Broken Lore in Fallout 4

[Moraelin]

@Takara

Well, since I'm a history geek, actually I could make most kinds of bows and crossbows from memory. As well, as Roman concrete. Or a trebuchet. Or a torsion ballista. You get the idea.

 

Yes, that's not very typical, but I'd say you don't need it to be typical. You only need one guy who can read one of those pre-war books and trade journals -- which are really in ample supply -- to tell the whole town how to do it.

 

Plus, there are a LOT of ghouls who were there since before the war, and did get an education before the war. You only need one who was a construction engineer or a bioengineer or doctor, to tell everyone else how it's done. And such specialists exist, really. E.g., the ghoul scientist in NV.

 

Hell, there are even a LOT of mutants from before the war, and not all of them are mindless brutes. Some don't even look like your average mutant. E.g., Harold.

[Boombro]

That true, but smart, pre-war guys are not in ample supply. And books are rare, with the plus that most wastelanders can't hardly read. There is also the want, just because I'm smart, doesn't mean I would want to open a school. Like that brain thing in point outlook.

Edited December 21, 2015 by Boombro

[Moraelin]

Well, I am aware of that, but as I was saying, you don't need EVERYONE to be literate and know that stuff. Literacy in Rome was probably around 10%. Most people not only didn't know the letters, but wouldn't even understand the language, Koine Greek, in which it was written. Heck, past a point, the majority of the population, speaking vulgar Latin, really proto-Romance languages, would have trouble understanding the classic latin of the educated elites even if you read a manuscript to them. It had really diverged as much as English differs from Anglo-Saxon, so even if you read a classic latin treatise to them, they'd understand about as much as if someone read Beowulf in original to you.

 

In ancient Egypt, estimated literacy was less than 1%. Yes, there's not a digit missing or anything. Less than ONE PERCENT. Literally. Didn't stop them from having the most advanced architecture at the time, or from having a guy like Imhotep (who really didn't deserve to be made into the villain of The Mummy;)) write the first medical treatise in recorded history.

 

Because, really, pre- or post-apocalypse most people don't really need very advanced knowledge. They just need one smarter guy to tell them, "pull these stone blocks up that ramp."

 

Edit: but really, we're not even talking rocket science or even civil engineering here. "Plaster those walls with mud and whitewash them" isn't something you need a post-grad degree to know. You just need one guy who lived in an adobe house before the war, really.

[TakaraPRG]

I mean...yes I agree the idea of picking up dirt off the floor, replacing a floorboard, or boarding up a broken window is something you don't need to be an engineer to fix. There are things that are slightly silly and I agree, but to think humanity can pull itself out of a hole so quickly is something I'm skeptical of. The ability is there...and i think you can explain that in the idea of NCR/BoS/The Institute There are groups out there with these kind of power and knowledge. But the world of fallout stems deeply from a world full of threats. Raiders are plentiful and people are generally looking out for themselves.

Well you know how to make concrete...now where is your ingredients...how do you get them...how do you get the mix right. Do you need to clear out a pack of feral ghouls to get them...is it worth the threat? Or can you just board up this old house and be just as safe? I mean Diamond city seems like they have a good thing going.

Sure....but lets be honest...people aren't looking for a boss. You might know how to do all those things but you are going to either need charisma to get people to believe in and listen to you, or be able to accomplish something on your own and prove that knowledge/power. there is a reason most really smart scientists aren't leaders....much to my dismay :-(

[northwind221]

Just because you can make concrete, doesn't mean you can ship it past I think 100 miles anywhere. Concrete is just that quick drying even if you keep mixing it. Which then pretty much says it all, you need vechicles. And to make the factories...

 

the ingrediants for concrete can be shipped as far as it needs to, but it would then need to be mixed on site.

 

Basicly its just a lot of work.

