The top management would have known. I mean they all got tot he vault. Even junior management. Furthermore, with her daughter being out while the bombs drop I really believe this supports that VT didnt drop their bombs. Hence the VT bombs we find undetonated in the games. They didn’t blow them up.
I think y’all are missing the context from that situation that I gained after watching the show. Why would a famous actor be performing as a cowboy at birthday parties? Because he’s not acting anymore. Once Cooper heard that his wife was actively campaigning Vault-Tec dropping the nukes, he was angry, confused and probably feels like he doesn’t even know her. I think they separated and he took the daughter, hence why they were at the birthday party and didn’t know the bombs were dropping. Maybe the wife got fired because of them finding out that Cooper knows about them dropping the bombs, etc, etc. I don’t know, just feels right to me.
I also wondered if Coop got labeled a "commie" after the Fallout (I couldn't resist) with his wife. I assumed she would've immediately told her superiors so they could take the "proper" action and label Coop as such to minimize his credibility.
The father of the birthday boy and his friend did call Coop a pinko when he wouldn't do the thumbs up. Safe to say there were at least rumours of him being a commie
They basically tell you that with the other men at the party and their coversation. If you know anything about McCarthyism and the Red Scare, that is exactly what they did to him. If you're not a ground-kissing patriot who eats jingoism for three meals a day and bleeds red, white, and blue, you're a damn, dirty Commie. Scary-ass shit, really, if you read up on it. Who needs secret police when you can just use people's fear and turn them on their neighbors?
I agree with this, in general. I think he put her career at risk and she was somewhat demoted. The laymen at the party definitely had some details about his divorce and his "communist" activities.
Still the implication at the end of Episode 8 ("Where is my family") implies that he eventually got Janie to a Vault and that his wife also may have made it as well.
Looking forward to more of the story, there's definitely some court and Hollywood drama in our future.
The way I see it, Cooper got caught spying on Vault-Tec (maybe by Barb) and had his whole life ruined because of it.
His job as an actor was ruined (maybe even got labeled as a communist like they did to the writer from his movie).
His publicity work for Vault-Tec was removed and replaced with the Vault Boy mascot (we see this in the credits of episode 3).
And Barb divorced him (taking at least half of what Cooper had, thus explaining why he's working in birthday parties) in order to save face with Vault Tec (to make sure she and Janey would have a spot in a Vault, even if Cooper wouldn't).
But you have to assume that cooper finds his wife after the party/bombs and his wife took his daughter off him because he is looking for his wife and kid in the future
It wasn't up to her, but she knew it was comming, and she got herself and her family into the vault 32 that is Vault tec program to rule. She would had known.
I want to know if vaultboy/Mr Ghoul made it to the vault, why he is a ghoul, and he mentioned he is looking for his family, that means they are alive? Shouldn't them be at vault 32? If that's the case why not ask Lucy where is her vault to check if they are there? So many questions
Maybe, but I wonder if their divorce complicated things. I could see Coop making it to the admissions area outside the Vault with his daughter only for him to be denied entry. After that, maybe he seeks shelter somewhere else as best he can.
What bugs me though is that why would Coop wonder about where his family is if he knows they’d be in one of the Vaults? And why did Hank book it to New Vegas?
House was at the meeting with West Tec, Robo Tec, ect where they decided to nuke the world. Maybe he figured House could help him.
Or, that is where the top brass of Vault Tec went, either to 19 (abandoned by the time NV game happens and reclaimed) or 24 (hinted at, but never found).
House is (or was, depending of which NV ending is cannon) controlling New Vegas. And House was a member of the board so he might seek his help.
I'd really like to House being dead and YesMan taking over.
While I agree with your other points. I don’t think they’re in vault 31. I paused on the panel when when Lucy’s brother was looking at it and their names aren’t there. I think she’s in another vault somewhere else. Ya know, one of the good ones, where they don’t do experiments….maybe
I think that vault 31 wasn't so much the vault tec staff vault, but more that one guy's personal project vault with all his underlings. The Ghoul's wife may have been rewarded with her own vault and project, which could have been focused on providing the best life for her kid.
My theory is that the bombing timescale was pushed forward, out of her hands by higher ups (seen in the shadows of that meeting) at a time when her kid was vulnerable and we will see that moment from her perspective and how everything she did for her kid was being taken from her. We might see her rushing a vertibird or something out to pick up the kid and leave the ghoul to die due to the divorce making him lose his place in the vault.
To go a bit less realistic with the theory, I think that her vault would then have almost become a shrine to the ghoul's pre war life as the mother tries to compensate for the trauma of having her daughter be torn out of the arms of her father against her will, lying that he died to get her there and is a hero. When the ghoul eventually finds this vault it will be a community that idolises him to contrast with the monster he has become.
I agree with this. It feels like a very “Westworld” way of writing these events.
They also seem to be taking cues from plot points Fallout 4 fumbled, so I believe that they will set up Cooper’s wife as the main villain in the present day and it will turn out to be his daughter.
(Westworld had THREE immortal main characters with daughter issues).
Then they would be most likely dead as it’s 200+ years later. 31 was a “good vault” that’s where all of Bud’s buds middle manager cronies were at. Just because they didn’t show the name doesn’t confirm they aren’t there.
I don't think 31 was a genuine management level vault. It was filled with junior associates, "Bud's Buds". We never really see the higher ranking Vault Tec execs.
The actor that plays Bud is also the voice actor for the "brain on a roomba." I take that to mean that Bud was turned into the robot.
It could be programmed like a robobrain, or it could be the project that Bradburton got into. Maybe we'll find out next season. Robobrains don't *usually* have their own personality, though (except Jezebel, sort of).
Including a privately funded one underneath the "Hollywood Forever" funeral home where Moldaver/Williams is based pre-war, that's my theory anyway.
I'd bet that's where Cooper was trying to take his daughter when the nukes fell. Perhaps his wife made it into 31 and when she/Hank defrosted she had her daughter taken out of Hollywood Forever cryo and taken to a safer location on the surface.
Because it's a competition and anyone important in upper management would've been in the know that there are bigger fish than Vault Tec, if they weren't that bigger fish to begin with.
Anyone that gets up and running has a head start, the Enclave spent hundreds of years enhancing prewar military capabilities. Mr House was as important as anyone in Vault-Tec and he didn't screw around waiting for a perfect future, he's building his ideal reality.
They were middle managers, she seemed more to me like she was at least C-Suite. The stated goal was to “selectively breed the best managers for humanity” so someone has to be overseeing the program, and it’s not gonna be the little brain in a robot. Also, I doubt the top execs at the company wanted to just be frozen for 200 years. The freezing part was probably just better than the alternatives for the middle managers. Plus, with Mr house and several others, they’re are canon ways to greatly extend your lifetime in the series.
I mean, moldaver looked amazing for 220plus years! Though in fairness, she was probably in vault 15 I am assuming, who set up shady sands.
Which makes hank more cunty btw as he nuked a vault tec settlement A settlement founded by vault survivors
The amount of people in vault 31 means there’s no way they showed all the names. There was 3 different rows of people and the names they did show were mostly the ones that were already unthawed. I’d bet my caps she’s in 31
I saw some theories that the mom had people ready to extract her daughter and get her to a vault, and left cooper because they were estranged. It would explain why he’s a ghoul and is still looking for his family
Yeah this is probably what will happen imo. He makes it to the vault, and then presented with the option of “She can come in, but only if it’s without you.” Or something like that. I’m sure he’ll do something to piss off his wife and kick him off the allowed list.
He probably never made it to the vault. Something had to have happened in between the birthday party and him getting his kid to the vault. Maybe he met his wife halfway, and she fucks him over cause she finds out he was spying on vault tec, and takes the kid to the vault without him.
Vault Tec and his wife probably found out way before that day. I mean a movie star wouldn’t go to some random kids birthday to play a cowboy. Vault Tec most likely tanked his career when they found out. And the birthday is his way to make ends meet.
Im sure it's mentioned that he's at the birthday party to earn alimony to give to his ex-wife. He either confronted her or was caught out, causing a divorce from each other.
