On the same note as the Deathclaws being from before the great war, Mirelurks also started their mutations before the great war due to the massive amounts of radiation being dumped into bodies of water.
I think in one of the 3d Fallout games it was also insinuated that most Vaults never got their full initial number of occupants due to pre-War Americans having grown unresponsive to nuclear attack warning sirens, which were tested out regularly in addition to nuclear drills, so when the bombs actually dropped, a lot less people showed up at their assigned Vaults, meaning a large number of possible Vault Dwellers just ended up being vaporised by the nuclear apocalypse, thus aggravating the troubles regarding the sustainment of the Vaults and their experiments.
That makes being a vault dweller a lot more depressing. Imagine how lonely it must've felt being around other people, knowing and wondering how many more people could've survived and joined you in the vault(s).
The vault population really is wild when you consider the quest in Fallout 3 and you return to the vault, you can convince the overseer to let the people go since they won't have enough genetic diversity to maintain their population without inbreeding occuring. It makes me think that every vault had to have assigned marriages or at least assigned breeding with a population that small Edit: literally wrote this right before he talked about it I feel so irrelevant
There is cut content from FO3 that made it far more clear that the "secret experiment" of 101 was to see how a population would deal with exactly that problem if forced to keep the door closed. Triangle City has a few deep dives into cut content, especially lore.
@@danvilleduncan3783 yea, I'm sure that's why the chosen one decided to add his genes to the vault population. Definitely had nothing to do with him being a porn star, and a sex addict at all.... Not that I blame him, he did help them out as a bonus from doing it. I'm not shaming him, I'd do the same thing if had to, I'm just as noble, and kind hearted as he is. I'd be willing to make the same sacrifice as him if needed.
• About misconception #3: For the first gen of Super Mutants (the ones from Fo1, infected with FEV-II from Mariposa), it's not just luck for them. There was a very important variable: if the subject was already exposed to the Wasteland's radiation. For some reason (I don't remember if it was ever explained in-game), humans with no past exposures to the outside radiation were the perfect candidates for becoming intelligent Super Mutants. There was some dialogue between the Lieutenant and the Vault Dweller that seems to indicate the FEV-II works like that. Lieutenant: The FEV was mutated by the war radiation. Those living in this desolate wasteland have been exposed to this mutant FEV, essentially inoculating them from the full effects. Vault Dweller: So? Lieutenant: So, you're from a Vault and have limited exposure to this mutated virus. The original FEV in the Vats should work quite well on you. • About misconception #5: One way you can think about it is: While our technology is highly dependent on transistors, they only used it when extremely necessary. We started using transistors in electronics (I'm only talking about computers right now) solely because of how much energy vacuum tubes required back in the 40-50's, but that wasn't a problem in Fallout's universe. Instead of trying to amplify power, thus creating transistors, they just solved it by switching to nuclear energy. Following this logic, they could now focus on developing new tech using vacuum tubes, thus only inventing transistors later when needed, mainly because of size constraints probably. With this, we could assume that the transistors from Fallout's universe could be different from ours in any way.
Those numbers for the Vault populations are sensible and actually, to me, make the construction of the Vaults a little more realistic. Major projects, yes, but not massive undertakings to house thousands in a single underground space.
And you have to remember that very few of the Vaults were actually made for the purpose of housing people who would go on to repopulate the surface. Most Vaults were made for very specific experiments, and so they didn't need that many people. They just needed enough to run the experiments.
For experiments, it does seem realistic But that's where it ends. There are a lot of underground housing projects in real life, even underground cities that have already been successfully built thousands of years ago.
@@BierBart12but experiments were the primary purpose of the vaults. Even the vaults without experiments were controls, so it would make no sense for them to have significantly higher populations
@@Romanticoutlaw What? No. That makes no sense at all. To be a valid "control group" you want the control group and the test group to be as similar as possible. Otherwise it's not a control group at all because you've introduced other factors that can skew the findings.
@@BierBart12underground citites and vaults are very different things, those cities relied on outside supplies to survive, and they had time to grow, vaults had no abylity to grow after they were built, and more importantly had to be completely self sufficient, which is something very few places on earth have been in thousands of years, and of those that didn't have any trade going on, they didn't have to maintain a nuclear reactor
If I remember right, the intellect of the super mutants came down to how damaged the person was by radiation before they were dipped in the FEV. The smart ones were people that weren't damaged from radiation, and the dumb ones were. Which is why the master wanted to get the people from Vault 13 so bad in Fallout 1.
Yeah and if *I* remember right, Master himself was from Vault 8 (Vault City) - thus stayed pretty smart. I don't remember who confirms this but... maybe Lynette?
This is also why the Institute needed Shaun in Fallout 4, as the Gen 3 synths were developed with FEV. If they used any ole Wastelander, the resulting Synths would be way too unstable. Shaun was relatively unmarred by radiation, which is why they needed him. The Lone Survivor was the "Backup" because, just in case Shaun didn't work out or died before the research could bare fruit, there was a second, less optimal, choice. LS is related to Shaun, so the genetic work might be mostly comparable, but the genetic damage is more troublesome.
That is the theory of the Master and one that most people go with. I personally prefer the Lieutenant’s theory that when West-Tek was hit by a nuke and became the Glow, the FEV there was spread into the atmosphere and people being exposed to trace amounts of it works as a vaccine. Either way they need subjects unexposed to the pollution of the surface. So they go for vault dwellers.
The super mutant misconception is really silly being that in New Vegas you can literally find a town full of them that can easily communicate and aren’t immediately hostile.
It really comes down to the differences between the original Fallout lore, and Bethesda's Fallout lore. Smart super mutants are common in Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas. In Fallout 3 and 4, super mutants are basically orcs. In Fallouts 1 the super mutants are an organized army. In fallout 2 and New Vegas the remaining super mutants have created communities. There's also supposed to be less of them because no one is actively creating super mutants anymore. In Fallouts 3 and 4, super mutants just exist to terrorize humans and strew gore around like its Christmas decorations, to drive home the point that they're monsters. There's a couple exceptions, but they're clearly exceptions in Bethesda's Fallout.
@@RaddSpencerIt should also be said that those groups of mutants have different origins, so the west coast ones are smarter and more organized, while the east coast ones are more tribal and animalistic
@@RaddSpencersmart super mutants were not common in old lore. Most were brain dead simpleton like Harry. The few smart ones ended up officers like the Luteniant, or Marcus or became nightkin. The Master needing pure humans so he could have smart mutants was a major plot point
@@vonfaustien3957 I suppose it depends on how you define "smart". I'm using the term broadly to cover any super mutant that isn't basically a mindless kill monster. Granted it's been a while since I played the first two games, but I don't recall any super mutants keeping bags of gore and viscera in either. In Fallout 1 I know all the super mutants were part of the Master's army, which is why they were usually hostile, but they still had structure, made plans, and had personalities beyond "ME EAT HUMAN!" In Fallout 2 you often see super mutants integrating with human society, Broken Hills is a great example of this. There's even a super mutant NCR ranger. So yeah, I stand by my statement. Smart (in this context) super mutants were common in the old lore.
Dude Norte I just wanna say that your fallout lore videos are really freaking cool. I already watched all of them from oldest to newest and I really enjoyed the iceberg series aswell. Also I like how the outros to your lore videos always have an NPC quote that coincides to what the video was about. Keep up the great work 👍
wow, you talking about how Fusion Cells could've prevented the Great War but they came too late just brings another heavy layer of depressing Pre-War lore.
Pretty standard for wars though, innovation is born out of necessity hence why irl innovations usually appear around increased tensions, depressions or competition.
the first one about vault sizes actually gave me an interesting idea: a vault that unlike the other ones, is actually big. like an entire city, a few thousand dwellers. would be an interesting place i think!
