Could the Transistor be invented in the Fallout Universe?

[Bloodway]

Since we all know what kicked off the Fallout universe in the first place was the fact that the Transistor was never invented to make way for Vacuum Tubes and Atomic Physics which became the cornerstones of scientific progress which we all know the events that lead up to this point of course.

First of all, is anyone in the Fallout universe even capable or even have the technical means of inventing the Transistor at all?

Also where's the Wikipedia article on the Transistor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor

Of course in Fallout's timeline, I wonder what exact difference happened here to why the Transistor was never invented?

Of course though, I would like to see a future Fallout game that revolves exactly around this plot which maybe one of the endings involve going back to history (around the early 20th century) to "set things right" thus averting the Fallout timeline from even happening at all (thus resulting our own timeline) which may sound like Bioshock Infinite though.

I think it would be also be interesting if the "main antagonist" in this said game was actually the one solely responsible for the Transistor not invented thus kicking off the Fallout universe since I would imagine him being a Andrew Ryan/Comstock type "Founder/Visionary" character who perhaps remained alive after all this time somehow via access of super science available to him that no one else was able to get and plus he had a alternative vision for the future (since he wanted a "Retrofuturistic Atom Punk" type world) which turned out to be a failure with the Great War happening. I think it might be even more interesting that is said antagonist was originally from our timeline who went back to history and prevented from the Transistor from being invented perhaps.

Thoughts?

 

[Practicat]

The transistor was invented, though in 2067.

Time travel as a canon thing in Fallout isn't something I ever want to see, mostly because it trivializes the idea of "what's done, is done" and learning from mistakes in the past.

As for why the transistor wasn't developed for so long compared to in the real world, I don't know. It's better to ascribe it to designer decision, in the same way color displays were extremely rare even close to the Great War, yet the Fallout universe has full color VR simulations.

 

[Bloodway]

The transistor was invented, though in 2067.

Oh....

I think by that time it was too late to develop anything by that time compared to our timeline.

 

[cratchety ol joe]

I was doing research on this, and I figure that (based on content in Fallout 1 and 2) the transistor must have been in development for at least 15 years, which would give the world 'advanced' technology similar to the tech of the 70's.

There are personal radios highly advanced computer systems and the auto-doc would require micro-electronics.

As a concept thought that I prefer to self-canon that micro electronics and even slightly more advanced versions of the tech (think the kind of tech we had in the early or mid 90s) would have been at a consumer level, and certainly used in 'high-tech' installations (manufacturing / military / hospitals)

The reason I prefer my own bastardisation of the canon is that there are too many things in the original Fallout games that demand the existence of advanced technology well beyond the hyper 50's 'beth-o-vision' vision of the Fallout world of vacuum tubes etc. And so in my mind-canon this concept fits better.

If anyone gives a damn I'll look out the timeline I was working on.

 

[Zerginfestor]

as @Practicat
i don't like time-travel plots, i think they're a little hokey. they remind me of those "coma theories", it's an uncreative attempt at adding shock value and a contrived plot twist... uh, no offense. yeah, i didn't like Bioshock Infinite, could you tell? in my opinion it fosters audience apathy, the kind where you ask yourself "well, if it was a dream/alternate universe the whole entire time, then what was even the point of doing all this?"

Rick and Morty had an episode that was related to time, and it really showed how fucking ludicrous the entire concept of time-traveling is. Even the directors of the show stated that the concept of Time Travel is up and beyond to the point that trying to convey it in a simple sense would take hours instead of 30 minutes.

basically: Time Traveling is fucking stupid, Alternative Realities is more probable than time Traveling.

 

[peadar87]

I hand-wave away the transistor thing as something the military kept to themselves. Consumer goods are mostly stuck in the 50s, although things like personal robot butlers are starting to bring microprocessors into the mainstream slowly.

 

[Brivoo]

as @Practicat stated, they were invented, though likely before they could be implemented on any large scale due to nuclear holocaust and all that.

i don't like time-travel plots, i think they're a little hokey. they remind me of those "coma theories", it's an uncreative attempt at adding shock value and a contrived plot twist... uh, no offense. yeah, i didn't like Bioshock Infinite, could you tell? in my opinion it fosters audience apathy, the kind where you ask yourself "well, if it was a dream/alternate universe the whole entire time, then what was even the point of doing all this?"

i'm more interested in the present, post-war Fallout world than the pre-war one. i liked FO1's approach to the whole matter, in that the details of the pre-war world's economy and politics were irrelevant—that age is long past, and humanity is turning a new leaf.

Time travel isn't necessarily stupid in itself, nor are 'coma theories', as you describe them; it's just that you'd be hard pressed to find any story that uses them in an interesting manner.

The problem is that, depending on how it works, time travel either creates a huge number of plot holes or is generally used for cheap shock value when it comes to the inevitable paradox. "The old man was his newborn son all along!" etc.

