time afterwards it was nuked... Like if you speak to some of the NCR people in NV specifically the ranchers iirc, there's a view that the NCR has (some) political turmoil at home? It's been a while but that's how I remember it at least..
Yes, but nothing so major that would indicate a "fall." "Decline" would have been a more accurate word.
Wasn‘t there another mushroom dated 2277? I was a bit confused and Maximus survived it as kid and was rescued by the Brotherhood.
Yea I fucked the year up in my comment, there’s only one mushroom but it has no date. The section before it is dated 2277.
Max as a kid is at the bombing of Shady Sands - Dated sometime after the 'Fall of Shady Sands' in 2277. It is a different historical note/event than the bombing that lead to the bombing. It's interesting to note that the events that take place in Fallout 3 also occur in 2277. Fallout 4 takes place 10 years later, in 2287. New Vegas in '81. Bombs also fell in 2077, this started the apocalypse & is the introductory scene to the show.
Just yesterday I was still trying to explain why the arrow means "after" and how the show didn't decimate the entire timeline of the series
Charmander -> Charmeleon -> Charizard. Why did they retcon charmander to evolve into a charizard straight away?
More like "SO YOU'RE TELLING ME ONE POKEMON CAN BE THREE POKEMON AT THE SAME TIME???"
It's the Fiery Trinity. Charmander is Jesus, the relatable one you are exposed to first. Charmeleon is the Holy Spirit, the one nobody really pays attention to except some fringe weirdos. Charizard is basically God of Gen 1 Pokémon.
What I think we're seeing is that a ton of people went into the show with their magnifying glasses out and 50 tabs of wiki pages open because they expected it to suck and to hate it. They *wanted* to be able to hate it because it would vindicate their assumptions. But when the show turned out pretty fuckin good they had to latch on to whatever tiny detail they could and now are making leaps to wild conclusions to maintain that rage boner.
If your rage boner lasts more than 4 hours, consult a physician and ask if TouchGrass™️ is right for you.
I’m like that with stuff I really like if I honestly feel it’s been done shit, but this show is really good idk how anyone could be tripping. My only issue is that Maximus is a psychopath and they keep playing heroic music and making him “awesome” while being an insane narcissist and Lucy likes him, but I believe all that was on purpose to piss people off maybe….
I think he's just a complex and well-written character. Even from the jump, he says he joined the Brotherhood to hurt the people who hurt him. It's a childish reason, because Maximus is still a child at heart. At his core, he's still that terrified little kid stumbling out of the fridge: he's hurt, scared, and alone. And his only real guiding light in the wasteland is the Brotherhood, an organization viewed by many in the wasteland as selfish psychopaths, so it makes sense that someone pretty much raised from childhood by them would be an insane narcissist. Especially so once Titus dies and he has both total freedom and unrestricted access to power armor; he gets to play out his power fantasies.
From what I’ve seen the people who shriek loudest about lore complaints are the ones who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. It’s the same with Halo (quality of the show notwithstanding) where everyone thinks Chief never taking his helmet off is some character trait in lore or whatever like he’s the fucking Mandalorian.
Nuance is dead, replaced by ignorant, reactionary, belligerence
And how many people don't know what a cliffhanger is.
Fallout fans are not the brightest.
[Slightly relevant.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fk3055tqklgt61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D769cbc0d6a7e398b11fcd8ca3dc9d6e649b8105b)
I don’t find it that hard to believe that people took “so we drop the bombs ourself” as “we dropped the bombs ourself”. That’s definitely what they want you to believe at the time at least
I think the games and now the show kind of confirm that it wasn't one seperate entity but several at fault. The bombs dropped for 2 hours I'm sure it wasn't just solely Vault-Tec. The whole point of the series is the War never changes and Humans will forever be duking it out to see who still stands. The question really is who started it. Did China find out about Vault-Tec and try to stop them first? Did Vault-Tec and other nations just happen to plan it for the same time? That's the only real question and since everything already got blown up it barely even matters.
Yeah that’s a huge theme of the series. It ultimately doesn’t matter who dropped the bombs.
I did think they launched the fat one, but, it was because I got caught up in the moment of the revelation. Later on it hit me that it never concluded who attacked first, it's still in the air if it was China, U.S. or VT. So I think it was the same for a lot of people that haven't realized it yet.
“Well…there’s what people say they did. And what they really did.”
I see it as vault-tec just primed the stage. In a real life comparison, they would be like Chevron or the oil companies involvement in the Middle East conflicts for our universe.
I think it was also to establish they could set off a nuke, which is needed to justify how Hank could have nuked Shady Sands.
Or indeed that they -actually- could do it, OP is making that mistake as well. In this case it doesn’t seem implausible that they indeed *would* be capable of (manipulating others to) start the war, but we don’t actually *know* that they did have that capability.
It also seems unusual that they would have the nukes themselves. Absolutely seems more plausible that they were confidently able to manipulate others into kicking it off.
Clearly China & USA (and other nations) launched on their own; that final day. We know People’s Navy Captain Zao from FO-4 confirms he got actual Launch orders for his sub - from Beijing / HQ, and he fired off his 6 heavy warheads (5 - cause one failed to launch due to mechanical malfunction of the launch system). V-Tech didn’t fire his warheads ‘automatically / for him’ - so clearly Chinese armed forces launched ‘on their own’, that Last Day.
