Bombs of DC

[charwo]

While I have nothing but contempt for the 'Dead World' motif of Fallout 3 (to the point I need a Green Mod to play) I'm actually quite pleased about the depiction of the bomb damage and the general post-strike aftermath as revealed in in the environmental storytelling and apocalypse logs. Despite the claims of Science! I find the nuclear bomb damage to be pretty accurate. According to Fallout Lore, there were long standing treaties among the Cold War Powers which caped the kiloton limit of (almost all) nuclear weapons to 20-25 kilotons, which correlates to bomb yields of the late forties and very early fifties. The damage clearly down by nukes fits with this perfectly: with bomb yields so limited, a lot more used, but only a few were used at civilian settlements, most of the bombs seemed to have been bunker busting types that crippled the Metro and air burst bombs designed specifically to sever the bridges and highways that connected the suburbs to the city center. In other words, the destruction pattern around DC proper is not at all haphazard: it represents a moderately successful denial of area strike broadly in line with tactical nuclear doctrine. Most of the burnt towns and all that seem to have been post-war decay and social breakdown.

 

As I have seen the world in Fallout 3, even with all of the DLCs, there are only evidence of seven nuclear bombs (not counting Fort Constantine storage): three military targets: the Springvale Airport that missed and created the Megaton Crater, the second that was a dud and fall into the first crater, the nuke that leveled Fort Bannister, the nuke that shattered the Front door of Vault 87, two strategic bombs that wrecked DC proper and then Arlington, as well as the tactical nuke that destroyed the White House, although just outside the the Capital Wasteland, it's fairly safe to say there was at least one more bomb on the east side of DC outerbelt, and Annapolis, which you can see far off in the distance from the Maryland Side of the Anacostia River, and more or less certainly, a direct hit on that world's version of Ronald Reagan airport.

 

Most of this is rather simple: but a fascinating question remains: where exactly did the DC nukes detonate? These appear to have been very low detonations in keeping with a denial of area doctrine, and yet, the DC nuke failed to hit any important target. We can assume that Raven Rock had missile defenses that kept it pristine, but in DC, there was clearly a nuclear explosion that leveled most of the city but missed the Mall, the Naval Yard, and Pennsylvania Avenue around the mall. Given the blast radius of a 25 kiloton nuke as seen here (http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) the intact buildings imply everything you see in the downtown was outside of the air blast radius, and then essentially means that the nuke detonated in northeast DC proper, roughly a direct hit on Glenwood Cemetery. This would give the ability to torch the city and avoid actually seeing the air blast damage (the barren, flat, debris free plain 3 miles in diameter that was so photographed in Hiroshima) It was the fires and violent infighting that made the overland passages into DC impassable. If I had to make an educated guess, if James and Catherine could not have walked to Underworld via the street grid, then Herbert Dashwood and Argyle certainly did. We're seeing advanced decay and the flimsiest of the ridiculously over engineered skyscrapers have started to collapse due to lack of maintenance.

 

The Arlington nuke is even stranger, because I've actually been through everything of Arlington, and the placing is so thorough I have a hard time believing Arlington was nuked at all. There should be an air blast clearing somewhere in Arlington to account for all the fire and debris being thrown around, and honestly the most plausible place is near Bailey's Crossroads, but at best that area was at the fringe of the air blast zone. So...was Arlington nuked directly? If not, how does one account for making Arlington completely impassable above ground, and if so, then where was the strike?

 

Beyond this, feel free to comment about other places you feel there must have been an atomic detonation. I haven't seen everything yet, but I've seen a bunch. So feel free to comment and discuss the lore in more detail!

[7thsealord]

Nothing against your observations, charwo.

 

One thing I note is that there were a bunch of nukes going off more or less en masse over or around DC. As far as I know, mass bomber / missile attacks in conjunction with multiple nuke detonations is NOT something that has ever been tested for real (wonder why? ;) ). So, I am very sure that, in this instance, there would have been what is generally known as "fratricide" - some incoming missiles and bombers would have been taken out or knocked off course or otherwise disrupted by earlier nuke detonations. This might help explain some of the incongruities in damage that you mention.

