Bethesda's Lore Recons

[SaucyLad]

One potential retcon that deserves consideration: Vault 111's Cryogenics.

In 2050~2076, the Sierra Army Depot was renovated & refitted with a state of the art research facility by the US Military. Part of that facility was Biostorage which had Cryogenic Suspension. Source.

In Fallout 2 (the year 2241+) you could visit the Sierra Army Depot as the Chosen One. If you bothered investigating the Biostorage facility you would find many body parts that have been stored there have "long since turned to soup" and a living intact human named PFC Dobbs.

If you release Dobbs he'll briefly speak with the Chosen One and then say he must get back to his army unit (he has no idea how much time has passed). When Dobbs is on his way out he suffers from Post-cryogenic syndrome and "disintegrates into a puddle of slime."

Sierra Army Depot aside, Robert House himself experimented with Cryogenics. To quote the wiki:

Before the Great War, Robert House and his company, as well as the Big Mountain Research Facility, are known to have produced technology within the cryogenic and cryonic field. Robert House extensively researched extending the human life, and created his own cryonic chamber that allowed the user to connect their brain pattern and consciousness to an external interface.

And then there's this:

House's body is extremely physically decrepit and can only live inside the chamber. Opening the chamber, even for a second, will doom the subject to having only little more than a year left at life due to exposure to outside contaminants.

So Robert House too experimented with Cryogenics, but even his own chamber was flawed because his body was not fully preserved - he even aged.

The discrepancy I see here is that Vault-Tec somehow managed to create a superior Cryogenics system than NOT ONLY the US Military, but also Big Mountain and the pre-war technological wonder-boy Robert House managed to pull off themselves.

 

[Empty09]

If FO3 was the retarded child of the series, FO4 is the adopted one.

 

[Dr Fallout]

If FO3 was the retarded child of the series, FO4 is the adopted one.

Who was the spawn of Borderlands and several MMOs.

 

[Someguy37]

snip

House did not use cryogenics because he was alive and conscious the whole time. Cryogenics freezes the user to the point he isn't conscious.

House's pod was a clean chamber which prevented bacteria and other things from killing his body as fast.

 

[Dr Fallout]

snip

House did not use cryogenics because he was alive and conscious the whole time. Cryogenics freezes the user to the point he isn't conscious.

House's pod was a clean chamber which prevented bacteria and other things from killing his body as fast.

Not to forget chemicals and drugs to prolong his body.

 

[Someguy37]

Not to forget chemicals and drugs to prolong his body.

Yes, that too.

In regards to the other places
-Big MT. is never stated to have been doing cryogenic experiments. Elijah only mentions "hibernation chambers" in Dead Money, but doesn't detail what those are specifically, and no cryo facility appears in Big MT. during Old World Blues. For all we know he was talking about something like House's clean chamber, rather then actual cryo storage.

-The Sierra Army Depot "cryo" testing was done using biomed gel, and thus wasn't really cryo-stasis at all.

Fallout 4 is the first case of actual cryo science outside of Mothershit Zeta.

 

[sallou]

Still not over Jet. But in particular Petes disgusting, dismissive, nonsensical handling of it on Twitter. Have these people even played 1 and 2? Do they even care? Ugh. Just ugh.

 

[Crni Vuk]

To be fair, there is no way in hell Pete could NOT defend Fallout 3 and 4. I mean it is pretty much his job ... of course that makes him a good target for NMA kinda, he really is a bit ... blunt about some of the more obvious questions/issues though. More consideration would have been definetly better. I mean it's not like people started to troll him or something, they just asked questions, very vallid questions in my opinion.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Pretty much all evidence regarding cryonics (cryogenics; the branch of physics dealing with the production and effects of very low temperatures.) never really worked out well in the Fallout universe before Fallout 4.
The army's own experiments, or House's effort (I am pretty sure he could have made a cryonic chamber that would have allowed his body to be put in almost complete stasis while his mind could be kept fully active).
If cryonics really worked as it did in Fallout 4 (it is idiotic to think that whoever designed and built these cryonic chambers did not test them out first on test animals and or Chinese POVs before putting a lot of them in Vault 111) the Enclave would never have bothered with the whole 'hiding out on an oil rig and needing Vaults to test various theories for the use of long term space travel', having instead boarded a starship (or perhaps space shuttles like the Quetzel fitted with fusion rocket boosters) and left for another planet.

IMO, forget Fallout 3 and 4, and hope Obsidian (or another good developer) gets to make another Fallout spin-off more closer to Fallout 1 and 2, or that some mod team will do a graphic facelift or recreation of FNV in a new engine.