The vault that only hold like 100 persons give me the idea of vault tech lied about the size so the citizen can give them the fund to create those experimental vault, you don't know it's a lie if they people die during the bomb fell
Sounds accurate, i mean how else would someone explain the massive supercomputers, terminals and the huge ass pip-boys on our wrists. I mean, in a world thats already low on ressources there is not a reason to waste them in such large amounts. Let alone the massive weight a pip-boy must have. Its just not pratical.
From what i remember/accepted as headcanon, is that transistors were created far later in the Fallout timeline than ours. Still well before the great war, just VT's had a long dominance and continued even until the bombs fell
I also thought that while transistors existed before the war, they were considered high tech and possibly were only considered for military tech due to the secrecy and expense. It's been while tho so that might just be head canon.
I knew about deathclaws actually being made before the war, if I remember correctly they were mostly chameleons or iquanas that were of course heavily gene spliced and mutated.
@@masonjohnson4310 that sounds right all I could really remember it was either some specific chameleon or iquana, maybe I was thinking about iquanas cause I watched the 1998 American Godzilla recently, just to see how bad it is.
My take is that vault population was according to the experience they were running like the ten rich robot brain in far harbor, 1 dude and 99 woman, one Gary, I'm guessing large population vaults were more social experiment like the ones with weird politics stuff going on like the one that add to vote out someone every years.
I always thought that the point of fallout's retro futurism vibe was brought on by the hypothetical: "what if our future technology was based more on the vacuum tube than the transistor?"
It may not be cannon, but i still like Fallout Tactics, if you play long enough into it you'll be able to recruit super mutants. There is even one very brilliant super mutant there trying to reverse the sterile nature that happens to Super Mutants.
FEV uncontrollably mutates people who have too many mutations themselves. Vault Dwellers are probably the least mutated people in the entire world. That might explain it.
The east coast enclave was able to control and use Deathclaws using collars. So it wouldn't suprise me if they had them already from before the nukes dropped, for the sole purpose of using them in the war. The Deathjaws were made at Nuka World for war purposes too. Also, pretty sure cazadors were made pre nukes, or atleast soon after by big mountain. More of the monsters were made by humans messing with genetics, then by accident from the nukes.
I read somewhere that if you want to save the human race from extinction there are two ways to do it. Have breeding pairs and use them to create a diverse genetic population. Which you would need somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 people. Or have one male to every 9 females. Then you would need just 500 to 1,000 people to keep a genetically stable population. Both need extensive record keeping to stop interbreeding
I'm sure vaults weren't the only fallout shelters. They were probably just seen as the most effective and fancy. As for the issue of transistors, I think there probably was some limiting factor not addressed such as photolithography not existing or never advancing for some reason and a different form of microelectronics existing that used a fundamentally different method of construction. Its not uncommon for great ideas to be neglected because of easier - yet very different - alternatives. Obviously there was factor that limited electronics considering how long they knew about transistors yet how little they advanced them. I'm guessing there was some other, unmentioned, technology that was common for robots and supercomputers that existed that was much better at creating artificial intelligence but ultimately limited for general computing. Remember, if milk didn't spoil, we wouldn't have cheese or butter and if meat didn't rot, we wouldn't have sausages and jerky. I think the thing that wiped out much of the population right after the war was the massive number of ghouls. They probably greatly reduced the human population along with that of dogs and cats. This is probably a part of the story that isn't mentioned but was thought of. As for the issue of energy, in a world where deadly robots and laser guns exist, it was probably very difficult to spread fusion technology since you had to protect it from thieves or criminal organizations and that's not to mention foreign rivals. If America told everyone how to do fusion, then the Chinese would've been building power armor and sentry bots as well. Look how much effort governments around the world spend trying to limit the use of nuclear fission even when doing so wouldn't lead to weapons creation.
a 30% decrease in intelligence is huge. after all 100 IQ is considered the average, while 70 is considered low enough to be legally considered an incompetent.
I'd argue that the resource wars were technically avoidable, but in a more tragic way. It's the fact that pre-war countries relied on constant growth and consumption that led to the intense scarcity that led to the wars. Nuclear energy wasn't a cure all, as nothing ever is, but if the country had taken a moment to pull back and reconsider their growth and consumption they really could have avoided all this. That's the great tragedy of Fallout to me, the resource wars were inevitable from the way the country operated and ran itself for decades before it came to a nuclear head. However, if the people had applied the foresight to see that they were sucking the planet dry and that only suffering and conflict could come from this constant growth; the entire nuclear apocalypse could have been avoided.
I always knew that there was transistors in Fallout, I always just thought that they were newer tech and hadnt had time to be implemented as much as they are in our modern world irl. Which explains why Vacuum tubes are still so prevalent in most technologies.
It was fun to find out Vacuum Tubes are still used today as well, but given their usage it does make sense. I mean, Microwaves are effectively a controlled EMP that heats food with the Electromagnetic Energy from the Microwave Radiation.
Can we talk about how I just dumped literally 1000 rounds of ammo (minigun) into a mirelurk queen to finish the castle quest and in the middle of dialogue with Preston (aka the G man) a legendary glowing mirelurk just one shots me. Like why couldn’t a mf warn me I’m their general ffs.
If they were competent they wouldnt have given you an empty title (General) to trick you into running all over the nuclear wasteland doing their grunt work.
Why is the start of Fallout 4 shown to be like a post-WW2 America, seemingly in an economic boom, if it's after years of war, resource shortages, diseases, etc.?
Interesting contradiction. In the blueprint of Vault 76 it shows a Max Capacity of 88, whereas in Fallout 3, if you access the history terminals in the Citadel, there are articles on a variety of vaults, one of which is Vault 76, in which it states that the Total Number of Occupants is 500.
With 500 fellow dwellers, the game crashed even more than usual so it was cut to 88 so that it would just work... (Not a real fact, just a joke, I assume it was just oversight given the time between games and likely staff changes over such large teams in that time
@@michaeldayman682 that'd be a good 'get out' for ret conning, also makes sense given the vaults with questionable funding issues etc. (thinking the one in far harbour)
It's important to point out that Chris Avellone's Fallout bible wasn't ever considered hard canon. Nor is it now, with Avellone having stated in 2011 that only portions of it were canon and any conflicts from Fallout 3 going forward invalidate Tue Fallout bible. Which is why we can assert now that fusion power was common by the time of the great war, because of its commonality in the modern games.
5:59, while not a very important correction, the bombings on Japan weren't the first ever instances of nuclear fission, just the first time nuclear weapons were ever used in warfare. Fission was done previously while developing the bombs
The tiny vault population thing always felt to me like it was caused by Bethesda not wanting to model huge vaults and instead settled on making them much smaller. It also makes no sense that vault tech would be such a powerful company if it was making a product that had such limited numbers (spaces in the vaults to purchase) and the folks we see purchasing vault spaces arent shown as mega rich so its not like they where selling the product for an insanely high sum of money.
I wish I could play through video games and pay close attention to the lore, but I could never keep it together in my mind. I just found you for the first time, I'm excited to binge your videos!
maybe the vault population thing could be another thing to show why the west coast recovered faster than the east, not only was the east hit harder, their vaults also had a lot less people than the on the west coast, so there were less people to repopulate
20:10 There are alternatives to a transistor used on circuit boards. An electromechanical relay uses a physical moving part to connect contacts within the output component of the relay. The movement of this contact is generated using electromagnetic forces from the low-power input signal, allowing the completion of the circuit that contains the high-power signal. I've used them in making circuit boards without using transistors. Even put together an alarm system with them.
Right? I was sitting there thinking "so we didn't have small circuits before the 50's? Gotcha." Also that stuff about EMPs only working on circuits with transistors? No, it'll pop capacitors, fry resistors, shatter diodes, and burn the jacket off wire.
@rmconnelly5 yeah I've had to replaced burned out relays that weren't surge protected, as well as capcitors under non emp conditions. An EMP would likely flip electromechanical switches and send current to components uncontrolled at best, or at worst fuse or burn out the relays with everything else. Come to think of it, electromechanical relays have been used since 1835 and should be the default assumption in place of transistors in Fallout lore. What this whole issue stims from is the game devs aren't electrical engineers. Granted neither am I, but I've had old timers show me how to build "motherboards" with breadboards. Some security system still in service run through those.