 

Also, we have little idea of what DC's ABM defenses were like. Presumably there were some, but possibly effectiveness was less than was hoped for (sabotage? surprise?) - which might also explain how some places seemed to come through much better than others. The defenses in general came up late or, in certain instances, were either erratic or failed completely.

 

Hmmm, comes to that, I wonder if any of DC's ABM system used nuclear warheads for interception? We're talking 50's style military thinking here, where nuclear warheads were very literally put on EVERYTHING. An incoming missile is a hard thing to hit, and if you could intercept it (or a bunch thereof) far enough away, using a nuclear warhead to take them out at a "safe" distance and altitude might make sense to some mindsets. I know there was a nuclear air-ro-air missile developed early on in the Cold War, intended to take out entire formations of enemy aircraft.

 

Which raises the question of, could the DC ABM system have been so buggy that it actually did a lot of the devastation itself? Something to consider.

 

Another thing I wonder about is just how much of the damage was actually the direct result of nuclear detonation?

 

For example (and I am not being serious here, mind you), we have that tendency in the game for old vehicles to blow up VERY spectacularly. One assumes that they were safe enough under "normal" pre-War conditions, but I cannot help but imagine a gridlocked stretch of DC traffic being hit by one smallish nuke - and the COLOSSAL chain-reaction (covering an area of several miles or more!) that could have resulted. Imagne that effect winding through a major urban area or two. Eeeekkkkk!!!!!

 

On a more serious note, one thing to consider is how the nukes were targeted. For example, if I was planning a nuclear strike, and literally had nukes to burn, I might look at using some of them unconventionally. For example, for California, I might consider dropping a few specifically on major faultlines in hopes of setting off earthquakes - which would conceivably cause much more damage and disruption than targeting someplace already targeted several times over. For a port city, I might consider dropping a few nukes just offshore to generate a radio-active tsunami or two and also, if very lucky, take out some ships.

 

For FO3's depiction of the DC area and surrounds, I note that a lot of the western edge of the map is marked by terrain that looks a lot like "badlands" or "scablands", typically caused by massive flashfloods. Plus there are a few sizable structures (such as Fort Independance,) that seem to have been partially buried. I also note that, up around Raven Rock, there is a series of very steep-sided river valleys. Steep-sided river valleys (near urban areas) are popular choices for building dams.

 

So postulate that (in FO3's DC), there could have been a dam or even a series of dams in that region. They would have presented a very obvious and tempting target. Take out the region's primary supply of water and hydro-electricity, and cause massive disruption and damage downstream at the same time. Sounds like a good move to me.

Given the destruction caused by the nukes and the superflood, there probably would have been little trace of the dams and related facilities afterwards, and especially few people (if any) left to ever recall that dams once existed there. Just a thought.

 

,,, And, by the way, I also prefer to have some Green-ish mods. I have enormous respect for Nature's ability to bounce back from whatever we dish out to it.

Edited August 1, 2012 by 7thsealord

[charwo]

That makes a lot of sense actually. Dam busting has a long and vaulted tradition. I do recommend against reading too much into the typographic features of the Appalachian foothills. I was raised in southwestern Ohio, and except for the south eastern edge of the state Ohio is essentially one giant flood plain with noting to compare even to the ridge of the Appalachians, which you see a little in Fallout 3. Still, western Ohio is replete with valleys and hills that are as steep as the ones in the Western Capital Wasteland, and quite a few that are more so. While I haven't done anything scientific, I am impressed by the plausibility and relative accuracy of Fallout 3's terrain (although stylized in scale and the Potomac water levels strike me as schizo, but this I interpret as a dry season, green world mod or not, given the dry riverbeds look like recently exposed riverbeds, and that it's just waiting for the next good rain to fill it back up how it was 2 or 3 years ago).

