As someone who is military, a reasoning for not doing a straight path to the oil rig in the vertibids is: Making it harder to track and follow them. Thus helping keep the location of their base more secret
@@Shushkin dude like 1/2 the military is nerds lol, 1/3 of it is muscle head high school drop outs, and the last 1/5 is career officer know it alls lmao
My dad is a retired oil rig worker. He says that it's not that there isn't oil in deeper waters, it's just not searched for because the costs of extracting are higher. You want to extract from a higher position because oil rises. In a world with less oil, it makes sense to search for oil in places that haven't been discovered yet. And in places which would be considered too costly to bother to survey now.
I mean, they probably weren't even extracting oil in the first place. It just makes no sense to use it when there are commonplace, objectively better alternatives. I mean, the Enclave are the US Government, but they can't engage in corporate incest alone. Even if they couldn't extract Uranium from the ocean, should we believe the in-universe claims of a resource crisis, the potential energy from the oil would be so negligible it wouldn't even be considered
Thank you for pointing that out. If the computer had it farther out to sea than it "actually" was, that could be explained with drift over the years it came closer to the states. Or perhaps the Enclave intentionally have brought the rig a little closer to the mainland, which tactically makes since for their "war" effort. Any distance closer to shore would make their fuel and supplies last longer, and it would improve response time to mainland targets or FOBs.
@@alexanderchristie9623 No matter where the rig is the freighter loaded with it's oil will go to the nearest deep water harbor it can unload at not just any ole coast line. Then be shipped to again the nearest refinery. So not sure where the reduced supply line relates to the rigs distance from shore.
Why would they need to tow it? It's nuclear-powered, so it's not like energy is a major issue. If they needed it moved somewhere, they could just, you know, *DRIVE IT THERE*.
We are talking about obsidian(I know, I know that company went by a different name back then{note 1}) here, you really thought they put that much thought into it? They were Lazier than Bethesda at the time. Odds are they didn't care one bit if the rig could be moved or not. The most likely didn't think the fan base would care or look to into it. {1} for clarification Urquhart officially left Interplay in 2003 with Avellone, Parker, Monahan, and Jones, and founded Obsidian Entertainment with them the same year. Same people same company different name.
Could be that the rig was fake - a Poseidon Energy coverup funded by the pre-war Enclave to create a fake oil platform to serve as a base after the imminent Great War. That would explain the odd location. Also, as for the documented location (i.e. where the computer thought it was) could be a security tactic. I remember something I read about a secret airfield in Northern Europe during WW2. Pilots were given coordinates for the location of the base before they were told to fly there for an operation, but once there, no base was anywhere nearby, but if you flew through the area you'd get a radio broadcast from someone on the ground that told you the true location. It was supposedly to keep possible spies in the unit from passing along information about the airfield's location by supplying misinformation to everyone who was told about it (until you actually went there)
I can definitely see an oil rig being faked, n had that thought as well. If they can afford a few hundred underground bunkers housing upwards of thousands each (canonical, obviously there's like 7 NPCs in a vault lol...) They could build a mock rig. Especially since most of the cost is actually getting the oil up n out. God I love collective head canon
When you watch a game vid and the comments tell you interesting history. Edit: My turn! Someone else motioned that not all oil rigs are stationary. Many float and are intended to be moved.
One thing I wonder about the oil rig is if it has to be in a viable drilling location at all. People tend to think of oil rigs as immobile, but they aren't, and it's a lot easier to make them semi-mobile than to build them in place.
Good point. But as I recall they said the rig was where the Enclave was getting their vertibird fuel from.. So that explains the rig, but now we have a problem with where are they getting the fuel.
I'm nowhere near versed on how sea oil rigs work, but I figure the same thing. So I'd assume it has to be at least somewhat near whatever viable source of oil they're using for vertibirds. But I guess the oil wasn't that important since they use vertibirds on the regular in F.O3 and 4.
They're not random villagers, they specifically wanted the Arroyans, because they were descendants of the control group that was placed in vault 13. Which is why they abducted Vault 13's inhabitants as well.
The oil rig wasn't over a natural deposit. The Enclave created an artificial oil reserve in a natural feature they found under the ocean in the decades before the Great War. They slowly accumulated as much crude oil as they could and stored it in an area that they controlled and the "oil rig" was a decoy for their pre war operation and the base they would use to retrieve it.
Just far a quick cover of one of your points. The reason they would fly south along the coast to San Francisco then head West out to see it easy. Military Pilots do this ALL the time. Its simply so you can find a notable landmark, and head DUE west. Not North West, Not South West, not South South West. Due West. This leaves the smallest gap for error in case instrumentation fails, or if the homing signal cuts out.
@@MidanMagistratethat’s an inaccurate description, there were most likely coordinates to the oil rig which is provided by a Chinese sub (which kinda shows how overt the Enclave was with their contingencies).
I've taken a small seaplane up the coast of British Columbia couple times, and instead of just flying diagonally across the Georgia straight to where we're going, they always fly up the coast then across, and they stick close to a number of islands as they fly across the straight. I've always guessed it so if something goes wrong they're close to land, I don't think it's unreasonable that a vertibird would follow the same logic, minimizing the amount of time they are over the open ocean.
@@MidanMagistrate by that logic though, Radkings entire video is moot, as you can explain all of it away as "its fallout" maybr they got new drilling tech that allowed them to extract oil from unconventional locations. Etc. So we are merely taking the "its fallout" explaination away, and discussing real world solutions to the problem. So when he said it doesnt make sense to c Fly south along the coast, then west, i provided a reason I knew as to why military pilots do that same thing. Others provided their knowledge. Thats all. XD we arent saying you are wrong, just providing alternate possibilities xD
one mild correction, it was 3's FEV that was designed to just kill post-war mutants, FEV Curling-13 was design to kill literally everyone....who didn't have the inoculation.
What if its a deepsea drilling rig that was never intended to actually drill for oil? The Enclave just used the platform because it is a tested structure and provides a believable cover, don't really need to be over a oil field.
@@Shushkin Yes, so makes sense that they built it for "oil". Im pretty sure in game lore, there's not a lot (if any) of oil in America left. So Im sure it was purely built out of self preservation. The rich elites and politicians knew it was happening so they ran off there to make sure they didnt die.
The confusion regarding the oils rig makes sense if we consider that it isn’t an oil rig at all and maintains no processes commonly found within one. You could make the argument that the excuse of the oil rig was used to secure any funding that couldn’t be discretely gained (workers engineers etc.). It would be interesting to see if the show tackles this at all.
In fallout 4 there's a terminal entry in the boston bugle building with a few articles and one of them is about "Where is the president ?" In the article the writer speculates based on an unknown source where the president has gone. Raven rock is mentioned at first, but according to his "highly-ranked anonymous source" the president is on an poseidon energy oil rig just off the coast of San Francisco and the official designation is "Enclave Control Station". I don't think the oil rig was an actual oil rig and just a mock up to look like one and the GNN spread propaganda to make it look like one pre war, so it doesn't get targeted by the nukes. China maybe didn't nuke the rig in case they somehow survived and could capture it, cause they really thought the US managed to successfully drill into deep sea oil reservoirs and just get this technology for free. Instead the rig was an propaganda mock up and not really functional.
@@Shushkin I had honestly just thought that Eden was like a brain scan of Richardson, or maybe even a head in a jar like House. Wouldn't be the first time the Enclave wasn't really telling the truth.
I like this lore inaccuracy and speculation video and wouldn't mind more. I wonder if the coast line changed dramatically in the last 165 years since the Great War? If the characters map is a pip boy map or a pre war map it wouldn't be necessary accurate to the actual California coat line in 2241.
One should also consider the source of this information: The Enclave would have a very vested interest in spreading misinformation about the location of their main base.
The amount of nuclear weaponry involved in the great war caused earthquakes and small continental upheaval. I think that is stated in the intro of F1, but how exactly true that is I can't say. Could be just artful descriptions.
I believe the computer coordinates were correct! After all, who would go looking for a secret oil rig in a small inland pond? Nobody! It's the perfect hiding place.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Enclave Oil rig was abandoned Pre-war and then co-opted by the enclave. I assumed it was no longed used for drilling oil, and just used for research and such.
