History Fridge / Fallout4

** Admittedly, Duff has a devil-may-care attitude towards safety standards: pumping out semi-toxic gas, burning off her eyebrows and sending people to fight poison-spitting flies. She might have gotten that from a genuine accident.

* So you've destroyed the Institute with the Minutemen without irking the Railroad and Brotherhood. Sucks about your son, but the three factions can now live in peace...for how long? The Railroad's hideout is not exactly subtle and they already have a plan in place to bomb the Prydwen, and it is unlikely the two factions will come to an agreement on anything. Eventually the Railroad and the Brotherhood will discover each other and clash.

* Virgil's already made it clear that he's using the Glowing Sea's radiation to hide, but there's another reason he's doing so well keeping hidden. If you look on the Pip-Boy, his location is outside the dotted line. He is LITERALLY off the map. Goes even further if you take the gridlines on the map into account. Not only is he literally off the map, he's literally [[IncrediblyLamePun off the grid]] as well. The only way you can be farther off the map is by going out of bounds or teleporting to [[DebugRoom QASmoke]], which removes you from the map entirely.

* Are Cait's flirtatious comments to you, like accusing you of staring at her ass or mentioning you've been looking at her, a sign of attraction, good natured teasing and ribbing or is she paranoid and uncomfortable from her past that she worries that you only took her as eye candy?

** On that note, was the Danse we've seen always a Synth or was he replaced at some point? Could the Institute have ambushed Danse while he was returning from [=ArcJet=]? During his time at the police station? At one or on the way to one of your settlements?

* Terminals in the Institute's FEV lab indicate that the overwhelming majority of Commonwealth Super Mutants were created from wastelanders who had been spirited away and replaced by Synths. And given that the Institute's variant of FEV seems [[DeathOfPersonality more or less erase the original identity]], there's a decent chance that any given Super Mutant you kill is actually [[spoiler: the original Roger Warwick, the original Mayor McDonough, or even the original Paladin Danse]] without either of you ever realizing.

** You'd be surprised what people with birth deformities can learn to accomplish with just two fingers to count on.

* If you declare yourself immortal to Piper during her interview, she will say you kind of are. Metafictionally, you can load into an old save every time you die.

* Why can't you sleep in Piper's bed even after romancing her? With Nat nearby, Piper likely doesn't want to risk her little sister hearing or walking in on her and her paramour "discussing Uganda".

*** Considering what happens to everyone else in Vault 111, it certainly is.

* The Cryolator is an incredibly powerful DiskOneNuke. Most enemies die instantly to it, and with only a few upgrades, it can take out tougher creatures like Deathclaws in seconds. As you discover when you wake up from cryostasis, HarmlessFreezing is actually ''[[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome really freakin' hard to pull off]]'' in this world. You need a team of expert scientists and engineers and a sophisticated life-support system keeping the process of being frozen from killing you, and even then you were only a hair's breadth away from death the entire time you were frozen (one of the terminals in Vault 111 recounts how one of your neighbors nearly died because a minor system glitch started thawing them out too early). The biological enemies you freeze with the Cryolator don’t have any safeguards at all, so they get all the nasty harmful effects that come with being frozen.

!! FridgeLogic:

** You'd be surprised what people with birth deformities can learn to accomplish with just two fingers to count on.
* Captain Zhao speaks English interspersed with Chinese phrases when talking to the Sole Survivor. His English speaking is still not flawless over the two hundred years, as he has not had any English speakers to converse with besides himself, but that he continues to use both may mean that he is diligently keeping up his use of both languages as a way to keep his mind active and to retain his humanity. Retaining his ability to speak Chinese would also aid him with his goal of returning back to China to help rebuild, while English would help him with the more immediate tasks at hand.
** He may also have been listening to the radio, which would of course be in English, so he may not need that much practice. He'd wind up mixing in Chinese for words/phrases he's forgotten or just because he's more comfortable with it and not used to talking to an English speaker.