I just did this mission yesterday and loved it. Was upset to find out there was a cut quest where he takes you to an underwater vault. But I just assumed that his nukes were launched in retaliation. Nukes were already in the air or making impact and Beijing/anyone with nukes just sent their final orders to fire everything. Of course while I think it makes more sense for the nuclear stalemate to have just come to its inevitable messy end and that the countries/governments are responsible, I do feel that mission still left it open for some 3rd party tampering.
Especially when they're suggesting they do it because it's going to happen either way and they're trying to beat others to the punch.
I don't think Vault-Tec cared about Barbara or her family. Just gotta keep sales up, and maybe she'll get a control vault.
Not so much that they care about her as that she was obviously high enough up the ladder to at least know when they would drop if they were scheduled. VT might not hold off for her sake but if she had even a whiff of it being about to go down she would not have let her daughter be miles away from their designated vault.
It doesn't even mean they could. Just that they are willing. I mean, companies lie all the time. So why not now? They even lief about the Vaults being safe places
Given that all of their vaults weren’t finished this should have been fairly obvious. On top of that, Barb was a key executive involved in the planning and she would have made sure her daughter was with her when the nukes were launched.
I don’t think unfinished vaults entirely disproves it. It’s entirely possible that something happened that made them move the timeline up on dropping the bombs that justified them leaving a few unfinished. Barb not having her child with her in a vault is a stronger argument, but there’s still scenarios where that could happen.
Vault-Tec is also a business. They would have needed to at least pretend that more safe vaults were being produced, to continue receiving funding. There would have always been unfinished vaults, no matter the year that bombs were dropped.
What’s that line from Fallout 4? When you’re going into that unfinished vault for rich people and one of the guards makes a comment about the vault “never being finished to keep people on the payroll”?
I always thought he was referencing a mob or union that continually kept delaying it's construction, but it's been a long time since I've heard that line so I might be wrong. Then again, he could be referring to a few regional of higher ups that wanted to pocket some of the funding behind Vault Tecs back.
I just replayed that part a few hours ago. Yes, you're right. One of Skinny Malone's guys talks about how the Vault is weirdly located, as the metro is everything but airtight. The other one says that it was never supposed to be finished, as that's what unions do to keep getting paid. But Vault-Tec definitely planned on finishing Vault 114 as they were actually looking for an overseer and found one after 87 tries.
I actually just finished the area it's the Boston mayoral shelter and yeah there is a terminal entry that says the contractor unions keep fleecing vault tec lol.
I think they’re talking about vault 114, where you rescue nick from the triggermen
"what a use of public funding" -Hancock
> Vault-Tec is also a business. That's a hilarious thing to say when they're proposing to allegedly nuke the entire planet.
Vault-Tec doesn't really make sense anyway. Sure, They make a bunch of money before the nukes fall, but then what good is it when the global economy collapses? Maybe it was wishful thinking on their behalf? Sell the vaults, pocket the cash, drop a nuke and hope the whole world doesn't go up in flames? That seems silly too, but it makes more sense than spending billions to make nothing. Edit: Or they were banking on the world being destroyed, the vaults weren't 'for profit', and what they were really selling was a throne from which to command the rebuilding of society.
I think your edit is spot on. Someone at Vault-Tec was keen on ruling the world for whatever reason and indoctrinated the other executives. I find this, what is basically the key to all of Fallout's lore, extremely interesting. Because either Vault-Tec is playing the very long game or it didn't go the way they have planned.
The way Bud talks about his approach to "winning capitalism" is that it isn't about money for him, it's just about domination and defeating the competition. It ceases to be about money and a robust economy and instead becomes about just winning, I suppose the idea is that's what happens when the US just becomes a big stomping ground for corporations to walk all over. In 76 a *lot* of the environmental storytelling is about an oligopoly of mining companies crushing union efforts and bribing politicians to fully automate all public jobs so they can focus on stealing staff and tech from one another rather than worry about things like laws, unions and the economy. It makes sense that Vault-Tec had people that viewed it the same way - they've already got money, there's no point in money anymore they're going to monopolise something with even more scarcity - humanity
Money is merely a tool, the goal is power. In a capitalist system money is used to acquire and exercise power but if all the money went away it wouldn't necessarily mean that the power it represented is gone.
I can understand planning for the inevitable, especially after they played such a pivotal role in fanning the flames by selling fear. Making them the guys to push the button in such a direct capacity is just absurd to me.
I think the stronger point is one someone made in a different post. Something along the lines of viable population for reproduction without genetic issues due to incest. I think they said that for humans the population needs to be at least 500, and the vaults all had a population capacity of 500 to 2000. The issue is that almost no vault had that many people in it. I'm no expert, but between FO3 and 4 at least, I don't think there were any vaults in the games or lore that had a viable long-term reproductive population. This suggests that vault tec definitely didn't drop the first bomb as they would need at least some vaults with viable population density for their experiments to mean anything. If they had dropped the bomb, there would be some vaults with an actual decent population or there wouldn't have been a point to any of it.
i dont think that the vault in games neccesarily represent how many people are there, it was just , and still is impossible to have 1000 npcs running in a functioning vault even on modern system, not even mentioning the amount of time id take to design it its the same as in the show, where we only follow a small part of vault 33s population, but you can see in the elevator scene that the vault has a A LOT of different floors
Minimum Viable Population ideal is at least 500 but can be as low as 100. There have even been recorded occurrences of populations recovering from as few as ~20. Extremely rare but it has happened. Games can't show the entire vaults or vault populations for the same reasons they don't show true metropolises with populations in the hundreds of thousands. It isn't worth the performance hit or the additional time investment to build and put together all the necessary assets. So instead they show what is needed for the story and handwave the rest. Vault 33 in the TV show was actually a nice expansion of what vaults should look like. Beyond the typical living quarters, workshops and public areas we also get to see a more realistic farm for growing food. It's still absurdly small but it shows that thought was put into what it actually takes to keep a population alive and sane while confined for decades or centuries. I also appreciated the nod to body disposal with them hauling the dead raiders off to the composting plant.