If I had to guess, the oil rig is in the same region as the same island that you see in the movie Commando, where someone can fly two hours off the coast of Santa Barbara in a twin engine propeller plane and land on an island populated by fully armed South American commandos armed with US military equipment. A 1980s action movie would never take liberties with geography, right? I think we may need to take a closer look into what people are really doing on Catalina Island. /s
@ 11:30 The vertibird could have been sticking to the land so they could spend as little time as possible flying over open ocean. Makes sense if you had to operate a century old flying vehicle.
I would personally wonder if the "Oil Rig" is in fact actually a military base and was always intended to be a such. Given unreliable nature of the people behind it...
Real quick IRL lore about gas. Some experts think it could be generated by a bacterial process. Just as we have bacteria that eats oil there is probably bacteria that produces it.
Yep we have them in our gut I had gas bloat which you sort out by increasing your good bacteria.The doctor described it as too many bad bacteria in your gut Farting and not enough good bacteria to break down the farts hilarious yet accurate and easy to understand in layman terms
they could fly west at san francisco to avoid alerting the NCR. Which would explain why all the soldiers say it's west, once over the ocean, without navigation tools, you wouldn't know which way you was heading.
@@thefrozenyak5272 go out in the middle of the ocean and it's about 11:00 am.. all the water seems the same. you sitting in the back of a vertibird relaxing, doors closed. you ain't watching the sun. you have no clue which way of north, south, east, or west. As for the stars, you think some enclave grunt is running around with a sextant, and knowledge of how to use one, some of those people can't read.
@@saulalessio2251 Is it established that the Enclave never travels in the morning or evening, when the position of the sun would make the direction you're headed obvious? Or that the Enclave's survival training does not include basic navigation, ie, how to tell what direction you're headed? I never mentioned precise navigation, just how people have figured out which direction they were headed without using tools for literally thousands of years. But if we're bringing tools into play, what information is provided in the heads up display of a power armor helmet? Because if I were designing something like that, I'd include a compass in the display.
The oil Rig in the news report could be a location that China and the US fought over while the Enclave one was a different rig entirely, it makes little sense that China could build an oil rig so close to the mainland US and get anywhere close to making it a fight for the US to take, so maybe the Enclave oil rig is one only the US knew about and built in secret
With the Vertibird going from Arroyo to San Francisco before going west, maybe they needed to refuel? Maybe they can’t go the distance from Arroyo over the ocean to the Oil rig without refueling. Edit: looked it up and the internet says they only have a distance of 150 miles before needing to refuel. So if the rig is 175-200 miles away from San Francisco the Vertibirds can barely make it there so it makes sense to stop and refuel along the way.
Ocean oil rigs are mobile platforms so the location is not a set location. More so when not actively drilling. So I would assume one of the first orders on the rig was to move away from any documented/known locations for the sake of security. After the great war.
The issue with the idea the rig doesnt have oil is fallout set up the Vertabirds as being run by conventional fuel hence the limited range and need for Navaro. meaning the enclave had acess to an oil reserve likely the one the rigs built on
With how ingrained Chinese spy’s where the chance of them finding out about the oil rig is a really funny possibility also all the submarines surely one of them would of noticed something
I think the Oil Rig is a defunct oil rig repurposed by Poseidon into an isolated base of operations, and possibly a forward outpost for Poseidon to chase after the deep sea oil deposit. It’s completely possible that purely from the length of time, accurate information about the oil rig could’ve been lost and retold with inaccuracies
Thoughts on a fallout game set in the deep south like Louisiana? I feel the heavy use of off shore oil rigs would be awesome along with seeing a fallout esc mardi gras would be sick
Hell yeah. For as consequential as rivers have been for literally all of human history, it’s frankly weird how little the Mississippi gets mentioned in Post-apocalyptic fiction.
Yikes, I almost missed this one. Been scrolling past it because the thumbnail being split like it is looked like advertisements/shorts/community posts as I was scrolling past. Glad I noticed it was a video of hours this time scrolling. Thanks for the great content, loving it as always 💚
The way I see it, the rig has 3 possible options of its existence. 1) It really was an oil-rig, but was just repurposed and towed to a different location. As @resevesh said, they are really just floating, non-stationary bases. 2) It was only officially an oil-rig for public purposes, but secretly a research base for Poseidon Energy. As such, it could've been placed there on purpose for whatever research they were doing. This would be supported by the layout we see, with lots of databanks and areas I'd call labs. 3) Extending from #2, it was only originally from Poseidon Energy, but secretly bought by the government or some other high-ranking official for the Enclave. This would be supported by the fact that there were suites for a president and military personell. Granted such things could have been retrofitted at any point post-apoc, but they look far too pristine and pre-war made.
This is a fantasy alternate reality. It's possible there is oil there. It's also possible the vertibirds they saw flew over sanfran on a mission south of sanfran, did said mission, and then flower to the oil rig. Also, I thought in fo1-2 it wasn't stated what the vertibirds use as fuel, but in later games it was either stater or implied they used the same nuclear tech the cars and power armor do in game. Really well out together video either way.
For the flight path of the vertibirds, it could be that they were minimising the time they spent over the water. We know vertibirds aren't perfect, with multiple wrecks across the series, and crashing down on the land would be much more survivable than crashing into the water. So while the flight path is longer and goes across occupied areas it also spends significantly less time over the water. Plus in Fallout 2 it's not like the Enclave are trying to be stealthy, they control the area north of San Francisco, both with active patrols and attacks on targets across the wasteland. While I doubt they would rush into a war with the NCR they probably also don't care that the NCR see them flying overhead. At the time of Fallout 2 the Enclave are the only air capable faction.
Maybe it was never an oil rig. Maybe it was a "research rig", aka secret spy rig. As a child reading Popular Science I remember reading articles about the Glomar Explorer when it was looking for "Manganese Nodules" wink wink. That sounds like a totally Enclave thing to have done. Thanks for the great vids.
Regarding the computer's coordinates, I imagine it could be like a cypher code. You had to do a 3-step process to determine the Oil Rig's actual location, something I doubt all that many wastelanders or pre-war civilians would know how to do. But military personnel would probably know the process and could determine where the real location is. A military pilot or navigator, for example, would know what to do. Though that raises the question of how the Chosen One or allies figured it out, but maybe they made a lucky guess and switched the coordinates around after the first attempt. If the Enclave wanted to keep the rig secret from normal wastelanders, intentionally fudging the coordinates and only informing the pilots and navigators would probably work. The scientists at Navarro only know the direction, so they aren't in the know about the fudging. I'm not sure about the other stuff, though. It's possible that the Oil Rig goes to drill for oil in the South every few years or so and then returns to the location given in the deciphered coordinates, making it a mobile platform.
I think your location pick is really good. I was also thinking through this whole video that maybe the Enclave tells their troops to give a vague location to throw off espionage attempts, and the computer told to give false coords because either A] nobody in the wasteland will know how to read coords or B] it would, again, throw off people trying to find them. Like maybe Enclave members are all told the actual location, so if anyone asks it means they aren't with the Enclave, so they should give them the false location.
It is probably of the coast of san fran because the vertibirds would use major landmarks (like san fran) to fly around. This is why they would go to san fran and then go west being that any GPS would be destroyed but compass systems would still work. I also think that it was disguised as an oil rig so location was not that important
Y'know? The best way to learn something is if you are doing it with something you enjoy, i just had my morning coffee, and knowing that Frank Horrigan fought the choosen quite close to Baja California is enough to make a man smile. Quite interesting knowing more about oil rigs. They did put a lot of effort on the post-nuclear role playing game.
I checked, those coordinates are definitely valid, but the distance offshore is not. The format you're using is incorrect. It should look like: 37°18'00.0"N 128°07'00.0"W. That point is 265 miles offshore. Either that or the point represents the center of the oil rig and the edge of the oil rig is actually 175 miles offshore... meaning the oil rig would be about (assuming its a square) 32,400 square miles in size. Which would make it just a bit larger than the state of Maine and just a bit smaller than the state of Indiana.