* Radiant quests occasionally dip into this due to their randomized locations, which are occupied by all kinds of hostile factions. A prime example would be Hostage Rescue. These quests always provide an option to just pay the ransom if one doesn't feel like mopping up another shipment of cannon fodder in order to rescue one dumb settler. That's completely reasonable if the kidnappers are raiders or Gunners, but it gets slightly strange in the case of Super Mutants. Why? Because Super Mutants neither need nor care for money. [[IAmAHumanitarian They catch humans for the sole reason of eating them]].
** Perhaps they're testing the sole survivor's strength to see if they're worth angering. If you pay the ransom you're presenting yourself as weak and the super mutants might try and seize more settlers to actually eat while if you go and kill them yourself they can leave you alone to find a safer target.
*** The Super Mutant Mooks certainly don't sound or act that smart whenever you're fighting them.
** Because of the game's tendency to pick randomly, radiant kidnappings can happen in heavily turreted settlements or if the target is heavily armed. That raises quite a few issues even if this weren't ''Fallout'', e.g. Stealth Boy devices aren't overtly involved.
* Why did [[FightingIrish Cait's]] parents wait for her to turn eighteen before they sold her into slavery? It's not like the Commonwealth has any youth protection laws ([[CrapsackWorld or laws at all]] for that matter), and so far the ''Fallout'' series has quite liberally demonstrated that there's a thriving market for child slaves in the post-nuclear wasteland.
** It could be Cait's price was worth more by then and they were raising her to be a beautiful young woman first. Less scummy, by at least a small amount, is they might have been pressed by circumstance.
** Considering what a [[SarcasmMode lovely]], peaceful, well-adjusted young woman Cait turned out to be, it's possible that her parents saw the writing on the wall that their little punching bag was getting feistier, stronger, more assertive and more interested in the great art of parricide with age, which is purely their own fault. They decided to cut their losses and sell her to the raiders to she wouldn't end up giving them Remington kisses; fat load of good that did them.
** Perhaps Mama and/or Papa O'Something loved their little girl [[ParentalIncest too]] [[PaedoHunt much]], but lost interest in Cait when she was an adult and sold her to the Raiders.
* A worldwide shortage of fossil fuels triggered the Resource Wars and, ultimately, the Great War more than 200 years ago. Combustion engines were pretty much non-existent when the bombs dropped, which makes the working principle of the various settlement generators somewhat mysterious. Everyone of them that isn't clearly labelled as nuclear merrily rumbles along like an ancient tractor while belching copious amounts of black exhaust fumes. The largest one, however, requires nuclear material to build regardless, which makes the whole thing even stranger.
** Most internal combustion engines can function perfectly fine (with the addition of a filter) off of other sources of combustible fuels, from alcohol to rendered animal fat/oil to woodgas.
* The Triggermen is a mafia-style gang that are the biggest drug producers in the Commonwealth and provide several quests centered around the smuggling of drugs. Except it's clearly demonstrated that ''all drugs are legal'' in every settlement; you can buy drugs from every trader or doctor, there's a shop in Diamond City dedicated to selling them, and you can easily craft drugs yourself, so it makes little sense for a criminal gang to finance themselves on something that's not illegal in the first place. In fact, most organized crime activities in the ''Fallout'' universe are either now legal or semi-legal trades, obsolete, or are already practiced by raiders. This could have been spun into a funny story about how a criminal gang found themselves running a respectable business but the tropes are played completely straight even though they're irrelevant to a post-apocalypse setting.
** A quest mentions the sale of chems is heavily taxed and they're actually bootleggers rather than dealers in illicit material.
** Also, just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's socially acceptable under every circumstance. The people explicitly selling chems in cities are often individuals of some medical skill who give out chems as prescriptions. In this sense, manufacturers like the Triggermen are less comparable to cocaine or heroin cartels, but more like off-brand pill pushers with homemade production facilities. They also appear to have a more cutthroat business strategy relying on getting folks addicted that definitely puts them as more of a proper gang, as do many similar chem manufacturers.
* What is the probability that Dogmeat could be a (more or less) full German Shepard two centuries after the Great War? The dog population of the United States would be reduced to a degree that largely mirrors the decline in human population, and the number of breeding partners available would decrease dramatically as a result. Consider the fact that 200 years would mean at least twenty generations of breeding (probably more like thirty or more), and it seems exceedingly unlikely that enough German Shepherds would have survived in the entirety of New England to produce a dog that is (again, more or less) pure-bred two centuries after the apocalypse. That is, of course, unless Dogmeat is a clone...