 

[Dr Fallout]

The Vaults always made more sense as control vaults in my opinion, an attempt to repopulate America in the later stages of the apocalypse.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Unless they are like the modern U.S. and just use a fiat currency whose value comes from the simple agreement by the people that it has value.

Yes, but the government supports it, all banks support it, so it is worth something. It is explained in FO1 why bottlecaps have value (becauase they are supported by the water traders of the hub), but there is no establishment in FO3 that could support bottlecaps, there is no reason to use bottlecaps except that everyone has (apparently) agreed they have worth, but in the disjointed, chaotic, completely lawless Capital Wasteland, why would anyone accept bottlecaps as currency, there isn't even any kind of hand wave explanation, it just is.

Also if you think about gold is a fiat currency of sorts, until recently gold had next to no practical use, it only had worth because people decided it had worth. Gold has no more natural inherent worth to a person than a piece of paper.

New Vegas even gone so far to introduce a currency next to bottle caps, as it makes sense that the Legion had their own coins/currency. Infact, I would even argue that after such a long time, not even bottlecaps make much sense anymore, since there could be better materials that serve as currency. Albeit, bottle caps as currency is simply cool

Point still stands. There is no reason to believe that in a scenario like Fallout bartering doesn't take place. There are even today culturse where bartering is still an every day part of their life, particularly more rural/remote societies.

 

[Someguy37]

Pretty much all evidence regarding cryonics (cryogenics; the branch of physics dealing with the production and effects of very low temperatures.) never really worked out well in the Fallout universe before Fallout 4.

The army's own experiments, or House's effort (I am pretty sure he could have made a cryonic chamber that would have allowed his body to be put in almost complete stasis while his mind could be kept fully active).

If cryonics really worked as it did in Fallout 4 (it is idiotic to think that whoever designed and built these cryonic chambers did not test them out first on test animals and or Chinese POVs before putting a lot of them in Vault 111) the Enclave would never have bothered with the whole 'hiding out on an oil rig and needing Vaults to test various theories for the use of long term space travel', having instead boarded a starship (or perhaps space shuttles like the Quetzel fitted with fusion rocket boosters) and left for another planet..

The point is that there has never been actual cryogenics in past Fallout games.

And what you suggest House could have made is a fundamentally contradictory thing. You cant keep the body perfectly preserved, while keeping the mind active, because the mind relies on the body to give it oxygen and nutrients. Trying to keep your mind active while your body is frozen would only kill you since your mind would get oxygen at thousands of times lower levels, due to your body being frozen, then it would need. You have to keep both active at the same level, or you would die.

The whole point of the vault experiments was to test these things out on people so The Enclave would know if they worked. They wouldn't have left on a spaceship while being frozen before they got the data back from Vault 111 that the pods didn't kill the people they contained. But the war knocked out all communications, and the Enclave never got their rocket finished(as per the cut content from Fallout 2) so they literally couldn't leave. Nor does it mean the other vault experiments no longer serve a purpose, as those situations would very likely come up after they reached.... wherever they were going to go, and thus are still valid tests and needed data.

They also likely did test them on animals and prisoners before the war. However, those short term tests would not give them the data they needed to be sure it would last for hundreds of years, aka the hundreds of years needed to reach another world, until they did it in the vault experiment and got the data of them surviving for such a long term.

 

[Severite]

Pretty much all evidence regarding cryonics (cryogenics; the branch of physics dealing with the production and effects of very low temperatures.) never really worked out well in the Fallout universe before Fallout 4.

The army's own experiments, or House's effort (I am pretty sure he could have made a cryonic chamber that would have allowed his body to be put in almost complete stasis while his mind could be kept fully active).

If cryonics really worked as it did in Fallout 4 (it is idiotic to think that whoever designed and built these cryonic chambers did not test them out first on test animals and or Chinese POVs before putting a lot of them in Vault 111) the Enclave would never have bothered with the whole 'hiding out on an oil rig and needing Vaults to test various theories for the use of long term space travel', having instead boarded a starship (or perhaps space shuttles like the Quetzel fitted with fusion rocket boosters) and left for another planet..

The point is that there has never been actual cryogenics in past Fallout games.

And what you suggest House could have made is a fundamentally contradictory thing. You cant keep the body perfectly preserved, while keeping the mind active, because the mind relies on the body to give it oxygen and nutrients. Trying to keep your mind active while your body is frozen would only kill you since your mind would get oxygen at thousands of times lower levels, due to your body being frozen, then it would need. You have to keep both active at the same level, or you would die.

