History Fridge / Fallout3

* At the end of Broken Steel, the purifier is already providing clean water to the wasteland. Go to the river near Jefferson Memorial and one will notice the mirelurks are near death. Why? Because the purifier cleans EVERYTHING, not just radiation, so the water becomes fresh for humans to drink. Mirelurks are marine animals based on horseshoe crabs, meaning they need seawater to live. The freshwater is killing them in the process.

** Science is in Vault 106, a place which inhabitants were used as experiment subjects by the Overseer; the bobblehead isn't the place's science lab, though.

* At the end of Broken Steel, the purifier is already providing clean water to the wasteland. Go to the river near Jefferson Memorial and one will notice the mirelurks are near death. Why? Because the purifier cleans EVERYTHING, not just radiation, so the water becomes fresh for humans to drink. Mirelurks are marine animals based on horseshoe crabs, meaning they need seawater to live.

%% This isn't Troper Tales or a forum. Refrain from first person entries, speculation, and "replying" to entries. RepairDontRespond is in effect here as much as any other page.

* At the end of Broken Steel, you have the option to [[spoiler:fire a KillSat on the Brotherhood's base. Now, why didn't the Enclave did this before? Because it's the Pentagon, one of the symbols of the Old World and of America's power. It would be far too valuable as a symbol if they can re-take it. Of course they wouldn't fire on it.]] Plus, this adds a reason as to why the Enclave would want to destroy the Brotherhood. Not only are they "impures" but they also ''dare'' to act as if America's symbols (The Pentagon and the Washington monument) were theirs. Not to mention they use one of these symbols as a ''radio tower''.

* East Coast Super Mutants getting StrongerWithAge neatly {{justifies}} Fawkes being such a GameBreaker with Broken Steel: He's from one of the first few batches of Super Mutants (he remembers the Vault being shiny and new, after all), making him ~200 years old, much older than most of the muties you and he chew through. ''And'' he still has all his faculties.
* The names of the weapons in ''Mothership Zeta'' are incredibly generic and dull, "alien atomizer", "alien disintegrator", "drone cannon", etc. Then you realize these aren't their actual names, they're just the names your character has given them in-universe to tell them apart, they probably have proper names but there's no way you could ask the aliens to tell you.

* [[spoiler:President Eden's plan was to release FEV to exterminate the mutated inhabitants of the Wasteland, when President Richardson's plan in Fallout 2 was... to release FEV to exterminate the mutated inhabitants of the Wasteland. It seems like lazy writing. But Eden is a computer, who contains all the records of the presidents of the US, from Washington to Richardson. He would have known all about Richardson's plan, and being a computer, he's completely lacking in imagination. It's not lazy writing to have him aping Richardson's idea, it's positively brilliant.]] Especially if you stop and consider that the plan technically wasn't flawed and failed because of just one OneManArmy grandchild of a regional hero, something that [[TemptingFate shouldn't happend in D.C]].

* Why do the Raiders decorate their bases with fresh corpses on hooks? Well, there's no farmland around so, oh, well, that explains it. Of course, killing and eating other human beings isn't sustainable as a long-term solution for hunger but since when has that stopped psychopathic killes? It also explains why they attack first and always. They're hungry!

* Mama Dolce's is revealed to be a front for a Chinese covert-ops cell back before the War...and the long-ghoulified Chinese are ''still there'', refusing to abandon their post after 200 years. Given what's found in the files and terminals there, it's implied that they can't leave, believing that the Great War continues to rage long after China itself was obliterated with America. And that, even after spending centuries trapped in "enemy territory," they're ''still'' waiting for orders to come home that will never come.

* Similar to "Maybe" in Fallout 1, listen to "Way Back Home's" lyrics. Fitting to [[spoiler:the Lone Wanderer's banishment from Vault 101, his former home, after either peacefully and violently fixing the chaos.]]

* Wernher not allowing you to bring your companions to the Pitt actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. The Pitt is way more guarded and reinforced than Paradise Falls or the Lincoln Memorial are, so shooting your way in is out of the question. You will have to infiltrate as a "slave" and then wreak havoc from the inside. A ghoul, super mutant, dog or robot seemingly following a slave everywhere would have attracted too much unwanted attention, while Jericho and Clover would have blown the Lone Wanderer's cover in a different way. Jericho most likely gained a lot of infamy among raiders for surviving as long as he did and then "retiring" from the life, so the Pitt raiders would have recognized him miles away and wondered why he is suddenly following this slave around. Clover is Eulogy's bodyguard, and since the Pitt gets most of its slaves from him, Ashur would have recognized her a long way off, probably conferred with Ulogy and the cover would have been compromised. Star Paladin Cross most likely would have also been recognized by Ashut as being Owyn Lyons' bodyguard, causing him to wonder what she is up to here.

