What if Super Mutants weren't sterile?

[naossano]

Did Beth made ae Chinese dictator responsible for the bombs ?
That cheapens the point made by the classics.
They made pretty clear about the fact nobody knows who launched first, and that it doesn't matter. Everyone would have at that point. And the fallout US government was one of the worst. And as we see in fo2, that government never learned. I guess you wouldn't except a company ruled by trump's brother to maintain an semi-harsh view against an alternate world us government.

 

[Big No]

Did Beth made ae Chinese dictator responsible for the bombs ?
That cheapens the point made by the classics.
They made pretty clear about the fact nobody knows who launched first, and that it doesn't matter. Everyone would have at that point.

I think everyone pretty much assumes China launched first since it would make more sense than the US launching first. Unless some sneaky third party decided to do it.

 

[naossano]

We are talking about the Enclave. The guys who would later send poisonous gas to their own citizens because their genes mutated a bit, not mentioning countless of sick experiments for many years.

Fallout Pre-war America was a pretty awful country to live in.

 

[Sublime]

We are talking about the Enclave. The guys who would later send poisonous gas to their own citizens because their genes mutated a bit, not mentioning countless of sick experiments for many years.

Fallout Pre-war America was a pretty awful country to live in.

What's the point though? They had won the War for Alaska, and while Pre war US was a mess it was still better than nuclear nothingness

 

[a721402]

What's the point though? They had won the War for Alaska, and while Pre war US was a mess it was still better than nuclear nothingness

It could be a false nuke alert make them thought China decide to go total nuts so them launch the first nuke, we have something similar happened before, during the cold war.

 

[Risewild]

What's the point though? They had won the War for Alaska, and while Pre war US was a mess it was still better than nuclear nothingness

It could have been any other nuclear super power.
Maybe other super powers were waiting for the USA and China to weaken each other and then be trampled by them. Since the USA was winning easily, it spoiled the plans of that third super power and they just nuked them.

Also we don't know if the rest of the world was nuked or not. There is no game that mentions where the nukes fell outside of the USA.

So for all we know only the USA and maybe China got nuked. The rest of the world might have been "fine" compared to these two countries. I say fine, but the rest of the world was embroiled in wars and lack of resources too, but they might have escaped direct nuclear apocalypse. Although the effects of the nukes would become global (nuclear winters, fallout, radioactivity spreading due to wind, etc).

But we only know for sure that the USA was nuked, and that the USA fired nukes too, but we don't even know if they were fired at China or not.

And then there is Mothership Zeta . Which shows the Zetans were interested in getting the USA nuclear launch codes...

EDIT: I just thought of something. It is very plausible that the Enclave might have been the first to shoot nukes. Before the bombs fell, the objective of the Enclave was to leave Earth into space. And they made the Vaults be experiments to see how people cope in different stressful situations that would be expected to happen in deep space traveling. But those experiments wouldn't happen if there wasn't a real nuclear attack on America. Because the vaults would only get people during the attack.
So if there wasn't a nuclear attack, the Enclave couldn't get their test subjects and couldn't go to space. And there would be no point in them wasting resources and money into making the Vaults being experiments in the first place...

 

[Sublime]

It could have been any other nuclear super power.
Maybe other super powers were waiting for the USA and China to weaken each other and then be trampled by them. Since the USA was winning easily, it spoiled the plans of that third super power and they just nuked them.

Also we don't know if the rest of the world was nuked or not. There is no game that mentions where the nukes fell outside of the USA.

So for all we know only the USA and maybe China got nuked. The rest of the world might have been "fine" compared to these two countries. I say fine, but the rest of the world was embroiled in wars and lack of resources too, but they might have escaped direct nuclear apocalypse. Although the effects of the nukes would become global (nuclear winters, fallout, radioactivity spreading due to wind, etc).

But we only know for sure that the USA was nuked, and that the USA fired nukes too, but we don't even know if they were fired at China or not.

And then there is Mothership Zeta . Which shows the Zetans were interested in getting the USA nuclear launch codes...