Keep up the great work Norte! Your videos are clear and straight to the point, and fun to watch. I do have a question, what do you do for work outside of UA-cam? I noticed theres never any sponsors, and no ads.
@@kikosawa Some people paid a very high price for a place in the Vaults. The government also covered some of the cost to "protect the future". The TV show modifies the sequence a bit with the plan for the Societal Preservation program coming late in the construction of the Vaults, whereas previously it had been the main factor in the original planning for the Vaults. They also made the pre-war Enclave a much more loose group than previously indicated.
3:53 You can also find the number of "dwellers" in Vault 111. Just have to count the number of cryopods, beds on the bunks, and the bed in the Overseer ofice
To fix a mistake, many vault had far fewer than their ideal max due to the amount of false alarms which lead to people not knowing it was real until too late.
I always figured with the Capital Wasteland mutants, it's not that they're stupid, but that they're constant at a starvation point and in pain from the bodies constantly growing. Since Fallout 3 was the game that introduced Behemoths, and the mid point in that growth cycle. I have no idea what caused them in 4 and 76 though, other than Bethesda tends to try and give people what they want until they don't want it anymore.
There is also the matter of education. The Super Mutants in the east coast had no one to teach them things like critical thinking or common sense. They just plopped into the wasteland, and were left alone
I think the Institute created the original super mutants in FO4, there is a wing in the base that is closed off that shows them being created, but they escaped
I always thought of the deathclaw being designed for missions during the tranquility seas war. What ever they fought against demanded any possible fighting unit. Until a loosing end so they covered it all up
Supermutants having different tiers of intelligence depending on what type/grade of FEV is used is cool. But is there a type of FEV that lets me keep and use my genitals?
A couple thoughts on vault population. For a multi generational vault you would not want to hit your max population on startup, so they need some room for growth there. Second is time. How do you get thousands of people from across a city into an underground vault with ICBMs and submarine launched nukes in play? I am gonna borrow a number from the movie Wargames. Six minutes from launch to landing from a submarine launch. So you can't get people in huge numbers to one location quick enough. But if you had a bunch of smaller shelters then you could. And when they all released then you would have your breeding population.
The Supermutants from the older games weee so well done, they didnt fell like braindead crashdummies which you oneshot with your Bloodied Railway one by one for quick xp farming... I still remember shitting my pants when i was entering the hills of the Nightkin Supermutants first time in Fallout NV, they felt much like a thread being able to stalk and assassinate you like an intelligent creature.. In F76 i almost feel bad when i kill them in a row... or rows
The whole entry on Super Mutants is another example of a retcon, actually. Only in terms of terminology, the majority of the actual info you presented has always been accurate, but prior to Fallout 3, the term "Super Mutant" applied *only* to people who were made *smarter* by the FEV. Anyone who got no smarter, and especially those who actually got dumber, were called simply "Mutant." Sure, it was with a capital M to differentiate them from creatures mutated by radiation, but still.
12:24 You said that this decrease wasn't that bad, but, I felt it was important to make a correction; a 30% decrease in brain capacity is essentially de-evolution and is devastating. Human brains are 99% similar to Chimpanzees, and that single 1% is what makes the difference between us and Chimps. Decimating that by 30% is an absolutely devastating number. For another comparison, a Lobotomy essentially deletes ~10-20% of your Prefrontal Cortex. Whereas the FEV Mutation destroys your brain more than a lobotomy does, by 10%, and that destruction is not fixated in one region, but, instead, is spread across your entire brain.
Ostensibly the damage they sustain should look like advanced forms of dementia. Confusion, wandering, memory loss, sundowning (a known phenomena among those with alzhemer's where their behavior changes around sunset to be more aggressive and confused), and complete with the occasional flash of recollection from their old life. If depicted like that they go from essentially rebranded orcs to dangerous, yet still painfully human, mutants. Super Mutants would be unpredictable, one moment trying to kill you to the next wondering why you are afraid or simply forgetting why they are holding a gun and wandering off. It'd add a lot in my opinion.
@@SavedPotato I really like that idea. I wonder what the process of rehabilitation for super mutants would be in order to help treat their FEV-induced dementia. I know in Fallout New Vegas the Nightkin were being treated for Schizophrenia because of their Stealth Boys affecting various regions of their brain, but I wonder what the process would need to be to help Super Mutants treat with and cope with their dementia. Like.. Would you try treating them as if they were human, since that is where their memories and identity would go back to?
Ay you should do a video about fort Constantine and Mr Crowley I'm curious as to why the bed in CO headquarters is owned and why the doors are in red like negative karma actions
Also even the working vaults that were control samples, likely not all the people reached them when the bombs fell. I bet a lot of them only got half filled.
We also know about two other vaults, Vault 68 which held 999 men and 1 woman, and vault 69 which held 999 women and 1 man. I know this still isn't a TON of people, but its still a lot more than 100 - 200 as mentioned in this video, which does skew the numbers, and it can leave the imagination a bit more open for vaults we don't know anything about. Yes, I know this also leaves room in the imagination for less population as well, given there's a vault with only 1 man and a box full of puppets.
Only Vault 69 has been mentioned in canon and even then the source is pretty questionable. Imo it would be a waste of a vault even for Vault Tec. I do agree with you that large population vaults are a possibility especially in regard to control vaults.
THANK YOU I was on the wiki for vault 76 and it said it was projected at 500 and changed to 88 but there was no reference to back it up so I didn't know if it was true or not
What you pointed out here only further progresses my theory about vault-tec. Hi there there's some giant vault-tec facility underground that holds a massive amount of people and they've been receiving all the data from all of these vaults and are preparing for something huge in the future. Or they had no intention whatsoever of saving humanity and thought they'd get a kick out of torturing the last remaining living people. All we can tell from the vault so far is that they saved a very small fraction of our population and an even smaller portion of that actually survived their horrific experiments very few things have come out of any of vault tec vaults that could actually help humanity. So did somebody invest billions and billions of dollars in the world's worst prank or what the f*** is going on
Great vid. Haven’t watched any others yet by my knowledge, but I highly recommend adjusting your mic audio. It’s very hard to ignore the static sound. It sounds like your gain might be a bit too high
A workaround for the lack of vault capacity could be to explain that a lot of people had their own vaults. There are a few cases that already indicate some people did this. To get around the problem of not seeing these vaults in game, they could imply that most of them became abandoned when occupants died or left, some ending up too radioactive to live in & as time past they just got covered over or people living in them purposely camouflaged their entrances to keep them hidden from potential raiders or enemies who might take them over for themselves.
The more I interact with the snallygasters in FO76, the more I am convinced that they are an early form or prototype of what would later become known as the Centaur.
8:40 I think I saw a small article, a real one, where fusion has been achieved, on a very small, lab only setting. Proof of real world concept I think.
We can do fusion, what we can do is create a fusion reactor which produces energy. Presently, a fusion reaction requires a lot more energy input that we can extract from it. A momentary fusion reaction is a lot easier to accomplish than a sustained one. These reactors are also massive and incredibly expensive to build and maintain. If our energy demands continue to grow as we progress our technology then we will probably have to pursue fusion energy more seriously. If we're ever going to colonise other planets or the space around our solar system we'll probably want fusion to do it. Once you leave the earth's surface the benefits become even more significant because they not only produce immense amounts of energy but do so with very little need for fuel, even compared to fission.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since that first video! Biggest misconception of people who haven’t played Fallout: the bombs xploded in the 50s. Who would guess 2077 happened to look exactly like the 50s, after all? Biggest misconception of people who play Fallout: the BoS worship technology. They certainly care a lot about it, but the only prayer anyone ever makes is when Owen Lyons gives grace before a meal. he just quotes the Codex about the importance of the Brotherhood itself, no mention of any tech!