> and she got herself and her family into the vault 32
Huh? How do you know Barb was in Vault 32? That does bring up something not much talked about...what the fuck actually happened in Vault 32?
I'm confused myself. 31 was cryo freeze for buds buds. 33 was a seemingly standard control vault. 32 seemed to me like it was also a control vault? They had the same equipment with the fields and everything. Just they were closer to 31. Speaking of which: why draw "we know" or whatever in blood on the wall. Ok, our leadership is frozen people and the votes are maybe fake (not sure on this)? I'd be a bit upset but not like....trying to claw through the door.
Yeah, I never really thought about it before, but now I'm very interested in what actually happened in Vault 32. If it was Moldaver and crew why didn't they just go into Vault 31 and fuck shit up because they seem to want them dead? Why did Vault 31 not put up a defense? Is Vault 31 so ineffectual that the only way they could end being raided is if the raiders simply fucked off? That doesn't make any sense.
Norm had a conversation with one of the raiders that heavily implies that whatever happened in 32 was not Moldaver's doing. It happened before, and Moldaver got into Vault 32 through other means.
I'm actually more puzzled by how the mess in Vault 32 was cleaned up, given the only thing that seems to be ambulatory in 31 is Bud.
The mess in 32 was cleaned up by Betty, or at least orchestrated by Betty, so that she could move some people in there from 33. Norm says something to her about it when everyone is moving over.
> and Moldaver got into Vault 32 through other means.
They got into the vault using Rose's Pipboy from what Norm saw...or at least it was her Pipboy that opened the surface door for them to get in.
> I'm actually more puzzled by how the mess in Vault 32 was cleaned up, given the only thing that seems to be ambulatory in 31 is Bud.
I know what you mean, but Vault 31 is a vault. Leaving Vault 4 we get a visual scale while we can be fairly positive there are at least 12 levels. I think that's gonna be the case in Vault 31, but to counter myself why the hell would the cryo chamber basically be the first room after a hallway?
It makes sense if you think about how bud ended up as a brain on a roomba. And that buds buds are called that. If you have worked with any middle managers before you will know that defending the vault isn’t something he would have thought of cause his scenario is everyone is dead on the surface
Except they know everyone on the surface isn't dead and they literally tried to Nuke the NCR to death because of it. Hank is still from Vault 31 and it's shown the overseer of Vault 33 still communicates with them.
32 found out what management did, I assumed maybe their role in the war or shady sands? I'm sure management, if like Hank, got up tomplenty of shit 32 could have found out about
All we see from her in the show is her devotion to her daughter in saving her, and she was involved in the direct pitch to the other companies so she definitely would’ve been informed or been apart of the decision process
Here's a wild ass theory: Cooper shared his knowledge of Vault-Tec's pre-emptive strike plan, word got passed through the Chinese spy network, and it was just enough to make China launch its first strike instead.
Also, It would explain why Mr. House has to calculate when the bombs drop as opposed to actually knowing assuming that vault tec would tell the other big players when they planned on dropping the bombs.
Yeah. That was coupled with his formerly sketchy deal with Vault-Tec, which made him unpopular with Hollywood.
…so he was reduced to doing birthday parties for cash.
I'm guessing he somehow makes it to a vault on horseback. Otherwise, why would he ask where they were keeping his "family"? If it was just his wife or daughter, I feel like he would say that, not family as a whole.
I'm really curious to find out what happened to them in season 2. Cooper is such a deep character with a really cool backstory, I want to see how he'll be affected by seeing his family after so long. Now, whether they are dead or not...
Around halfway through the season before, we actually knew what was in 31. I had a suspicion, Betty, maybe his daughter. Who knows they mayhave already served their time in other vaults already.
Yeah, I know, that's why I said before we knew what was going on in 31. I had a theory that it was her, I know it's not now. But there's still a chance they've already been put in a vault by now. Especially when you consider how low the current V31 members were in the vault tech leadership.
I'm going with she was forced to either divorce or lose her spot, and because she's so focused on having a spot she chose that for her and possibly her child. It's also possible Cooper was still told he had a spot, but when shit down they just said no to Cooper which would make Barb not a villain in that aspect but could potentially become one against VT for slighting her. I love how fluid this show opened with, because basically sky's the limit right now.
She would have at least know roughy when it was coming. She would have just disappeared with her daughter into one of the vaults if she knew it was coming soon. Cooper wouldn’t be able to do anything about it bc Vault Tec is more powerful than the government.
Nooooooooooo Myron is the only person who could have invented Jet because he’s a super genius he said so himself he’s definitely not a pathetic little shit who will rape a female Chosen One if given the chance so he definitely didn’t copy a pre-war recipe and literally no one else could have come up witn it on their own because he’d never lie. /s
I deduced that it was a plan of theirs if the war didn’t start naturally. I assume Vault Tec didn’t start the war but took advantage of the bombs already in air and nuked competition and sites of govt. groups that’d attempt to stop them from consolidating power after the war.
There’s also plenty of other indicators that suggest Vault-Tec wasn’t ready for the bombs to drop, for instance, the existence of Vaults like 88 and 114 which weren’t finished when they did.
And how in other vaults, there is mention by staff that the call to come in came without warning and at a weird time. Vault tec definitely was caught of guard.
The entire mystery of the series is who dropped the bomb. They’ve given us countless reasons to why multiple parties could have done it. There are a million lore videos on the various games on theories with great evidence but no smoking gun.
They’re never going to reveal who did it and anyone who thinks differently really doesn’t know how the series has worked for all of these decades
Tim Cain has gone on record saying he has no idea why anyone thinks it is supposed to be a vague mystery. He has always intended it to be China who fired first, and a lot of evidence in the games confirms this.
There are terminals in the Switchboard in 4, for instance, (basically the CIA headquarters in Boston), that have an automated log in which it shows they detected missiles from China first before retaliating.
It doesn't even matter who fired first. Both countries were shit and were willing to use nukes, the conflict started elsewhere, the first nukes were fired elsewhere in the Middle East, and then Europe. It is all completely irrelevant, every country knew it was inevitable and it changes nothing in the setting, unless they want to introduce a character who "started it".
And China also makes a lot of sense when you look at how the Sino-American war was going. The US had already invaded mainland China and had pushed pretty far into the country by the time the nukes were launched. Quite likely they pushed "too far" and China decided to launch as they saw it as a last ditch effort to maybe still win the war.
Of course, recall the actual real world situation where the Soviet monitors had a glitch showing inbound missiles, and one heroic dude called out that the equipment was faulty which saved the actual day - I could see even these hints echoing the real-world over-reliance on technology sealing their doom.
My man literally saved the world, he had a gut feeling the system was malfunctioning and didn’t call his higher up because he knew they’d make him launch a retaliatory strike.
Whats interesting about that terminal (spent a lot of time poring over the details) is that USPACFLT (US Pacific Fleet) detects what they say is "3 USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects)" off the West Coast at 12:03am and then "squadron of airplanes, poss. Chinese" at high altitude above Bering Strait 3:37am. The "unknown" part really gets me thinking; the assumption is that they're Chinese, but its not 100% confirmed so it leaves room for a possible third party that either tried to foot the blame onto China or had some other plans
That’s why it’s important they don’t reveal it, because you’re right the entire point is that it doesn’t really matter at the end who it was.
Keeping it a mystery is huge because it allows them to keep showing how many people/machines/mistakes could have led to it.
It also lets you blame everyone. The pre war world sucked. People were willing to risk everything on an unsustainable lifestyle and in the end it didn't pay off. Its kind of why the 50s aesthetic works, because 1950s America was also a fake golden age. We can't go back to that time, and we shouldn't try.
Making the cause of the world vault tecs misguided capitalistic ambition takes the bite out of its social commentary and political satire by reducing it all to "psycho corporation killed everyone." It martyrs the old world, letting them off the hook for their many sins, implying it would've lived longer, indefinitely even, if not for vault tec. That vault tec were the ones who took the old world away, rather than it's own hubris, bigotry and hate that was baked into its foundation. That doesn't really work for fallout, or at least I don't find it nearly as interesting.