EDIT: I just thought of something. It is very plausible that the Enclave might have been the first to shoot nukes. Before the bombs fell, the objective of the Enclave was to leave Earth into space. And they made the Vaults be experiments to see how people cope in different stressful situations that would be expected to happen in deep space traveling. But those experiments wouldn't happen if there wasn't a real nuclear attack on America. Because the vaults would only get people during the attack.
So if there wasn't a nuclear attack, the Enclave couldn't get their test subjects and couldn't go to space. And there would be no point in them wasting resources and money into making the Vaults being experiments in the first place...

Maybe I was a bit hasty to say that it must have been China, however there aren't other superpowers competing with the USA: they were even in good terms with the Soviet Union. It's possible that it was a European nation, but they were already in a civil war during the events of the American-Sino war.

I also wish to clarify that I had in mind mainly to the space plan when talking about the Enclave. If you want to colonize space effectively it's much easier if you have a big economy and a vast industrial complex than a devastated Wasteland.

 

[SiriusShenanigans]

Fallout 2 hinted that it was dejected AI that were locked into doing miserable tasks and unable to see the world that fired the nukes. I always like the idea that it might have been them.

 

[Risewild]

Maybe I was a bit hasty to say that it must have been China, however there aren't other superpowers competing with the USA: they were even in good terms with the Soviet Union. It's possible that it was a European nation, but they were already in a civil war during the events of the American-Sino war.

I also wish to clarify that I had in mind mainly to the space plan when talking about the Enclave. If you want to colonize space effectively it's much easier if you have a big economy and a vast industrial complex than a devastated Wasteland.

The Enclave already had all of that, what they needed now was results to their experiments, and for that they needed test subjects, and that was why they invested so much money and resources into making the vaults so they could experiment on people. But if no one uses the vaults, they will not get any results for the experiment.
I think the Enclave even had their spaceship already built and everything, all they needed was the vault experiment results. So they did not need a big economy or a vast industrial complex anymore.
They wanted to leave Earth to never return, because Earth was bankrupt in relation to resources.

This is from the design documents for Van Buren:

In November, 2076, the Enclave seized control of Bloomfield Space Center. They knew nuclear war was just around the corner, so they tried to refit the Hermes-13 and convert it into a vehicle that would take selected personnel (mainly themselves) off-planet, destination yet to be determined.

Notice how the Enclave knew nuclear war was just around the corner one year before the bombs fell. Now, it is very suspicious that the Enclave knew bombs would soon fall if they didn't plan on dropping them. Specially since there wasn't any indication other countries would do it.

 

[Sublime]

The Enclave already had all of that, what they needed now was results to their experiments, and for that they needed test subjects, and that was why they invested so much money and resources into making the vaults so they could experiment on people. But if no one uses the vaults, they will not get any results for the experiment.
I think the Enclave even had their spaceship already built and everything, all they needed was the vault experiment results. So they did not need a big economy or a vast industrial complex anymore.
They wanted to leave Earth to never return, because Earth was bankrupt in relation to resources.

This is from the design documents for Van Buren:

Notice how the Enclave knew nuclear war was just around the corner one year before the bombs fell. Now, it is very suspicious that the Enclave knew bombs would soon fall if they didn't plan on dropping them. Specially since there wasn't any indication other countries would do it.

Sorry but the quote from Van Buren only reinforces my point. They were basically trying to refit a space shuttle with no clear plan. It's not hard to see why they dropped it. Besides, finding human to experiment on wasn't that difficult in Pre War America. Heck, even real life US government used to experiment on their people during the 50s: keep in mind that while the Vaults were testing for space colonization those very same experiments could have been done in a lab or any controlled environment, but with much more efficiency

 

[NMLevesque]

Prosocial to KIN and ONLY to kin.

Kin can refer to our entire species. Also, we have shown a prosocial capacity to other species, e.g dogs, cats, horses.

we don't owe any moral obligations to outsiders

That's not how morality works.