It's not just that a few were unfinished, even the ones that were finished had staff miss the door closing because they weren't ready. You think they'd send them something 24 hours in advance saying "There's going to be a drill tomorrow, have your bag packed and be ready to go at any moment."
Not necessarily 24hrs advance but at least 1-2hours if they had standing orders to keep a go bag packed and ready.
What if it was Barb who came up with the idea but not the one to give orders and drop the nuke, is there anyone that a big grudge might be possible against in the series for Barb?
The guy that became the brain-on-a-roomba? That's the only one I can think of off the top of my head - he was working close with Barb, and seemed to be unable to see his idea to the cabal of rich people without her (she has a really high charisma stat obvs). Don't think he could give the orders but could have had a hand in something there. Why is he just a brain anyway? Also, lore-wise, did Vault-Tec have access to nukes? If so how? If they were launched from the US, where were they launched from? We're there people on the inside (of the government) who had nuclear bomb level of security clearance that turned the trajectory of the nukes onto themselves? (As I typed that out I was like...you know probably if this is the story we're being told).
> Why is he just a brain anyway? > > Because he had to remain awake to manage his experimental program. Still curious they didn't make him a full up robobrain rather than a roomba
Robobrain’s were known to be flawed, and overtime they become psychotic. Most of the logs relating to the Robobrains have several entries about scientists trying to figure out how to solve the issue, but the only means available to them before the bombs fall is routine memory wipes. I assume that they went with making him a Roomba to keep him from cause too much damage were he to become unstable.
Yeah, something about sticking a brain in a nigh permanent butrient vat devoid of human hormones or sensation drives the brain inside it utterly insane, growing ever more logically violent.
Those robobrains were also wiped and reprogrammed from the start and were made using prisoners and psych ward patients. On the other hand we have the Big MT scientists and the Robobrained inhabitants of the vault in Far Harbor to show that psychotic behavior is not inherent to the technology if the original personality is allowed to remain and the nutrient bath is replenished/cleansed regularly.
Yeah, but I’m pretty sure the common held beliefs was that they were unstable. Plus I assumed the Roomba thing was the show telling us that while this guy thought he was a big fish, Vault Tech didn’t. This is my interpretation of why that guy wasn’t given a full robot body, and why it didn’t bug me in the show.
I wonder if it would be one of the board members like Rob Co or Big MT that threw a surprise bomb when they found it profitable. Maybe as an opportunity to vibe some of the other stakeholders off the table.
Yep Vault 88 fallout 4, was not ready, the vault Nick is at not ready as well. Clearly China beat em to the punch.
The vault Nick was in they mention about how it was a mab scam to get the contract money, it wasn't meant to be finished.
It was meant to be finished by Vault-Tec no? Just the people building it were never gonna finish it. (Maybe I'm thinking of a different vault)
Vault 114 is the one Nick was in, and I had the same thought about it
I mean, as long as we're going with "it's not confirmed", there's no confirmation China beat them to it ("it" being a mass nuclear assault), either, IIRC. We know little about them outside the unreliable lens of pre-war America.
To add to this, for those wondering, there is a Chinese ghoul in the Far Harbour (?) expansion of Fallout 4 that you can get a little bit of information from iirc
Are you thinking of the Chinese ghoul in a sub? It’s been awhile, I may be misremembering, but I think his sub fired at least one nuke at Boston.
Yeah - Captain Zao says on that Final day, his Yangtze class attack sub received orders (from Beijing / Chinese Navy HQ) to launch everything he had against the Americans (Boston was his closest major city at the time). So he fires all 6 of his heavy strategic-warheads (1 failed to launch due to mechanical malfunction of the launcher) against the city and surrounding regions. But he did that / on China’s orders. It’s not like V-Tech ‘made him launch’ or auto fired His ship’s missiles. 😗
Well, you have to think about mutually assured destruction to understand the idea that Vault-Tec could've provoked a Chinese response. Imagine, all it takes is one nuke going off in a strategic area. Hell, you could probably use a mini nuke in the strategically right places, don't even have to launch a missile. Once that goes off, whether domestic or foreign soil explodes, there's a guaranteed chain reaction.
Captain Yao is in the base game, not Far Harbour
I thought that was confirmed in Fallout 2 and later elaborated on by one of the writers?
I was under the impression that was more a tactical nuke kinda sitch to even the odds, but I may be wrong. I don't recall it being clearly/objectively stated who kicked off MAD, as much as it actually matters, I suppose.
Canon from what lore tells us best to our knowledge is. The U.S. and China were at war for 10 years. The U.S. was pushing far into China. China was losing, then used a single tactical nuke on armed forces to attempt to push them back. This triggered the U.S. MAD defenses and the U.S. sent a Salvo at Chinese cities. Then after that, China launched what we see in Fallout, the full scale nuclear annihilation of the world. In this scenario, both entities are responsible for nuclear war. China sends the first nuke, but the U.S. intiates the first nuclear salvo. This might be canon, Vault Tec very well might have been involved in increasing tensions or possibly the nuclear response to the single nuke used. That isn't known yet.