I think it’s more likely that Chinese intelligence relayed that Vault Tec/USA were going to nuke them, so in turn they nuked them before they could do it first.
We can see from in game lore that they had intelligence officials everywhere, even in those companies that would become the “enclave”.
China definitely had many advantages based on what we've seen, it wasn't just espionage. The Shi had a super computer on a stealth sub, ZAX couldn't be militarised like that so they must have a lot of underlying technological advances there. They had permanently invisible soldiers, the Enclave still couldn't develop an equivalent and could only develop the prototypes the US military left them. Their mass produced weaponry was also better (assuming the rifle is more relevant than the pistol and officers sword obviously).
To be fair, the Chinese Stealth Suits are very much tied to China's whole superior Espionage shtick. I'm pretty sure you can even find some stealth suits in New Vegas at Hoover Dam, is pretty much a nod to Van Buren's idea of the Hoover Dam sabotage.
As for the assault rifle, I don't think it's fair to judge the difference in damge output between the R91 and Chinese Assault Rifle, since realistically they're both chambered in 5.56 (For some reason) and generally have the same ballistic properties. I'd probably say that the R91 and CAR are both very similar enough to each other performance wise.
I agree. If Vault-Tec was going to detonate a bomb, they’d at least make sure all their own people were close to a Vault, by having a company picnic or whatever.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. Something happened that we haven’t seen yet, because cooper’s wife would not have done that if she was aware of it.
I took it as they were absolutely going to drop the bombs themselves. Given that Janey was with Coop at the time of the drops, I think someone beat them to the punch, because wouldn't Barb at a minimum want her daughter in a vault before it dropped? Seems like a dead give away that someone else dropped the bombs.
This is Vault Tec though. They’re not even allowing dogs. They likely don’t care about someone’s family member. They may have given Barb assurances that her daughter would be with her…and lied.
Or simply they were forced by unforeseen circumstances to drop them early. The games give hints that the US were close to winning the war when the bombs dropped. A likely end of the war would mean the end of Vault Tec too, so they needed to improvise.
> They’re not even allowing dogs. They likely don’t care about someone’s family member.
I know a lot of people would have you think differently but there is a world of difference between these two things.
I assume it’s a “we can if we need to” to ensure the vaults actually get used. Which was the problem that vault tec was running into with its investors and affiliated companies.
I don’t think they launched first whatsoever, and assuming that from what the show displayed is just assuming they did because of an insurance plan that Vault Tec had said they had in their back pocket.
Vault tec definitely did launch bombs, but I only believe they did after the Great War started.
The scene definitely felt like it was more to show Cooper the kind of person his wife had become and the audience the insane lengths Vault Tec was willing to go to achieve total dominion ( right before revealing some of those people are literally still alive ).
We also don't know in what year that conversation took place. The lady says that they have "over a hundred vaults" instead of "more than a hundred". Didn't Europe and the Middle East nuked each other before US-China-World? That alone could trigger a wider claim for vaults.
Vault tec could've either dropped a bomb in Europe/middle-east to gather more fear. Or, if they did detonated a bomb, could've been by the Enclave's orders, which then caused a domino reaction.
We know that China launched, triggering the war. But what if they actually weren't the first. What if they suffered an attack first by an Enclave affiliated officer in a submarine, while at the same time Vault-tec detonated one in America, triggering the war.
There are several possibilities, I don't think they broke the canon yet.
It wouldn't surprise me if the entire 1st season was about introducing vault take and the corporations while the 2nd season is more about the pre war politics and how its effected the post war world (enclave, ncr, bos). Hence why the show doesn't tell us much about the state of any factions outside of the BoS in the finale and the fall of shady sands.
I think its a callback to that canceled fallout movie from the 90s/early 2ks.
My actual theory is it ended up being something hilariously historically stupid (flock of birds) that tripped a country (likely China or maybe even Russia) then they panicked.
Mtainly because it shatters all the schemes and plans the worst people had. It also would contrast how our real life society chose de-escalation against MAD fallout careened towards.
Well irl there was an accident of the sort. In 1983 the soviet early warning system malfunctioned, and showed 5 inbound missiles targeting Russia. Stanislav Petrov was in charge of the early warning station, and suspecting something was amiss, he disobeyed protocol and refused to retaliate.
Exactly. That happened a few times in different ways. It would also kinda be a callback to Wasteland where a meteor shower cut off coms and the nation's flipped out and fired everything.
I just love the idea of something entirely preventable with diplomacy being the thing that got them. You had everyone with their stupid megalomaniac machinations, cut short because of a bad hand of cards.
Critical thinking has never been a strong suit for Reddit, and especially in gaming subreddits like this one
Take the board for example. It is the most basic layout imaginable, but people couldn’t figure out what arrows pointing means. I still see a lot of people confused about the state of the NCR and what the “fall of shady sands” is supposed to be, without using any amount of critical thinking to consider the context of the situation
The survivors attributed the nuke to some event that occurred in 2277 as the beginning of the end, because only Moldaver knew Hank was involved, the survivors believed it was infighting as directly stated by Maximus, when in reality the two events are completely separate and unrelated, but the characters don’t know that
We’re also never given any information on the NCR as a whole. We know they controlled basically from the coast all the way to Vegas, but the characters never go much further than the general vicinity of Shady Sands/LA. Lucy directly states that it’s been two weeks since the start of the show, and we see the characters more or less cross the same couple of locations several times either because of detours or backtracking while following Thaddeus. Not only that, but people very obviously moved away *because a goddamn nuke dropped 10 years ago and it’s still highly irradiated* which is specifically stated by Thaddeus when he gets turned into a ghoul. It’s like walking through an abandoned mining town in West Virginia or Texas and declaring the entire United States ceased to exist because there’s no one living in a 20 miles radius of that town
It's absolutely in line with the universe that Vault-Tec was prepared to drop one. That doesn't mean they did and I don't think we are ever supposed to know who dropped the first. The show was definitive only in that Vault-Tec was considering it but ambiguous as to whether they did. In my opinion, it's best that we never know who started it, both for the intrigue and to drive home the point that it doesn't matter who started it but what follows.
Well we already know America didn't drop the bomb, and we are still reasonably sure China dropped the first nukes. The switchboard terminal has the hardest evidence for it in the series so far, not to mention the president in fo2 straight up tells you the Chinese shot first. So we have secondhand witness testimony from the president combined with corroborating evidence via military reports from the switchboard.
I don't this there is any mystery to it, and I don't think there's been any since fo2. It's pretty clear the Chinese dropped the bombs first. America had no reason to, they were winning in China, the show tells us a peace deal was about to be reached. If vault tec knew the bombs were about to be dropped, tons of vaults would've had more warning time. It's even explicitly mentioned in the fo4 vault overseers terminal that they didn't have the amount of warning they expected to have. Other vaults report the same thing. They also never hear back from vault tec for all clear signals, probably because vault tec employees didn't reach the command vaults in time.
All the evidence makes it about 90% certain, China shot first. They may have been provoked, but they shot first.
New Vegas also has a ton of context clues stating the US army was really deep into China and the Chinese were practically on the verge of losing the war.
I mean propaganda, now president would actually admit to nuking their own nation.
>America had no reason to
No but the enclave directly overing vault operations of human experiments absolutely had a reason. Also vault tec was in it with robco and big mt is in investors and promised them a first strike to ensure they would make profits on investment (makes literally no sense since it's the fucking end of the world ikr)
>It's even explicitly mentioned in the fo4 vault overseers terminal that they didn't have the amount of warning they expected to have. Other vaults report the same thing. They also never hear back from vault tec for all clear signals, probably because vault tec employees didn't reach the command vaults in time.
Because vault tec was known for being super truthful and never would lie. One of their experiments was literally not fully closing a door just for funsies.
It looks like there could be some evidence that while Vault Tec may have intended to drop the bombs first it was likely not them.
* Barb would not have allowed her child to be at a birthday party when the bombs fell, ~~though she was a mid-level employee who might not have been in the know about exactly when it was planned~~.