The thing that keeps this from happening again? The US Navy. Not the UN, not any fear of MAD (which will not stop the pathological), not mutual economic integration (which didn't stop WWI).

I think you've had a bit too much propaganda.

 

[NMLevesque]

Honestly I'd prefer it if the first launch was accidental. That just seems to fit in perfectly with the cynical satire of Fallout, and doesn't create any awkward narrative conclusions to draw about the country that fired first.

 

[Big No]

Not to mention having the Enclave be the ones to start the war would feel like overkill towards them being the villains.

 

[Risewild]

Sorry but the quote from Van Buren only reinforces my point. They were basically trying to refit a space shuttle with no clear plan. It's not hard to see why they dropped it. Besides, finding human to experiment on wasn't that difficult in Pre War America. Heck, even real life US government used to experiment on their people during the 50s: keep in mind that while the Vaults were testing for space colonization those very same experiments could have been done in a lab or any controlled environment, but with much more efficiency

I see it at only reinforcing my point.
They had a clear plan, they wanted to settle another planet.

The Enclave's plan was originally to go to space and colonize another planet.

They wanted to leave Earth because it had no more useful resources and they wanted only the elites to survive a nuclear apocalypse (elites = themselves).

They knew the nukes would be falling very soon, they had used a lot of money and resources to make the Vaults being experiments for their space program, they spent more resources and money to seized control of Bloomfield Space Center, they spend a lot of resources and money to refit a spaceship for them to leave Earth, they also acquired a specific oil field to be their base of operations and keep them safe for when the nukes were falling.

Which raises a couple of questions: How would they know when to move to the oil field to be safe right before the nukes started falling? and how did they know the oil field wouldn't be nuked too? These questions get an easy answer if it was the Enclave that started the apocalypse.

This reinforced with them needing the vaults to be populated (if it was so easy to get test subjects, why did the Enclave invested so much resources and money into constructing 100+ vaults for specific experiments for their space program?).

Basically, without a nuclear apocalypse, the Enclave couldn't fulfill it's plans of space colonization and the Vaults (with all of it's resources and money invested) wouldn't have had a purpose.


On a different note, we really don't know if the USA and the USSR had good relationships. The USA in Fallout hate with a passion communism, and they had closed their borders due to the New Plague, so I don't think they would have had any good relations with any other countries at that time (it even annexed Canada by force). Cautious relations would make more sense (let's keep an eye out on them just in case).
Also, the terminal in Helios One shows that the USA considered both China and the USSR as threats:

"Can I tell my wife?" Well, let's say you do. You tell her not to tell anyone. Your bond is sacred. But a woman's idle tongue is the devil's plaything. No sooner do you leave for work the next day than she's on the phone telling her best friend Candy. Then Candy tells Gertie, Gertie tells Maxine, Maxine tells Lulu, and while Lulu is telling Doris, a Chinese agent posing as an American operator listens in, and the next thing she's on the line with the Forbidden City, singing like a treasonous canary. The following day you and your wife are bound in shackles and China is sitting at the controls of our entire arsenal.

"Can I tell my children?" What father wouldn't want to his kids to look up to him? Don't be that father. One day at school, Ivan Bullykov will get more than lunch money out of your kids. He'll have national secrets! And while they're parading him through Red Square as a national hero, your children will be working in forced labor camps, right next to you and your beautiful young wife, who's now wrinkled and homely since the communists have banned makeup because it expresses individuality.

 

[Sublime]

I see it at only reinforcing my point.
They had a clear plan, they wanted to settle another planet.

They wanted to leave Earth because it had no more useful resources and they wanted only the elites to survive a nuclear apocalypse (elites = themselves).

They knew the nukes would be falling very soon, they had used a lot of money and resources to make the Vaults being experiments for their space program, they spent more resources and money to seized control of Bloomfield Space Center, they spend a lot of resources and money to refit a spaceship for them to leave Earth, they also acquired a specific oil field to be their base of operations and keep them safe for when the nukes were falling.

Which raises a couple of questions: How would they know when to move to the oil field to be safe right before the nukes started falling? and how did they know the oil field wouldn't be nuked too? These questions get an easy answer if it was the Enclave that started the apocalypse.