 

I actually have a theory along your lines: that despite the mythos of permanent radiation (which is bulls***), it's perfectly possible to to interpret the radioactive water tables for the Columbus Commonwealth to be the result of nuclear strikes on up river nuclear power plants. Think about it: radiation continuously coming out of the watersheds for 100s of years (although for a lot of reasons I hold that really Fallout 3 takes place in 2177 not 2277, simply due to the sate of decay. Barring fundamentally different building materials, in by 2277, no modern skyscraper should be left uncollapsed and there should be no trace of any abandoned pre-war home if only due to sand and dirt deposits buying them). On the other hand, causing nuclear plants to melt down, either by direct strike or post-strike failures of the cooling chambers, would cause nuclear material to be deposited in the river system itself, and that s*** will be radioactive for any realistic estimate of humanities existence. If Cheng was like the US government, the notion of not simply destroying the nation in nuclear strike would not be enough. It was important to deny them a chance to rebuild in peace. It's a very Strangelove philosophy, but...this is Fallout. Americans developed Deathclaws as combat supplements and mole rats to plague China for decades, win or lose, and the Chinese unleashed a shitload of mutagens, which as Vree explains in Fallout 1, is probably the actual reason for the mutants, possibly including the ghouls, although radiation played a role.

 

I think the giant incest theme is not Science! at all, but all done by Chinese bio-weapon mutagens designed to make exposed hard shell creatures grow larger and far more aggressive. Not only does it make more sense than believing God is a fan of incompetent 50s Hollywood science (not the very competent 50s actual science), it's also completely plausible given the other bioweapon programs. Hell, for a long time, I thought the Ghouls came about because the pre-war American population was trans-human in our terms, with massive gene therapy to increase human health and regeneration. The ghouling effect came about because those humans were able to heal radiation damage that would kill a normal person and do so after massive, permanent DNA damage. It would also explain why every Fallout protagonist can be one step away from bleeding to death, sleep for two days and be the picture of health again (and you just thought it just an RPG trope divorced from the setting and logic?) By the same token, when I wrote my Fallout 1 fanfic way back in the day, I had the Vault Suits made out of synthesized from spider silk polymers to make them bullet and trauma resistant, as well as increase their durability to inter generational levels.

[7thsealord]

Yes, I was making the topographical interpretation strictly in-game. I know other areas of North America had superfloods in prehistoric times, and it just seemed plausible that a modern equivalent could have happened near DC under the circumstances leading up to FO3.

 

The radioactivity thing, and the biowar ideas, all seem quite logical. Certainly the best explanations I've heard that make sense here.

 

As regards the durability of building materials, note that a lot of other materials are remarkably durable as well. Pre-packaged meals still edible, ammo still entirely safe and usable, batteries still carrying a charge, computer terminals still functioning - all after decades if not centuries of sitting in holes or out in the open.

 

Hm, does lead me to wonder. Just how certain ARE the people of FO3 about the actual date? Could be getting into ultra-paranoid conspiracy territory here. Then again, we KNOW the aliens and the ultra-secret organization bent on world conquest actually do exist in the game. Maybe the conspiracy theories of FO3 simply don't go far enough?

 

Oh, dear. Using way too many caps and question marks. I really need to reign it in. ;)

Edited August 3, 2012 by 7thsealord

[charwo]

What I think happened is that the Fallout world was not 120 years of the 50s, not even in the US. At closest to us, the Fallout universe in 2012 would look absolutely the same. The only difference would that the August 91 Coup succeeded in the Soviet Union, making the nation survive on borderline North Korea terms. In fact the end of the Cold War as we know it in Europe is essential for the in lore marginalization of the Soviet Union and it's 'I'm still here too' place in the pre-war Lore. I also think that Deng's reformed happened in the PRC, and Chaeng's ilk were more of a Fascistic restoration movement based around Mao's cult of personality, if they were anything other than the cyrpto-fascists (Commies in name only) that run the PRC today and in our world.