* You do the tutorials in Vault 101.

** Of course, this is primarily because radiation works differently in the Fallout universe than in real life. In reality, you can expose water to as much radiation as you want and it won't become irradiated itself. It's radioactive particles in the water that make it dangerous, and those could be removed relatively easily through a variety of methods, including filtration, distillation, and reverse osmosis. In the Fallout universe, the water itself, along with most other materials, can become irradiated.

* Mama Dolce's is revealed to be a front for a Chinese covert-ops cell back before the War...and the long-ghoulified Chinese are ''still there'', refusing to abandon their post after 200 years. Given what's found in the files and terminals there, it's implied that they can't leave, believing that the Great War continues to rage long after China itself was obliterated with America. And that, even after spending centuries trapped in "enemy territory," they're ''still'' waiting for orders to come home that will never come.

* You can stumble across a wrecked, abandoned farmstead. Read through the logs and get some warm fuzzy feelings about how people are still thriving in the post-apocalyptic world. Reading the last log, you figure they got spooked by some raiders and decided to up and leave. But on the way to the farmstead, you pass through an area called the Grisly Diner, a raider-occupied, trapped diner, complete with seemingly freshly-cut bits of bodies hanging from chains. OhCrap.

* The number of Raiders and ghouls has been a common complaint about the game since it came out. However, there's something people have forgotten about the alternate history: no outsourcing, higher amounts of religion and less families splitting. In the real world, America's population hasn't been growing much for a long time, thanks to numerous cultural shifts, including the invention of reliable birth control, popularization of condoms, the sexual revolution, the uptick in divorce, changing economic times, and a general shift in attitudes about reproduction. None of these happened in the Fallout universe. In fact, a common thing during wars with foreign nations, or cold wars with them, is the promotion of increased reproduction by the government. Furthermore, without these changes, reproduction would already be higher than it is in our universe. Seeing as one of the things China is most famous for around the world is its population, it would be highly likely that America would begin promoting massively increased breeding as well, in order for the number of Americans to keep pace with the number of Chinese. China, likewise, would want to keep pace. This is a simple numbers issue, after all, and having a massively higher population is a great aid in war, due to having more people to fight or produce things. Now, in the real world, China already has over a billion people and America has only a bit over 300 million. However, in the Fallout universe, it's highly likely that both nations were at a much higher number than that by their 2015, and would increase at a more and more rapid pace, as happens with population rates. Furthermore, going by the number of factories in Fallout 3, as well as general attitudes of the pre-war society, there was likely no outsourcing in the Fallout universe. Part of the reason nations such as China and India have such high populations is due to all those factory jobs. In the Fallout universe, that effect would instead happen to Americans. It would be highly likely that Americans were still having five or more kids by 2077 in the Fallout universe, as the condensed, smaller families would only become popular over time in our universe, which never happened there. Thus, based on all these facts, America's population was likely up to several billion by 2077. Now, the nuclear war would obviously lower the population drastically, however, this is another thing changed by how the Fallout universe works. In the Fallout universe, radiation doesn't usually kill you unless you get a lot of it, and that amount is far, far higher than it is in the real world. Furthermore, no nuclear winter happened in the Fallout universe, and a nuclear winter is what's responsible for a high percentage of the death in a nuclear war. In pre-industrial societies, the birth rate is even higher, due to the fact that more children are needed due to higher mortality rates and the dangers of the world around them. It's pretty much a given that the populations we see are only a representation of the actual populations of locations, and the canon population sizes are hundreds or thousands, which is just impossible to show in the game engine. Had the human race been reduced to the numbers you see in the game, humanity would already been extinct due to the fact that it's impossible to recover from such a low number and keep any sort of genetic variation, which we can clearly see the wastelands have. So, with the fact that the populations are far larger than we see here, we can assume the raider populations are still even larger, just unorganized. However, there's another important fact: most Americans live on the coasts, with the upper east coast being the most populated. Thus, the actual numbers of the Capital Wasteland is likely somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, with the raiders and the cities both likely made up of the descendants of the possibly over one billion individuals who likely lived in the upper east coast at the time of the war.

* [[spoiler:President Eden's plan was to release FEV to exterminate the mutated inhabitants of the Wasteland, when President Richardson's plan in Fallout 2 was... to release FEV to exterminate the mutated inhabitants of the Wasteland. It seems like lazy writing. But Eden is a computer, who contains all the records of the presidents of the US, from Washington to Richardson. He would have known all about Richardson's plan, and being a computer, he's completely lacking in imagination. It's not lazy writing to have him aping Richardson's idea, it's positively brilliant.]]
** Especially if you stop and consider that the plan technically wasn't flawed and failed because of just one OneManArmy grandchild of a regional hero, something that [[TemptingFate shouldn't happend in D.C]].