I believe it's reasonable that the people and computer were either intentionally misleading or intentionally misled as to the actual location of the rig.
I seriously don't see the dates and other nitpicky details about when the last deposit was found and tapped to be the main problem with the Rig. More so it's odd that it wouldn't have been a priority target for the PRC to hit when the nukes started flying.
Camp Navarro is more likely the City of Fort Bragg since the actual Navarro is a tiny town of 100 people in a densely forested valley. My guess is Navarro is a cooler name. There is also a BSA Camp Navarro north of the village of Navarro along Flynn Creek Road.
I'm here to say nothing other than the fact I grew up here! Right on Flynn creek, very funny to see our little town with a single store in a game series I grew up playing (started with f03). Can confirm we've lost livestock due to enclave patrols and death claws in the area.
I think you're reading too much into what's likely just some random dev putting some random numbers into the dialogue, hoping nobody ever bothers to verify them. Either that, or Fallout 2's "oil rig" was never actually an oil rig, it is known that the Enclave, or the US Goverment as they've been known at the time, secretly moved there a while before the Great War, so it's not unfeasible it was actually a purpose-built doomsday base of operations only posing as an oil rig, rather than an actual oil rig that had been repurposed.
another idea: SInce it is not said (or at least I don't remember it, if I am wrong the whole theory can be ignored ^^) that the oil rig is still active there is another option: Nowadays all oil rigs are more or less floating on the ocean and are anchored and drilling holes in the ocean floor. (thats why the mexican sea oil spill occured, since they did not calculate the water correctly and the "ship" caused the breaking of the tubes) So they just took one oil rig and floated it as more or less mobile base to the location it can be found in the game since it far away from the coast not to be targeted and seen and near enough to reach the shores.
Imagine if Bethesda made this mistake instead. You wouldn’t stop hearing about it for years lol like the Bethesda ruined jet myth that was perpetuated by ppl who liked to say they played the classic games as a badge of honour even through they probably put in 20 minutes into it and dropped the game
I live in Northern California about an hour North of Navarro. It’s only got like 200 people there max. I always think about F2 when we drive through on our way south
The vertibirds supposedly coming from the north to fly over San Francisco could be them using it as a point of reference. Enclave pilots might just be using these as flight path markers to reduce the chances of pilots getting lost.
There was a proposal a few years back to drill oil in the Central california zone which is west of san francisco and the only reason it never went through was protests about the area being a marine sanctuary
There is also the possibility of the oil right being a moveable rig (the ones in deep sea are such types of rigs) and by watching some of the tech of fallout maybe it has some kind of space kraut technology to drill to such depths. Also I have to say that keeping in mind its one of the most important bastions of the pre war goverment it has sense to be some kind of moveable base to re take América and eventually Canada and México and maybe even move it to alaska or hawaii to work as a kind of aircraft carrier till they fix enough navy assets to continue the reconquest according to their plans.
Fallout 2 Is exactly the same game as the first Fallout but with new content and slight upgrades on the gameplay. And people complains about modern sequels being made lazy.
@@davidfrancisco3502 You can't have played both games then, they may have the same graphics and interface style, but the tone of FO2 is _completely_ different from FO1. Fallout 1 was a straight-up gritty post apocalyptic adventure, Fallout 2 has some of the craziest dark humor as well as multiple 4th wall breaks. FO2 is crazier than wild wasteland FNV and it maintains that the whole game.
11:45 Taking a path like that isn't necessarily weird, for one they might be also carrying out a patrol, but also it's generally preferable to fly over land in case of an emergency. It's not so much a thing irl anymore because aircraft have gotten so reliable but both comercial and military flights used to be planned like that and the FAA still does have rules demanding that all comercial flights never get more than 225 minutes away from an airfield, which is why flights across the atlantic route close to Greenland. Another factor might be navigation, GPS presumably isn't available in the post apocalypse and without it navigating across open ocean is pretty difficult, so you'd want to avoid long trips across the ocean. The Enclave base would probably have something like a radar beacon to assist with navigation but that'd have limited range so pilots might follow the coast until they pick up its signal. Though that being said the fact that this guy had some clue of who was on the Vertibirds indicates that they just had some other task in SF and had to land.
It doesn't make any sense why the remnants of the US government would hang around in an oil rig in the Pacific. A single Chinese Communist warship can sail up there, fire a few missiles, and eradicate what's left of the US government. Fallout 3's Enclave made more sense in that they're in an underground bunker close to the capital where they can retake it, while the bulk of their forces are using an old air force base as a rallying point. Both are far inland and are harder to assault; if it wasn't for the Lone Wanderer being brought into Raven Rock, and if it wasn't for them turning the Enclave's own orbital strike weapon against their own base in the airfield, the Enclave would've remained strong.
Super late, but I actually have a very different hypothesis. This isn't well-known, but the San Francisco area is actually one of the biggest oil refinery areas in the US, largely in the Martinez/Antioch area. Interestingly, other major refinery areas are Bakersfield and Los Angeles - and these are the only real-life areas covered by a Fallout game with large amounts of oil refining, I believe. Maybe they were abandoned due to lack of supply or destroyed by bombs, but it's interesting that none of these areas have the old refinery buildings or infrastructure mentioned, especially since we get a pretty good look at Bakersfield as Necropolis. I think the Enclave's oil rig wasn't for extraction - it was an off-shore refinery, possibly because the pre-war government feared sabotage or enemy action if fixed-site, on-shore oil refineries were used instead of a mobile refinery at a secret location. Tankers bring crude oil to the rig from anywhere they can find it, and refined oil is either used on-site or transferred by tanker to shore - which would also provide a reliable fuel supply for gas-powered military vehicles and equipment if it were cut off from the rest of the US. Say, by the Great War. We have something similar in real life in FPSO units - most are converted oil tankers which now act as mobile, floating processing units. We use oil tankers for convenience, but if an oil production platform were no longer usable, perhaps the pre-war government would convert it instead.
Radking, I greatly enjoy watching your Fallout Lore videos, especially ones concerning locations, geology, spatial distributions of factions. I do want to say, with modern day flight patterns on civilian airlines, most aircraft try to hug the coast or stay over land as long as possible so that, in case of emergency, pilots can land the aircraft on land and not in the ocean to increase chances of survival. The Enclave might have done similarly, especially if flying such a long distance (for example, to Arroyo) l just thought I’d mention it since it increases the likelihood of the oil rig being off the coast of San Francisco.
Someone already pointed out that not flying straight for the oil rig from Navarro was to keep the exact location of the base obscured, but I want to offer an alternative/supplemental explanation. I think they along the coast is simply for safety. After all, the Veritbirds are a century old, so one crashing isn't out of the question, no matter how well maintained. And given the Enclave likely has limited/no ablitity to produce new build vertibirds, each one is one is a precious resource that must preserved, so even a relatively minor malfunction can force a complete loss if over open water. Whereas overland, another team can be dispatched to recover the aircraft, repairing or completely destroying it as deemed necessary. The same goes for personnel, the Enclave simply does not have many people, so losing them to simple accidents is unacceptable. My guess is that whatever general manages the vertibirds decided that the risk of losing a vertibird with all hands over open water due to technical failure is not worth the slightly increased risk of attack by flying down the coast.
Maybe an ex oil rig that wasn't used to drill oil anymore? And maybe they don't really know where it is themselves, just more or less the direction and they get the details to ther verties. It's on a need to know basis.
I would say a big reason to fly to San-Fransisco then turn west to the rig could be a matter of navigation, by following the coast down to San Fran then bolting straight west you could simply the navigation process since all you need to do is turn west eventually your pilots will become very familiar with this and have an easier time of it leading to less strain for long flights. I commonly play Flight sims and it's very common for me to follow Rivers, Major Roads and Coastlines, all significant landmarks that are often very easy to identify from any altitude and most ranges, I also find that flying from a fixed point along a straight bearing, cities ar a MAJOR component to my Navigation since they are almost impossible to miss and will have an abundance of roads and often rivers I can then follow, as a more specific example, IL-2 my personal favourite flight sim recently released the English Channel as a map and I have found using Caen as a reference city to be very useful even on return trips to Britain as it's a known route I have a lot of familiarity with flying. this is not to say you cannot fly straight from point A to point B via instrument or the use of GPS, this is just my theory on why it they had the Enclave do this.. outside of making it at all possible for the player to have this interaction.