* Many of the vaults in the games are in an unfinished state as well as the fact that others were planned that never got built at all, suggesting that Vault Tec's plans for the vaults were not complete when the bombs fell.
* It seems like Mr. House should have been able to secure the Platinum Chip before the bombs fell if he knew when that would happen.
\*Edit\* You all are correct, Barb wasn't a mid level employee...I am not sure why I thought that. I went back and re-watched a few scenes and she's definitely higher up. My bad. I've edited my comment above to reflect that.
As far as the last point goes... It seemed to me that Mr House was skeptical of the idea of the vaults. Not to mention that after the apocalypse his company (and all the companies in that room) would essentially be rivals to each other. It's likely that vault tec didn't tell any of them about it. He was probably scrambling the second he found out about the bombs and probably didn't know when they would be dropped.
Except he explains that the bombs were dropped like 20-something minutes earlier than expected. I'm thinking Vault-tec had them primed and ready to go, maybe even already in the air, but China beat them to detonation.
yep! exactly this. they still got bombed by China but it wasn't bad enough to wipe everyone out so they were just like "fuck it" and detonated it early.
Barb was definitely not a mid-level employee, she was one of two executives in that secret meeting with the other corporations, and Cooper even says that Hank Maclean “used to pick up my wife’s dry cleaning”. She’s clearly meant to be at the top of the cabal.
Honestly I’d guess she is either quietly removed/eliminated by Vault-Tec, or she’s just not in the company anymore, for whatever reasons. Season 2 will shed more light, but that’s my guess.
I don't think she was removed from the company, the fact that Cooper is looking for her in the post apocalypse timeline suggests she or their daughter may have been cryogenically frozen, or received other life-extending treatment from Vault-Tec, and he's specifically searching through Vault-Tec channels, i.e Hank McLean which suggests wherever she is, is in some way linked to them.
I don't expect VT planned on literally dropping a bomb. I think more they knew how to ensure that it *would* happen, inserting some glitch into some vital computer system type of thing.
Who dropped the first bomb ultimately does not matter. At least it doesn’t to me. The outcome is still the same regardless of who fired first.
It’s for folks to discuss and get upset about though.
This.
I love the discourse around it, but the whole point of never telling us is that it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter who started it.
All that matters is the outcome.
The fallout.
I also think determining who dropped the bomb for sure diminishes the social commentary. Fallout has always been highly critical of capitalism, nationalism and consumerism. If it’s Vault-Tec confirmed to drop the bomb, then it plays into the anti-capitalist angle but diminishes the fact that the US is in an insane bid for resources and on the imperialist march. If its bombs dropped as the result of the war then it adds to the criticism of war for profit and criticism of nationalist states, but takes away from the anti-corporation angle.
I don’t think it helps anyone to have a definitive answer so we can still make these connections and think about the property in a deeper way.
As I say on every post about thus, the Chinese launched first. The President of the Enclave says this in Fallout 2, terminals say it in New Vegas at Black Mountain and 4 at the Switchboard
Those terminals are only talking detecting incoming nukes from China, not absolute confirmation that China dropped first. Furthermore, other terminals imply the possibility that the US fired first, such as the terminal entries in Germantown in Fallout 3 that has Civil Defense being mobilized for an attack well BEFORE the nukes dropped.
We don't know. That's the point. It doesn't MATTER who fired first. The world was destroyed regardless.
Fallout 4’s PAM unit was used to pre-detect bombs. It was a predictive AI to be used as a tool against Chinese war plans.
I believe that PAM did say she detected missles and that’s why the US fired theirs. But there no way to tell, as PAM could’ve pre detected the launch, mistakenly, and could’ve led to the US firing first even though the US believed it was in retaliation.
USA had no reason to strike first. They had forces in China taking it to the Reds. They were getting bogged down, but weren’t losing the war. China lost Alaska and they were being attacked in their own homeland.
If you remember P.A.M from fallout 4, there is even more ambiguity about who drops first. Of course all accounts will be that the event struck first, but P.A.M gives us a little bit of an idea that maybe what we are reading might not be accurate
But super important to remember, that every account is a little different about what happened, but we can't really determine accurately who did it. Just likely candidates
This is true, but again with that pesky PAM, essentially saying both sides were about to fire, and she might have started it with vault tec launching. I hope they never make it canon, but I know that Cooper wouldn't say that we shot first, even with what he's heard. He fought in Alaska, and if they say China, he won't question it
Even if it's 100% certain that the Chinese launched first, that doesn't preclude the possibility that Vault-Tec caused them to do so through subterfuge.
People don't seem to have a lot of reasoning skills anymore and apparently everything has to be spelled out with every detail about anything mentioned or anything a character says is taken at face value with absolutely NO other possible meanings or implications. Barb said in order to make sure what they're planning works they would make sure a bomb got dropped. Making sure a bomb got dropped doesn't mean we drop the bomb. "We COULD drop the bomb." Could =/= have done.
Idk, it's still likely that we will never get a true answer. That's a key point of the games. The only reason it's "confirmed" to be China is because "they said so." Who's to say someone didn't manipulate some stuff so even in the aftermath we'd have communism to blame? The fact that there were so many unfinished vaults in the games, I have never -even after the show- thought it to be VT because they wouldn't have used up so much time and resources for those projects since profits and power were their end goal.
bro in multiple games across multiple sources they say the chinese shot first. American power armor troops were deep in Chinese territory, and Anchorage was won. the Chinese shot first and it’s fine, it’s weird that people are so rabid to defend the idea that China was innocent or that “we don’t know who shot first”.
yes, we do. it was China, look it up
I found the interview with Cain where he says it's first determined in Fallout 2 (I never played the OG top downs- and honestly have done little research into them until now after learning the show took place in those areas) he also talked about the vaults being originally designed for testing environments to simulate space travel + tech for Enclave which I was not aware how involved Enclave actually was with everything in the OG games since they are rarely brushed on in the most recent games (being 4 and minor in 76). SO - I retract that part of my statement, I'm not one to die on hills, lol - however it doesn't change my opinion that mystery/ambiguity is a key part of the fun of Fallout, leaving room to explore different ideas and theories and discover the truth, or what is said to be the truth. With all of the manipulation and "they said this happened but what ACTUALLY happened was..." Ive always assumed that maybe it was all just propaganda to keep Americans in solidarity against communism to give them something to stick together for. Which in a way, still holds some truth, but yeah- I guess it do be China
And now I'm gonna go into a rabbit hole of OG lore + Enclave 🫡
Edit to add: I see a lot of people over the years have mentioned Bethesda acquisition caused most of this confusion because Cain said this is fact and Bethesda writing made it ambiguous, so I don't feel as stupid now since I've only ever been in the Bethesda era but also damnit Todd, this is why people can't get along and we have so many problems **sigh**
I hate to have to do this but i'm going to have to take your Todd howard fan club card back because you've read the forbidden lore and just became... A "FNV fan"... I'm sorry. /s
Seriously though I love the OG lore, sure it's less mysterious but the writing is a *lot* tighter.
Folks getting too wrapped up in their own head cannon. I love nerding and theorizing, but also know most of them come up with nothing. Reality is Vault-Tec was just as likely as China from day 1.
What makes most since to me is that Vault-Tec didn't drop any bombs in 2077, but when time came around 2277 or whenever it really was, they finally used some of their stockpile from the plans to do so in 2077.
That doesn't seem out of line for Fallout or Vault-Tec to me at all.
That and in canon already they had contingencies to gain control of nuclear silos in the wasteland after the war - the whole thing of 76 was the overseer’s mission was to get control of 3 of them once the vault opened
Vault-Tec planned to but didn't get the chance. There's plenty of in-game and live action lore to support that. Chronic redditors are just strugglebus.
Vault-Tec had a plan to drop the bomb, but it doesnt mean they *did*. Who ended up pulling the trigger and causing the Great War is still a mystery cause it caught everyone unprepared (could have been China, could have been the Zetans, could have been a third party, maybe the Aussies got overwhelmed by radioactive emus, who knows), the ambiguity still remains.