This reinforced with them needing the vaults to be populated (if it was so easy to get test subjects, why did the Enclave invested so much resources and money into constructing 100+ vaults for specific experiments for their space program?).

Basically, without a nuclear apocalypse, the Enclave couldn't fulfill it's plans of space colonization and the Vaults (with all of it's resources and money invested) wouldn't have had a purpose.


On a different note, we really don't know if the USA and the USSR had good relationships. The USA in Fallout hate with a passion communism, and they had closed their borders due to the New Plague, so I don't think they would have had any good relations with any other countries at that time (it even annexed Canada by force). Cautious relations would make more sense (let's keep an eye out on them just in case).
Also, the terminal in Helios One shows that the USA considered both China and the USSR as threats:

They are the America's leading class, they would be the first to know if shit was going to hit the fan. Most plausible scenario is that the war reached a turning point and either intel from secret services or some technological bamboozle told them the reds would fire the nukes as they US were approaching a turning point in the war. So they they were in a rush to save their ass and they thought about the space option. They exploited people's paranoia to start the Vaults, but the idea behind wasn't
Start nuclear war--->test subjects
But Nuclear War starts---> we need to continue our experiments
If you don't believe, just think of the Chinese prisoners in OWB or the authorization they received to toy with an entire community for their weather control technology. Or the Shady stuff happening at Mariposa. Plenty of test subjects. Regarding the space ship, it's clear they were in a rush. They didn't have proper technology for a long trip through space so they had to use what they had. Also, honestly the destination unknown is most likely an indication that they didn't know where to head to.
They realized their plan wouldn't fly so they dropped it.

 

[Risewild]

They didn't drop their plan until 100 years after the bombs fell. Probably because the spaceship got destroyed or it was so old it wouldn't work anymore.

The proof they didn't drop their plan was that the Vaults kept working the way they were planned to.
Also you can't compare a small camp with at most 100 people with the thousand that each vault would host. Not to mention that the experiments in Little Yangtze was not space experiments.
The weather experiment was also not related to space travel. Big Mountain was a civilian research center, they did the research and experiments they wanted, not what the government wanted them to. They did experiments that were aimed at aiding the armed forces, but not because they were asked to.

Mariposa was to find a cure for the New Plague, so it was also not for space experiments. It was also in tiny specimen numbers compared to the vaults.

None of this is relevant. There is no way the Enclave could achieve the number of willing subjects for experiments over problems found in space travel, by using prisoners. The willing is important here, since that was one of the "features" about Vaults and their population.
You can't expect to get reliable results about the psychological effects on the many problems of deep space travel when you make people to go through the experiments by force. They need to be willing.

Also the "destination yet to be determined" is because it was the design documents for the game, since the game was never finished, they never came up with the destination. Some things in Van Buren seem point to Mars, since the Hermes-13 was intended for the first manned mission to Mars. Some things in the Fallout Bible seem to point for the Moon, as the G.E.C.K. could (theoretically) be used to fertilize a patch on the moon. So maybe the devs were divided on which to pick.

Another thing that doesn't make sense unless the Enclave planned on launching a nuclear strike. The vaults construction started in 2054. With the purpose of being experiments for the Enclave space travel goal. China only starts the war at the end of 2066. So the vaults were started to be built almost 13 years before there was any war with the USA. So how did the Enclave knew that there would be a nuclear strike so far in the future?
Again I mention this, the Enclave plans of building the vaults to experiment on the vault residents, would only work if there would be a nuclear strike. Otherwise all of that would be for nothing.
How in the world would the Enclave know that China would, 13 years in the future, have a war with the USA, then lose the war and end up using their nukes to blast the USA at the right time the Enclave would be able to hide in their Oil Rig?

All of these factors makes it very unlikely (or impossible) for the Enclave to know all of this unless they could time travel. But it's possible, if they planned to start a nuclear war or at least launch some nuke strikes aimed at US soil themselves at a very precise date.