It could be possible that the vertibirds flew south until San Francisco and then turned west to the oil rig to minimize the amount of travel over the ocean, since it's easier to survive a crash on land than on the ocean, as well as recover any gear or personnel.
A simple explination for the vertibirds flight path is navigation. After the great war we can assume things like the GPS network are unavailable, thus resulting the pilots being forced back to compass and map navigation. Its pretty easy to plot a course if you use known landmarks, and San Francisco would be a visible landmark from the air. It also works at nighttime as there would be some lights that the pilots could use to determine their location.
An idea I had while watching (which other commenters mentioned) is that the base personnel and computer were lying in order to obscure the true location of the base.
I have 2 ideas about the location. 1: the enclave lied about where the base is. It put the wrong coordinates in the computer and told the people the wrong location in order to keep anyone from finding it and possibly to keep it safe. Or 2: due to the desperate search for oil, new technology was developed for extracting oil in areas previously considered impossible. And that it is 175 mile west of San Francisco. Fallout technology and its timeline doesn’t completely match our real life timeline and technology.
Personally, when lore becomes really speculative, I begin to lose interest in it. I also feel it's ok to admit that the real life developers of this game just probably made a few mistakes when writing the lore for this place. Incorrect coordinates? The devs probably didn't want to go find a map. You couldn't just Google it in 1997. Not geologically viable? The devs probably don't know anything about geology and just thought "oils rigs go in the ocean".
So I haven't meaningfully played any FO games pre Bethesda, so these are legitimate questions here. With regards to the coordinates, would we actually expect an honest answer just giving away the bases location that easily from a terminal? Giving false coordinates would certainly make more sense then just saying it can't give out that information. People that think they have what they need tend to leave well enough alone. As for being West of San Francisco, how much do we know of whether or not the people we're asking for it's location actually know exactly where it is? Do we expect they that should know of it's exact location? If they only know of where it is based on talk and observations, isn't it possible they just see things going out westward and follow a reasonable assumption that it's simply West of San Francisco? Vertibirds could be seen going out westward and taking a sea route south, and to the people at the base it would just seem like it is simply West of San Francisco. Again, I am not familiar with this game specifically, so just honestly asking.
Fallout 1&2 had cursed developments and as stated in the video the devs themselves have said that the lore is spotty which was why the Fallout Bible was made so that the developers and fans together could hash out the lore and fix contradictions in preparation for Fallout 3 [ Van Buren ] until the franchise was sold to Bethesda in a bid.
From what I've read, it WAS a real oil rig, as evidenced byt he fact that China and the U.S. competed over it due to it being one of the last places oil could be found (Pre-Great war). The oil was incredibly deep down, but due to new technology, it could be harvested. The U.S. got to it first, and was accused of sabotage (perhaps the chinese vessel sent to build a rig sank). The oil is probably all gone by fallout 2 though, if the Rig hasn't outright moved.
its possible the vertibirds took that weird path because their pilots weren't skilled at navigating in the post-apoc environment.. plotting a least time path would require some pretty accurate positioning of both the aircraft and the destination, to figure out the correct course. but by using landmarks like the ruins of SanFran, they could simplify navigation, since they'd know that if they took a course due west of the ruined city, they'd reach the platform and could be guided in by the platform's radar and flight control. presumably they would have navigated from Arroyo to nevarro to san fran using similar landmark references. using such navigation, you don't need positionign systems, just reference maps with notable landmarks and a compass. the maps could easily have been compiled by the Nevarro staff and pilots.
"we'll use Poseidon to refuel our Vertibirds." Yeah ok, fly 340 miles round trip over the ocean just to fill the machine that probably burns through fuel.
I feel like this just a case of the old writing adage, “if you’re not a florist, don’t write about florists, because actual florists will rip you to shreds.” Obviously Fallout’s writers are very talented, but it could be that they weren’t as well versed in geology hence why the rig is where it is.
It's 100% the faults of devs. But since the devs weren't Bethesda at the time that would be blasphemy so I better say it was intentionally wrong by the computer even though it was clearly the devs fault who most likely figured the fan base wouldn't care nor look further into it.
I think you’re probably right about the oil rig location, it makes the most sense. I’ve got to admit that the idea is brilliant. With the right processing equipment, the Enclave could pump out oil to convert into fuel or jet fuel and power their vehicles and equipment for a long time. I’m surprised that they relied only on vertibirds though. Having a few boats would have made for some decent flexibility when it came to mainland operations. However I’m almost equally inclined to think that the o Enclave Oil Rig was never a real oil rig. To me it’s almost equally possible that it was designed from the ground up to be a secret military base and location for the president/government to retreat to and the oil rig was just a cover story.
As someone who is military, a reasoning for not doing a straight path to the oil rig in the vertibids is:
Making it harder to track and follow them. Thus helping keep the location of their base more secret
I love it that there's nerds in the military as well.
@@Shushkin dude like 1/2 the military is nerds lol, 1/3 of it is muscle head high school drop outs, and the last 1/5 is career officer know it alls lmao
@@zombiefanatic4833 Fair enough.
@@Shushkin Can confirm, I am infantry and most of us love Fallout, on top of that a good chunk even play DnD
@@zombiefanatic4833 And 99% are rednecks
My dad is a retired oil rig worker. He says that it's not that there isn't oil in deeper waters, it's just not searched for because the costs of extracting are higher. You want to extract from a higher position because oil rises.
In a world with less oil, it makes sense to search for oil in places that haven't been discovered yet. And in places which would be considered too costly to bother to survey now.
And it’s not like the enclave has to pay money
I mean, they probably weren't even extracting oil in the first place. It just makes no sense to use it when there are commonplace, objectively better alternatives. I mean, the Enclave are the US Government, but they can't engage in corporate incest alone. Even if they couldn't extract Uranium from the ocean, should we believe the in-universe claims of a resource crisis, the potential energy from the oil would be so negligible it wouldn't even be considered
Not to mention the idea that we might have better oil deposit detection abilities in the future.
You could tow the rig, a lot of them aren't stationary
It doesn't have to drill in order to be a base
Deep sea rigs actually float
Thank you for pointing that out. If the computer had it farther out to sea than it "actually" was, that could be explained with drift over the years it came closer to the states. Or perhaps the Enclave intentionally have brought the rig a little closer to the mainland, which tactically makes since for their "war" effort. Any distance closer to shore would make their fuel and supplies last longer, and it would improve response time to mainland targets or FOBs.
@@alexanderchristie9623 No matter where the rig is the freighter loaded with it's oil will go to the nearest deep water harbor it can unload at not just any ole coast line. Then be shipped to again the nearest refinery. So not sure where the reduced supply line relates to the rigs distance from shore.
Why would they need to tow it?
It's nuclear-powered, so it's not like energy is a major issue. If they needed it moved somewhere, they could just, you know, *DRIVE IT THERE*.
We are talking about obsidian(I know, I know that company went by a different name back then{note 1}) here, you really thought they put that much thought into it?
They were Lazier than Bethesda at the time.
Odds are they didn't care one bit if the rig could be moved or not.
The most likely didn't think the fan base would care or look to into it.
{1} for clarification Urquhart officially left Interplay in 2003 with Avellone, Parker, Monahan, and Jones, and founded Obsidian Entertainment with them the same year.
Same people same company different name.
I didn't knew that! That makes a lot of sense.
A moment of silence for all the fallen enclave members that serving in the Enclave oil rig Sandwich bar when it explode o7
No way its kuro toaster!!!!! Is this some kind of radking discord reference????? 😲😲😲😲
I know your cloning yourself kuro
@@generalgrievous2580 nuh uh
@@yololollipops2446 shed is here too
@@shedninjareal holy moly its end game biggest crossover in history!!!!
