What did the vault dwellers do with their dead?

Wooz

Wooz

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I was on a train for ten hours recently, and somehow, don't ask me how, I started thinking about the Vaults.

Then, one weird thought struck my mind: What the hell did the Vault Dwellers do with their dead?

Burn them in a crematorium?

Dump them into the wastes?

Bury them? Where?

I just thought this aspect of vault life, (in this case, death) was pretty much ignored.

What do you guys think? Rosh? Per?
 
Let´s presume the average age of people entering the vaults was 35.. If I remember right, the radioactivity took something like 130 years to be in a non hostile level(I might be wrong about the time). Hence, only one or two generation of vault dwellers needed to be disposed of. They might recycle their bodies, burn them . . There could be a part of the vault that has bare ground in which they could bury the dead. There are lots of options. But yeah - this aspect wasn´t covered in the games at all.
 
The thing is, in a closed society like a vault, i doubt they'd "recycle" the bodies, as every member of the society was theoretically one of the few survivors of nuclear annihilation.

I think people'd be far more attached to each other than in our society.
 
mad said:
But yeah - this aspect wasn´t covered in the games at all.
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obviously, if they had to incorporate everything, they'd still be in the planningstage of production...

mad said:
There could be a part of the vault that has bare ground in which they could bury the dead.
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no fucking way... what use would a vault be if radiated water could just pop out of the ground?

Wooz69 said:
The thing is, in a closed society like a vault, i doubt they'd "recycle" the bodies, as every member of the society was theoretically one of the few survivors of nuclear annihilation.

I think people'd be far more attached to each other than in our society.
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ow come on... when yer dead, yer dead... thats it. that would probably be the way more advanced people would see it.

although, they still nuked eachother, so i guess they aint so advanced afterall.

on a sidenote: w00z, i kinda expected a conspiracy thing from you... kinda soylent green style with the Overseer as the ultimate evil. you disappoint me w00zyboy

Role-Player said:
Set up a Vault Burger stand?
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thats actually quite funny in dutch...

1) the standard english version: burger (McD & stuff)

2) burger in dutch: it means civilian OR citizen.

vault citizen burgers, now also available for breakfast!

King of Creation said:
They probably had an incinerator.
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that or recycling, yeah
 
SuAside said:
no fucking way... what use would a vault be if radiated water could just pop out of the ground?
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Ground doesn´t have to be "connected" to other ground - it could be isolated, like a big room with approx 3 meters of ground. They could farm something there, and use the bodies of their dead as a fertilizer.
That´s what I meant originally by recycling - not the direct kind of cannibalism. Or they wouldn´t have to farm anything there, just bury em.
 
Wooz69 said:
The thing is, in a closed society like a vault, i doubt they'd "recycle" the bodies, as every member of the society was theoretically one of the few survivors of nuclear annihilation.

I think people'd be far more attached to each other than in our society.
Click to expand...

First thing that came to my mind was a box of soylent green Vault Shreddies :D

In an enclosed system, suffering from limitations of resources and forced to recycle as much as possible to maximise their Vault's operational lifespan, I think it'd be probable that the earthly remains of the vault dwellers were somehow converted into food, or fertiliser to say the least. After all, these were valuable deposits of proteins and energy since they could not be acquired from outside of the given Vault's system.

However, let us remember that the Fallout universe is also about mentality, the accepted mentality being that of the American 50's, and I'd seriously doubt that they would get over using corpses as food base in that time, unless of course the conditions were very harsh. I'd suspect that the bodies were simply cremated, the ashes being more convenient for eventual preservation, rather than being traditionally buried. (assuming that, contrary to cannibalism, incineration would be a kind of pragmatism acceptable to the dwellers and the creators of the system.) It is not as much a matter of being attached to each other, but of mentality and values as such. Remember that the first generation to find themselves locked in a Vault needn't have even known each other before, lest be attached. Yet it would be them to be the first to solve such a conundrum.

Of course, there could still have been a situation where the heads of the Vault Behavioral Project didn't give enough hydroponics to a certain Vault... ;)
 
the most logically thing is cremation, I dont think those who designed the vaults thought that "yeah, lets use the dead folks as food, that'll save us a lot of money"

besides, since this aspect wasn't covered in the games (or the bible) it can't have anything to do with food.
 
Kahgan, that was one stupid post.

Crematorium, probably. Dunno.

Keep in mind folks, that even if the first generation, as Silencer pointed out, wasn't at first attached to each other, people in such extreme circumstances stick to each other. Every vault was for them probably the last hope for humanity, that they may be the last human survivors of nuclear annihilation. I doubt people after one or two generations wouldn't, there's only so much people inside a vault, and realize that even ten years is a lot of time in such a confined society to be attached to each other.