 

I think the resource wars changed EVERYTHING. Essentially, there were three great disasters in the early 2050s. One, the deep well oil extraction programs began to fail (very close to possible RL), two was the New Plauge and war in the Middle East, and by comparison it seems less tragic of the end of modern computing. Yes it is cannon the transistor wasn't built in 1947, but it had to have come shortly thereafter because General Atomics simply cannot, CANNOT build Mr. Handy units by 2020, which is again canon, without the electronic revolution. And this is where things get sketchy for a lot of Fallout fans: I believe that the World of Tomorrow feel of the pre-war was a deliberate illusion, both IC and OOC. OOC, in our world, the tech LOOKS 50s tech, but look at Tranquility Lane. What if those Radiation King TVs do look like early 60s black and whites....until you actually look at them? And then when you do, assuming you're 'cable bill' paid up to date, it's in full color and as devastatingly realistic and 3-D as Tranquility Lane. Because in the end, the VR revolution wasn't about simulation immersion: it was about interaction. The best way I can put it is to watch a pre-war program, like Captain Cosmos, you are an impotent observer to a drama on the Holodeck of the Enterprise D. You cannot interact with Captain Cosmos or his crew, but you are there. You can look around, you can look at Jangles the Moon Monkey and see the poo under his fingernails from the last time he threw poo at the aliens from Mothership Zeta.

 

So where is all of this going? Everywhere. Because of all the terrorism and war and near social collapse of the 2050s, American society began to cannibalize itself for ideas, and gravitated back to the 1950s as the pinnacle on when everything was right (and there are a lot of people who believe it here and now). The retro future 50s was BY DESIGN, by the military industrial complex people that became the Enclave, as an experiment for social control and possibly to convince living large Americans as we know them to accept a 'simpler' lifestyle that involves a drastic reduction in the material standard of living. The buildings are ridiculously over engineered for two reasons: the building materials look 50s but are actually from design revolutions we ourselves are just going through. Sorta like we have 'wood' that looks and feels like wood to the eye and hand, but it actually made out of paper byproducts, is much denser, and retains moisture better, resists insect better, is stronger and sometimes cheaper than the wood it is supposed to look like. Those houses look Levytown, but they were made out of space age materials. And because there was a push by the powers to be to say 'this is as good as it gets' there was a major move against the notion of planned obsolescence. Beyond dwindling costs of radical overengineering, the entire design philosophy of the Fallout universe is to build things that last forever. Don't believe me? The T-51b power armor in the first Fallout comes standard with a reactor and fuel enough to last 100 years of continuous use. Also, the Vaults (beyond the 'Social Preservation Experiment') were designed to last forever. I think given the data, the people coming in were told they would be realized to the post war world as soon as it was 'safe' according to sensors, which meant that a realistic timeline for a Vault to remain sealed could be anything from 5 years to 900. Certainly the people of Vault 13 had things well in hand to run the Vault for centuries, because the only thing that Vault ever needs is the water chip, which was due to bureaucratic bungling. There is a shortage of nothing else, not food, not clothes, not water (after the purification chip is installed), not entertainment.

 

So what about the computing? Simple: hackers, government or non destroyed the internet as we know it. There are three interpretations: the first is that the Internet withed on the vine because of the bandwidth crunch which will be on us shortly, or personal computing beyond 80s stuff was actively discouraged by the government (unlikely) or the civilian infrastructure was destroyed in the decades before the war and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Every cell phone, every PC, every printer, all of it worthless in the course of one good act of cyber terrorism that may or may not be connected to the EC-Arab League War in the 2050s. But because the Enclave was on the rise...well...it's long been said that if the more authoritarian parts of society had known what the Internet and personal computing could do, they'd have never allowed it. They would have done everything, anything to stop it. And the Enclave gets that chance because the entire infrastructure has to be rebuilt. Advanced computing technologies are priced out of the reach of consumers, and those typewriters are actually like the last generation of electronic typewriters that had a HUD over the page and even spell check and such. It looks like a typewriter, it's actually a mini PC that is set up exclusively to do word processing and MS Office applications. My ex had something like that and got it cheap. Cell phones are banned under these circumstances, hyping up all the bad things about them, and offering subsidized video phone booths instead. Why? It avoids the bandwidth problem, makes the infrastructure cheaper, and it means that electronic surveillance of suspected dissidents is easier because the truly dangerous people can't modify their own cell phone, but need to use pre-set up booths run and designed by AT&T, and even if they have an illegal cell phone, the lack of civilian cell phone traiffic make them stick out like a sore thumb. And too....this brings about the rebirth of printed news. If I were to do fanfiction pre-war, I would have GNR start as GLXY satellite radio that ended up becoming a radio franchiser much like Sirius and Cumulus affiliations are in our world.

