What if the NCR-Brotherhood war never happened?

Mutant Screg

Mutant Screg

Totally not a mutant
Some of my thoughts on the matter. Don't trust me on knowing every tidbit of lore that could conflict with anything below, and please let me know if you notice any discrepancies.

I can see several BoS bunkers grouping up to form an assault team on let's say the Hub for example. With their superior tech and probable knowledge of pre-war tactics, I can see them taking over at least a portion of the Hub. The Brotherhood would need a trade route eventually to gain a steady supply of food/energy cells for the slowly increasing number of intitiates bred within the bunkers. Hell, they could even find and pay merchants a choice amount to recover pieces of tech and scrap that would seem very obscure to the casual scavenger to create new suits of home manufactured power armor. The Brotherhood wouldn't even necessarily need something as big as the Hub to get what they need. Just a small town on the same trading route would be sufficient, and much easier to capture. Another bonus would be the "employment" of the townspeople as workers in their makeshift factories, producing goods for the BoS with the promise of their safety.

Now all of this relies on a Brotherhood that isn't bent solely on amassing large amounts of prewar tech. This would mean that High Elder Maxson had never come to power, resulting in the Brotherhood being less bent on moving eastward, and of course amassing tech. Preventing the NCR-Brotherhood war in 2231 would in turn prevent the Brotherhood from the vast loss of power from the would-be war. This would allow them to be much more prepared to stomp on the Enclave's rise of power, raiding their outposts and preventing new ones from sprouting up too close to BoS territory, causing the Enclave to rely on vertibirds for rapid transport, which would take up a lot of resources to do consistently, even without the potential of having one shot down. In the end, the Brotherhood would win the Brotherhood-Enclave war and they would have raided and amassed vast amounts of tech from the Enclave, making them most likely the single most powerful force in the west, if not the entire world.

Now comes the permanent expansion of the Brotherhood. With the Enclave gone and on the run, the BoS would gain all of their territory and military bases, including Navarro if it was not completely wrecked in the war. This would supply them with at least a few remaining vertibirds and a sizable underground/above ground base, equipped with turrets and sufficient space for as many soldiers as they would need to hold the place. I just cannot imagine the NCR attempting to take on the BoS on their own initiative, considering how they are usually on the side of peace unless provoked. Assuming that the Brotherhood began to allow outsiders into their ranks, they could gather up an army of massive size and equipped with top-of-the-line weapons and armor from their trade outposts. By this point, the Brotherhood could pretty much wipe out the NCR and all of its affiliates, gaining even more power and influence.


I could go on but I don't want to have too large of a wall of text. Now I'd love to hear your guys' take on this hypothetical situation. And of course, let me know if I've goofed up on any lore (besides the omission of the war and Elder Maxson).
 
The rest of the world would also be scattered full of pre-war tech, that someone is bound to gather up. NCR does that as well, if you look at their weapons selections, armors, etc, they are using old weapons and gear scavenged.

I think FoT illustrated well how a BoS open to recruitment looks like: A majority of lower ranks wearing the same kind of equipment your average NCR trooper does. This because power armors need to be found and scavenged, and this depends on luck, and would not be able to keep up with rapid recruitment.
As seen in FONV, NCR also gets their hands on BoS-level equipment, for similar reasons - intensive scavenging.

Either way, we are dealing with power-vacuums here, and the existing Fallout-lore allready depict the situation in a believable manner - NCR, BoS, Enclave, Cesar's Legion, Khans, Pitt, Commonwealth, these are all power-vacuum-fillers, that are eventually bound to start rubbing against each others, for good or bad.

There's no reason to assume similar events wouldn't be happening across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin-America, especially since global networks are down (meaning that Africa wouldn't be that much worse off than any other continent, for example)

In the end, personally, I find it unlikely that - given a fresh start, the North American continent would re-unite into a superpower such as USA again. The various nations created would fight over exact border definitions, but complete conquests against another militarized and organized power would be counter-productive in terms of rebuilding a ruined land.
 
The war was inevitable. The Brotherhood wants to stockpile weapons technology and keep it out of the hands of "tribals".Even House noted that you would see the Brotherhood carrying an auto doc or prosthetic limbs. The Western Brotherhood only really cares about itself and its goals, which means isolation and stockpiling guns. The NCR cares about expansion and controlling resources.