The vault populations have to be in the hundreds to possibly over a thousand for each vault. Why? Economy. There's no way Vaulttec could ever make money off of selling 80 rooms to people, the vault cost billions. Unless they collect $100,000 per month from the people who are buying 'rent' at the vault it would just be unfeasible. AND if the price for getting 1 month of security was your entire life savings, there's no way they'd send Vaulttec representatives to ask Average Joes to sign up, like what happened in the start of FO4. There's some non-sense in lore somewhere. Either the population lore doesn't make sense or the start of FO4 doesn't make sense. P.S. I always felt like the games didn't give the play full access to the true vault size, just a small portion of it, due to game engine restrictions.
Two words: government subsidies. But about your point of the game's, limitations, it makes sense we don't get to see the entire layout due to problems such as collapsed rooms, destroyed elevators and submerged passages.
Personally i'm not a fan of the Fallout 4 vaults having such relatively minuscule population capacities I know its more realistic, but i found Fallout 1 indicating that the average Vault population was around 1000 to be much more interesting than if they only had around Vault 81's measly 96 people.
Small Vaults are not a product of Fallout 4. Vault 22, while dimensionally large, had much of its space dedicated to agricultural research. The residential area of that Vault is very small compared to some others, like Vault 3. You must understand that most Vaults were not control Vaults designed to house loads of people. Most of them had specific purposes in mind, and therefore dedicated much of their space to housing specialized equipment and researchers. Vault 13 was a control Vault, and therefore *was* dedicated to housing large numbers of residents. Vault 81 on the other hand was not. It was designed for developing and testing diseases and cures on a small, controlled population. In fact, one of the things the Vault 81 dwellers talk about is how small their Vault is, and how they have to control their birth rates in order to avoid overcrowding and resource depletion. The reason they think this way is because until the events of Fallout 4 they believed that they were a control Vault, as they were unaware that a large portion of the Vault had been sectioned off and dedicated to a research staff that no one aside from the first Overseer knew about. Likewise, Vault 111 was made specifically to test the effects of cryogenic freezing on the human body, which is why about half of it is dedicated to housing cryogenic pods. No two Vaults are the same in purpose or internal layout. They are all unique. So while there certainly could be more control Vaults with large populations like Vault 13, they are unlikely to feature in games because the smaller experimentation Vaults are a lot more interesting to design, write, and explore. Once you've seen one control Vault, you've pretty much seen them all. The closest thing to another control Vault that we've gotten is Fallout 3's Vault 101, which like Vault 13 was just designed to test the effects of living underground for extended periods of time.
now I could be wrong but I swear that somewhere it says that their are some specific vaults to keep people alive and also im pretty sure that fev/radition mutated them futhur but great video
The fear of nuclear war may have contributed to the popularity of vacuum tube technology in Fallout, as nuclear weapons detonated at a high altitude can cause a massive EMP, which would be pretty bad for any transistors.
20:20 not totally correct, the first circuit board was invented in 1925. The transistor simply made them smaller, not as an idea. It was because of these early boards that the transistor even existed. This is why Fallout has a large device on your wrist, which would be a wristwatch in our world. Why computers are bigger, instead of laptops, and something many miss here, why a certain person had to put info on a plat chip. Because he "didnt" have the access to a transistor, where he could have simply put it on a digital chip instead. Without a transistor today, we would still have a type of Internet (Less advanced), we would still have a type of PC, and even Robots. It would be a different world without them and that is what happened in Fallout, the world we may have lived techology wise.
3:20 According to the “Fallout Bible”, the population of pre-war USA in the Fallout universe was closer to 400 million, so the percentage of citizens that would have been accepted for a vault would have been even LOWER.
Uh.... I think you're making some misconceptions about vault populations. You even acknowledge it, but just keep going with a premise you recognize is flawed. There is no reason to believe the vaults shown in the games are representative of the vaults not shown. A vault with robo-brain occupants or in vr are more interesting than a vault of a several hundred people just living their life so they're more likely to show up in a game. That being said, you're correct in claiming there was no way the entire population of the US was going to be sheltered, but is that a misconception people have? In game there is plenty of text saying there wouldn't be enough vaults, and the existence of Pulowski preservation shelters also suggest that. And even if all vaults had 1000 capacity, you'd need well over 3000 vaults to house america.
As a side note, transistors (or more properly semiconductors) can coexist in the same circuit. I'm looking at a vintage tabletop radio that has that right now. But damage to yhe semiconductor can also kill them. Therefore I choose to believe that such hybrid circutry is super common in FO. Semiconductors arrived almost a century late in FO, and combined with EMP fears likely lead to yhe continued dominance of vacuum tubes.
I don't know if it's a theory held by anyone else but instead of accepting scaling I just accept that the distances are real to their earth that their earth is literally smaller hence a lot less resources and it also explains how people could travel so far distances without dying in the wasteland
On the same note as the Deathclaws being from before the great war, Mirelurks also started their mutations before the great war due to the massive amounts of radiation being dumped into bodies of water.
We will be seeing them in the UK soon 🇬🇧
@@karimjoselima3268 creatures mutated and twisted from shit? You mean Tories?
@@CatnipBanana already here I guess 😢
Didn't know that one nice
@@CatnipBananayes, but also the royal family
I think in one of the 3d Fallout games it was also insinuated that most Vaults never got their full initial number of occupants due to pre-War Americans having grown unresponsive to nuclear attack warning sirens, which were tested out regularly in addition to nuclear drills, so when the bombs actually dropped, a lot less people showed up at their assigned Vaults, meaning a large number of possible Vault Dwellers just ended up being vaporised by the nuclear apocalypse, thus aggravating the troubles regarding the sustainment of the Vaults and their experiments.
Yea, most space in vaults were people who weren't able to get there in time or didn't know it was the end of the world.
That makes being a vault dweller a lot more depressing. Imagine how lonely it must've felt being around other people, knowing and wondering how many more people could've survived and joined you in the vault(s).
The vault population really is wild when you consider the quest in Fallout 3 and you return to the vault, you can convince the overseer to let the people go since they won't have enough genetic diversity to maintain their population without inbreeding occuring. It makes me think that every vault had to have assigned marriages or at least assigned breeding with a population that small
Edit: literally wrote this right before he talked about it I feel so irrelevant
Remember that in fallout 2 vault city was having the problem of lack of diversity in their gene pool that is why the chosen one add his gene to it.
Same here.
There is cut content from FO3 that made it far more clear that the "secret experiment" of 101 was to see how a population would deal with exactly that problem if forced to keep the door closed.
Triangle City has a few deep dives into cut content, especially lore.
@@edgarsnow2463 Yeah his videos are very great I love triangle city
@@danvilleduncan3783 yea, I'm sure that's why the chosen one decided to add his genes to the vault population. Definitely had nothing to do with him being a porn star, and a sex addict at all.... Not that I blame him, he did help them out as a bonus from doing it. I'm not shaming him, I'd do the same thing if had to, I'm just as noble, and kind hearted as he is. I'd be willing to make the same sacrifice as him if needed.
• About misconception #3:
For the first gen of Super Mutants (the ones from Fo1, infected with FEV-II from Mariposa), it's not just luck for them. There was a very important variable: if the subject was already exposed to the Wasteland's radiation. For some reason (I don't remember if it was ever explained in-game), humans with no past exposures to the outside radiation were the perfect candidates for becoming intelligent Super Mutants. There was some dialogue between the Lieutenant and the Vault Dweller that seems to indicate the FEV-II works like that.
Lieutenant: The FEV was mutated by the war radiation. Those living in this desolate wasteland have been exposed to this mutant FEV, essentially inoculating them from the full effects.
Vault Dweller: So?
Lieutenant: So, you're from a Vault and have limited exposure to this mutated virus. The original FEV in the Vats should work quite well on you.