The whole point of the vault experiments was to test these things out on people so The Enclave would know if they worked. They wouldn't have left on a spaceship while being frozen before they got the data back from Vault 111 that the pods didn't kill the people they contained. But the war knocked out all communications, and the Enclave never got their rocket finished(as per the cut content from Fallout 2) so they literally couldn't leave. Nor does it mean the other vault experiments no longer serve a purpose, as those situations would very likely come up after they reached.... wherever they were going to go, and thus are still valid tests and needed data.

They also likely did test them on animals and prisoners before the war. However, those short term tests would not give them the data they needed to be sure it would last for hundreds of years, aka the hundreds of years needed to reach another world, until they did it in the vault experiment and got the data of them surviving for such a long term.

I'll be honest, I like the way the vaults were in FO1 better then FO2, but, I guess that ship has sailled like 16 years ago. Still, at least the cryonics test makes more sense then a lot of the others that were just way over the top. I wonder what happens when we give people psychoactive drugs? They are affected psychoactively? WHO KNEW!!?!?! Meh, kinda rediculous, that's something they really, REALLY, didn't need the vaults to experiment with.

 

[Someguy37]

To be fair though, Fallout's vault lore has been broken since day 1.

Fallout 1
>Lets built all these vaults to save humanity!
>Proceeds to put Vault 13 and 15 so far from any major population center that no one would realistically have the ability to reach them before the bombs fell.
>LA, and San Fran, both major population centers with tons of people, had no actual Vaults, with LA only having a small demo vault.

Fallout 2
>It was really a "LOL EVIL GOVMENT!" conspiracy all the time.
>Despite spending billions of dollars to build all these vaults, The Enclave didn't spend any money making sure the communication lines stayed intact, thus meaning they lost contact with all the vaults, rendering the whole thing pointless.
>Vault 8 is built even FURTHER away from any major population center then Vaults 13 and 15 were, making one wonder how anyone managed to reach it in time in the first place.

Tactics just made it worse with Vault 0, and The Calculator, being "the central hub" not making any sense with the rest of the Vault experiment.

 

[TorontoReign]

To be fair though, Fallout's vault lore has been broken since day 1.

Fallout 1
>Lets built all these vaults to save humanity!
>Proceeds to put Vault 13 and 15 so far from any major population center that no one would realistically have the ability to reach them before the bombs fell.
>LA, and San Fran, both major population centers with tons of people, had no actual Vaults, with LA only having a small demo vault.

Fallout 2
>It was really a "LOL EVIL GOVMENT!" conspiracy all the time.
>Despite spending billions of dollars to build all these vaults, The Enclave didn't spend any money making sure the communication lines stayed intact, thus meaning they lost contact with all the vaults, rendering the whole thing pointless.
>Vault 8 is built even FURTHER away from any major population center then Vaults 13 and 15 were, making one wonder how anyone managed to reach it in time in the first place.

Tactics just made it worse with Vault 0, and The Calculator, being "the central hub" not making any sense with the rest of the Vault experiment.

It doesn't have to be near a major population center to save a few thousand people. A lot of people didn't like the social experiment stuff in Fallout 2 true. Tactics biggest flaws was Vault 0 imo so I agree with most of what you said. Enclave communication lines wouldn't necessarily last a nuclear war.

 

[Severite]

To be fair though, Fallout's vault lore has been broken since day 1.

Fallout 1
>Lets built all these vaults to save humanity!
>Proceeds to put Vault 13 and 15 so far from any major population center that no one would realistically have the ability to reach them before the bombs fell.
>LA, and San Fran, both major population centers with tons of people, had no actual Vaults, with LA only having a small demo vault.

Fallout 2
>It was really a "LOL EVIL GOVMENT!" conspiracy all the time.
>Despite spending billions of dollars to build all these vaults, The Enclave didn't spend any money making sure the communication lines stayed intact, thus meaning they lost contact with all the vaults, rendering the whole thing pointless.
>Vault 8 is built even FURTHER away from any major population center then Vaults 13 and 15 were, making one wonder how anyone managed to reach it in time in the first place.

Tactics just made it worse with Vault 0, and The Calculator, being "the central hub" not making any sense with the rest of the Vault experiment.

I always kinda of assume, given the population density, that there was infrastructure all the way around, and that 13 and 15, which were some of the first vaults made, were put close enough to house the people in that area, and that the origional FO1 design had more vaults that frankly just arn't known about, and arn't really necessary to show. It was already demonstrated in FO1 that the only vault 13 knew about was 15, and I suspect that's just because it was mentioned because it served the same "city space". But, kinda think of the americas as a suburbized version of a hive city in wh40k, and you'll see my the way I viewed it before FO2 came along and retconned the hell out of it And, of course, the reason we don't see all the other vaults, is they haven't popped back up, or failed in some way. Which, I assume back in fo1 design, was the intended way.

