History Headscratchers / Fallout2024

*** At the time of ''Fallout 2'', the NCR's population sits somewhere around 700,000. By the time of ''New Vegas'' and the television show, the population of Shady Sands is apparently 30,000-it's likely the overall population of the NCR at the time is now somewhere in the millions. The ''New Vegas''-era NCR controls multiple major cities spread across five states, and has worked to re-establish pre-war infrastructure like roadways, railroads, and telegraph lines; they're so strong and well-developed that they can take on the Brotherhood and win. The East Coast, by contrast, is a small, barely-developed region; "cities" like Megaton or Diamond City are little more than shantytowns made up of a few hundred people squatting in old buildings. The Brotherhood might ''control'' areas like the Commonwealth or the Capitol Wasteland, but they don't care about anything other than seizing old technology, and there's no real indication that they've worked to ''develop'' the area anywhere close to the extent that the NCR did with its territory. And, of course, all of this is also contingent on just how much Hank, and by extension whatever branch of Vault-Tec he controls, ''knows'' what's going on on the other side of the country. Shady Sands was right next door to Vault 33, and its destruction was as much of an act of spite as it was a calculated decision.

* Could be that they actively refused to participate in Vault Tec's mad scheme because they're not as StupidEvil as every other megacorp. Someone has to be the OnlySaneMan.

[[folder: The bombs dropping on LA later in the day?]]

[[folder: How can a nuked out city have a perfect maintained electrical grid?]]

[[folder: Why did Howard not tell anyone about the Vault Tec plans?]]

[[folder: Shady Sands geographical location]]

[[folder: Nuking Shady Sands]]

[[folder: No Poseidon Energy?]]

** The chips are heavily stacked against Howard in managing to get this revealed. In episode one, we already see that he's been reduced to doing birthday parties to get by, has alimony payments, and is deemed a pinko. Which means between his last seen in episode 8 and then, he's been blacklisted, deemed a communist, and divorced. In the political climate of the setting, the fact he was going to communist meetings is already going to be a mark against him since they could easily find that out. But he's going against Vault-Tec, a trillion dollar company with absolutely no morals. They definitely have the resources to deny everything he says about them, get him blacklisted by the industry, marked as a communist so nobody will want him or believe him, and probably punish his wife if they find out it was her Pip Boy he bugged. This is a business that's got no issue killing people, too, so 'just' bringing him down to that state is easily in their ability. Especially since all he has to go on is hearing the meeting, no recording or physical proof of it.

** The Brotherhood and Enclave aren't really "civilizations" as much as they are comparatively small groups of like-minded individuals with access to advanced technology-the Enclave is a highly secretive group that operates mostly from the shadows, and the Brotherhood is so widely dispersed that a single nuke wouldn't do much beyond wiping out a chapters. The NCR was a ''nation'', a self-sufficient democracy with agriculture, industry, reasonable standards of living, and a standing military... in other words, exactly the kind of society that Vault-Tec couldn't abide.

** The final episode all but reveals that Vault-Tec and its allies have the capacity to arm and fire at least one nuclear warhead, but doesn't outright reveal that they were the ones responsible for kicking off the Great War-it's entirely possible that events spiraled out of control without their interference, and the nuke they launched at Shady Sands was the same one they intended to drop on the US or China.
** The Brotherhood and Enclave aren't really "civilizations" as much as they are comparatively small groups of like-minded individuals with access to advanced technology-the Enclave is a highly secretive group that operates mostly from the shadows, and the Brotherhood is so widely dispersed that a single nuke wouldn't do much beyond wiping out a chapters. The NCR was a ''nation'', a self-sufficient democracy with agriculture, industry, reasonable standards of living, and a standing military.

** Really, such [[DidntThinkThisThrough dipshittery]] is pretty on-brand for the Fallout megacorps. The same megacorps which programmed worker robots to kill people for not wearing hard-hats and trying to sneak onto subway trains to reduce lawsuits. The same megacorps who put the disembodied brains of psychopaths into combat droids because they wanted them to think for themselves in order to increase combat efficiency. The same megacorps who fed children mutagenic nutrient goo and outlawed bag-lunches.

How did Hank McLean access, aim, and launch a nuke at Shady Sands? And why not nuke other competing civilizations like the Brotherhood or Enclave, if Vault-Tec's reclamation plan relies on a blank slate on the surface?

[[//folder]]

[[Why did Howard not tell anyone about the Vault Tec plans?]]