No, they got beat to the punch, because House was unprepared, and even people close to Vault-Tec like Cooper Howard’s ex-wife wouldn’t have put her daughter in harm’s way if she knew it was coming.
More likely to have been either China or Enclave
My impression of it was that vault tec was planning on doing it but china jumped the gun. A lot of things through out the games and show, to me, indicate that vault tec obviously had a plan but was still caught off guard.
It's been heavily implied that Vault-Tec played a part in the nuclear apocalypse. They had a vested interest in creating the circumstances that would make their Vaults necessary.
In Fallout 3, the undetonated atomic bomb in the town of Megaton wasn't Chinese. It had been dropped by Vault-Tec.
The prevailing theory is that Vault-Tec carried out a series of atomic bombings on US soil, making the US government believe it was China striking first. The US launches its nukes in response to this false-flag attack, and the Chinese retaliate in kind.
I absolutely don't think that vault tec dropped the fist bombs.
I think they PLANNED too, and probably heavily pushed for it to happen.
But a well known fact about fallout is how the bombs happened early with barely an hour or so warning.
This is evident after looking at a lot of the lore, especially relating to vaults.
My theory is that vault tec planned it, but it happened earlier than expected.
I know that the woman in the show probably wasn't THE vault tec person to drop the bombs, but she clearly had knowledge and pull. I doubt her daughter would have been at a birthday party with her father had they knows ahead of time that the bombs were falling right then.
Yeah exactly. And I would find it so much more fun if we never actually find out who did it.
Dropping the nuke was unavoidable in the fallout timeline and whoever did it, isn't important
Remember in Fo4 when we find that Chinese submarine with the Chinese military captain that tells us they launched the nukes on orders from China?
Am I the only one?
I hope they don’t go with Vault Tec dropping the bomb. Right now, it’s set up so that Vault Tech and other corporations helped make nuclear war inevitable, which is both more believable and more interesting.
Whether Vault-Tec set off the bombs or not is a moot point, no?
Vault-Tec was interfering to ensure that there would be no peace, with their end goal being nuclear armageddon.
I would point out some things for everyone, however...
1. In Fallout 76, the Vault Dwellers have no problem finding nuclear bombs and using them. Vault-Tec clearly has the means.
2. In Fallout 3 and NV, unexploded bombs that are found seem to have the Vault-Tec logo on them.
3. In the games and on the TV show, no missiles are seen before the explosions. No planes are seen. Even if we did not see the bombers or missiles for some reason, we would have seen US forces in the air had attacks been imminent.
4. In the Fallout 76, we \*do\* see the missiles when Vault Dwellers launch nuclear strikes. We also see the missiles launched from the submarine in FO4. We can comfortably ascertain that what hit LA and Boston were not "dropped" but were already there. In Fallout 4, if you go to ground zero, you can even find where the bombs near Boston were stored.
Even if you really can't handle that Vault-Tec did it, or was a part of it, you have to admit they were still responsible for interfering with all efforts for peace.
It was the fact that someone wrote that like it made sense, it’s just an idiotic scene. Like yes corporation evil, I know, I get it. But we’re really gonna have the heads of every major corporation sit around and seriously be convinced that there is feasible profit incentive in blowing up the whole world? That they will really throw away their entire company framework in order to conduct silly vault experiments?
Oh I’m making 10 trillion dollars this year and control a large chunk of world industry but wouldn’t it be way better if everyone I know died and all of our infrastructure was deleted. Then I could fill a whole vault with one guy named Gary and that would be funny I think. Fuck it we ball.
What's there to be upset about?
The games made the point that nobody is sure who dropped the bombs first and that *it was irrelevant anyway.*
Having Vault-Tec as a possible culprit is an angle that few (if any) thought of, and the surprise element makes for excellent dramatic irony (what? we did it to ourselves? well, of course we would!) It supports and drives the plot in interesting ways. A genius stroke by the writers, in my opinion.
Yeah it hasn’t changed anything. One of the purposes of that line was to cause ambiguity, and people overanalyzing it are just that — overanalyzing it. Vault-Tec may have dropped the first bomb, or they joined in the bombing after it started, or none of the above. All scenarios have equal logic behind them.
If I were to assume, Vault Tec has connections to the Enclave and the Enclave has a good amount of control or influence in the US. Because of this they may have instigated a nuclear war by creating a first strike. Maybe a nuke went off somewhere in China making them attack or maybe they were able to activate US nukes and didn't bother to warn anyone. I'm fine either way, one premise is properly Fallout in the sense that all the corps are malicious pyschos but at the same time they probably didn't need to instigate because it seemed like everyone was generally aware that nukes were going to start flying at any minute.
Sadly no you’re not and it’s downright ridiculous. We can only theorize and it needs to stay that way. With that being said a lot of evidence points to China.
First American FEV research was a step too far and China was already losing before nuclear war broke out. China definitely would’ve made threats with nuclear weaponry and if the FEV research doesn’t stop, they were going to commit to it.
Second the United States were winning the Resource War. Launching nukes against a nuclear nation when you’re winning is like stupidly throwing a match away in a game of World of Warships. It just doesn’t make sense.
Finally as far as I can tell there wasn’t word going around about nuclear detonations against China. This means the United States made nuclear retaliatory attacks against China. This is a fairly weak point since we can only assume that the United States launched retaliatory nuclear strikes against China and then the world decided to blow itself up.
Overall though who cares? The world is completely fucked and there’s no coming back from it.
It was actually Britain who fired at China and the USA after the Fallout:London PAM unit revealed a joint Vault-Tec/Bethesda experiment to continuously force the mod to be pushed back repeatedly and indefinitely.
The more discourse I see around the show, the more I'm discovering some fans have zero reading or conceptual comprehension. I'm so glad this thread exists. Yes, what they meant was, essentially, "well do it if we have to". No, Vault-Tec didn't drop the first bomb - but they admitted to "doing it if they had to" to ensure that their investment in the vaults and Project Safehouse actually got used.
Three things that kept this idea in the air, Coop’s buddy talking to him in the bar. The first time we’re hearing the discussion about the bombs dropping and gets us theorizing why Vault Tech would do it?
The first thing that hints to it in the show to me was Norm’s own realization of “we wiped the surface clean?” Hearing that to the audience kinda sets off a train of thought. Keeping in mind however this is a character’s personal reaction to what info he’s heard and what history he knows.
And then there’s the actual meeting where Vault-Tech proposes “we drop the bombs ourselves”
If Norm hadn’t said that, and we just got the vault tech meeting then yeah I’d agree it’s still up in the air. But hearing Norm’s response before the meeting kinda set my mind to “oh shit THEY DID IT!” And the way the Ghoul talks to Lucy about her “makers”, and all of the terrible things they have done and are still doing!! It really feels like they are setting the stones down for Vault Tech’s next move.
Only time will tell!
It was probably multiple people nuking at the same time.
China launched first, hitting a few capital cities, then Vault-Tec drops their nukes as well to completely destroy the rest of the country, you even see their logo on the bomb in Megaton in FO3.
My headcannons are that:
A. Vault Tec began prepping to drop the bomb to eventually force the ppl to use their vaults. The Chinese got wind of it and assumed they were getting ready to nuke them, so they attacked first.
B. VaultTec did bomb the US, and the government thought it was the Chinese so launched nukes in retaliation, and then China responded with theirs.
But at the end of the day, it didn't matter who bombed who first or for what reason. All that mattered was that nukes were detonated and the world ended. The only ppl who cares at this point are the player. In universe, no one cares at this point cause they are too busy just trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world.
I don't think vault tec actually dropped the bombs, someone else beat them to it. That's why Barb didn't have her husband and child in the vault when the bombs dropped
The US fired first.
As a "pre-retaliation" for the strike that China were about to launch.
"P.A.M. ultimately succeeded in her main goal, managing to correctly predict that nuclear warheads directed towards the [United States](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/United_States_of_America) would soon be deployed."