Could be that the rig was fake - a Poseidon Energy coverup funded by the pre-war Enclave to create a fake oil platform to serve as a base after the imminent Great War. That would explain the odd location. Also, as for the documented location (i.e. where the computer thought it was) could be a security tactic. I remember something I read about a secret airfield in Northern Europe during WW2. Pilots were given coordinates for the location of the base before they were told to fly there for an operation, but once there, no base was anywhere nearby, but if you flew through the area you'd get a radio broadcast from someone on the ground that told you the true location. It was supposedly to keep possible spies in the unit from passing along information about the airfield's location by supplying misinformation to everyone who was told about it (until you actually went there)
Or follow might have different ocean levels like in half life due to the Great war
I can definitely see an oil rig being faked, n had that thought as well. If they can afford a few hundred underground bunkers housing upwards of thousands each (canonical, obviously there's like 7 NPCs in a vault lol...) They could build a mock rig. Especially since most of the cost is actually getting the oil up n out.
God I love collective head canon
When you watch a game vid and the comments tell you interesting history.
Edit: My turn! Someone else motioned that not all oil rigs are stationary. Many float and are intended to be moved.
@@dooshopo Nope. Vehicles in fallout had all switched to nuclear power by the time the bombs fell. That's why cars give radiation when they explode.
@@onba7726 Not sure about later series and what the BOS did with the verts they built after 2 but the verts in 2 were gas powered not nuclear.
One thing I wonder about the oil rig is if it has to be in a viable drilling location at all. People tend to think of oil rigs as immobile, but they aren't, and it's a lot easier to make them semi-mobile than to build them in place.
Good point. But as I recall they said the rig was where the Enclave was getting their vertibird fuel from.. So that explains the rig, but now we have a problem with where are they getting the fuel.
I always thought those big legs on the rigs went all the way down to the sea floor
I'm nowhere near versed on how sea oil rigs work, but I figure the same thing. So I'd assume it has to be at least somewhat near whatever viable source of oil they're using for vertibirds.
But I guess the oil wasn't that important since they use vertibirds on the regular in F.O3 and 4.
@@theblondesiouxsiesioux the enclave don’t use them in 4. They don’t even appear in 4.
They're not random villagers, they specifically wanted the Arroyans, because they were descendants of the control group that was placed in vault 13. Which is why they abducted Vault 13's inhabitants as well.
Also even then wouldn’t they be technically be wastelanders, like either exposure or intermarriage with locals.
It's also kind of convenient for the plot
The oil rig wasn't over a natural deposit. The Enclave created an artificial oil reserve in a natural feature they found under the ocean in the decades before the Great War. They slowly accumulated as much crude oil as they could and stored it in an area that they controlled and the "oil rig" was a decoy for their pre war operation and the base they would use to retrieve it.
Just far a quick cover of one of your points. The reason they would fly south along the coast to San Francisco then head West out to see it easy. Military Pilots do this ALL the time. Its simply so you can find a notable landmark, and head DUE west. Not North West, Not South West, not South South West. Due West. This leaves the smallest gap for error in case instrumentation fails, or if the homing signal cuts out.
This is fallout though, the series where you can just tell an automated boat to go somewhere and it will.
@@MidanMagistratethat’s an inaccurate description, there were most likely coordinates to the oil rig which is provided by a Chinese sub (which kinda shows how overt the Enclave was with their contingencies).
I've taken a small seaplane up the coast of British Columbia couple times, and instead of just flying diagonally across the Georgia straight to where we're going, they always fly up the coast then across, and they stick close to a number of islands as they fly across the straight. I've always guessed it so if something goes wrong they're close to land, I don't think it's unreasonable that a vertibird would follow the same logic, minimizing the amount of time they are over the open ocean.
@@Canageek I'm saying it's fallout where a majority of things are automated, the boat you take to Far Harbor wad automated
@@MidanMagistrate by that logic though, Radkings entire video is moot, as you can explain all of it away as "its fallout" maybr they got new drilling tech that allowed them to extract oil from unconventional locations. Etc. So we are merely taking the "its fallout" explaination away, and discussing real world solutions to the problem. So when he said it doesnt make sense to c
Fly south along the coast, then west, i provided a reason I knew as to why military pilots do that same thing. Others provided their knowledge. Thats all. XD we arent saying you are wrong, just providing alternate possibilities xD
one mild correction, it was 3's FEV that was designed to just kill post-war mutants, FEV Curling-13 was design to kill literally everyone....who didn't have the inoculation.
What if its a deepsea drilling rig that was never intended to actually drill for oil? The Enclave just used the platform because it is a tested structure and provides a believable cover, don't really need to be over a oil field.
Wasn't oil the whole reason why there was a war?
@@Shushkin Yes, so makes sense that they built it for "oil". Im pretty sure in game lore, there's not a lot (if any) of oil in America left. So Im sure it was purely built out of self preservation. The rich elites and politicians knew it was happening so they ran off there to make sure they didnt die.
A believable cover? Who would they need to cover from?
@@thetayz72 anyone who is not a member of the Enclave. A certain senator from Appalachia maybe?
The confusion regarding the oils rig makes sense if we consider that it isn’t an oil rig at all and maintains no processes commonly found within one. You could make the argument that the excuse of the oil rig was used to secure any funding that couldn’t be discretely gained (workers engineers etc.). It would be interesting to see if the show tackles this at all.
The oil rig was just a disguise. Why would you want to nuke an oil rig? You wouldn't. Waste of a nuke.
Good I am so scared about that show. We all saw how the Halo show went...
@@patriot9487 Don't be scared. KNOW that they will fuck it up. Be at peace. :D
@@shorewall AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH😭😭😭😭😭
If the rig isn't a rig, where is the Enclave getting fuel for the veribirds from?
In fallout 4 there's a terminal entry in the boston bugle building with a few articles and one of them is about "Where is the president ?" In the article the writer speculates based on an unknown source where the president has gone. Raven rock is mentioned at first, but according to his "highly-ranked anonymous source" the president is on an poseidon energy oil rig just off the coast of San Francisco and the official designation is "Enclave Control Station". I don't think the oil rig was an actual oil rig and just a mock up to look like one and the GNN spread propaganda to make it look like one pre war, so it doesn't get targeted by the nukes. China maybe didn't nuke the rig in case they somehow survived and could capture it, cause they really thought the US managed to successfully drill into deep sea oil reservoirs and just get this technology for free. Instead the rig was an propaganda mock up and not really functional.
I hate that note and completely disregard it.
Does it mean that president Eden and Richardson were both president of the USA at the same time?
@@nathanlevesque7812 k
@tgjenepifd Well Eden was a computer. He's the oldest running president for 200 years
@@Shushkin I had honestly just thought that Eden was like a brain scan of Richardson, or maybe even a head in a jar like House. Wouldn't be the first time the Enclave wasn't really telling the truth.
I like this lore inaccuracy and speculation video and wouldn't mind more.
I wonder if the coast line changed dramatically in the last 165 years since the Great War? If the characters map is a pip boy map or a pre war map it wouldn't be necessary accurate to the actual California coat line in 2241.
One should also consider the source of this information: The Enclave would have a very vested interest in spreading misinformation about the location of their main base.
The amount of nuclear weaponry involved in the great war caused earthquakes and small continental upheaval. I think that is stated in the intro of F1, but how exactly true that is I can't say. Could be just artful descriptions.
I believe the computer coordinates were correct!
After all, who would go looking for a secret oil rig in a small inland pond? Nobody! It's the perfect hiding place.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Enclave Oil rig was abandoned Pre-war and then co-opted by the enclave. I assumed it was no longed used for drilling oil, and just used for research and such.
Nah
It was the enclave researching incest.
@@Shushkin Same as Vault 101. :D
@@shorewall or all the others vaults, rigth? 😂
Mm... maeby not the 76 🤔
If I had to guess, the oil rig is in the same region as the same island that you see in the movie Commando, where someone can fly two hours off the coast of Santa Barbara in a twin engine propeller plane and land on an island populated by fully armed South American commandos armed with US military equipment. A 1980s action movie would never take liberties with geography, right? I think we may need to take a closer look into what people are really doing on Catalina Island. /s
@@JohnDoe-hj9fh /s means sarcasm. which can be confusing
@ 11:30
The vertibird could have been sticking to the land so they could spend as little time as possible flying over open ocean. Makes sense if you had to operate a century old flying vehicle.