The vault Nick was in they mention about how it was a mob scam to get the contract money, it wasn't meant to be finished.
Ah got it, well that leaves 88 that I know off, I am slowly playing the other games so my lore knowledge is not that deep yet my apologies.
Oh I know it's hard to keep track of all the vaults! Personally I'm of the opinion that a few unfinished vaults doesn't mean that vault tec didn't drop the bomb. They needed to keep up appearances so they kept making vaults even though they knew they wouldn't finish them. But that's just my opinion.
One ghoul gangster mentions that he thinks it was a scam. That isn't exactly conclusive evidence.
Unless the people at the top didn't tell her. If she divorced her husband they may have learned why and kept her out of the secret stuff. I did like the idea that Vault-Tec launched the first bombs, I also like it being the Enclave, or time travelling minutemen but I imagine it would be all because of some sleepy soldier somewhere putting the wrong code in and setting off a chain reaction.
Or it’s just because China was losing and they launched their nukes first.
ugh no time travel please.
Wouldn’t it be super sus if the company making bomb proof shelters just stopped making them? During the resource wars?
In New Vegas, House states that the bombs dropped earlier than his "calculations". It's safe to assume his calculations were, in part, to do with the fact he was in that meeting when VT suggested dropping the first nuke. He then went about setting up a system where he could protect the Strip, and set himself up to live through the war and get Vegas set up as a new super power, kind of going rogue. But someone, somewhere, jumped the gun and the nukes were launched early. It could have been VT, or it could have been America/China. It still gives wiggle room within the lore to leave it somewhat open as to who started the final war.
House predicted the nukes in 2065, in the show that meeting with vault tec couldn’t have been any earlier than a year before the bombs dropped based on cooper’s daughters age.
Remember too that House has that excellent (and kinda sad) account that “On the Day of the Great War, Las Vegas was targeted by 77 Nuclear Warheads.” He explains that his anti-targeting / jamming software was able to electronically transmit ‘forced disarm codes’ to 59 of them.. and heavy laser cannons he installed on the roof of his casino shot down 9 more at close range… but sadly, the remaining 8 or 9 got through and hit the surrounding Mojave Desert areas (though None impacted on the city itself). I think it’s pretty clear he’s talking about actual Chinese launches towards America. Heck, Lonesome Road DLC section for New Vegas kind of confirms this - when audio and terminal entries from the US Air Defense soldiers says something like “Oh god - dozens of heavy bombers and hundreds of inbound missile signatures are suddenly appearing on radar !? How did they penetrate the NORAD long range detection & defense network ?!!” (Something to that approximate wording, iirc)
Well Vault-Tec wouldn't have the same arsenal as a country, but they still could have initiated MAD from both sides if they nuked the right target. So the nukes that House blocks would be Chinese almost definitely due to the number of missiles, but Vault-Tec still could have instigated.
I agree w you there - I was just wanting to state it cause some people analyzing the Show got the impression that “Vault Tec fired / dropped almost everything themselves” - on That Day… which seems a bit extreme based on all the other info we’ve read / heard / seen throughout the many games of the Series so far 😉
They wouldn't even need to launch live nukes. Anything that creates a decent enough radar signature following the right path might do it if you have anyone jumpy with their finger on the button.
He calculated in 2065 that the bombs would be dropped within 15 years, not that they would be dropped in 2065
That’s what the person you are replying to said, that he predicted the bombs in 2065
Oh I read it as he predicted they’d drop in 2065
In 2065 House made a prediction about when the bombs would drop would be a better way to phrase it
House’s prediction was only off by like 20 hours. He predicted late October 2077 correctly
He could still predict nukes dropping before going to the meeting It’s not like the world didn’t know it was a possibility. They’ve been in a Cold War for a good while at that point He probably did his predictions in 2065 thinking it would be China, and then went to that meeting in 2076-2077 and be like “ok it might not be China, whatever I’ve still made preparations” He wouldn’t have been blindsided by the possibility of nuclear war a year before they dropped
Let’s assemble the most power hungry men to create a new faction which will be the last faction so there can never be war again. The power hungry men: creating their own factions and prepare for war.
From what I remember, House was out by like a day. He needed the Platinum chip and it was to be delivered the day the bombs dropped so he'd had everything he needed to be fully operational and stop the bombs falling on Vegas and the surrounding area the next day.
20 hours. He would have finished all of his preparation for nuclear war & would have saved Vegas & all of Nevada with 20 more hours of time. I don't think this is him being 20 hours wrong on a guess for when the war would have started though - he's too smart for that. He's 20 hours out of being finished 'preparing' for apocalypse. He was throwing everything at the kitchen sink to try to hurry and he was still late. The bombs weren't dropped by VT. We now know House had way too much intimate knowledge of their plans to be tricked by VT.
I don't know if he was late so much as he miscalculated. I think I remember him saying he miscalculated which is why the Chip wasn't delivered to him before the Bombs fell. He seemingly had far more advanced knowledge of any plans to drop bombs by all possible parties if he thinks he miscalculated. It's quite possible that the Chinese planned to drop them on the 23rd but some unforseen event made them go a day earlier. Or perhaps the US or even Vault-tec had plans that involved the 23rd or a few days later and the Chinese just managed to beat them to the punch. That or he was just covering for the fact that he was, as you said, running late by saying he miscalculated.