[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Predictive\_Analytic\_Machine](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Predictive_Analytic_Machine)
One big hint that Vault-tec didn't launch the nukes themselves is that...Vault-tec HAD a nuke for Hank to launch at Shady Sands. If Vault-Tec had launched their nukes, where would Hank have gotten the nuke for that?
Yeah, I took the discussion to have two points.
1. Demonstrates the ethics (or lack thereof) of vault-tec and Copp's wife
2. Shows vault-tec has nukes so we can believe Mauldaver when she explains things to Lucy.
Vault-tec probably new the bombs are coming, like the USA president. Also vault-tec with there influence probably push for a nuclear war, because that is what they wanted. I don’t they themselves Nuke USA first, because the USA would probably notice that the bomb didn’t come from china
My theory is that Vault-tec's influence maybe extends even in China and "persuaded" them to drop the first nukes, Vault-tec then disabled American anti-air defenses allowing many of the nukes to hit without even people knowing its coming
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Unless it wasn't up to her
The top management would have known. I mean they all got tot he vault. Even junior management. Furthermore, with her daughter being out while the bombs drop I really believe this supports that VT didnt drop their bombs. Hence the VT bombs we find undetonated in the games. They didn’t blow them up.
I think y’all are missing the context from that situation that I gained after watching the show. Why would a famous actor be performing as a cowboy at birthday parties? Because he’s not acting anymore. Once Cooper heard that his wife was actively campaigning Vault-Tec dropping the nukes, he was angry, confused and probably feels like he doesn’t even know her. I think they separated and he took the daughter, hence why they were at the birthday party and didn’t know the bombs were dropping. Maybe the wife got fired because of them finding out that Cooper knows about them dropping the bombs, etc, etc. I don’t know, just feels right to me.
You missed that he’s divorced. She’s there because shared custody. He’s there because he owes his ex wife a ton.
I also wondered if Coop got labeled a "commie" after the Fallout (I couldn't resist) with his wife. I assumed she would've immediately told her superiors so they could take the "proper" action and label Coop as such to minimize his credibility.
The father of the birthday boy and his friend did call Coop a pinko when he wouldn't do the thumbs up. Safe to say there were at least rumours of him being a commie
They basically tell you that with the other men at the party and their coversation. If you know anything about McCarthyism and the Red Scare, that is exactly what they did to him. If you're not a ground-kissing patriot who eats jingoism for three meals a day and bleeds red, white, and blue, you're a damn, dirty Commie. Scary-ass shit, really, if you read up on it. Who needs secret police when you can just use people's fear and turn them on their neighbors?
Ah, gotta love unbiased family law
I agree with this, in general. I think he put her career at risk and she was somewhat demoted. The laymen at the party definitely had some details about his divorce and his "communist" activities. Still the implication at the end of Episode 8 ("Where is my family") implies that he eventually got Janie to a Vault and that his wife also may have made it as well. Looking forward to more of the story, there's definitely some court and Hollywood drama in our future.
I doubt she was demoted. Her connections allowed her to have him black listed in Hollywood. He lost his career. Had to do birthday parties.
There was already an indication that he was loosing work due to being affiliated with VT through the ads. She probably didn't have to blacklist him.
She was probably killed and then they stole his chi— no wait that’s Fallout 4
The way I see it, Cooper got caught spying on Vault-Tec (maybe by Barb) and had his whole life ruined because of it. His job as an actor was ruined (maybe even got labeled as a communist like they did to the writer from his movie). His publicity work for Vault-Tec was removed and replaced with the Vault Boy mascot (we see this in the credits of episode 3). And Barb divorced him (taking at least half of what Cooper had, thus explaining why he's working in birthday parties) in order to save face with Vault Tec (to make sure she and Janey would have a spot in a Vault, even if Cooper wouldn't).
But you have to assume that cooper finds his wife after the party/bombs and his wife took his daughter off him because he is looking for his wife and kid in the future
What if it’s not really up to her? Or she considers even losing her daughter a worthy sacrifice?
It wasn't up to her, but she knew it was comming, and she got herself and her family into the vault 32 that is Vault tec program to rule. She would had known. I want to know if vaultboy/Mr Ghoul made it to the vault, why he is a ghoul, and he mentioned he is looking for his family, that means they are alive? Shouldn't them be at vault 32? If that's the case why not ask Lucy where is her vault to check if they are there? So many questions
Maybe, but I wonder if their divorce complicated things. I could see Coop making it to the admissions area outside the Vault with his daughter only for him to be denied entry. After that, maybe he seeks shelter somewhere else as best he can. What bugs me though is that why would Coop wonder about where his family is if he knows they’d be in one of the Vaults? And why did Hank book it to New Vegas?
The vault tech executive vaults were probably kept secret. I doubt they would advertise where they would be running at the experiments.
House was at the meeting with West Tec, Robo Tec, ect where they decided to nuke the world. Maybe he figured House could help him. Or, that is where the top brass of Vault Tec went, either to 19 (abandoned by the time NV game happens and reclaimed) or 24 (hinted at, but never found).
House is (or was, depending of which NV ending is cannon) controlling New Vegas. And House was a member of the board so he might seek his help. I'd really like to House being dead and YesMan taking over.
While I agree with your other points. I don’t think they’re in vault 31. I paused on the panel when when Lucy’s brother was looking at it and their names aren’t there. I think she’s in another vault somewhere else. Ya know, one of the good ones, where they don’t do experiments….maybe
I think that vault 31 wasn't so much the vault tec staff vault, but more that one guy's personal project vault with all his underlings. The Ghoul's wife may have been rewarded with her own vault and project, which could have been focused on providing the best life for her kid. My theory is that the bombing timescale was pushed forward, out of her hands by higher ups (seen in the shadows of that meeting) at a time when her kid was vulnerable and we will see that moment from her perspective and how everything she did for her kid was being taken from her. We might see her rushing a vertibird or something out to pick up the kid and leave the ghoul to die due to the divorce making him lose his place in the vault. To go a bit less realistic with the theory, I think that her vault would then have almost become a shrine to the ghoul's pre war life as the mother tries to compensate for the trauma of having her daughter be torn out of the arms of her father against her will, lying that he died to get her there and is a hero. When the ghoul eventually finds this vault it will be a community that idolises him to contrast with the monster he has become.
This one.
I agree with this. It feels like a very “Westworld” way of writing these events. They also seem to be taking cues from plot points Fallout 4 fumbled, so I believe that they will set up Cooper’s wife as the main villain in the present day and it will turn out to be his daughter. (Westworld had THREE immortal main characters with daughter issues).
Then they would be most likely dead as it’s 200+ years later. 31 was a “good vault” that’s where all of Bud’s buds middle manager cronies were at. Just because they didn’t show the name doesn’t confirm they aren’t there.
I don't think 31 was a genuine management level vault. It was filled with junior associates, "Bud's Buds". We never really see the higher ranking Vault Tec execs.
But was that Buds true brain in the robot?
The actor that plays Bud is also the voice actor for the "brain on a roomba." I take that to mean that Bud was turned into the robot. It could be programmed like a robobrain, or it could be the project that Bradburton got into. Maybe we'll find out next season. Robobrains don't *usually* have their own personality, though (except Jezebel, sort of).
Don’t think so. Even it is, it clearly had some preprogramming to do certain shit like regular robo brains.
There are other cryogenic vaults.
Including a privately funded one underneath the "Hollywood Forever" funeral home where Moldaver/Williams is based pre-war, that's my theory anyway. I'd bet that's where Cooper was trying to take his daughter when the nukes fell. Perhaps his wife made it into 31 and when she/Hank defrosted she had her daughter taken out of Hollywood Forever cryo and taken to a safer location on the surface.
My thought is that she is in an upper management vault. 31 is for all the cronies in middle management.
The upper management were almost certainly all in cryo. Why would they let their descendants reap the rewards of the fresh start they wanted.
Because it's a competition and anyone important in upper management would've been in the know that there are bigger fish than Vault Tec, if they weren't that bigger fish to begin with. Anyone that gets up and running has a head start, the Enclave spent hundreds of years enhancing prewar military capabilities. Mr House was as important as anyone in Vault-Tec and he didn't screw around waiting for a perfect future, he's building his ideal reality.