That’s a VERY good point! It’s easier to recover a crew who might crash near identifiable landmarks than in open ocean.
I would personally wonder if the "Oil Rig" is in fact actually a military base and was always intended to be a such. Given unreliable nature of the people behind it...
Real quick IRL lore about gas. Some experts think it could be generated by a bacterial process. Just as we have bacteria that eats oil there is probably bacteria that produces it.
It is. I thought this was old knowledge.
Yep we have them in our gut I had gas bloat which you sort out by increasing your good bacteria.The doctor described it as too many bad bacteria in your gut Farting and not enough good bacteria to break down the farts hilarious yet accurate and easy to understand in layman terms
@@lupaswolfshead9971 When we talk about gas its about natural gas not intestinal gas.
@@imabrahamdc2464 hmm ok farts are not natural gas then being primarily methane with other fragrant gases mixed in lol
they could fly west at san francisco to avoid alerting the NCR. Which would explain why all the soldiers say it's west, once over the ocean, without navigation tools, you wouldn't know which way you was heading.
You're headed west
What about the sun? Or at night, the stars? No tools necessary.
@@thefrozenyak5272 go out in the middle of the ocean and it's about 11:00 am.. all the water seems the same. you sitting in the back of a vertibird relaxing, doors closed. you ain't watching the sun. you have no clue which way of north, south, east, or west. As for the stars, you think some enclave grunt is running around with a sextant, and knowledge of how to use one, some of those people can't read.
@@saulalessio2251 Is it established that the Enclave never travels in the morning or evening, when the position of the sun would make the direction you're headed obvious? Or that the Enclave's survival training does not include basic navigation, ie, how to tell what direction you're headed? I never mentioned precise navigation, just how people have figured out which direction they were headed without using tools for literally thousands of years. But if we're bringing tools into play, what information is provided in the heads up display of a power armor helmet? Because if I were designing something like that, I'd include a compass in the display.
The oil Rig in the news report could be a location that China and the US fought over while the Enclave one was a different rig entirely, it makes little sense that China could build an oil rig so close to the mainland US and get anywhere close to making it a fight for the US to take, so maybe the Enclave oil rig is one only the US knew about and built in secret
With the Vertibird going from Arroyo to San Francisco before going west, maybe they needed to refuel? Maybe they can’t go the distance from Arroyo over the ocean to the Oil rig without refueling.
Edit: looked it up and the internet says they only have a distance of 150 miles before needing to refuel. So if the rig is 175-200 miles away from San Francisco the Vertibirds can barely make it there so it makes sense to stop and refuel along the way.
Ocean oil rigs are mobile platforms so the location is not a set location. More so when not actively drilling. So I would assume one of the first orders on the rig was to move away from any documented/known locations for the sake of security. After the great war.
The issue with the idea the rig doesnt have oil is fallout set up the Vertabirds as being run by conventional fuel hence the limited range and need for Navaro. meaning the enclave had acess to an oil reserve likely the one the rigs built on
With how ingrained Chinese spy’s where the chance of them finding out about the oil rig is a really funny possibility also all the submarines surely one of them would of noticed something
A spy could literally be anywhere. Those feckers had stealth suit technology.
well maintained oil rigs also last like 40 years. idk how the enclave increased the lifespan by 4x
2x I think. It wasn't that long after the war during the events of fallout 2.
@@ShushkinFallout 2 takes place during 2241, over 160 years after the great war.
@@ulfskinn1458 Ah ok.
Tbf it's the future, and the base of all the US government, they'd probably spare no expense in maintaining it.
Lore magic
the coordinates being wrong at first could be a trap to fool people who are trying to find them
you're reading way to into things to come up with that crazy conspiracy theory
I think the Oil Rig is a defunct oil rig repurposed by Poseidon into an isolated base of operations, and possibly a forward outpost for Poseidon to chase after the deep sea oil deposit. It’s completely possible that purely from the length of time, accurate information about the oil rig could’ve been lost and retold with inaccuracies
Thoughts on a fallout game set in the deep south like Louisiana? I feel the heavy use of off shore oil rigs would be awesome along with seeing a fallout esc mardi gras would be sick
honstly it would be fun to see it in my home state of pa and maybe use the invoelment of the key role pa played in the war of 1812 as a key plot point
Hell yeah. For as consequential as rivers have been for literally all of human history, it’s frankly weird how little the Mississippi gets mentioned in Post-apocalyptic fiction.
I could see some in universe idiot saying they could be used for a vault lol
Point lookout dlc should be its own game tbh I agree
Would probably just be like point lookout tbh
Yikes, I almost missed this one. Been scrolling past it because the thumbnail being split like it is looked like advertisements/shorts/community posts as I was scrolling past.
Glad I noticed it was a video of hours this time scrolling. Thanks for the great content, loving it as always 💚
Consider this:
Nautical Mile to Mile: for an approximate result, multiply the length value by 1.151
175 nautical miles = 201.386 miles
The way I see it, the rig has 3 possible options of its existence.
1) It really was an oil-rig, but was just repurposed and towed to a different location. As @resevesh said, they are really just floating, non-stationary bases.
2) It was only officially an oil-rig for public purposes, but secretly a research base for Poseidon Energy. As such, it could've been placed there on purpose for whatever research they were doing. This would be supported by the layout we see, with lots of databanks and areas I'd call labs.
3) Extending from #2, it was only originally from Poseidon Energy, but secretly bought by the government or some other high-ranking official for the Enclave. This would be supported by the fact that there were suites for a president and military personell. Granted such things could have been retrofitted at any point post-apoc, but they look far too pristine and pre-war made.
This is a fantasy alternate reality. It's possible there is oil there. It's also possible the vertibirds they saw flew over sanfran on a mission south of sanfran, did said mission, and then flower to the oil rig. Also, I thought in fo1-2 it wasn't stated what the vertibirds use as fuel, but in later games it was either stater or implied they used the same nuclear tech the cars and power armor do in game.
Really well out together video either way.
For the flight path of the vertibirds, it could be that they were minimising the time they spent over the water. We know vertibirds aren't perfect, with multiple wrecks across the series, and crashing down on the land would be much more survivable than crashing into the water. So while the flight path is longer and goes across occupied areas it also spends significantly less time over the water.
Plus in Fallout 2 it's not like the Enclave are trying to be stealthy, they control the area north of San Francisco, both with active patrols and attacks on targets across the wasteland. While I doubt they would rush into a war with the NCR they probably also don't care that the NCR see them flying overhead. At the time of Fallout 2 the Enclave are the only air capable faction.
Maybe it was never an oil rig. Maybe it was a "research rig", aka secret spy rig.
As a child reading Popular Science I remember reading articles about the Glomar Explorer when it was looking for "Manganese Nodules" wink wink.
That sounds like a totally Enclave thing to have done.
Thanks for the great vids.
Brazil has the tecnology to explore oil 300Km far from the coast. I can imagine fallout tecnology can do that
Regarding the computer's coordinates, I imagine it could be like a cypher code. You had to do a 3-step process to determine the Oil Rig's actual location, something I doubt all that many wastelanders or pre-war civilians would know how to do. But military personnel would probably know the process and could determine where the real location is. A military pilot or navigator, for example, would know what to do. Though that raises the question of how the Chosen One or allies figured it out, but maybe they made a lucky guess and switched the coordinates around after the first attempt. If the Enclave wanted to keep the rig secret from normal wastelanders, intentionally fudging the coordinates and only informing the pilots and navigators would probably work. The scientists at Navarro only know the direction, so they aren't in the know about the fudging.
I'm not sure about the other stuff, though. It's possible that the Oil Rig goes to drill for oil in the South every few years or so and then returns to the location given in the deciphered coordinates, making it a mobile platform.
I think your location pick is really good. I was also thinking through this whole video that maybe the Enclave tells their troops to give a vague location to throw off espionage attempts, and the computer told to give false coords because either A] nobody in the wasteland will know how to read coords or B] it would, again, throw off people trying to find them. Like maybe Enclave members are all told the actual location, so if anyone asks it means they aren't with the Enclave, so they should give them the false location.