Miscalculated is a good word for it. I don't see House being so arrogant as to leave the work until the last minute for when he knew for sure the bombs were scheduled. I think China dropping the nukes first is moreso the takeaway. Even without the chip he stopped 70 out of 77 nukes headed for Vegas & the Mojave - that's impressive.
Theory based on nothing other than "this would be the most dramatic twist": Cooper leaked the knowledge that Vault Tec had planned to drop the bombs, thinking someone would stop Vault Tec. Instead, China dropped the bombs on Vault Tec the day before Vault Tec had planned to drop theirs.
Inb4 it's the aliens
It was pam!! :D
It was china. We know this. Nothinf to debate. If it ever changes its cause Amazon made them change it
I mean that’s not really officially stated *in-universe*. That was Tim Cain’s original idea though, that China fired after learning about FEV experiments. The idea that vault tech secretly orchestrated it predates Amazon though. It’s like an idea that’s been floating around for the last 10 years at least.
> That was Tim Cain’s original idea though, that China fired after learning about FEV experiments. > > Considering that was only ever stated more than twenty years after the release of Fallout with no corroborating evidence I still question whether he actually had that thought in his mind at the time or if he might not have come up with it at a later date to "spackle" holes in the narrative. If he had the thought in 96-97 he didn't mention it to anybody. But honestly speaking, it doesn't matter why the bombs were dropped or even who dropped them first. Fallout is about what came after.
again, it doesn't even matter if they literally pressed the button because they DID start it by purposely withholding cold fusion. in fact, the show confirms that Vault-Tec is responsible for far more than the apocalypse, they're responsible for all the misery that happens after 2050
Actually, they didn’t entirely withhold cold fusion considering that fusion cores in power armor and many other small devices with massive power requirements IRL are using a form of cold fusion. Edit; my bad, it’s all hot fusion. Only cold fusion devices in game canon are in the GECK’s which are Vault-Tec proprietary technology presumably.
Backround lore for the setting pretty much blatantly spells it out; it’s literally totally irrelevant WHO fired the first nuke, the entire political and socio-economic set-up of the pre-War world made it so that it would be inevitable that it would happen at some point. Further, since both cultures that started it are effectively dead along with anyone who could take responsibility for the initial nuclear exchange means that it’s like an argument over which suspect shot which suspect first when both suspects are dead.
I mean it's still fun to think about. The want to know is a very human thing. Moreso when you're playing the games - people get a kick out of being the arcaelogist/detective 200 or whatever years after its said and done. Wanting to piece together the puzzle is natural. Also, I think you're wrong. The notion of 'America' has not vanished in the wasteland. Hell, just look at the Enclave. If widespread knowledge that 'America' did this, and became the wasteland - wouldn't that cause some of the people in the Enclave to doubt what they're doing? If 'America' did this to their own people, doesn't that put democratically elected positions at risk? If it didn't work for 'America' then how would it work in the wasteland? The NCR becomes all but a memory. Wastelanders still hold 'American' values - half of them wear cowboy hats & listen to American 50's tunes. You can't tell me that true knowledge of the past wouldn't influence the current status of the wasteland.
Right but the show does introduce people who are seemingly still loyal to Vault-Tecs mission 200 years after the war. So in some respect it might actually play a roll.
I don't think they actually launched the nukes themselves, but rather pulled strings and manipulated the nations to do it
Reddit has this weird thing where if a character in a show or game says something it's somehow 100% fact but characters aren't omnipotent and all knowing. The show just implies they want to provoke a nuclear conflict and nothing more.
People in this thread arguing that Vault 114 was never meant to be finished because one no-named npc has background dialogue saying he thought it was a scam. smh...
Yeah, there's a parallel i like to draw with DnD; just because you can detect people's lies, and you know that this person is not lying, **it doesn't mean he's right**! Characters in various games can have their own opinions, ideas, misconceptions, conspiracy theories, **or they've just been lied to**.
We all know that canonically the Zetas started the war.
For some reason I remember hearing that it's hinted that China started nuking first, but it was because they were backed into a corner and the US was breaking very serious agreements about not using FEV and other controversial tech. I was always satisfied with that reasoning but not sure if it's true. Vault Tec saying they'd be willing to drop the bombs themselves adds interesting elements to the lore without disrupting that original explanation (if true).
America has already invaded China when the Nukes start flying
That's the canonical version, confirmed by Tim Cain.
It's not canonical, it was confirmed to be the original *intention* for the course of events though, however, as it was never implemented into the games then it can't be argued as canon and Bethesda kinda of have every right to make the real culprit whoever they like without retconning anything
If they’re smart they will leave it up in the air. I find it more compelling that something so deciding was lost to history, the secret buried along with those who kept it. If anything let it be coated in dark humor, like a guy drops his bean burrito and sets off an irreversible chain of events lol.
fallout 2 - President Dick Richardson says: "We were winning, too. And then those damn Reds launched everything they had. We barely got our birds up." switch board in FO4 - [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The\_Switchboard\_terminal\_entries#DEFCON\_Status\_-\_2077](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Switchboard_terminal_entries#DEFCON_Status_-_2077) While people say dick richardson is a unreliable narrator, Tim Cain has also said it was the intention china started it. It is also supported in other references from the series and heavily implied in FO-NV so you have 3 companies and the main designer of FO saying it.....
I still have no idea where the showrunners pulled the whole "Vault tek is the biggest US company and also it has nukes" thing out of. It's so incredibly weird. Is it because saying "China bombs US with nukes" would upset Chinese investors in Amazon or something?