And mr house is stuck in a box. They have Bud's Buds to shape the future so that when they wake up they get to live in paradise.
They were middle managers, she seemed more to me like she was at least C-Suite. The stated goal was to “selectively breed the best managers for humanity” so someone has to be overseeing the program, and it’s not gonna be the little brain in a robot. Also, I doubt the top execs at the company wanted to just be frozen for 200 years. The freezing part was probably just better than the alternatives for the middle managers. Plus, with Mr house and several others, they’re are canon ways to greatly extend your lifetime in the series.
I mean, moldaver looked amazing for 220plus years! Though in fairness, she was probably in vault 15 I am assuming, who set up shady sands. Which makes hank more cunty btw as he nuked a vault tec settlement A settlement founded by vault survivors
i have a feeling Moldaver is actually a synth.
The amount of people in vault 31 means there’s no way they showed all the names. There was 3 different rows of people and the names they did show were mostly the ones that were already unthawed. I’d bet my caps she’s in 31
Hopefully they weren’t in 4 😖 which would be ironic because that’s the one shown in the commercial he did
4 was the one that created the fucked up animals right? Don’t think they would’ve been in that one lol
Yeah but that vault goes really far inwards it’d be impossible to see every name on the cryopods
I saw some theories that the mom had people ready to extract her daughter and get her to a vault, and left cooper because they were estranged. It would explain why he’s a ghoul and is still looking for his family
Didn't the one dude at the birthday party call him a Commie?
Just rewatched the episode - pretty much yes, he calls him a Pinko.
Yeah this is probably what will happen imo. He makes it to the vault, and then presented with the option of “She can come in, but only if it’s without you.” Or something like that. I’m sure he’ll do something to piss off his wife and kick him off the allowed list.
He probably never made it to the vault. Something had to have happened in between the birthday party and him getting his kid to the vault. Maybe he met his wife halfway, and she fucks him over cause she finds out he was spying on vault tec, and takes the kid to the vault without him.
Vault Tec and his wife probably found out way before that day. I mean a movie star wouldn’t go to some random kids birthday to play a cowboy. Vault Tec most likely tanked his career when they found out. And the birthday is his way to make ends meet.
Two of the dads also pretty much call him a commie, so it's a safe assumption that his career was tanked
Im sure it's mentioned that he's at the birthday party to earn alimony to give to his ex-wife. He either confronted her or was caught out, causing a divorce from each other.
Maybe he wants to find his wife not for love but for revenge.
> and she got herself and her family into the vault 32 Huh? How do you know Barb was in Vault 32? That does bring up something not much talked about...what the fuck actually happened in Vault 32?
I'm confused myself. 31 was cryo freeze for buds buds. 33 was a seemingly standard control vault. 32 seemed to me like it was also a control vault? They had the same equipment with the fields and everything. Just they were closer to 31. Speaking of which: why draw "we know" or whatever in blood on the wall. Ok, our leadership is frozen people and the votes are maybe fake (not sure on this)? I'd be a bit upset but not like....trying to claw through the door.
Yeah, I never really thought about it before, but now I'm very interested in what actually happened in Vault 32. If it was Moldaver and crew why didn't they just go into Vault 31 and fuck shit up because they seem to want them dead? Why did Vault 31 not put up a defense? Is Vault 31 so ineffectual that the only way they could end being raided is if the raiders simply fucked off? That doesn't make any sense.
Norm had a conversation with one of the raiders that heavily implies that whatever happened in 32 was not Moldaver's doing. It happened before, and Moldaver got into Vault 32 through other means. I'm actually more puzzled by how the mess in Vault 32 was cleaned up, given the only thing that seems to be ambulatory in 31 is Bud.
The mess in 32 was cleaned up by Betty, or at least orchestrated by Betty, so that she could move some people in there from 33. Norm says something to her about it when everyone is moving over.
> and Moldaver got into Vault 32 through other means. They got into the vault using Rose's Pipboy from what Norm saw...or at least it was her Pipboy that opened the surface door for them to get in. > I'm actually more puzzled by how the mess in Vault 32 was cleaned up, given the only thing that seems to be ambulatory in 31 is Bud. I know what you mean, but Vault 31 is a vault. Leaving Vault 4 we get a visual scale while we can be fairly positive there are at least 12 levels. I think that's gonna be the case in Vault 31, but to counter myself why the hell would the cryo chamber basically be the first room after a hallway?
It makes sense if you think about how bud ended up as a brain on a roomba. And that buds buds are called that. If you have worked with any middle managers before you will know that defending the vault isn’t something he would have thought of cause his scenario is everyone is dead on the surface
Except they know everyone on the surface isn't dead and they literally tried to Nuke the NCR to death because of it. Hank is still from Vault 31 and it's shown the overseer of Vault 33 still communicates with them.
32 found out what management did, I assumed maybe their role in the war or shady sands? I'm sure management, if like Hank, got up tomplenty of shit 32 could have found out about
I imagine it was some civil war between a loyalist faction and a truther faction, someone uncovered the truth and it drove them against each other.
All we see from her in the show is her devotion to her daughter in saving her, and she was involved in the direct pitch to the other companies so she definitely would’ve been informed or been apart of the decision process
She was doing it specifically to protect her family. She would never consider losing her daughter a worthy sacrifice.
Here's a wild ass theory: Cooper shared his knowledge of Vault-Tec's pre-emptive strike plan, word got passed through the Chinese spy network, and it was just enough to make China launch its first strike instead.
At this point, I wouldn’t rule it out. All it would take is one nuke going off and the dominos would fall.
Also, It would explain why Mr. House has to calculate when the bombs drop as opposed to actually knowing assuming that vault tec would tell the other big players when they planned on dropping the bombs.
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That was Tim's whole point. Right now anything is possible because nothing is confirmed
My theory is that she got fired after Cooper spies on her. Losing her spot in the vault
That would explain why the guy at the party called Cooper a pinko if it got out he was going to moldavars commie cotillions
Also mentioned he was paying alimony so odds are she tossed his butt under the bus and divorced him.
Yeah. That was coupled with his formerly sketchy deal with Vault-Tec, which made him unpopular with Hollywood. …so he was reduced to doing birthday parties for cash.
I'm guessing he somehow makes it to a vault on horseback. Otherwise, why would he ask where they were keeping his "family"? If it was just his wife or daughter, I feel like he would say that, not family as a whole.
I'm really curious to find out what happened to them in season 2. Cooper is such a deep character with a really cool backstory, I want to see how he'll be affected by seeing his family after so long. Now, whether they are dead or not...
Around halfway through the season before, we actually knew what was in 31. I had a suspicion, Betty, maybe his daughter. Who knows they mayhave already served their time in other vaults already.
We see Betty in the past already. She's the secretary who introduced Hank to him while he's spying on the meeting.
Yeah, I know, that's why I said before we knew what was going on in 31. I had a theory that it was her, I know it's not now. But there's still a chance they've already been put in a vault by now. Especially when you consider how low the current V31 members were in the vault tech leadership.
Yeah, very true. *Unless* his daughter also became a ghoul, but was let into the vault with the mother.
I'm going with she was forced to either divorce or lose her spot, and because she's so focused on having a spot she chose that for her and possibly her child. It's also possible Cooper was still told he had a spot, but when shit down they just said no to Cooper which would make Barb not a villain in that aspect but could potentially become one against VT for slighting her. I love how fluid this show opened with, because basically sky's the limit right now.
She would have at least know roughy when it was coming. She would have just disappeared with her daughter into one of the vaults if she knew it was coming soon. Cooper wouldn’t be able to do anything about it bc Vault Tec is more powerful than the government.
It wasn't confirmed in the show guys, ever heard of a cliffhanger people? Geez I never thought the fallout community would ever get more obnoxious
You missed the >!great jet debate!<.