SuAside said:
w00z, i kinda expected a conspiracy thing from you... kinda soylent green style with the Overseer as the ultimate evil. you disappoint me w00zyboy
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Er. No, the ultimate evil is the governments that lead into a worldwide nuclear war for the sake of greed and profits.
 
Kahgan said:
Again, I have to remind you that this stuff gets mentioned! It does, If the developers thought that this was something that might have happened, they most definatly would have mentioned it somewhere, at least in the bible.
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Or maybe they just didn't care to provide any explanation. May I remind you that we are talking about a fictional world which is not complete for a number of reasons. The fact that the designers didn't provide an aspect says exactly nothing about that aspect other than it wasn't relevant for the game.

Edit: Oops. :P
 
kids, why are you arguing about something that MIGHT have happened in a FANTASY WORLD

each person makes his own fallout universe in his head... for example: i for one prefer to think that there were very few cars at the time of FO2. although the FO bible clearly states that there is a car per 200 people...

you just ignore what you dont like and you make yer own stuff up. thats one of the strengths of FO really, you get an open world that in time incorporates your own thoughts.

as for the "bring out yer dead"-thing:
many people seem to think that recycling automaticly means eating them. a mans body can be recycled in many ways...
 
Cremation is the most likely prospect, as people in Vaults had to work together with each other and had a much more optomistic outlook on life and treating each other, even if they did tend to view outsiders as vermin.

Hence, the difference between the Vaults and what was outside of them, and what made Iguana-on-a-Stick such an item for the Vault Dweller to find out about. It kind of lessens the whole "barbaric wasteland" if the Vault Dwellers were also cannibals or ate their dead. Some might have, but the use of the human body to the consumption of another isn't much in terms of food. That is why carnivores must outnumber the herbivores/omnivores by a great number in order for the carnivores to survive.

Eating the dead, for whatever reason, is also highly unhealthy and would hardly be entertained in any closed ecosystem where one disease could mean death for everyone, at the cost of maybe a single meal for a dozen people.
 
Jesus Christ! They kep the dang bodies in the morgue! Where else where they are going to put them. I figure there is a lot of room underground to build a morgue and a crypt. They just did not brought it up because it was probably morbus and pointless to the Fallout storyline. In any case, i think it depends on each player imagination to figure where the bodies go, and not in the game designers.
 
Who talks about eating them?
Recycling doesn't mean they put roasted VDs on the menu!

Remember Waterworld (yes, I know that at least every second person here hates the movie, but some people didn't find it THAT bad, tastes differ)? In Waterworld they dumped the dead in some kind of mud hole in order to extract drinking water or whatever. Stupid idea, I guess, but they didn't eat them either.

Using dead bodies as fertilizers could work well. I'm sure they recycle sewage, so filtering out poisonous substances shouldn't pose a problem.

Who says they'd have ethical problems with recycling the dead? If they use people as fertilizers they could incinerate people and then use their ashes for the hydroponic garden or whatever.

Christ, what has our society come to that people associate recycling with cannibalism. No wonder OUR recycling system doesn't work out, then.
 
They must have a contained space for garbage disposal. Though obviously the Vault would try to conserve as much space as possible by recycling materials, there is some garbage that would have to be stored away.

My guess would be a large room, separated from the main Vault, which garbage would be dumped into after being compacted. Garbage wouldn't be dumped outside of the Vault, because it would give away the location of the Vault.

I doubt that entire bodies would be disposed of in this way, but ashes of cremated bodies possibly. Minimizing the space the remains would take up.

This is all assuming that the Vault dwellers would have ethical issues with the recycling of human bodies. Due to the history of the Fallout Universe (and the stemming from the fifties), I believe that they would rather not recycle bodies.
 
"To help you survive in the wasteland, here's a 10mm Pistol, a Flare, some Stimpaks, and here, a suit of magnificent, rattling Bone Armor made out of your loved ones."

"But I'm a stealth character."

"The companion helmet has a bone which connects through your nose like this."

"Oooww!"

"Remember now, if you ever get stuck, just rattle Mommy Bone here a little for clues."

"M-mommy?"

"Ahh, the wonders of technology. And there are those who say that we vault dwellers would turn tribal given half a chance. Ha! What, are you still here? What are you waiting for, a hintbook? Out! Out! Out! And don't come rattling around here again without that chip!"
 
Per:
ROTFLMAOBHOF!

Anyway, I have to think that they didn't keep people around in a mortuary, but also that they didn't eat them or directly recycle the remains in the form of bone armor (I'm still laughing, Per) or meat. They might have had waste-to-energy incinerators, or some useful way of recycling the dead that makes more sense than using the immediate remains for food and such.

You can burn things in an enclosed space if the fire in the incinerator or oven or whatever draws off of and exhaust into the outside air, and its heat is simply transfered through something to the inside where you're using it to boil water to run a turbine, or whatever. A simple incinerator could simply dump its heat outside with the exhaust, but that's a waste of good heat energy.
 
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