Nigga I don't care if you want to watch the show. I just said you should stop writing entire walls of speculation about it nobody is going to read or care about. If you admit it is going to be bad, then why bother spending all that time talking about it?
"Speculation" ->
excuse to talk about lore and shit.
That's the TLDR.
You've seen it in action right now.
"Vault-tek ends world in show" -> "the way they did it is retarded" -> "in the games there's some stuff that may say they had a hand in it"
Retarded thing from the show being used to springboard into
actually worthwhile discussion. The tv show is firewood for this, basically.
What "secret nuke in NV", I can't seem to recall one right now.
If he doesn't mean the nukes in Lonesome Road, there's an unmarked location on FNV with a nuke (re-used asset from Megaton in Fallout 3) you can
find.
I'm not sure if I would use this as evidence considering it only appears with
Wild Wasteland.
Original Fallout movie script,
I believe the movie script also wanted to make the Overseer of Vault 13 someone who also had a personal hand on it, which I do find a bit retarded. Dude's a bit of a cunt, sure, but it feels incredibly contrived.
Edit: Also he goes down like a fucking
legend in Fallout 1's bad ending which does help ameliorate his image just enough that I don't think he'd be so big a bastard as to help end the world.
Gone but not forgotten. R.I.P
Fallout Official Survival Guide p.88:
"The Overseer: Leader of Your Community"
"This distinguished looking gentleman is the ruler of Vault 13, the man who is sending you out into the world of Fallout to find a replacement for the Vault's water purifier chip. He genuinely cares about you and everyone in the community, though he can be a bit paternalistic, even condescending, at times."
Evidence of Vault-Tek not being the "good guys" is present in the first two games. In Fallout 1, Vault 12 (designed to not seal up properly) and Vault 29 (only kids under the age of 15 - maybe killed the parents) were overtly cruel experiments. Also the Enclave being able to open the Vaults from the outside is overt proof of their involvement in their creation, or they had some in-depth monitoring on the process of their design early on to give themselves a skeleton key. Feels like you could just blame the war on the deep state or something if you absolutely had to.
Also, Tactics is 100% no matter what Todd says. He and everyone that agrees with him can eat my entire ass, Fallout 3 states about as much with it's computer entries in the Citadel.
I also support Tactics canonicity, however the original intentions behind Vault 0 and the Calculator were benevolent. The robots were meant to clear the surface of hostile life, help clean up the surface, and then educate and help the dwellers come onto the surface. (I'm not entirely sure how widespread knowledge about the experiments was with Vault-Tek's top brass.)
To initiate Mankind's post-war rebirth. When outside temperature, radiation levels, and poison particle counts return to acceptable levels, Vault-0 will remotely activate the Exodus Protocol, which will initialize the integration of all Vault Dwellers onto the planet's surface. The brains are to be harvested from a select group of geniuses that were chosen, by committee, for their skills and their cute haircuts... (fade to static).
Tactics does, IMO, go a little overboard with some of its humour but I'd be lying if I said the games as a whole were overly solemn.
"Committee rules 30 to 3 in favor of streamlining Vault-0's computer backup system costs from 24 billion dollars to 2.3 billion. These cuts will take place immediately. This ruling was based on the dwindling chance for actual nuclear war taking place along with much needed pay increases to senior committee members. Furthermore, the subterranean Vault compartments that were designated for backup computer and life support systems will now be renovated for senior vault personnel leisure facilities. The committee has a construction agenda that must be finalized by mid March. The new facility options are as follows; several top quality restaurants with 10,000 square feet of cold storage, seven smoke rooms with piano bars and two subterranean hunting grounds stocked with rare animals purchased from world renowned zoos. All of these are feasible but require an additional 12.4 billion dollars which can be acquired by... *click*"
You're right though in that Vault-Tek actually thought the likelihood of war was decreasing so they diverted funds for superficial expenditures instead, probably beginning with the process of converting Vault 0 into some sort of private retreat for Vault-Tek execs. Considering some of the vaults had swimming pools in them and/or other means of recreation that ended up becoming experiments, I can imagine a timeline where war never occurs and the vaults just become gimmick getaways or R&D hubs for the government. They likely had some foresight and considerations for the future, but as soon as they considered the plans could be all for nothing, they just half-assed it.
With the Calculator in mind though, there's one other interesting thing to consider:
The Chinese, or rather, the
Shi.
In Fallout 2, the
Shi are being lead by an AI (
The Shi Emperor), a naval super computer with unparalleled capability when it comes to dictating probabilities and outcomes, and tempered with some human decision making behind the wheel, it's allowed the
Shi to do decently well in the post-apocalypse. Keep in mind, this thing was just taken out of a random nuclear submarine the Chinese that had washed ashore. This indicates, maybe, that the Chinese made a lot of tactical and strategic decisions made purely off of probabilities and data that are given to them by hyper-intelligent AI or something. Whilst the Americans used sophisticated but not
hyper-sophisticated AI for robots on the battlefield, the Chinese (at least as indicated in the Operation Anchorage DLC) might've preferred them more for strategic purposes instead of combat?
The statistical certainty House made of nuclear war occurring on a specific date and time could've easily have been made by some computer somewhere (more proof of House being the GOAT if he predicted it more accurately than a super computer), so the Chinese might've had a deadline of sorts to try and win the war before - as their computers tell them - that nuclear bombardment becomes inevitable. You could argue the war was a self-fulfilling prophesy in this context then. Their computers predicted nuclear war would begin at this date and time with 93% certainty, ergo a pre-emptive strike became the most sound decision to make.
It would be a cop-out to essentially put the blame on AI for humanity's end but it still rests on the Chinese for becoming so soulless they surrendered their own humanity and stopped thinking for themselves. Ken Lee I believe outright states having to veer sometimes from the calculations because the hyper-efficiency isn't moral all of the time but I could be misremembering. If the Chinese were putting more and more of their faith in AI over humans, then cold hard logic and machine-minded men bringing ruin to everything would be its own kind of poignancy.
There is a further avenue for copout where you can double down on this concept, and they just outright surrendered over all command, strategy, and tactics to AIs and eventually the AIs launch the nukes themselves because it's the "most optimal", but Fallout 4 gives us a guilty Chinese ghoul meaning a human finger had to confirm and push the button (there's no AI or mention of one on that Sub. I'm not taking this as proof of the Shi Emperor being an exception, I'm just thinking it's an omission of ignorance).