Talk about every plot hole, all of them!
Please
It is probably of the coast of san fran because the vertibirds would use major landmarks (like san fran) to fly around. This is why they would go to san fran and then go west being that any GPS would be destroyed but compass systems would still work.
I also think that it was disguised as an oil rig so location was not that important
Could be disinfo. And/or, the rig could move. They don't have to stay in one place, I don't think.
Y'know? The best way to learn something is if you are doing it with something you enjoy, i just had my morning coffee, and knowing that Frank Horrigan fought the choosen quite close to Baja California is enough to make a man smile.
Quite interesting knowing more about oil rigs. They did put a lot of effort on the post-nuclear role playing game.
I checked, those coordinates are definitely valid, but the distance offshore is not. The format you're using is incorrect. It should look like: 37°18'00.0"N 128°07'00.0"W. That point is 265 miles offshore. Either that or the point represents the center of the oil rig and the edge of the oil rig is actually 175 miles offshore... meaning the oil rig would be about (assuming its a square) 32,400 square miles in size. Which would make it just a bit larger than the state of Maine and just a bit smaller than the state of Indiana.
I believe it's reasonable that the people and computer were either intentionally misleading or intentionally misled as to the actual location of the rig.
I seriously don't see the dates and other nitpicky details about when the last deposit was found and tapped to be the main problem with the Rig. More so it's odd that it wouldn't have been a priority target for the PRC to hit when the nukes started flying.
Camp Navarro is more likely the City of Fort Bragg since the actual Navarro is a tiny town of 100 people in a densely forested valley. My guess is Navarro is a cooler name. There is also a BSA Camp Navarro north of the village of Navarro along Flynn Creek Road.
I'm here to say nothing other than the fact I grew up here! Right on Flynn creek, very funny to see our little town with a single store in a game series I grew up playing (started with f03). Can confirm we've lost livestock due to enclave patrols and death claws in the area.
I think you're reading too much into what's likely just some random dev putting some random numbers into the dialogue, hoping nobody ever bothers to verify them.
Either that, or Fallout 2's "oil rig" was never actually an oil rig, it is known that the Enclave, or the US Goverment as they've been known at the time, secretly moved there a while before the Great War, so it's not unfeasible it was actually a purpose-built doomsday base of operations only posing as an oil rig, rather than an actual oil rig that had been repurposed.
Dude, I love how you do a lot of research for things like this, that's why I'm subscribed ❤
another idea:
SInce it is not said (or at least I don't remember it, if I am wrong the whole theory can be ignored ^^) that the oil rig is still active there is another option:
Nowadays all oil rigs are more or less floating on the ocean and are anchored and drilling holes in the ocean floor. (thats why the mexican sea oil spill occured, since they did not calculate the water correctly and the "ship" caused the breaking of the tubes)
So they just took one oil rig and floated it as more or less mobile base to the location it can be found in the game since it far away from the coast not to be targeted and seen and near enough to reach the shores.
as a geologist, this video has been sort of a redemption because i've been struggling alone with these inconsistencies for so many years xD thank you!
Imagine if Bethesda made this mistake instead. You wouldn’t stop hearing about it for years lol like the Bethesda ruined jet myth that was perpetuated by ppl who liked to say they played the classic games as a badge of honour even through they probably put in 20 minutes into it and dropped the game
Yeeeeah gimme some more videos on the messy parts of the lore!
If you can't find it in game then the only reason for npcs to say 'west from sanfran' is to protect the Enclave.
Hydro carbons can also bubble up over time through the mantle
Didn’t think I’d spend my morning researching real life oil rigs and whether they can be moved, but there we are.
Enjoy your family time, you deserve it 😊
Best regards to RadWife and the RadKids!
I live in Northern California about an hour North of Navarro. It’s only got like 200 people there max. I always think about F2 when we drive through on our way south
The vertibirds supposedly coming from the north to fly over San Francisco could be them using it as a point of reference. Enclave pilots might just be using these as flight path markers to reduce the chances of pilots getting lost.
There was a proposal a few years back to drill oil in the Central california zone which is west of san francisco and the only reason it never went through was protests about the area being a marine sanctuary
I never knew the oil rig had such conflicting information on it.
There is also the possibility of the oil right being a moveable rig (the ones in deep sea are such types of rigs) and by watching some of the tech of fallout maybe it has some kind of space kraut technology to drill to such depths.
Also I have to say that keeping in mind its one of the most important bastions of the pre war goverment it has sense to be some kind of moveable base to re take América and eventually Canada and México and maybe even move it to alaska or hawaii to work as a kind of aircraft carrier till they fix enough navy assets to continue the reconquest according to their plans.
If the original writers were given this information before writing the game they would probably not care
For all the praise fo2 gets it is written in such a way you don't know what to take seriously and what to laugh off
Fallout 2 Is exactly the same game as the first Fallout but with new content and slight upgrades on the gameplay. And people complains about modern sequels being made lazy.
@@davidfrancisco3502 You can't have played both games then, they may have the same graphics and interface style, but the tone of FO2 is _completely_ different from FO1. Fallout 1 was a straight-up gritty post apocalyptic adventure, Fallout 2 has some of the craziest dark humor as well as multiple 4th wall breaks. FO2 is crazier than wild wasteland FNV and it maintains that the whole game.
11:45 Taking a path like that isn't necessarily weird, for one they might be also carrying out a patrol, but also it's generally preferable to fly over land in case of an emergency. It's not so much a thing irl anymore because aircraft have gotten so reliable but both comercial and military flights used to be planned like that and the FAA still does have rules demanding that all comercial flights never get more than 225 minutes away from an airfield, which is why flights across the atlantic route close to Greenland. Another factor might be navigation, GPS presumably isn't available in the post apocalypse and without it navigating across open ocean is pretty difficult, so you'd want to avoid long trips across the ocean. The Enclave base would probably have something like a radar beacon to assist with navigation but that'd have limited range so pilots might follow the coast until they pick up its signal.
Though that being said the fact that this guy had some clue of who was on the Vertibirds indicates that they just had some other task in SF and had to land.
It doesn't make any sense why the remnants of the US government would hang around in an oil rig in the Pacific. A single Chinese Communist warship can sail up there, fire a few missiles, and eradicate what's left of the US government. Fallout 3's Enclave made more sense in that they're in an underground bunker close to the capital where they can retake it, while the bulk of their forces are using an old air force base as a rallying point. Both are far inland and are harder to assault; if it wasn't for the Lone Wanderer being brought into Raven Rock, and if it wasn't for them turning the Enclave's own orbital strike weapon against their own base in the airfield, the Enclave would've remained strong.
Super late, but I actually have a very different hypothesis. This isn't well-known, but the San Francisco area is actually one of the biggest oil refinery areas in the US, largely in the Martinez/Antioch area. Interestingly, other major refinery areas are Bakersfield and Los Angeles - and these are the only real-life areas covered by a Fallout game with large amounts of oil refining, I believe.
Maybe they were abandoned due to lack of supply or destroyed by bombs, but it's interesting that none of these areas have the old refinery buildings or infrastructure mentioned, especially since we get a pretty good look at Bakersfield as Necropolis.
I think the Enclave's oil rig wasn't for extraction - it was an off-shore refinery, possibly because the pre-war government feared sabotage or enemy action if fixed-site, on-shore oil refineries were used instead of a mobile refinery at a secret location. Tankers bring crude oil to the rig from anywhere they can find it, and refined oil is either used on-site or transferred by tanker to shore - which would also provide a reliable fuel supply for gas-powered military vehicles and equipment if it were cut off from the rest of the US. Say, by the Great War.
We have something similar in real life in FPSO units - most are converted oil tankers which now act as mobile, floating processing units. We use oil tankers for convenience, but if an oil production platform were no longer usable, perhaps the pre-war government would convert it instead.
Radking, I greatly enjoy watching your Fallout Lore videos, especially ones concerning locations, geology, spatial distributions of factions. I do want to say, with modern day flight patterns on civilian airlines, most aircraft try to hug the coast or stay over land as long as possible so that, in case of emergency, pilots can land the aircraft on land and not in the ocean to increase chances of survival. The Enclave might have done similarly, especially if flying such a long distance (for example, to Arroyo) l just thought I’d mention it since it increases the likelihood of the oil rig being off the coast of San Francisco.