I think time travel shines the brightest when it becomes the focus of the story, rather than a plot device. movies like Primer, where the focus is the complexity and implications of it, really demonstrate what its full potential could be.

Fuck Bioshock Infinite, though. That game was utter garbage.

 

[Bloodway]

I guess it would be better off traveling to alternate realities making time travel pointless anyways, which basically why change history while you can just travel to a universe that already has better results?

I think this opens up many possibilities of them opening up to our world and them walking around saying "This world still looks Pre-war intact but much more technologically advanced due to the transistor in this world has been invented much earlier than 2067, perhaps the tech in this world prove useful to our own..Also note that although this world still resembles how the Pre-War world was, looks like it's culture however is strangely alien to us which perhaps deserves some extensive study which maybe might be beneficial to us possibly"

Since I've always been wondering how anyone from the Fallout universe would react to a culture evolved past the 1950s.

 

[cratchety ol joe]

Since I've always been wondering how anyone from the Fallout universe would react to a culture evolved past the 1950s

In my head-canon I've always thought that the FO timeline was basically like our own but at key intervals societal effects caused a 'collapse' (pivotal being the fuel shortage) to make people wish to go back to the good old times and hence living in a pseudo-50's society to 'feel better', but I do not preclude that the self same society is still as culturally advanced as our own time line allows for.

This concept isn't too far fetched from our own 'real-world' society as we adopt past trends and fashions as are comfortable to the en-vogue crowd.

 

[Bloodway]

In my head-canon I've always thought that the FO timeline was basically like our own but at key intervals societal effects caused a 'collapse' (pivotal being the fuel shortage) to make people wish to go back to the good old times and hence living in a pseudo-50's society to 'feel better', but I do not preclude that the self same society is still as culturally advanced as our own time line allows for.

This concept isn't too far fetched from our own 'real-world' society as we adopt past trends and fashions as are comfortable to the en-vogue crowd.

Except it isn't though, since I thought it was already made clear that the Pre-War world was stuck in the 1950s with a population mostly filled with conformists that allowed the US/Enclave to experiment on them for warfare.

 

[Hassknecht]

The world of Fallout wasn't stuck in the 50's, and it didn't "regress" into a sort of 50's cliché. Well, Bethesda appears to think so, but there was nothing in the original games that would have supported that. It's not the 50's, it's how the 50's imagined the future, the World Of Tomorrow. Well, the World Of Tomorrow gone wrong, like Mad Max happening in the Jetsons.
Brass brassiers instead of petticoats!

 

[Bloodway]

The world of Fallout wasn't stuck in the 50's, and it didn't "regress" into a sort of 50's cliché. Well, Bethesda appears to think so, but there was nothing in the original games that would have supported that. It's not the 50's, it's how the 50's imagined the future, the World Of Tomorrow. Well, the World Of Tomorrow gone wrong, like Mad Max happening in the Jetsons.
Brass brassiers instead of petticoats!

Well it kinda goes back to my original idea from my OP that maybe something in the Fallout timeline might have caused or kicked by someone who really had this "World of Tomorrow" vision for the future that turned out wrong.

Of course I also notice that Fallout's Pre-War era was a crapsaccharine world that at first glance it looks like a idyllic world of tomorrow as the 1950s imagined it (hence it's culture stuck in the 50s kinda makes sense though) but upon closer inspection and if you delve deep into it, there's something very terribly wrong about it.

Perhaps this Storyteller video on Big M.T. pretty much captures this "Creepypasta" feel of the Pre-War world:



I think that's what makes Fallout interesting.

Oh from the TV tropes page:

The entire Pre-War USA of the Fallout series is like this. The entire world is known, not only feared, to be on the fast track to destruction, and society is more dog-eat-dog than ever before. There are hints that the average attitude in the pre-war world is more cynical and self serving than even our own. On the surface, however, the nation presents itself to be a patriotic heaven filled with wholesome families and optimistic cheerful people. Some hints include that in Washington, D.C.'s alternate Mall, they had a War Museum where we have part of the Smithsonian, and that they willingly allowed the addictive, radioactive Nuka-Cola Quantum to be produced.

• This only gets worse with hints present in the 3D games (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4) that paint a picture of just how awful America was before the bombs dropped. Reverence of capitalism was such that unions were illegal and worker rights were non-existent, health and safety was a joke to the point that promos for Nuka-World, the In-Universe equivalent to Disneyworld, proudly boast about meeting "minimal safety requirements", lackluster quality control could get you killed by everything from the food you eat to the robot workers or defense turrets in your office, and the government was essentially an all-controlling totalitarian bunch of psychoes who'd do things like support Vault-Tec in its experiments and use gatling laser-bearing Powered Armor troops to put down peaceful protests.

Pretty self expiatory.