• About misconception #5:
One way you can think about it is: While our technology is highly dependent on transistors, they only used it when extremely necessary. We started using transistors in electronics (I'm only talking about computers right now) solely because of how much energy vacuum tubes required back in the 40-50's, but that wasn't a problem in Fallout's universe. Instead of trying to amplify power, thus creating transistors, they just solved it by switching to nuclear energy. Following this logic, they could now focus on developing new tech using vacuum tubes, thus only inventing transistors later when needed, mainly because of size constraints probably. With this, we could assume that the transistors from Fallout's universe could be different from ours in any way.
Also they weren’t invented until a century later in the fallout timeline
Maeby Sensor flux?
Those numbers for the Vault populations are sensible and actually, to me, make the construction of the Vaults a little more realistic. Major projects, yes, but not massive undertakings to house thousands in a single underground space.
And you have to remember that very few of the Vaults were actually made for the purpose of housing people who would go on to repopulate the surface. Most Vaults were made for very specific experiments, and so they didn't need that many people. They just needed enough to run the experiments.
For experiments, it does seem realistic
But that's where it ends. There are a lot of underground housing projects in real life, even underground cities that have already been successfully built thousands of years ago.
@@BierBart12but experiments were the primary purpose of the vaults. Even the vaults without experiments were controls, so it would make no sense for them to have significantly higher populations
@@Romanticoutlaw What? No. That makes no sense at all. To be a valid "control group" you want the control group and the test group to be as similar as possible. Otherwise it's not a control group at all because you've introduced other factors that can skew the findings.
@@BierBart12underground citites and vaults are very different things, those cities relied on outside supplies to survive, and they had time to grow, vaults had no abylity to grow after they were built, and more importantly had to be completely self sufficient, which is something very few places on earth have been in thousands of years, and of those that didn't have any trade going on, they didn't have to maintain a nuclear reactor
If I remember right, the intellect of the super mutants came down to how damaged the person was by radiation before they were dipped in the FEV. The smart ones were people that weren't damaged from radiation, and the dumb ones were. Which is why the master wanted to get the people from Vault 13 so bad in Fallout 1.
Yeah and if *I* remember right, Master himself was from Vault 8 (Vault City) - thus stayed pretty smart. I don't remember who confirms this but... maybe Lynette?
This is also why the Institute needed Shaun in Fallout 4, as the Gen 3 synths were developed with FEV. If they used any ole Wastelander, the resulting Synths would be way too unstable. Shaun was relatively unmarred by radiation, which is why they needed him. The Lone Survivor was the "Backup" because, just in case Shaun didn't work out or died before the research could bare fruit, there was a second, less optimal, choice. LS is related to Shaun, so the genetic work might be mostly comparable, but the genetic damage is more troublesome.
That is the theory of the Master and one that most people go with.
I personally prefer the Lieutenant’s theory that when West-Tek was hit by a nuke and became the Glow, the FEV there was spread into the atmosphere and people being exposed to trace amounts of it works as a vaccine. Either way they need subjects unexposed to the pollution of the surface. So they go for vault dwellers.
@@masonjohnson4310 were synths genetic material from Shaun??
@@SolomonGrumpy yes, they're basically his children. Hence him being called father, he was the father of the last generation of synths.
The super mutant misconception is really silly being that in New Vegas you can literally find a town full of them that can easily communicate and aren’t immediately hostile.
and 4 has a literal rocket scientist super mutie
It really comes down to the differences between the original Fallout lore, and Bethesda's Fallout lore. Smart super mutants are common in Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas. In Fallout 3 and 4, super mutants are basically orcs.
In Fallouts 1 the super mutants are an organized army. In fallout 2 and New Vegas the remaining super mutants have created communities. There's also supposed to be less of them because no one is actively creating super mutants anymore. In Fallouts 3 and 4, super mutants just exist to terrorize humans and strew gore around like its Christmas decorations, to drive home the point that they're monsters.
There's a couple exceptions, but they're clearly exceptions in Bethesda's Fallout.
@@RaddSpencerIt should also be said that those groups of mutants have different origins, so the west coast ones are smarter and more organized, while the east coast ones are more tribal and animalistic
@@RaddSpencersmart super mutants were not common in old lore. Most were brain dead simpleton like Harry. The few smart ones ended up officers like the Luteniant, or Marcus or became nightkin.
The Master needing pure humans so he could have smart mutants was a major plot point
@@vonfaustien3957 I suppose it depends on how you define "smart". I'm using the term broadly to cover any super mutant that isn't basically a mindless kill monster.
Granted it's been a while since I played the first two games, but I don't recall any super mutants keeping bags of gore and viscera in either.
In Fallout 1 I know all the super mutants were part of the Master's army, which is why they were usually hostile, but they still had structure, made plans, and had personalities beyond "ME EAT HUMAN!"
In Fallout 2 you often see super mutants integrating with human society, Broken Hills is a great example of this. There's even a super mutant NCR ranger.
So yeah, I stand by my statement. Smart (in this context) super mutants were common in the old lore.
Dude Norte I just wanna say that your fallout lore videos are really freaking cool. I already watched all of them from oldest to newest and I really enjoyed the iceberg series aswell. Also I like how the outros to your lore videos always have an NPC quote that coincides to what the video was about. Keep up the great work 👍
Couldn’t agree more
wow, you talking about how Fusion Cells could've prevented the Great War but they came too late just brings another heavy layer of depressing Pre-War lore.
Pretty standard for wars though, innovation is born out of necessity hence why irl innovations usually appear around increased tensions, depressions or competition.
the first one about vault sizes actually gave me an interesting idea:
a vault that unlike the other ones, is actually big.
like an entire city, a few thousand dwellers.
would be an interesting place i think!
That’s the potential of vault 88 that player settlement could be massive
So basically, a dwarven empire as a vault?
An entire game could be set in the vault.
There's a book series that starts with "City of Ember" that I'm thinking of.
The vault that only hold like 100 persons give me the idea of vault tech lied about the size so the citizen can give them the fund to create those experimental vault, you don't know it's a lie if they people die during the bomb fell
I was under the impression that transistors exist but came later in the timeline and never significantly replaced tubes.
Sounds accurate, i mean how else would someone explain the massive supercomputers, terminals and the huge ass pip-boys on our wrists. I mean, in a world thats already low on ressources there is not a reason to waste them in such large amounts. Let alone the massive weight a pip-boy must have. Its just not pratical.
Yes same here I believe transistors were invented I. The 2020s-2040s compared to our world were it was invented in the 1940s-1950s
From what i remember/accepted as headcanon, is that transistors were created far later in the Fallout timeline than ours. Still well before the great war, just VT's had a long dominance and continued even until the bombs fell
I also thought that while transistors existed before the war, they were considered high tech and possibly were only considered for military tech due to the secrecy and expense. It's been while tho so that might just be head canon.
Can't forget Vault 68 and 69, which each had 100 residents, as well as that 1 vault with only 1 dude and a crate of puppets.
Vaults 68 and 69 had 1000 residents each
It deffinetly supposed to be a standard number of residents before F4
The funny thing about vault population is that with Fallout 76, that must be one HUGE vault, with thousands of dwellers coming out month by month.
Millions of dwellers over the course of 2 years (in game time)
The 88 is just noted wrong its actually ♾️ ♾️
I knew about deathclaws actually being made before the war, if I remember correctly they were mostly chameleons or iquanas that were of course heavily gene spliced and mutated.
I think I remember reading that it's specifically Jackson's Chameleons in FO4
@@masonjohnson4310 that sounds right all I could really remember it was either some specific chameleon or iquana, maybe I was thinking about iquanas cause I watched the 1998 American Godzilla recently, just to see how bad it is.
In fallout 2, there's a peaceful tribe of intelligent talking deathclaws. One will even join you as a companion. I won't spoil it by saying more.
@@corruptcamerupt2344 it’s the Jackson Chameleon, hence why they occasionally get chameleon recessive genes and can go ‘invisible’ naturally.
It's Iguana, not Iquana.
Here is a throwaway thought, maybe the experiment vaults had less people?
Depends on the experiment but I mean it makes sense with a good portion of the experiments you hear about! I mean look at vault 111.