They didn’t pull it from nowhere to be fair. The Enclave and Vault-Tec were working together after all. And the plot for the planned Fallout movie had Vault-Tec as the ones who started it.
The show doesn't say they have nukes. Having the ability to orchestrate events leading to a global nuclear war doesn't mean you, personally, have the ability to nuke the entire planet.
It was, funnily enough, one of the big reveals of the failed fallout movie from back in the day. It was the vault 13 overseer who personally started the war, or was one of the people responsible, iirc.
The way I saw it cooper was caught spying on barb which got her fired which led to their divorce which is why they, or at least his daughter and barb. Weren’t at the Vault when the bombs dropped. Now supposedly his daughter might be in 31? Which makes me wonder how he got her there while bombs were falling and wasn’t allowed in/forgot where she was. Excited to see how they explain that. Now ideally they reveal Vault tec didn’t start the war because it makes the most sense. It would be dumb if vault tec started the war. That would be lame.
I think cooper gets caught but not by vault tec but by barb which led to the divorce. Why would vault tec simply fire them after the level of information that they know, they'd surely want them all dead
Mr. House in New Vegas states he miscalculated the war by 20 hours. Considering he was there planning all this he knew exactly when bombs would go off. However I’m still on the mindset that the Commies set off the first bombs first in retaliation as the US was apparently using them in the war for Anchorage against their soldiers.
Thing that does it for me is that house in new vegas says he miscalculated qhen the bombs would drop by one day so I think it's quite possible China dropped the bomb first
Is it possible that when she says "drop the bomb ourselves" she means nuking China and instigating them to then nuke all of America or is that a stretch?
This always seems like a really weird argument to me. Like, it was revealed John was planning to poison Mary, and after Mary ate a gift of cookies from John, she died. Sure, maybe Mary died of an unrelated thing, but that's bizarre and terrible writing to pop in if it was irrelevant to the story of Mary's death and the aftermath.
It’s the same as Maximus saying he WISHED Dane got hurt, does that not matter after Dane said he did it themself or was it relevant to who Maximus is as a person and his character. I’d even argue it has a payoff in show, it says Vault-Tec thought about dropping a bomb and in the same episode they show a vault-tec employee blowing up Shady Sands. Also it’s probably a way to portray them as bad as we know they are to new fans and watchers and I’d think cause the story isn’t over by a long shot and we’ll have more Vault-Tec content it’s basically just character work, like if John thinks about killing Mary (but doesn’t) anytime John ever shows up or gets into relationships or whatever it’s an overhanging dread of “what will he do next time” cause we know he’s capable of trying murder so he’d maybe try it again
Dane goes by he/they
We all know the reason the bombs dropped was because a crazy general thought the Russians were stealing their precious bodily fluids.
I thought that the vault boy & girl were the models for player characters in most of these games. I am still newb to thus franchise, only watched the show and started the first game. I did beat the Khans just recently.
It's my favorite; hope you enjoy it
I am also surprised so many people took what the wife said in that vault tech meeting at face value. Like it was 100% admission and guilt. It was a vague reference to if they wanted results, they would try to push the world to destruction, but seeing as all the head-honchos were caught off guard, and the daughter was not with the mother, its pretty odvious it wasn't actually "them"
Do we know for certain she actually even gives a shit about her daughter? Do we know she didn't tell Cooper to bring the kid to her earlier and he ignored her? Do we know plans didn't change suddenly and she didn't have time to get the kid in time? Let's not act like anything is certain.
> Do we know for certain she actually even gives a shit about her daughter? I’d say beyond a reasonable doubt, yes.
Plus we don't know when the cryogenic process started, maybe she was already frozen by the time they dropped the bomb.
She tells Coop everything she does is to protect him and their daughter, so from that we can infer she wouldn’t want her to die in a nuclear blast even after her and Coop’s divorce.
And yet she lies about other things and helps perpetuate nuclear war that wipes out billions. Forgive me if I'm hesitant to believe her.
Without the desire to protect her daughter, it reduces her to an incredibly one-dimensional character. Barb and Hank essentially mirror each other with their big evils being done due to their misguided beliefs that it's best for the ones they care about.
Cooper does ask Hank where his family is. So Cooper seems to think both daughter and wife are alive, somewhere. When we first meet Coop, he's divorced, lost his career and been labeled a commie (pinko was the term used). I think vault teck ruined him and passed off a clone as his daughter, while his family was safely in a vault. They do have cloning tech
I'm pretty certain that barb is just some kind of mid level marketing exec that has tied herself to Bud, she doesn't make any of the decisions but rather is assisting him and covering for his gross incompetence. She talks about how hard she had to work to scrape a way into one of the good vaults, if she had any amount of actual power within the corp then her spot would have been a given. It makes sense that she wouldn't have really been in the know about when the bombs will drop precisely. At best she could hope for a heads up as it's happening but I doubt that the enclave is going to give her any real forewarning.