** Or Dogmeat is secretly a synth and he's been providing information to the Institute all along. With the existence of synth gorillas it can't be all that hard to make a nicely programmed Gen 3 copy of a German Shepherd with the right biological material. We never see how far the Institute's Coursers and synths reach, so it may be feasible that there were undiscovered vaults out there. Maybe a genetic bank, a sort of Noah's Ark full of frozen animal DNA or even animals akin to Vault 111?
*** If you pay attention to some of the monitors in the SRB in the Institute, you can see a video feed of the surface... from a ''birds eye view.'' Implying that at least some of the crows you see in the Commonwealth are synths. It's important to note that dogmeat in previous games is explicitly referred to as a mutt. The simplest answer was that Dogmeat was created by the Institute, and intentionally placed at the Red Rocket within walking distance of Vault 111. However...
*** ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' features the cyberdog companion, Rex. Rex was a police dog in Denver before the war, kept alive for two hundred years by his cybernetics. Roxie is another cyberdog that [[PlayerCharacter The Courier]] can create while exploring the Big MT in the ''Old World Blues'' add on, and one of her ending slides states that she eventually ran across Rex in the Mojave and "Constructed a litter of cyberpups." While they're amusingly referred to as [[HilariousInHindsight Boston Terrifiers]], both Rex and Roxie are purebred German Shepherds, not unlike Dogmeat in ''Fallout 4.'' Given that ''New Vegas'' takes place only six years before ''4'', its not impossible that Dogmeat is a direct descendant of Rex and Roxie.
* Why does Virgil choose to hide from the Institute in the glowing sea? It's not like synths are affected by radiation, not are they attacked by any of the creatures there. Obviously, he's still in the Commonwealth for safety reasons, but it's senseless that he chooses to hide there with only two turrets for security.
** Its not entirely clear whether or not the Institute knew that Virgil had infected himself with FEV. In fact there is evidence suggesting they did not, given that X6-88 never mentions this fact to Kellogg (and knowing that his target is a super-mutant, and not a human would be some pretty need-to-know information). Its likely that all the institute really knew was that he sabotaged the place, and left with a head-full of their secrets. If they didn't know he was a super-mutant, then the Glowing Sea is an unlikely place for him to hide. (Which the Sole Survivor even points out). While it seems they did know / figure out that he went there, without knowing that he had become a super-mutant assassins would likely dismiss him as simply one of many hostile creatures in the area. The real FridgeHorror is that the first time the player goes to Virgil's cave, there is a Deathclaw sleeping outside. Think about that one for a moment. The Deathclaw can't fit in the cave, so its waiting for him to come out...
** Additionally, the Institute's ability to teleport synths in and out is based on radiowaves. Of course normal background radiation wouldn't effect that even in the post-nuclear apocalypse of Fallout but an area like the glowing sea certainly would. Assuming the Institute would lose anyone they tried to teleport into that mess of a landscape by telefragging them it would at the very least buy Virgil time. Synths might not be affected by radiation directly but a deathclaw will still eat them no questions asked or destroy the gen 1 synths if allowed.
* Mixing five different Nuka-Cola drinks to make a special recipe does not yield five bottles of the new drink out of that.
** Don't worry, as always, there's [[https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/33636 a mod for that]].
** The mixer might leak (or do something to reduce the amount of usable soda, like boiling or some sort of chemical reaction).

* The Triggermen is a mafia-style gang that are the biggest drug producers in the Commonwealth and provide several quests centered around the smuggling of drugs. Except it's clearly demonstrated that ''all drugs are legal'' in every settlement; you can buy drugs from every trader or doctor, there's a shop in Diamond City dedicated to selling them, and you can easily craft drugs yourself, so it makes little sense for a criminal gang to finance themselves on something that's not illegal in the first place. In fact most activities of organized crime today are either now legal trades, obsolete, or are already practiced by raiders. This could have been spun into a funny story about how a criminal gang found themselves running a respectable business but the tropes are played completely straight even though they're irrelevant to a post-apocalypse setting.