 

The electronic tech is the symbol of a velvet glove police state, and the overengineering is a testament to the arrogance of a people who felt that they were the top of what humanity could ever do, but were also terrified of the fragility of human life and civilization and reason that they saw first hand on CNN, first when Tel Aviv was destroyed, and then later when the European Commonwealth nuked the Arabs into defeat, saw the rebuilding costs and almost total oil depletion and tucked tail and ran. They saw Iraqi Freedom on steroids, and if you buy the line that there were no wars between the Resource Wars and WWII (I don't), that means that not only did they not learn the lessons of Vietnam and the WOT, there was a century of uninterrupted peace. War for most people of 2050 was utterly unthinkable, like the Earth flying into the sun. It would also explain the great naivety the American public had about war and their government (and honestly, it's naivety. They couldn't believe people, or at least culturally White people like every American, could do evil on that scale). This is a country that in one interpretation had nothing but 100 years of prosperity, won the Cold War with the USSR, even though China stepped right up, it was still good times. The pre-war America had essentially conquered every racial, gender and possibly sexual orientation that drives us bonkers. I ask you: there's a lot of racism in Fallout, but do you ever so much as hear an in game comment, present or pre-war, about race, or particularly caring if someone is make or female in terms of social place. No, all the racism are between baseline humans and mutant camps. Women dressed like June Cleaver pre-war, they are also field surgeons, soldiers and grease monkeys in Operation Anchorage and no one bats so much as an eyelash.

[7thsealord]

Wooo, heavy stuff.

 

To take it one step further, just how much of an accurate picture is/was there really of the rest of the world? Yes, the USA fought a war in Alaska with China, also invaded Canada, and (going by one of the loading screenshots) got booted out of the UN somewhere along the line. Noting too that the 'Anchorage sim' is supposedly NOT an accurate representation of the conflict - the notes left by development staff in that complex say as much repeatedly.

 

The historical data is all quite one-sided actually, especially given the ideas you put forward. One wonders if this version of the USA had become something like North Korea - a state where most of the population was kept isolated from most world events; then repeatedly told that (a) they were WAY better off than anybody else, and (b) they were surrounded by powerful enemies who would stop at nothing to bring them down.

 

Have to wonder what the rest of the world's tech base is/was REALLY like. Maybe the rest of the world is actually STILL in very good shape, but a big chunk of the USA (including all areas covered by or mentioned in the Fallouts) is either quarantined or in "failed state' condition. Quite a stretch, I realize, but reckon the theory is worth a thought or two.

 

******

 

Just to backtrack a little on the matter of radioactivity in the Wastes. Those "rad pits" scattered around might actually be remnants of melted-down reactor cores. Given the alleged preponderance of nuclear power systems, expect that there could have been a variety of reactors out there in various roles. During the attacks or in the chaos that followed, most would have been compromised and led to various reprises of Chernobyl.

 

On the matter of giant mutated bugs, note that roasted scorpion is quite the delicacy in northern China. They farm the things in large quantities, and there are quite a few venders and restaurants in Beijing and elsewhere that serve them (taste ok, kind of moorish flavour).

 

So, gotta wonder if Radscorpions might have been first geneered to address this demand. I know that canon has them as supposedly mutating from American species, but if you were deliberately creating Giant Scorpions for whatever reason(s), you would probably want to start with big buggers, or whatever you had lots of, or ideally both.

Edited August 2, 2012 by 7thsealord

[charwo]