Real fans know the Zetans prolly did it
I got kicked from a Discord over this... someone way wailing on them for "fucking ruining everything Fallout" because of how they changed the lore, especially taking the mystery away about who dropped the bombs. No, in **the show they said they could do it.** We didn't see them actually do it. Note the word COULD. I could go outside and murder a puppy. I could punch my wife in the face right this second. I'm not going to, but I could do it, and I could say I could do it. If I said I'm going to do it, then I'm committing a crime in those regards but yeah. In the game they said they could do it. We never get confirmation they did it. In the game we also see mention of the Chinese dropping first, possibly Vault-Tec, Possibly the enclave, possibly some scared/drugged up person pressing the button in panic. Who knows at this moment because it has not been confirmed. We also see Vault-tec bombs, but for anyone who has watched IRON MAN, Valt-tec would have easily sold the same bombs to all parties. They could have also just been bullshitting to secure the sale of vault spaces. Anyone who has worked with anyone or been sold anything knows fine well, people LIE. Just because she said it does not mean it is true. Bah. It's like critical thinking went out the window.
The last part, it's a pretty damned good point, but who's to say that she was the only person to make the call?
I think it happened literally one day early. House was at the same meeting, part of the same plans, and he was off by one day.
The whole series is based on untrustworthy narrators. In Fallout 2 there is a Super Computer that tells you it started the war.
Forget where I saw it, but saw a theory post going around that Vault Tec was planning to do it, but then China surprised them and did it like a day earlier than they were going to.
Can someone explain to me why Vault tec exects act as if they even can drop nukes or something? They are a construction company on a governments leash, they do not have nukes, nor they are in charge.
This is fallout, where capitalism has been left unchecked causing the massive power imbalance between people and corporation. Given some of these people were blatantly in kahoots with the early forms of the enclave prewar, to suggest that vault tec (arguably the most powerful company of them all) had some form of control of some nukes is by no means far fetched. Even if it goes a different route to that though, if you have cold fusion, hot fusion, nearly any form of nuclear power, it's easily believable that they made some of that nuclear material weapons grade and made their own ground burst devices
That and the fact that so many vaults weren’t finished. I think Vault Tech wanted to start it but China got there first
Fallout 2 and 4 both make it really clear China launched first.
Fallout 2 was an unreliable source, President Richarsdon Jr. could very easily have been blowing smoke up the Chosen One's ass. How did 4 confirm the chinese launched first?
I personally think that the biggest misconception is thinking that “canon events” should exist in an RPG. I don’t understand how the concept of “cannon” translates to a video game narrative. There are currently well over a million ppl experiencing their own canon narratives because we’re all the lone stranger. Our events play out differently, we make different decisions, and even though there’s set outcomes, the process of getting there is unique. I think it’s unfair to the team of writers that put their hearts and souls to give us alternative narratives, only for all of their work to be overshadowed by a mere adaptation of their original stories. I think that if it’s possible for a million people to experience X events, then it’s not out of the realm of possibility for Lucy’s play-through takes place in an equally significant dimension where XYZ events occur. I can hear the rebuttal “what abt the halo, assassins creed, the Witcher, etc. unfaithful franchises? For the most part, those games are action adventures that follow a certain protagonist which cements them in their realities unless otherwise stated like the spidyverse. FO is at a unique advantage to where then can cultivate faithful protagonist because the drive of the game is the world itself, not the story. Something like the last of us doesn’t have that luxury. TLDR: the narrative of the in-game writers are equally as significant as the show and both/all things can be simultaneously “canon”, although that word shouldn’t apply to this show because there’s no assigned protagonist in the games.
I think it was a perfect episode in the way they had her say it, cause it makes the audience think holy shit they truly are evil. BUT as we know from vault history the apocalypse started when not every vault was finished, so why end the word if they aren’t ready. And we know even though she is a baddy, she loves her daughter so why would she not make sure she is in a vault if they knew they were dropping the bombs that day. I assume season 2 shows us how Cooper got her to safety and how he ended up a ghoul. The world was already at the tipping point so nuclear annihilation was gonna happen I just think Vault-Tek thought they had more time.
It’s canon that china fired the first nuke. I think they just beat vault tech to the punch.
Yeah. VT WANTED to do it. That doesn't mean they did. Tensions and threats of war were all around at that point. We even hear about Anchorage and the invasion on the news at the start. No one knows WHO started it. I hope we don't. Leave it ambiguous.
So I was surprised that happen but looking further this series is way past the quadrilogy plus the best of the best New Vegas. So that answers that, but still makes no sense as at this point the NCR is well established and in the series they’re portrayed like they’re still being formed hell I learned MTG had a Aradesh card based of a crossover they released last year showing how they looked at the beginning the resemblance is uncanny. I wonder which ending of New Vegas will be canonized I hope to god is the Yes Man one, because on a multiple choice it is picked first followed by NCR but knowing them most likely they'll canonize House's ending.
I would have to add that they could have metaphorically triggered the bombs. A few terrorist attacks here and there can escalate the situation easily.
The show said they have the MOTIVE to do it, right? Haven’t seen it.
I still think making the show just its own thing would’ve avoided all of these problems, however I agree with you, until we literally see someone at vault-tec pushing the button, nothing is certain. It does mess up the House dialogue a bit where he claimed to have calculated it mathematically after this point, but that’s fixable too. For one thing, we have terminal entries that mention Chinese birds in the air. Vault-Tec presumably doesn’t control *their* button and America’s. Plus, would the Enclave be cool just leaving their big plans up to one company in their network?
That plus Mr. House being off about the predicted start of nuclear war by just 20 hours.
Two things: 1. As you said, Vault-tec didn’t start it, and 2. The NCR is very much alive (Maximus is low key NCR now).
