History Headscratchers / Fallout2024

*** But vaulters had nothing to do with anything, what's to avenge them for?

*** Except he was on the job. While he was busy with Maximus, Wilzig could escape (and did). Also there was at least one sequence where Ghoul unloaded multiple rounds at Maximus, with a frustrated, and even a bit desperate, look. All the while Max was completely still, so if Ghoul aimed at that weak spot instead of the chest plate, he would've downed him easily. And proficient with armor or not, Max could've still easily killed him as well if he got a grab on him (and if the script didn't demand that he throw the ghoul harmlessly instead of crushing his head when he did grab him).
*** Maximus' problem isn't a lack of proficiency, it's a total lack of experience. He didn't just crush him because it simply didn't occur to him; we've established that he's a doofus - is this really so much of a stretch? And as for the Ghoul, he's on the job for the love of the game - as he said out loud: he knows that Wilzig isn't going to be moving so quickly with a missing foot and a wounded Ma June. So, once he's out of immediate danger and realizes that he's dealing with an amateur, he opts to just screw around with Maximus instead of just killing him - hence the lassoing - confident that he can catch the target sooner or later... and he's not entirely wrong about that either.
*** The fight with Maximus is the first time he's dealt with PowerArmour in a long, ''long'' time. It just doesn't occur to him at the time. In fact, it is probably ''this'' fight and his dwelling on what he could have done differently that makes him realise that there was an easier way to handle it.

*** But it was tangentially his fault - he knowingly sold her there to be dismembered. What made her think that once he comes about, he wouldn't recapture her and sell her to another organ harvesters/brothel/whatever? She could've at least taken his weapons.

* Also, why does she let the others go? It seemed she wanted a slaughter as revenge against Hank/Vault-Tek, and she didn't care that the Vaulters were completely innocent of any of her woes, so what gives?

* Also, wasn't she at all interested in ''owning three Vaults''? It's an enormous treasure cove of easily defendable living space, clean water, arable land, healthy people, technology etc and she just abandons it all. Why?!

* Also, what exactly did blowing the hallway achieve? It's not like that would isolate 33 or prevent a pursuit (even if she was concerned about that), since 33 has its own exit. I don't see why she would care about concealing the fate of 32 from them either, not that the debris stopped them when they decided to take over 32. What else could there be?

** ''If'' he'd crept out clandestinely, or at least had some distraction (like blowing up a hallway))), then sure, it'd be an issue. But he simply run out of the main gate. I would've expected a pursuit to follow pretty much instantly.
*** Problem: the Enclave don't know that there's a traitor in their midst. The alarm doesn't tell them that Wilzig is defecting, so all they'd know would be that something was amiss in the area; it'd take them a few minutes to figure out what was going on. Plus, Wilzig seems to be in relatively good standing with the Enclave, so they had no reason to suspect him. Hence why automated security took up the slack.

** Plus, Maximus fumbles his gun early in the fight, so he spends most of the duel being pretty mobille and attacking the Ghoul at close range, meaning that cutting a hose was the most effective option. By contrast, in the final battle, the Brotherhood Knights are at range, not likely to drop their guns, and holding still - ideal for exploiting that particular weakness.

** I imagine he'd been preparing for the escape for a little while, just had to enact the plan ahead of schedule. Also, we don't know the Enclave's strength at present: it has a sprawling underground laboratory, yes, but it's still a faction with a very bad reputation across the Wastelands, and we don't know if they'd be willing to risk blowing their cover by sending a search party after them. It's not like they can teleport in and out of their base at will, like the Institute.

[[folder:Howard's knowledge of Power Armor's vulnerability]]
* In the final battle of Season 1 Howard takes down several BoS knights by shooting them in a week spot. Why didn't he do the same in the fight with Maximus in Filly?
[[/folder]]

It is revealed that before the bombs dropped, the Ghoul served in the military, and thanks to having experience of using the T-60 power armor was aware they had a fatal weak spot. He uses this knowledge to take down several Brotherhood knights in the final episode. Why didn't he use this knowledge against Maximus when they faced off in Filly? [[{{Pun}} Plot Armor?]]

* It's built by GECK.

*** Plus, she keeps a feral ghoul of someone she once cared for. The Flame Bringer is not all there anymore, if she ever was.

*** She does mention specifically that "Hypocrisy is like violence, you lose if only your enemies use it" or something to that effect.

*** This is quite likely. Moldaver was very close with Lucy and Norm's mother, and would have known the kids - she might have told Monty to keep Lucy out of harm's way, and he decided to get lucky while he was at it since he was already playing the role of her new husband.

*** Lucy just got a pair of people killed accidentally and might have felt a twinge of guilt.
*** Shes LawfulGood basically.

*** Vault 13 is said to be in Mt. Whitney, which places the most likely location of Shady Sands at Lone Pine. This is about 200 miles away from Los Angeles.

How did Hank 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?