As for the rad scorpions, maybe the mutagens that created the American versions were based on civilian, peaceful versions. I always thought the Brahmin were not a post-war mutation, but a specific gene mutation from the pre-war. The long and short of it was Cow Tongue was all the rage, and farmers wanted to take advantage of it. Along the way, they created a much hardier version that lived alongside normal cows. By and large the Brahmin base of it's engineering replaced the cow first as the livestock of choice, and then as the dominant form of cow. This has happened before and is quite plausible: Cows are domesticated Aurochs, which have been extinct as a baseline since the 1600s. But cows....would face a lot of issues going feral, not as much as say toy breeds among dogs, but still. If the Brahmin was substantially hardier, it would have a reproductive advantage both in the wild and in farms over regular, more high maintenance cow. With the giant bug thing: Rad Scorpions should have nearly impotent venom as their poison glands become weaker the larger they are, But they become MORE poisonous. Why would humans want to do this? Well, the area of denial doctrine fits, but no, no this isn't it. Remember how the Vault Dweller is introduced to Radscorpions in Fallout 1? That that potent poison gland doesn't make any sense, but with quick, nearly cost free, low tech processing, it becomes California's most potent poison flushing system, to the point even pre-war chemicals lack the same punch. Coupled with your note that the Chinese consider scorpion a delicacy, I see the insect enlarging mutagen as bio-farming, a join effort between large scorpion farmers (like fish farmers) and Chinese pharmaceuticals to drastically increase meat yields while simultaneously creating powerful pharmaceutical agents. Did Chinese 'radscorpions' look like the ones in Fallout? I dunno....but the point is the PLA only needed to tinker with the baselines to make them world on ants and horseshoe crabs and to up the aggression.

 

As for the failed state? Actually I take the opposite view. The Enclave was merely the shadow government, and they were constrained by the real government and the Constitution. And most probably the right and left hands worked independently. Like, at my most douchey, if I were President of the US, even while being part of the Enclave, I would evac to the Oil Rig, but I wouldn't leave America to rot. I could see the Mariposa experiments because presumably they are doing them to POWS and the worst of the Leavenworth populations, so....f*** them, they deserve it. But any semi-responsible leader would flip out about the Vault Preservation Program. Not the idea of using them as experiments: but the extremes of the experiments on American citizens. The Vault 87 EEP experiments on helpless and innocent 87 residents I'm sure did not have government approval. Nor the whole Vault filled with one person and a crate of puppets. Among others. These are American citizens after all. Horrible things like that happened behind closed doors, and in the dark.

 

I am actually going to make an extensive post on why I think Anchorage is actually the best DLC in it's tangential storyline, not so much in it's gameplay, but it's haunting subtext (this was Chase being as damning of US atrocities as possible without actually being seditious, and thus Anchorage was a protest of the most subversive kind) and the fact that the VSS armory at the end shows that the programers were wrong: Anchorage DID happen that way, and Chase couldn't explain the details because they weren't cleared to see the classified elements (the VSS logs say so) so Chase just let them think he was being a blowhard and glory hound. And strangely enough when taken in the context of the rest of his correspondence, Constantine Chase is the most compelling pre-war character in all of Fallout: because of what he allowed himself to say in every correspondence tells us about the man and his times.

 

The truth is, in true Fallout style, the nuclear strike was an epic tragedy. There was no upside to the nuclear exchange: the technology problems of the Resource Wars were at an end (the nuclear tech was so ubiquitous that the 'oil problem' in and of itself was dead by the 2070s, World War III was....so much more by then), and the subtext from what is a very whitewashed and censored media is simple: the Enclave's control was failing, and their attempts to inculcate Enclave values had FAILED, and failed miserably. And....while the notion of suburban privilege remained alive for centuries afterword, look at the immediate pre-war world: food riots, general war exhaustion, fear of the government that is becoming lawless, and everything indicates that while grim determination to finish China was there, the occupation and 'annexation' of the same was a Bush move. It was universally reviled, it failed utterly as a propaganda ploy and by all accounts the treatment of Canada was at least, AT LEAST as unpopular as our Vietnam. And because China by September 2077 was utterly defeated in the field ( the US by early October had taken control of Beijing mopping up partisans, and most of the Chinese coast including Shanghai and Nanking) this says that America was in no way a failed state, nor was China. Also....that Liberty Prime was used against the Enclave is not all that ironic. Listen to those statements: although Chase knew nothing of the Enclave, everyone could feel it's touch. In the times when power armor units were being sent to club hungry food rioters and murder Canadian civilians (the opening of Fallout 1 was as disturbing to it's audience as it was to us), Liberty Prime's declarations of the triumph of freedom and democracy and the eradication of those who refuse to embrace them was actually just plausible enough to be directed to Cheng like the rest, but they were actually grave implicit threats towards the Enclave and a forcible declaration that America's ideals make it America, not it's power. You see this dichotomy again and again in the game, especially with John Henry Eden. And that's why Maxon received no reply from Army command on October 20, a full three and a half days before the end. Things weren't collapsing: the Enclave actively nixed those broadcasts because they were afraid (rightly so) instead of Maxon being declared a traitor, it was going to provoke a general revolt, China theater or no.