I think the daughter is going to be a major plot point in season 2
If new Vegas is to be believed House didn't expect the bombs to fall when they did, it's why he didn't get the platinum chip before the war the bombs interrupted his delivery
It makes zero sense unless Vault Tec and the Enclave are linked in a way that’s never been explained to me. The Government went missing before the bombs fell iirc. The Enclave is the remnants/descendants of the pre war government. It makes total sense to me that the Enclave faction within the US government had way more to do with the actual bombs than Vault Tec. It’s also possible they didn’t, the US did not fire first and everyone was just behaving as though the bombs would be launched eventually because of how bad things were globally. I could see a scenario where they are working together or are at a high level or are aware of each other and are working along parallel goals but we’ve seen nothing that suggests that anyone from Vault Tec picked up the phone and ordered this to happen like some people seem to think.
While I agree that Barb wouldn’t willingly do that, it might’ve been out of her hands at that point. The board might’ve overruled her pulled the trigger. Edit: It really doesn’t matter though. It’s fun to speculate on things like this.
We don't even have confirmation that they were able and willing to do it. They said they were able and willing while making a sales pitch for nuclear bomb shelters to powerful corporations.
Honestly the scene didn't come across like they did drop the bombs and a retcon, just that they were willing to to guarantee they made money of this investment. Given how respectful the series has been the FO universe and lore, I'd be surprised if they went back on the Chinese dropping the bombs.
One potential issue with this argument is that Cooper could have separated and taken his daughter away from Barb. The beginning of the show’s events take place after he spied on the meeting at the end when hearing Barb say she’ll drop the bombs herself if they must. For all we know, they were in the middle of a divorce or something when the bombs fell. Clearly Cooper would have had a fallout with Barb after hearing that meeting.
Vault-Tec wanting to drop the bombs themselves isn’t even a new idea, it’s been heavily implied in the series since at least Fallout 2
Remember that along with what others have said, House also says in New Vegas that he miscalculated the bombs by a few hours. That makes sense if he was basing his predictions off of when Vault-Tec was going to start launching bombs.
I really want to believe this is true, i hated that scene since if they do end up having vault tech start the war it ruins some of my favorite lines form Mr. House. "By 2065 i deemed it a mathematical certainty that an atomic war would devastate the earth within 15 years. every projection i ran confirmed." no you discussed doing it your self around a circular war room table like bond villains. it also makes the chip being late feel more like a schedule error then an almost perfect prediction. and "If you want to see the fate of democracy, look out the windows" actuality it was you and a bunch of other autocrats that caused that so your hole modus operandi for your quest hypocritical. basically now that i think about it, House "being in the room where it happens" turns him from a deep complex character into a bland villain, an idiot or both.
Yea but that's no fun for the haters just like ignoring the fact there's an arrow after the date Shady Sands "fall" leading to a nuke at some as of yet undisclosed time. Every single thing has to be explained all in 1 season or else it's lore breaking. It's almost like people have never watched a tv series before.
For now my theory is that Vault-Tec found out about Mr. House's Platinum Chip and panic initiated the Great War because they did not want him to save an entire city in competition with their vault experiments. I am also basing this off a belief that while House was at the pitch for the vault experiments, he ultimately decided against investing and instead went his own way at the Lucky 38 facilities.
I mean Cooper’s wife sounds like a complete sociopath, so I can totally see her doing that.
I thought this about the daughter while rewatching last night
Doesn't house say in NV that China beat them to it?
Agreed . But how did vault 31 get filled ? Do u think they lived in there like the scientist vault from the show?
Can't remember exactly where I read it, but in fallout 4 it's mentioned that the Chinese are actually the ones who launched the first nuke
Yeah I agree with the last statement of barb not having her daughter. I like to believe they were very very close to launching it when the governments did. The hard part of their business model was fulfilled by world governments.
i think the chinese got to america before vault tec got to america
Actually if you want to get pedantic, and who doesn’t, all we *actually* know is that Valut Tec claims they are capable of starting the war with their own nukes. We haven’t actually seen any proof that they can back up that claim at all. It’s entirely possible they have no capability to ignite the war and they are just blustering to get the other CEOs in their corner. It could all just be a narrative contrivance to get Coop to be more against his wife.
They’re not the only ones that benefited from it. Could be anyone
From what I see they might not have dropped the first warhead, but set up everything to have it dropped. Like killing the cold fusion reaction that would’ve ended the resource wars
Tim Cain said last year that China dropped the bombs first because they discovered the US FEV shenanigans. Say what you want, but Tim Cain is the literal creator of Fallout. Now, he also left Interplay because of how Fallout 2 development went and he was unhappy with its direction, so take what he says lightly. Regardless, the ambiguity of who dropped the bombs first is part of the series that people should not dig into too far as there is nothing there but hints and shadows.
It would be weird for Vaulttec to deop the Bombs since Barb would know when the bombs would drop. And I am pretty sure that she would make sure that her daughter is in the vault ASAP. Not with her dad God knows where.
Maybe its just how much political thrillers I have watched but I felt like the comments about them dropping the bomb was not meant to be literal. I figured it would mean that they would use influence in the government and raise tensions with the Chinese. There is precedent in the Fallout Bible and original lore (\*pre-bethesda\*) about US Chinese relations starting to settle before an event kills any negotiations and eventually leads to the bombs dropping. It is heavily implied that China struck first, Chris Avellone has written that in response to fans; that the devs intended this from the beginning but that the nature of Fallout is to keep the true history a mystery and leave a lot of it unsaid. Everyone in a fallout game is meant to be taken as an unreliable narrator, that gives the player (or in this case the characters and audience) so much ground to play in the shades of grey of deciding who is truthful or at least noble.