@@iimuffinsaur Even 81 was an experiment iirc, they just said "No"
My take is that vault population was according to the experience they were running like the ten rich robot brain in far harbor, 1 dude and 99 woman, one Gary,
I'm guessing large population vaults were more social experiment like the ones with weird politics stuff going on like the one that add to vote out someone every years.
Well vault 76 was a control vault and had less than 100 people
@Lavalamp Is that really true? I mean, aren't the players mostly canon?
I always thought that the point of fallout's retro futurism vibe was brought on by the hypothetical: "what if our future technology was based more on the vacuum tube than the transistor?"
It may not be cannon, but i still like Fallout Tactics, if you play long enough into it you'll be able to recruit super mutants. There is even one very brilliant super mutant there trying to reverse the sterile nature that happens to Super Mutants.
11:25 and also about the purity of the subjects, people from vaults were usually of at least average intelligence after the dip.
FEV uncontrollably mutates people who have too many mutations themselves. Vault Dwellers are probably the least mutated people in the entire world. That might explain it.
@@masonjohnson4310 yeah that's the explanation the Enclave and the Master gives iirc
The east coast enclave was able to control and use Deathclaws using collars. So it wouldn't suprise me if they had them already from before the nukes dropped, for the sole purpose of using them in the war. The Deathjaws were made at Nuka World for war purposes too. Also, pretty sure cazadors were made pre nukes, or atleast soon after by big mountain. More of the monsters were made by humans messing with genetics, then by accident from the nukes.
I read somewhere that if you want to save the human race from extinction there are two ways to do it. Have breeding pairs and use them to create a diverse genetic population. Which you would need somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 people. Or have one male to every 9 females. Then you would need just 500 to 1,000 people to keep a genetically stable population. Both need extensive record keeping to stop interbreeding
I'm sure vaults weren't the only fallout shelters. They were probably just seen as the most effective and fancy. As for the issue of transistors, I think there probably was some limiting factor not addressed such as photolithography not existing or never advancing for some reason and a different form of microelectronics existing that used a fundamentally different method of construction. Its not uncommon for great ideas to be neglected because of easier - yet very different - alternatives. Obviously there was factor that limited electronics considering how long they knew about transistors yet how little they advanced them. I'm guessing there was some other, unmentioned, technology that was common for robots and supercomputers that existed that was much better at creating artificial intelligence but ultimately limited for general computing. Remember, if milk didn't spoil, we wouldn't have cheese or butter and if meat didn't rot, we wouldn't have sausages and jerky.
I think the thing that wiped out much of the population right after the war was the massive number of ghouls. They probably greatly reduced the human population along with that of dogs and cats. This is probably a part of the story that isn't mentioned but was thought of. As for the issue of energy, in a world where deadly robots and laser guns exist, it was probably very difficult to spread fusion technology since you had to protect it from thieves or criminal organizations and that's not to mention foreign rivals. If America told everyone how to do fusion, then the Chinese would've been building power armor and sentry bots as well. Look how much effort governments around the world spend trying to limit the use of nuclear fission even when doing so wouldn't lead to weapons creation.
a 30% decrease in intelligence is huge. after all 100 IQ is considered the average, while 70 is considered low enough to be legally considered an incompetent.
I'd argue that the resource wars were technically avoidable, but in a more tragic way. It's the fact that pre-war countries relied on constant growth and consumption that led to the intense scarcity that led to the wars. Nuclear energy wasn't a cure all, as nothing ever is, but if the country had taken a moment to pull back and reconsider their growth and consumption they really could have avoided all this.
That's the great tragedy of Fallout to me, the resource wars were inevitable from the way the country operated and ran itself for decades before it came to a nuclear head. However, if the people had applied the foresight to see that they were sucking the planet dry and that only suffering and conflict could come from this constant growth; the entire nuclear apocalypse could have been avoided.
I always knew that there was transistors in Fallout, I always just thought that they were newer tech and hadnt had time to be implemented as much as they are in our modern world irl. Which explains why Vacuum tubes are still so prevalent in most technologies.
It was fun to find out Vacuum Tubes are still used today as well, but given their usage it does make sense. I mean, Microwaves are effectively a controlled EMP that heats food with the Electromagnetic Energy from the Microwave Radiation.
Yes, they were invented only a few years before the nuclear war and are the only reason why advanced AI exists
Can we talk about how I just dumped literally 1000 rounds of ammo (minigun) into a mirelurk queen to finish the castle quest and in the middle of dialogue with Preston (aka the G man) a legendary glowing mirelurk just one shots me. Like why couldn’t a mf warn me I’m their general ffs.
If they were competent they wouldnt have given you an empty title (General) to trick you into running all over the nuclear wasteland doing their grunt work.
Why is the start of Fallout 4 shown to be like a post-WW2 America, seemingly in an economic boom, if it's after years of war, resource shortages, diseases, etc.?
Presumably because the protagonist lives in a wealthy neighbourhood, mostly spared from the economical scourge of war
Because the sole survivor is a synth! And those are their false memories assigned in their creation, some Blade Runner 2049 stuff
Either false memories or because sole survivor was a government employee / were chosen by high power to be frozen.
Interesting contradiction. In the blueprint of Vault 76 it shows a Max Capacity of 88, whereas in Fallout 3, if you access the history terminals in the Citadel, there are articles on a variety of vaults, one of which is Vault 76, in which it states that the Total Number of Occupants is 500.
With 500 fellow dwellers, the game crashed even more than usual so it was cut to 88 so that it would just work...
(Not a real fact, just a joke, I assume it was just oversight given the time between games and likely staff changes over such large teams in that time
Vault Tech propaganda and advertising material.
They had to maintain government funding and public support.
@@michaeldayman682 that'd be a good 'get out' for ret conning, also makes sense given the vaults with questionable funding issues etc. (thinking the one in far harbour)
@@RJ-wx3fhthey should've said like 10 million instead of 88 lol
76 is non canon.
It's important to point out that Chris Avellone's Fallout bible wasn't ever considered hard canon. Nor is it now, with Avellone having stated in 2011 that only portions of it were canon and any conflicts from Fallout 3 going forward invalidate Tue Fallout bible. Which is why we can assert now that fusion power was common by the time of the great war, because of its commonality in the modern games.
5:59, while not a very important correction, the bombings on Japan weren't the first ever instances of nuclear fission, just the first time nuclear weapons were ever used in warfare. Fission was done previously while developing the bombs
The tiny vault population thing always felt to me like it was caused by Bethesda not wanting to model huge vaults and instead settled on making them much smaller.
It also makes no sense that vault tech would be such a powerful company if it was making a product that had such limited numbers (spaces in the vaults to purchase) and the folks we see purchasing vault spaces arent shown as mega rich so its not like they where selling the product for an insanely high sum of money.
You are my fav youtube channel now. Its like having shoddycast back from 10 years ago. Thank you.
I wish I could play through video games and pay close attention to the lore, but I could never keep it together in my mind. I just found you for the first time, I'm excited to binge your videos!
maybe the vault population thing could be another thing to show why the west coast recovered faster than the east, not only was the east hit harder, their vaults also had a lot less people than the on the west coast, so there were less people to repopulate
20:10 There are alternatives to a transistor used on circuit boards.
An electromechanical relay uses a physical moving part to connect contacts within the output component of the relay. The movement of this contact is generated using electromagnetic forces from the low-power input signal, allowing the completion of the circuit that contains the high-power signal. I've used them in making circuit boards without using transistors. Even put together an alarm system with them.
Right? I was sitting there thinking "so we didn't have small circuits before the 50's? Gotcha." Also that stuff about EMPs only working on circuits with transistors? No, it'll pop capacitors, fry resistors, shatter diodes, and burn the jacket off wire.
@rmconnelly5 yeah I've had to replaced burned out relays that weren't surge protected, as well as capcitors under non emp conditions. An EMP would likely flip electromechanical switches and send current to components uncontrolled at best, or at worst fuse or burn out the relays with everything else.