Someone already pointed out that not flying straight for the oil rig from Navarro was to keep the exact location of the base obscured, but I want to offer an alternative/supplemental explanation. I think they along the coast is simply for safety. After all, the Veritbirds are a century old, so one crashing isn't out of the question, no matter how well maintained. And given the Enclave likely has limited/no ablitity to produce new build vertibirds, each one is one is a precious resource that must preserved, so even a relatively minor malfunction can force a complete loss if over open water. Whereas overland, another team can be dispatched to recover the aircraft, repairing or completely destroying it as deemed necessary. The same goes for personnel, the Enclave simply does not have many people, so losing them to simple accidents is unacceptable. My guess is that whatever general manages the vertibirds decided that the risk of losing a vertibird with all hands over open water due to technical failure is not worth the slightly increased risk of attack by flying down the coast.
Any plans to cover the new lore bits and other stuff mentioned in the Fallout Tabletop book "Winter Of Atom"?
Maybe an ex oil rig that wasn't used to drill oil anymore?
And maybe they don't really know where it is themselves, just more or less the direction and they get the details to ther verties. It's on a need to know basis.
i'd love more messy lore videos :)
Enjoy your time off with family you definitely deserve it. Can’t wait to see the amazing video you’ll come back with after being nice and refreshed
It's possible the personel are running off the computer's info and have been gaslit.
I would say a big reason to fly to San-Fransisco then turn west to the rig could be a matter of navigation, by following the coast down to San Fran then bolting straight west you could simply the navigation process since all you need to do is turn west eventually your pilots will become very familiar with this and have an easier time of it leading to less strain for long flights.
I commonly play Flight sims and it's very common for me to follow Rivers, Major Roads and Coastlines, all significant landmarks that are often very easy to identify from any altitude and most ranges, I also find that flying from a fixed point along a straight bearing, cities ar a MAJOR component to my Navigation since they are almost impossible to miss and will have an abundance of roads and often rivers I can then follow, as a more specific example, IL-2 my personal favourite flight sim recently released the English Channel as a map and I have found using Caen as a reference city to be very useful even on return trips to Britain as it's a known route I have a lot of familiarity with flying.
this is not to say you cannot fly straight from point A to point B via instrument or the use of GPS, this is just my theory on why it they had the Enclave do this.. outside of making it at all possible for the player to have this interaction.
Still never understood how you could run out of oil when you had advanced electric charges, mass fusion, and advanced fission anything...
Oil isn't just used for energy, it's used to manufacture plastics, fertilizers, jeans, and a bunch of other stuff.
I think the Enclave base is in that cow pond. They are just using the cows as a cover.
It could be possible that the vertibirds flew south until San Francisco and then turned west to the oil rig to minimize the amount of travel over the ocean, since it's easier to survive a crash on land than on the ocean, as well as recover any gear or personnel.
0:56 that hurts right their a moment of silence for fallen enclave soldiers who died for us
>Security robot was critically hit for 4575 hit points
☠☠☠
A simple explination for the vertibirds flight path is navigation. After the great war we can assume things like the GPS network are unavailable, thus resulting the pilots being forced back to compass and map navigation. Its pretty easy to plot a course if you use known landmarks, and San Francisco would be a visible landmark from the air. It also works at nighttime as there would be some lights that the pilots could use to determine their location.
Would be cool to see the whole video in the style as the intro
An idea I had while watching (which other commenters mentioned) is that the base personnel and computer were lying in order to obscure the true location of the base.
I have 2 ideas about the location. 1: the enclave lied about where the base is. It put the wrong coordinates in the computer and told the people the wrong location in order to keep anyone from finding it and possibly to keep it safe. Or 2: due to the desperate search for oil, new technology was developed for extracting oil in areas previously considered impossible. And that it is 175 mile west of San Francisco. Fallout technology and its timeline doesn’t completely match our real life timeline and technology.
Personally, when lore becomes really speculative, I begin to lose interest in it. I also feel it's ok to admit that the real life developers of this game just probably made a few mistakes when writing the lore for this place. Incorrect coordinates? The devs probably didn't want to go find a map. You couldn't just Google it in 1997. Not geologically viable? The devs probably don't know anything about geology and just thought "oils rigs go in the ocean".
So I haven't meaningfully played any FO games pre Bethesda, so these are legitimate questions here. With regards to the coordinates, would we actually expect an honest answer just giving away the bases location that easily from a terminal? Giving false coordinates would certainly make more sense then just saying it can't give out that information. People that think they have what they need tend to leave well enough alone. As for being West of San Francisco, how much do we know of whether or not the people we're asking for it's location actually know exactly where it is? Do we expect they that should know of it's exact location? If they only know of where it is based on talk and observations, isn't it possible they just see things going out westward and follow a reasonable assumption that it's simply West of San Francisco? Vertibirds could be seen going out westward and taking a sea route south, and to the people at the base it would just seem like it is simply West of San Francisco. Again, I am not familiar with this game specifically, so just honestly asking.
Fallout 1&2 had cursed developments and as stated in the video the devs themselves have said that the lore is spotty which was why the Fallout Bible was made so that the developers and fans together could hash out the lore and fix contradictions in preparation for Fallout 3 [ Van Buren ] until the franchise was sold to Bethesda in a bid.
The rig is where it is because the writers said so. Thats it. Trying to compare the location to real world geology and science makes zero sense.
From what I've read, it WAS a real oil rig, as evidenced byt he fact that China and the U.S. competed over it due to it being one of the last places oil could be found (Pre-Great war). The oil was incredibly deep down, but due to new technology, it could be harvested. The U.S. got to it first, and was accused of sabotage (perhaps the chinese vessel sent to build a rig sank).
The oil is probably all gone by fallout 2 though, if the Rig hasn't outright moved.
its possible the vertibirds took that weird path because their pilots weren't skilled at navigating in the post-apoc environment.. plotting a least time path would require some pretty accurate positioning of both the aircraft and the destination, to figure out the correct course. but by using landmarks like the ruins of SanFran, they could simplify navigation, since they'd know that if they took a course due west of the ruined city, they'd reach the platform and could be guided in by the platform's radar and flight control. presumably they would have navigated from Arroyo to nevarro to san fran using similar landmark references. using such navigation, you don't need positionign systems, just reference maps with notable landmarks and a compass. the maps could easily have been compiled by the Nevarro staff and pilots.
Can you do a video about what the east and the West Coasts know about each other?
"we'll use Poseidon to refuel our Vertibirds."
Yeah ok, fly 340 miles round trip over the ocean just to fill the machine that probably burns through fuel.
BABE WAKE UP NEW RADKING JUST DROPPED glory to atom
I feel like this just a case of the old writing adage, “if you’re not a florist, don’t write about florists, because actual florists will rip you to shreds.” Obviously Fallout’s writers are very talented, but it could be that they weren’t as well versed in geology hence why the rig is where it is.
Flying over land instead of the direct route might be a saftey thing
It's 100% the faults of devs.
But since the devs weren't Bethesda at the time that would be blasphemy so I better say it was intentionally wrong by the computer even though it was clearly the devs fault who most likely figured the fan base wouldn't care nor look further into it.
Pretty much. 👍
One of the best fallout lore videos I ever saw.
what if in the fallout world the coords are in the ocean from continental drift? are there any other coords to compare them to?
I think you’re probably right about the oil rig location, it makes the most sense. I’ve got to admit that the idea is brilliant. With the right processing equipment, the Enclave could pump out oil to convert into fuel or jet fuel and power their vehicles and equipment for a long time. I’m surprised that they relied only on vertibirds though. Having a few boats would have made for some decent flexibility when it came to mainland operations.
However I’m almost equally inclined to think that the o Enclave Oil Rig was never a real oil rig. To me it’s almost equally possible that it was designed from the ground up to be a secret military base and location for the president/government to retreat to and the oil rig was just a cover story.
this is the first time I've seen a Fallout UA-camr use GIS, a program I frequently use for my geo-science degree, hats off RadKing