 

The Enclave's cowardly rat behavior in the post war, where they abandoned the mainland, is very well explained by all of this. In short, the Enclave hadn't been expecting nuclear war per se, nor did they cause it, but the Enclave was preparing for a post-war Civil War with the US military. Beneath the veneer of complacency, Americans were nursing deep, deep rage against the Enclave portions of the government. The Enclave had alienated the military personnel from the military industrial complex. This makes sense because the Enclave in every canonical instance shows itself totally incompetent at public relations. Three Dog is the kind of guy who would LOVE to see the US re-establishing order in the Capital, and he is their biggest enemy. Nathan Vargas, their biggest supporter takes one look at them, and is appalled, and they disappear him to Raven Rock. Even before Waters of Life, Eden's fireside chats are blatantly disingenuous and condescending, and worse still from a PR prospective, he says the Enclave is coming, but not why they haven't come back yet and what they've done elsewhere. That's why most people are forced to assume it's a looped pre-war or immediate post-war broadcast: if the government still exists in 2277, why the hell isn't DC under their control?! It's the damn national capital! The Enclave's unremitting arrogance and malevolence dooms everything it every tries to do. Their evil is so out in front, and so badly concealed that in the land of TVtropes, the Enclave is the only non-Nazi group to actually fall under Those Wacky Nazis as a consistent rule.

 

The world of Fallout has always been a world half full, one where all problems can ultimately be solved and every wrong justified, but at great cost and certainly not all at once. The Exchange was not necessary, nor was World War III. It's just no hero stepped up to the plate to set things right.

[7thsealord]

W-e-l-l, note that I am not up on the finer historical details of preceding Fallout games. Played FO original for a short while (and it was fun with the walkthrough notes) - but not 2, Tactics or NV.

 

Still think that the "US as a quarantined failed state" theory has validity, but am not fanatical about it. Just my way - when trying to figure stuff out, I sometimes get interesting results by (figuratively speaking) turning the telescope around and peering in the fat end. A deliberate major change of perspective can be very illuminating, sometimes. What if, despite all claims to the contrary, FO's USA was NOT Number One? (As a proud Aussie, I kind of think this anyhow, but there you go ... ;) )

 

That whole business with so many Vaults being just human experimentation really made no damn sense to me. More like Vault-Tec's board of directors were all secretly psychopaths. The world is ending and, rather than saving (useful) lives, valuable resources and technology is being expended on bozarre mindgames and so forth? Nuts, plain nuts - though perhaps no more so than the entire nuclear annihilation thing in the first place, I guess.

 

(Actually, I kind of wonder now. All the money people paid to Vault-Tec for Vault reservations - did it all REALLY go to that, or was a lot of it skimmed or sidetracked (into Enclave accounts, maybe)? Wouldn't surprise me - all that fancy hardware the Enclave likes so much can't have been cheap. Was Vault-Tec actually the biggest con job in history? Yep, there are REAL Vaults, and some of those manage quite well - but how many others were substandard or even specifically designed for self-destruction? Hmmm. )

 

I agree that, for an "evil organization" (or an Organization With Big Plans, if one prefers to leave moralistic labelling out of it), the Enclave seems determined to shoot itself in its collective foot, over and over. In another discussion on this forum, someone suggested that 'President Eden' was actually "playing to lose" - the AI did all the calculations and projections for restoration of the USA (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and had concluded that the single biggest obstacle to this was the Enclave itself. So, Eden set about arranging matters so that the Enclave would inevitably fall.

 

As for your last piece, there was perhaps no lack of heroes (can think of a few after it all went to hell - the nurses at the Germantown aid station being an excellent example). Just, no one who was in the right place at the wrong time.

Edited August 3, 2012 by 7thsealord