Come to think of it, electromechanical relays have been used since 1835 and should be the default assumption in place of transistors in Fallout lore. What this whole issue stims from is the game devs aren't electrical engineers. Granted neither am I, but I've had old timers show me how to build "motherboards" with breadboards. Some security system still in service run through those.
I think Vault-Tec would designed their vault to fit their purpose. Vault 13 was never meant to open up, so its capacity make sense.
Love these mini lectures mate, great video
Keep up the great work Norte! Your videos are clear and straight to the point, and fun to watch. I do have a question, what do you do for work outside of UA-cam? I noticed theres never any sponsors, and no ads.
Only recently found this channel when on was on the Eurostar to Paris, and I binge watched your channel all throughout my trip!
"The thing you need to understand is that the Vaults were never meant to save anyone."
The thing I don't understand is how were they supposed to raise money with such a low number of customers
@@kikosawa Some people paid a very high price for a place in the Vaults. The government also covered some of the cost to "protect the future".
The TV show modifies the sequence a bit with the plan for the Societal Preservation program coming late in the construction of the Vaults, whereas previously it had been the main factor in the original planning for the Vaults. They also made the pre-war Enclave a much more loose group than previously indicated.
Yasss, something to watch! Been waiting for it!
Ya know, I've heard a lot of this before. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to hear it again.
3:53 You can also find the number of "dwellers" in Vault 111. Just have to count the number of cryopods, beds on the bunks, and the bed in the Overseer ofice
In order for oil to not be a factor, plastic recycling would need to be much more effective.
i think I have read somewhere that while they do have transistors on fallout they were discovered much later.
To fix a mistake, many vault had far fewer than their ideal max due to the amount of false alarms which lead to people not knowing it was real until too late.
I always figured with the Capital Wasteland mutants, it's not that they're stupid, but that they're constant at a starvation point and in pain from the bodies constantly growing. Since Fallout 3 was the game that introduced Behemoths, and the mid point in that growth cycle. I have no idea what caused them in 4 and 76 though, other than Bethesda tends to try and give people what they want until they don't want it anymore.
There is also the matter of education. The Super Mutants in the east coast had no one to teach them things like critical thinking or common sense. They just plopped into the wasteland, and were left alone
I think the Institute created the original super mutants in FO4, there is a wing in the base that is closed off that shows them being created, but they escaped
@@terriblej6107they didn't escape, the Institute dumped their used test subjects in the Commonwealth... For some reason.
@@passingrando6457for field research of course!
They were in 76 due to west tek dumping a strain of fev in the water supply (pre war, I think)
I always thought of the deathclaw being designed for missions during the tranquility seas war. What ever they fought against demanded any possible fighting unit. Until a loosing end so they covered it all up
The goat uploaded another one
Supermutants having different tiers of intelligence depending on what type/grade of FEV is used is cool. But is there a type of FEV that lets me keep and use my genitals?
A couple thoughts on vault population. For a multi generational vault you would not want to hit your max population on startup, so they need some room for growth there. Second is time. How do you get thousands of people from across a city into an underground vault with ICBMs and submarine launched nukes in play? I am gonna borrow a number from the movie Wargames. Six minutes from launch to landing from a submarine launch. So you can't get people in huge numbers to one location quick enough. But if you had a bunch of smaller shelters then you could. And when they all released then you would have your breeding population.
sweet glad you made a sequel to a great topic
The Supermutants from the older games weee so well done, they didnt fell like braindead crashdummies which you oneshot with your Bloodied Railway one by one for quick xp farming...
I still remember shitting my pants when i was entering the hills of the Nightkin Supermutants first time in Fallout NV, they felt much like a thread being able to stalk and assassinate you like an intelligent creature.. In F76 i almost feel bad when i kill them in a row... or rows
The whole entry on Super Mutants is another example of a retcon, actually. Only in terms of terminology, the majority of the actual info you presented has always been accurate, but prior to Fallout 3, the term "Super Mutant" applied *only* to people who were made *smarter* by the FEV. Anyone who got no smarter, and especially those who actually got dumber, were called simply "Mutant." Sure, it was with a capital M to differentiate them from creatures mutated by radiation, but still.
The greatest misconception is that there is any stable lore.
Someone hide this man before Todd gets him
This is the company who has a thing called dragon brakes for elder scrolls Lore where literally everything is canon even when it contradicts lol
12:24
You said that this decrease wasn't that bad, but, I felt it was important to make a correction; a 30% decrease in brain capacity is essentially de-evolution and is devastating. Human brains are 99% similar to Chimpanzees, and that single 1% is what makes the difference between us and Chimps. Decimating that by 30% is an absolutely devastating number. For another comparison, a Lobotomy essentially deletes ~10-20% of your Prefrontal Cortex. Whereas the FEV Mutation destroys your brain more than a lobotomy does, by 10%, and that destruction is not fixated in one region, but, instead, is spread across your entire brain.
Ostensibly the damage they sustain should look like advanced forms of dementia. Confusion, wandering, memory loss, sundowning (a known phenomena among those with alzhemer's where their behavior changes around sunset to be more aggressive and confused), and complete with the occasional flash of recollection from their old life.
If depicted like that they go from essentially rebranded orcs to dangerous, yet still painfully human, mutants. Super Mutants would be unpredictable, one moment trying to kill you to the next wondering why you are afraid or simply forgetting why they are holding a gun and wandering off. It'd add a lot in my opinion.
@@SavedPotato I really like that idea. I wonder what the process of rehabilitation for super mutants would be in order to help treat their FEV-induced dementia. I know in Fallout New Vegas the Nightkin were being treated for Schizophrenia because of their Stealth Boys affecting various regions of their brain, but I wonder what the process would need to be to help Super Mutants treat with and cope with their dementia. Like.. Would you try treating them as if they were human, since that is where their memories and identity would go back to?
Ay you should do a video about fort Constantine and Mr Crowley I'm curious as to why the bed in CO headquarters is owned and why the doors are in red like negative karma actions
Also even the working vaults that were control samples, likely not all the people reached them when the bombs fell. I bet a lot of them only got half filled.
Love the videos as always! Cracked up when you put a round into Old Longfellow in VATS at 16:16
16:13
He had all the time in the world to correct his shot, but just went for it :D
Rad daddi here to bless us with radurday
Vault 15, from original Fallout. 2000 residents. Admittedly, the test scenario was overpopulation.
I thought it was groups of people with different beliefs?
@@ABulletCantStopABullMoose It was several different cultural or class groups, all crammed into Vault 15.
We also know about two other vaults, Vault 68 which held 999 men and 1 woman, and vault 69 which held 999 women and 1 man. I know this still isn't a TON of people, but its still a lot more than 100 - 200 as mentioned in this video, which does skew the numbers, and it can leave the imagination a bit more open for vaults we don't know anything about. Yes, I know this also leaves room in the imagination for less population as well, given there's a vault with only 1 man and a box full of puppets.
Only Vault 69 has been mentioned in canon and even then the source is pretty questionable. Imo it would be a waste of a vault even for Vault Tec. I do agree with you that large population vaults are a possibility especially in regard to control vaults.
THANK YOU I was on the wiki for vault 76 and it said it was projected at 500 and changed to 88 but there was no reference to back it up so I didn't know if it was true or not
Hell yeah, another norte video!!! 😎
Fusion is no longer theoretical! So cool dude
You can't talk about FEV strains and not explain the new plague and how it was released into the wasteland post war
Hmmmmmmm🤔
What you pointed out here only further progresses my theory about vault-tec.
Hi there there's some giant vault-tec facility underground that holds a massive amount of people and they've been receiving all the data from all of these vaults and are preparing for something huge in the future.
Or they had no intention whatsoever of saving humanity and thought they'd get a kick out of torturing the last remaining living people.
All we can tell from the vault so far is that they saved a very small fraction of our population and an even smaller portion of that actually survived their horrific experiments very few things have come out of any of vault tec vaults that could actually help humanity.