[charwo]

Yes, but there should have been a metric f*#@ton of survivalists in 2077. Fallout lore is broken is some important respects: Uranium is virtually inexhaustible especially with any kind of sea water extraction, something theorized in the 50s I hasten to add, and fusion was making even that a moot consideration. But basically unless you count real, sociopathic Hitler levels of evil in the Chinese government, World War III would never have led to the "Great War," the Chinese had lost by this point and MAD demands genocide for genocide. You can't win a war unless you survive, and the Chinese were in a worse place than the Americans to survive nuclear war at that point, plus the topagraphy of China would have turned the entire country into Fallout Siv, very much like the Glowing Sea in the immediate aftermath. For the same reasons China gets an airpocolypse every winter . The only way for War to never change is by saying the Great War wasn't war, it was an act of omnicidal malice. I've always taken Fallout to mean nuclear war isn't warfare.

Given that, there was a thorough nuclear war in the Middle East 20 years before, and this is when you really should have started to see Ghouls in number for the first time.....assuming Ghouls weren't around in 1946 in Hiroshima or survivors of Chernobyl. More than that, it was a testing ground for what large scale nuclear war would actually do to environments, societies and the like. Had I been there, I would have taken copious notes on just how survivors rebuilt and what skills would be necessary. If you can get the entirety of the library of congress on a holotape, and fit it inside the GECK briefcase, every survivalist in the country would want to keep those on file in their basements. They may have had a Usernet based internet, and it was probably heavily censored by the Old Enclave, but there kinds of stories, info, strategies would be traded around the way preppers do now.

Even if most of the survivalists didn't survive, during the 11 years of World War III, prepping would have been at an all time time. Thinking you could find useful data in every fifth basement is not an exaggeration. The only reason why Americans were caught so flatfooted was that they'd already won the conventional war, this putting the flag over the Reichstag time in WWII parallels.

[Pthalo]

I should hope prepping was high on the to-do list, given Vault-tec made an entire industry out of it.

[Skinsword]

Well, if it makes any difference, I never understood why everything ever since FO3 supposedly had to be rusty, torn, etc, or "OMG IT'S NOT LORE FRIENDLY." It's not even just counting the years or anything. Ever since Fallout 1, way back in ye olde Black Isle days, it has been established that for example shiny new weapons are manufactured by the Gun Runners. Factions like the future NCR were also building shiny new concrete buildings, with pre-war tech. That's not even Bethesda stuff, it's the lore from the original makers of the series.

 

Only apparently they forgot how to do that, in the decades since the events of FO1.

 

But, in the end, lore aside, to each their own. I may not understand the mental process behind it, but I'm not gonna tell people what they should like. If someone likes rust that much, and that's what they're willing to put a lot of work into, they're certainly within their rights to.

 

Mods which add cleaned up textures or pre-war beds, furniture, good walls, etc DO exist too. So in the end, as usual, download what you like and ignore what you don't.

 

Or if you really want to make a difference, you can just make your own mods and/or help others who want to make such mods. That's how I started in ye olde FO3 days, which also launched without a GECK, and lemme tell you it's been a lot easier than to wait for others to do whatever I wished for.

They didn't forget at all. The West Coast is bigger and better than ever because of the Gun Runners and the NCR. Wasn't it said in NV that the Gun Runners can give the Brotherhood a run for their money?

 

Its just that the East Coast took much longer to recover than the West. My guess? Washington and the Mid-Atlantic region got hit the hardest and it naturally took them a longer time to get past the raiders stage.

[Moraelin]

Well, yes, it is very much the official lore that DC and surrounding areas got hit the hardest, while for example Las Vegas IIRC got only some fallout from it all. (Yet people are still content to live in half-demolished houses. Heh.)

 

All I'm saying is that some of the stuff still makes no sense to me, such as the rusty slide on the Mausers in FO3. That looks like a recipe for a gun that will jam in the middle of a firefight. If your life depended on it, which especially in Raider and Mutant county it WILL depend, you bloody clean it and oil it. I mean, for crying out loud, rust is not a very hard material anyway; just rub some sand on it. You don't need high technology or infrastructure to find a handful of sand.

 

Or ESPECIALLY if the rain or even the dust in the wind can bring in some rather deadly fallout, I think realistically you'd be even MORE concerned with proofing your home against the elements. Patching your walls with some mud, if nothing else, or hell even with some of those old rolls of duct tape, would actually be a priority.

[KimberJ]

Lore Mongers! Quick, hide under a rock till they pass! Just kidding. :P Lore Mongers.