*** They themselves are not nations but practically own entire states at their peaks. Terminal entries in Fallout 4 explicitly state the amount of influence the Brotherhood have the Capital Wasteland for example. This distinction makes little difference, almost like saying that the leading political party of an one-party nation aren't themselves a nation even if they are the governing body.
*** 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.
*** This misses a few details. For starters, SpaceCompression is in play for all the games. Rivet City, for example, is on an old ship. A Nimitz class carrier has a crew of 5000, but that's with external support and supplies. But it gives an idea of how many people there is room for. The USS Enterprise aircraft carrier can support a crew of a little under 6,000. Much of it might not be livable, due to flooding, wreck, lack of food, etc, but there is living space at least enough. Not remotely close to Shady Sands but still a lot, especially given the Capital Wasteland's clean water shortage is fixed due to Project Purity and Lyons giving free water. That alone would see a rise in population or at least a decrease in death rate in the short run. By Fallout 4, they export materials and clean water. According to Wasteland Warfare, Megaton is one of the largest cities in the Capital Wasteland and only surpassed by Rivet City in population, which either means it's big or indirectly damns it by faint praise. Next, the Brotherhood of Steel's population is another uncertainty due to SpaceCompression, recruitment of wastelanders, and Outcasts defecting. Then we have inevitable new recruits from after Fallout 3. A few terminal entries mention members with family in the Capital Wasteland implying they either settled there, are stationed there, or the Lyons outside recruitment policy continues. Additionally, in Fallout 4, rebuilding the Commonwealth is one of the themes with settlements being a core feature. We don't know how successful the Sole Survivor is, if they are at all, but at minimum we still have SpaceCompression. The player has the choice of saying "I just killed hundreds of people. I don't find it very funny" to fellow Brotherhood members if that ending was chosen regarding destroying the Institute. The Institute Facility in-game clearly lacks that capacity, but in lore they do. The real life Fenway Park can accommodate many thousands of spectators at least and Diamond City was founded in 2130 and seems to lack the overwhelming clean water shortage the majority of the Capital Wasteland has. Paranoid about Synths but that's not a population cap problem. In any event, we are not given enough to estimate populations besides "More than the game is showing".
* Remote detonation of Vault 15's reactor or GECK?

Why wasn't there an executive of Poseidon Energy at the evil corporate meeting in Episode 8? It was a very powerful corporation pre-war with ties to the Enclave.
* 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.
* It's possible that their exclusion is foreshadowing that Vault-Tec wasn't as open with the Enclave as previously believed. Poseidon Energy was the company closest to the US and Enclave before the war, so its possible they were excluded because Vault-Tec thought they would spoil the plan.

When Betty has the imprisoned raiders poisoned, she clearly needs to pin the blame on someone. She chooses the current woman who was in charge of the prison cell, who can be seen getting dragged offscreen when Norm finds out. But at this point, she's well-aware that Norm has been snooping around and is learning something isn't right, and his job was also directly related to feeding the prisoners. So why didn't she put the blame on him, and get a nuisance out of her way?
* Norm is the last known survivor of the [=MacLean=] family; Betty might be complicit in a lot of bad things, but even she might balk at harming the son of one of her lifelong friends, and if Hank came back and found out Betty did something to his son, even justified by their actions and backgrounds, he would most definitely be pissed.

If Barb had reached the top levels of Vault-Tec, as suggested by the fact that she is the one proposing they end the world to a meeting of other [=CEOs=], why would she let Janey be with Cooper on the day it was meant to happen?

*** Put simply, we never get a precise answer to this question and that's probably the point. Like all the other possible culprits they were clearly awful people perfectly ''willing'' to destroy the world, but the evidence is circumstantial and honestly, possibly lost forever in the chaos of that last day.

In between the time that Norm and Chet explore the destroyed Vault 32 and Betty's re-opening it up to colonists from 33, someone did a major renovation on the whole thing. Clearly it couldn't have been anyone from 33, as they had to keep the secret of what really happened there from them. My assumption at the time was that Vault 31 people had come in and done it in secret. But on retrospect, the reveal of Vault 31's actual inhabitants means that's not really an option. So how did 32 get magically rebuilt to pristine shape?
* The only people it could have reasonably been were Betty and Stephanie, both from Vault 31, but that's a huge amount of work for just them to clean up. With the overseer of Vault 31 saying that Chet could go back into his father's cryo-pod, maybe a large amount of people were thawed solely for the purpose of cleaning up, then went back in to sleep.
* That might explain Bud being trapped under a mop! Was it a mop or a broom? It wasn't put away properly after the renovation.

If Vault 4, and Vaults 31-33 were all within spitting distance of where the Master's Cathedral used to be, and all had easily identifiable exits that led directly to the surface, then how did the Master never find these places? It's a huge plot point in the first game that the Master is seeking prime normals (i.e. people with little to no radiation exposure) to dip into the vats. This is why both he and the Lieutenant are eager to learn the location of Vault 13.
* One possibility: geography/local architecture may have changed significantly in the years since the Master and his faction was destroyed - which it ''demonstrably has,'' in no small part due to ''a nuclear weapon being detonated'' worryingly close to Vault 4 - and the Vault exits weren't always so visible. Also, the only reason why Moldaver got in was because she knew someone who knew about the Vault triad (we still don't know if she was preserved in 31 or elsewhere) and because she had said person's Pip-Boy. So, getting in or finding said way in may not be as easy as it seems. As always, I have no concrete proof that this is the case, but the fact that Vault 4's unconcealed exit is a lone building with an incredibly obvious Vault door standing in the middle of nowhere seems to imply that there ''may'' have been greater concealment at some point in the dim and distant past - otherwise, people would have been trying to kick the door down decades ago.

* One possibility: geography/local architecture may have changed significantly in the years since the Master and his faction was destroyed - which it ''demonstrably has,'' in no small part due to ''a nuclear weapon'' worryingly close to Vault 4 - and the Vault exits weren't always so visible. Also, the only reason why Moldaver got in was because she knew someone who knew about the Vault triad (we still don't know if she was preserved in 31 or elsewhere) and because she had said person's Pip-Boy. So, getting in or finding said way in may not be as easy as it seems. As always, I have no concrete proof that this is the case, but the fact that Vault 4's unconcealed exit is a lone building with an incredibly obvious Vault door standing in the middle of nowhere seems to imply that there ''may'' have been greater concealment at some point in the dim and distant past - otherwise, people would have been trying to kick the door down decades ago.