Also basic geopolitics would have led to war, even if they had similar goals. Nation states don't like powerful non state actors being in their boarders. Meaning, the NCR would have attacked them because they have guns and can challenge NCR authority.
 
....................No. Just, no.

The BOS were state "actors" in the NCR at the time of FO2, considering they had their own state in the nation. They coexisted PERFECTLY with their neighbors, for reasons that members like Matthew easily dispensed. The BOS knew their place and the necessity of changing and adapting at the time the Chosen One interacted with them. Cooperation meant more territory and more territory meant more tech to scavenge. For the NCR, cooperation meant more technology at their disposal so they could continue to advance their livelihood and expend and ripen their resources.

The war was NOT "inevitable". It was the unfortunate consequence of a moron succeeding the position of High Elder, just as dying to a Viper's poisoned spear nicking him in the cheek was NOT inevitable to Maxson II, it was simply the result of hubris and carelessness. It could've happened, it could've been avoided. It was NOT preordained or predestined or unavoidable or inevitable. Not in the slightest.
 
SnapSlav said:
....................No. Just, no.

The BOS were state "actors" in the NCR at the time of FO2, considering they had their own state in the nation. They coexisted PERFECTLY with their neighbors, for reasons that members like Matthew easily dispensed. The BOS knew their place and the necessity of changing and adapting at the time the Chosen One interacted with them. Cooperation meant more territory and more territory meant more tech to scavenge. For the NCR, cooperation meant more technology at their disposal so they could continue to advance their livelihood and expend and ripen their resources.

The war was NOT "inevitable". It was the unfortunate consequence of a moron succeeding the position of High Elder, just as dying to a Viper's poisoned spear nicking him in the cheek was NOT inevitable to Maxson II, it was simply the result of hubris and carelessness. It could've happened, it could've been avoided. It was NOT preordained or predestined or unavoidable or inevitable. Not in the slightest.
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In the political science sense the BoS was a non state actor within the NCR. Just because they had a "state" in the NCR doesn't mean they are apart of the NCR structure, at least not entirely. ISIL is a non state actor. A non state actor is a group that can or does perform nation state like functions within an existing nation state. The NCR being the actual nation state and the state of Maxson being a regional subdivision that the BoS ran. Since the BoS isn't entirely NCR, there would be tensions with this arrangement, where the BoS runs stuff under its own accord and the NCR has varying degrees of oversight. This would challenge the sovereignty of the NCR as a nation state and would lead to war at some point. Not saying who would fire the first shot, but something would have kicked off a conflict. I would have guessed the NCR would have started the conflict wanting more from the BoS than they would have been getting and the NCR wanting to flex its military power.
 
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"Since the BoS isn't entirely NCR, there would be tensions with this arrangement"
Like how there's tensions with the arrangement of Day Glow and the NCR, and Redding and the NCR, and pretty much EVERY state in the NCR and NCR?

The BOS were a state in a confederated nation. They had just as much power and say as any other state, EXCEPT that they were the top dogs in technology across the board. They had tons of sway because of their leverage. Just because they were a state didn't mean they were somehow destined to chafe under the auspices of the originating governing body. Like I pointed out already, the BOS knew their place before the war took place. This was not a docile "let's just fly under the radar" approach. They were a POWER BROKER, because they could be. It took the rise of the fucking Enclave for them to feel the slightest bit worried about their survival, and even then they had plans on how to secure their future. See Vertibird Plans quests from FO2.

Don't just bring in vague concepts like political science and how this must has theoretically impacted groups as part of a nation when we HAVE documentation and demonstration and explanation to showcase us what actually took place.

Also, the moment you followed up talks of "political science" with the bullshit politically correct acronym for a bunch of regressives and degenerates from halfway across the world, your argument lost a lot of its commanding attention. This is rational discourse, not politics. Make sense, don't pander.
 
as previous canon pointed out, bos can and did adapt. i like to think the bos of another reality became infiltrated deep into ncr, forming an ncr version of enclave. just become bos arn.t do gooders doesn't mean they are dumb.
 
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