So did somebody invest billions and billions of dollars in the world's worst prank or what the f*** is going on
Great vid. Haven’t watched any others yet by my knowledge, but I highly recommend adjusting your mic audio. It’s very hard to ignore the static sound. It sounds like your gain might be a bit too high
A workaround for the lack of vault capacity could be to explain that a lot of people had their own vaults. There are a few cases that already indicate some people did this. To get around the problem of not seeing these vaults in game, they could imply that most of them became abandoned when occupants died or left, some ending up too radioactive to live in & as time past they just got covered over or people living in them purposely camouflaged their entrances to keep them hidden from potential raiders or enemies who might take them over for themselves.
i love this kind of video! great work!!
Kinda annoying how underrated your channel is
Keep up the great content!
"The world ended 25 years before The Great War. Just, no one knew it at the time."
The more I interact with the snallygasters in FO76, the more I am convinced that they are an early form or prototype of what would later become known as the Centaur.
8:40 I think I saw a small article, a real one, where fusion has been achieved, on a very small, lab only setting. Proof of real world concept I think.
We can do fusion, what we can do is create a fusion reactor which produces energy.
Presently, a fusion reaction requires a lot more energy input that we can extract from it. A momentary fusion reaction is a lot easier to accomplish than a sustained one.
These reactors are also massive and incredibly expensive to build and maintain. If our energy demands continue to grow as we progress our technology then we will probably have to pursue fusion energy more seriously.
If we're ever going to colonise other planets or the space around our solar system we'll probably want fusion to do it. Once you leave the earth's surface the benefits become even more significant because they not only produce immense amounts of energy but do so with very little need for fuel, even compared to fission.
lmao the david pumpkins suit at 6:45
I’ve been thinking about this ever since that first video!
Biggest misconception of people who haven’t played Fallout: the bombs xploded in the 50s. Who would guess 2077 happened to look exactly like the 50s, after all?
Biggest misconception of people who play Fallout: the BoS worship technology. They certainly care a lot about it, but the only prayer anyone ever makes is when Owen Lyons gives grace before a meal. he just quotes the Codex about the importance of the Brotherhood itself, no mention of any tech!
The vault populations have to be in the hundreds to possibly over a thousand for each vault. Why? Economy. There's no way Vaulttec could ever make money off of selling 80 rooms to people, the vault cost billions. Unless they collect $100,000 per month from the people who are buying 'rent' at the vault it would just be unfeasible. AND if the price for getting 1 month of security was your entire life savings, there's no way they'd send Vaulttec representatives to ask Average Joes to sign up, like what happened in the start of FO4. There's some non-sense in lore somewhere. Either the population lore doesn't make sense or the start of FO4 doesn't make sense.
P.S. I always felt like the games didn't give the play full access to the true vault size, just a small portion of it, due to game engine restrictions.
Two words: government subsidies. But about your point of the game's, limitations, it makes sense we don't get to see the entire layout due to problems such as collapsed rooms, destroyed elevators and submerged passages.
Personally i'm not a fan of the Fallout 4 vaults having such relatively minuscule population capacities
I know its more realistic, but i found Fallout 1 indicating that the average Vault population was around 1000 to be much more interesting than if they only had around Vault 81's measly 96 people.
Small Vaults are not a product of Fallout 4. Vault 22, while dimensionally large, had much of its space dedicated to agricultural research. The residential area of that Vault is very small compared to some others, like Vault 3. You must understand that most Vaults were not control Vaults designed to house loads of people. Most of them had specific purposes in mind, and therefore dedicated much of their space to housing specialized equipment and researchers. Vault 13 was a control Vault, and therefore *was* dedicated to housing large numbers of residents. Vault 81 on the other hand was not. It was designed for developing and testing diseases and cures on a small, controlled population. In fact, one of the things the Vault 81 dwellers talk about is how small their Vault is, and how they have to control their birth rates in order to avoid overcrowding and resource depletion. The reason they think this way is because until the events of Fallout 4 they believed that they were a control Vault, as they were unaware that a large portion of the Vault had been sectioned off and dedicated to a research staff that no one aside from the first Overseer knew about. Likewise, Vault 111 was made specifically to test the effects of cryogenic freezing on the human body, which is why about half of it is dedicated to housing cryogenic pods. No two Vaults are the same in purpose or internal layout. They are all unique.
So while there certainly could be more control Vaults with large populations like Vault 13, they are unlikely to feature in games because the smaller experimentation Vaults are a lot more interesting to design, write, and explore. Once you've seen one control Vault, you've pretty much seen them all. The closest thing to another control Vault that we've gotten is Fallout 3's Vault 101, which like Vault 13 was just designed to test the effects of living underground for extended periods of time.
Live for these videos lowkey
Please live for something else, I beg of you. One day, these videos will end, and you will be devastated... Be careful, please.
now I could be wrong but I swear that somewhere it says that their are some specific vaults to keep people alive and also im pretty sure that fev/radition mutated them futhur but great video
0:45 5:18 10:58 15:48 18:03
W
The fear of nuclear war may have contributed to the popularity of vacuum tube technology in Fallout, as nuclear weapons detonated at a high altitude can cause a massive EMP, which would be pretty bad for any transistors.
On Nuclear Fusion, if memory serves, we *have* actually managed to create power-positive nuclear fusion recently.
16:35 umm in fallout 3 the enclave had caged death claws they would send after you. They definitely saw post war combat. Not pre war obviously.
20:20 not totally correct, the first circuit board was invented in 1925. The transistor simply made them smaller, not as an idea. It was because of these early boards that the transistor even existed. This is why Fallout has a large device on your wrist, which would be a wristwatch in our world. Why computers are bigger, instead of laptops, and something many miss here, why a certain person had to put info on a plat chip. Because he "didnt" have the access to a transistor, where he could have simply put it on a digital chip instead. Without a transistor today, we would still have a type of Internet (Less advanced), we would still have a type of PC, and even Robots. It would be a different world without them and that is what happened in Fallout, the world we may have lived techology wise.
Remember there were vaults 68 and 69 with 1000 dwellers each.
That is true
I love your vids fam but you always make me think about the Burger King foot lettuce voice lmao
The resource wars canon really makes the amount of fusion powered buildings in FO4 look silly
one thing to improve- valve tubes all still produced and also a micro tubes like nuvistor-6s51n, smaller compant and cheaper than standard tubes
3:20 According to the “Fallout Bible”, the population of pre-war USA in the Fallout universe was closer to 400 million, so the percentage of citizens that would have been accepted for a vault would have been even LOWER.
Chris Avellone came in my ass in a dream and told me that the Fallout Bible isn't actually canon. You can look that second part up, it's true.
I thought I caught you in a mistake, instead I learned something.
Kudos.
:)
Love your videos!
Uh.... I think you're making some misconceptions about vault populations. You even acknowledge it, but just keep going with a premise you recognize is flawed. There is no reason to believe the vaults shown in the games are representative of the vaults not shown. A vault with robo-brain occupants or in vr are more interesting than a vault of a several hundred people just living their life so they're more likely to show up in a game. That being said, you're correct in claiming there was no way the entire population of the US was going to be sheltered, but is that a misconception people have? In game there is plenty of text saying there wouldn't be enough vaults, and the existence of Pulowski preservation shelters also suggest that. And even if all vaults had 1000 capacity, you'd need well over 3000 vaults to house america.
Great video, thanks for the effort.
As a side note, transistors (or more properly semiconductors) can coexist in the same circuit. I'm looking at a vintage tabletop radio that has that right now.
But damage to yhe semiconductor can also kill them. Therefore I choose to believe that such hybrid circutry is super common in FO.
Semiconductors arrived almost a century late in FO, and combined with EMP fears likely lead to yhe continued dominance of vacuum tubes.
Good stuff. Many thanks.
I love u Norte keep up the good vids
great vid
I don't know if it's a theory held by anyone else but instead of accepting scaling I just accept that the distances are real to their earth that their earth is literally smaller hence a lot less resources and it also explains how people could travel so far distances without dying in the wasteland