 

[Trannigan]

Someguy gets it.

 

[Someguy37]

It doesn't have to be near a major population center to save a few thousand people.

True, but Vaults 13 and 15 were literally located in the middle of the desert. There is just NOTHING out there IRL, and theres no city ruins, or anything mentioned as being just outside the Vaults, to indicate there was some "Fallout universe only" city nearby.

By the time the US got confirmation that China was launching nukes, and was able to sound the alarm sirens, people would have had, realistically, only a few minutes TOPS to reach the Vaults, and given the location of vaults 13 and 15, and the lack of anything resembling a city near them, its very unrealistic more then a handful of people could have reached them before being killed. Let alone the populations we see/are implied by Fallout 1/2.

The Fallout Bible tried to reconcile some of these problems, but Avellone also made up some rather dumb vault experiments, such as the airborne drug vault we got in Fallout 3, which only further complicated the issue by making The Enclave seem just stupidly evil, instead of wanting to do valid tests.

Fallout's vault lore/design has just been broken from the beginning.


Unrelated, but Fallout 1/2 also had a very critical design flaw that Fo3/NV/4 retconed. The outward opening vault door is a laughably idiotic design choice. If any part of the entrance cave collapsed, and fell in the vault door track, it would prevent the door from being able to open, and the vault dwellers would have no means of fixing it, since they would all trapped inside. The inward opening doors of newer Fallout games are actually the more sensible option, since any part of that could break is located on the inside, and is this repairable.

 

[Ilosar]

It doesn't have to be near a major population center to save a few thousand people.

True, but Vaults 13 and 15 were literally located in the middle of the desert. There is just NOTHING out there IRL, and theres no city ruins, or anything mentioned as being just outside the Vaults, to indicate there was some "Fallout universe only" city nearby.

By the time the US got confirmation that China was launching nukes, and was able to sound the alarm sirens, people would have had, realistically, only a few minutes TOPS to reach the Vaults, and given the location of vaults 13 and 15, and the lack of anything resembling a city near them, its very unrealistic more then a handful of people could have reached them before being killed. Let alone the populations we see/are implied by Fallout 1/2.

The Fallout Bible tried to reconcile some of these problems, but Avellone also made up some rather dumb vault experiments, such as the airborne drug vault we got in Fallout 3, which only further complicated the issue by making The Enclave seem just stupidly evil, instead of wanting to do valid tests.

Fallout's vault lore/design has just been broken from the beginning.


Unrelated, but Fallout 1/2 also had a very critical design flaw that Fo3/NV/4 retconed. The outward opening vault door is a laughably idiotic design choice. If any part of the entrance cave collapsed, and fell in the vault door track, it would prevent the door from being able to open, and the vault dwellers would have no means of fixing it, since they would all trapped inside. The inward opening doors of newer Fallout games are actually the more sensible option, since any part of that could break is located on the inside, and is this repairable.

FO4 does showcase that disprecancy. Vault 111 is just over the hill and you barely make it in time. On the other hand, you've already got numerous people inside the Vault itself when the bombs fall. And I suspect that many of the Vaults that were out there had plans, or even invited people to come early. After all, with how Vault-Tec and the Enclave were connected, maybe they got an advance warning and started bringing in the future vault dwellers before the bombs fell.

I do agree that the Vault experiments (and really the Enclave itself being a bunch of genocidal loonies) weren't a great part of the lore. Future games have just taken the concept too far, and the valid social/technological experiments (Vault 11, Vault 111, Vault 36) are lost in the mire of sillier Vaults (Vault 82, Vault 114, Vault 95, Vault 21, etc.). It's why I'm not hard on Bethesda for just rolling with the concept. It was already silly in FO2.

One thing I found today is that the Boston Burgle already had knowledge of the Enclave's existence, and claimed that the President had already been on the Poseidon oil rig for half a year by the times the bombs fell. Is that corroborated by information from previous games?

As for the effective cryogenics, it's possible they were a secret pre-war addition and technology evolved since the Sierra Army Depot was built. House's chambers aren't really comparable since it was designed to keep him awake and in control, whereas the Vault 111 chambers are for cryosleep.

I mean, let's face it, Fallout runs on Science!. Cryogenics is not exactly out of line with vaccum tube AIs, plasma weapons and magical radiations and FEVs. To say nothing of the stuff that comes out of Big Mountain.

 

[fakeangel]

>Let's build vaults to save humanity

You are mistaken from the start

C'mon, there was only 122 vaults built that could only successfully hold 1000 people each. That's 122 thousand total, less than half the population of any major city in the U.S.

The vaults were never meant to save anyone.