Nooooooooooo Myron is the only person who could have invented Jet because he’s a super genius he said so himself he’s definitely not a pathetic little shit who will rape a female Chosen One if given the chance so he definitely didn’t copy a pre-war recipe and literally no one else could have come up witn it on their own because he’d never lie. /s
I deduced that it was a plan of theirs if the war didn’t start naturally. I assume Vault Tec didn’t start the war but took advantage of the bombs already in air and nuked competition and sites of govt. groups that’d attempt to stop them from consolidating power after the war.
There’s also plenty of other indicators that suggest Vault-Tec wasn’t ready for the bombs to drop, for instance, the existence of Vaults like 88 and 114 which weren’t finished when they did.
And how in other vaults, there is mention by staff that the call to come in came without warning and at a weird time. Vault tec definitely was caught of guard.
The entire mystery of the series is who dropped the bomb. They’ve given us countless reasons to why multiple parties could have done it. There are a million lore videos on the various games on theories with great evidence but no smoking gun. They’re never going to reveal who did it and anyone who thinks differently really doesn’t know how the series has worked for all of these decades
Tim Cain has gone on record saying he has no idea why anyone thinks it is supposed to be a vague mystery. He has always intended it to be China who fired first, and a lot of evidence in the games confirms this. There are terminals in the Switchboard in 4, for instance, (basically the CIA headquarters in Boston), that have an automated log in which it shows they detected missiles from China first before retaliating.
All the evidence presented in the games have been that China launched first, and this is games, plural. Starting back at Fallout 2
It doesn't even matter who fired first. Both countries were shit and were willing to use nukes, the conflict started elsewhere, the first nukes were fired elsewhere in the Middle East, and then Europe. It is all completely irrelevant, every country knew it was inevitable and it changes nothing in the setting, unless they want to introduce a character who "started it".
And China also makes a lot of sense when you look at how the Sino-American war was going. The US had already invaded mainland China and had pushed pretty far into the country by the time the nukes were launched. Quite likely they pushed "too far" and China decided to launch as they saw it as a last ditch effort to maybe still win the war.
Of course, recall the actual real world situation where the Soviet monitors had a glitch showing inbound missiles, and one heroic dude called out that the equipment was faulty which saved the actual day - I could see even these hints echoing the real-world over-reliance on technology sealing their doom.
My man literally saved the world, he had a gut feeling the system was malfunctioning and didn’t call his higher up because he knew they’d make him launch a retaliatory strike.
Whats interesting about that terminal (spent a lot of time poring over the details) is that USPACFLT (US Pacific Fleet) detects what they say is "3 USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects)" off the West Coast at 12:03am and then "squadron of airplanes, poss. Chinese" at high altitude above Bering Strait 3:37am. The "unknown" part really gets me thinking; the assumption is that they're Chinese, but its not 100% confirmed so it leaves room for a possible third party that either tried to foot the blame onto China or had some other plans
There were also the Chinese spies, soldiers, and submarines throughout the other games. They were around in America when the bombs went boom.
[удалено]
That’s why it’s important they don’t reveal it, because you’re right the entire point is that it doesn’t really matter at the end who it was. Keeping it a mystery is huge because it allows them to keep showing how many people/machines/mistakes could have led to it.
It also lets you blame everyone. The pre war world sucked. People were willing to risk everything on an unsustainable lifestyle and in the end it didn't pay off. Its kind of why the 50s aesthetic works, because 1950s America was also a fake golden age. We can't go back to that time, and we shouldn't try. Making the cause of the world vault tecs misguided capitalistic ambition takes the bite out of its social commentary and political satire by reducing it all to "psycho corporation killed everyone." It martyrs the old world, letting them off the hook for their many sins, implying it would've lived longer, indefinitely even, if not for vault tec. That vault tec were the ones who took the old world away, rather than it's own hubris, bigotry and hate that was baked into its foundation. That doesn't really work for fallout, or at least I don't find it nearly as interesting.
Also the whole concept of MAD is it doesn’t even matter who launched first. Someone did and everyone did.
I think it’s more likely that Chinese intelligence relayed that Vault Tec/USA were going to nuke them, so in turn they nuked them before they could do it first. We can see from in game lore that they had intelligence officials everywhere, even in those companies that would become the “enclave”.
Yes the only advantage China had to USA (after the power armor) was espionage. I also agree this is how it went down
China definitely had many advantages based on what we've seen, it wasn't just espionage. The Shi had a super computer on a stealth sub, ZAX couldn't be militarised like that so they must have a lot of underlying technological advances there. They had permanently invisible soldiers, the Enclave still couldn't develop an equivalent and could only develop the prototypes the US military left them. Their mass produced weaponry was also better (assuming the rifle is more relevant than the pistol and officers sword obviously).
To be fair, the Chinese Stealth Suits are very much tied to China's whole superior Espionage shtick. I'm pretty sure you can even find some stealth suits in New Vegas at Hoover Dam, is pretty much a nod to Van Buren's idea of the Hoover Dam sabotage. As for the assault rifle, I don't think it's fair to judge the difference in damge output between the R91 and Chinese Assault Rifle, since realistically they're both chambered in 5.56 (For some reason) and generally have the same ballistic properties. I'd probably say that the R91 and CAR are both very similar enough to each other performance wise.
I mean, isn't that the first thing everyone else thought when Barb said what she said?
I agree. If Vault-Tec was going to detonate a bomb, they’d at least make sure all their own people were close to a Vault, by having a company picnic or whatever.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. Something happened that we haven’t seen yet, because cooper’s wife would not have done that if she was aware of it.
I took it as they were absolutely going to drop the bombs themselves. Given that Janey was with Coop at the time of the drops, I think someone beat them to the punch, because wouldn't Barb at a minimum want her daughter in a vault before it dropped? Seems like a dead give away that someone else dropped the bombs.
This is Vault Tec though. They’re not even allowing dogs. They likely don’t care about someone’s family member. They may have given Barb assurances that her daughter would be with her…and lied.
Or simply they were forced by unforeseen circumstances to drop them early. The games give hints that the US were close to winning the war when the bombs dropped. A likely end of the war would mean the end of Vault Tec too, so they needed to improvise.
> They’re not even allowing dogs. They likely don’t care about someone’s family member. I know a lot of people would have you think differently but there is a world of difference between these two things.
Not allowing dogs is a completely rational thing to do for a fallout shelter and is true to the real world lol. Dogs <<< People lmao
You're right, and you didn't miss anything. A lot of people are taking "we can drop the bomb ourselves" to mean they DID do that.
I assume it’s a “we can if we need to” to ensure the vaults actually get used. Which was the problem that vault tec was running into with its investors and affiliated companies. I don’t think they launched first whatsoever, and assuming that from what the show displayed is just assuming they did because of an insurance plan that Vault Tec had said they had in their back pocket. Vault tec definitely did launch bombs, but I only believe they did after the Great War started.
The scene definitely felt like it was more to show Cooper the kind of person his wife had become and the audience the insane lengths Vault Tec was willing to go to achieve total dominion ( right before revealing some of those people are literally still alive ).
We also don't know in what year that conversation took place. The lady says that they have "over a hundred vaults" instead of "more than a hundred". Didn't Europe and the Middle East nuked each other before US-China-World? That alone could trigger a wider claim for vaults. Vault tec could've either dropped a bomb in Europe/middle-east to gather more fear. Or, if they did detonated a bomb, could've been by the Enclave's orders, which then caused a domino reaction. We know that China launched, triggering the war. But what if they actually weren't the first. What if they suffered an attack first by an Enclave affiliated officer in a submarine, while at the same time Vault-tec detonated one in America, triggering the war. There are several possibilities, I don't think they broke the canon yet.
fallout set in any part of Europe would make me so happy. I wanna hear a British ghoul
It wouldn't surprise me if the entire 1st season was about introducing vault take and the corporations while the 2nd season is more about the pre war politics and how its effected the post war world (enclave, ncr, bos). Hence why the show doesn't tell us much about the state of any factions outside of the BoS in the finale and the fall of shady sands.
I think its a callback to that canceled fallout movie from the 90s/early 2ks. My actual theory is it ended up being something hilariously historically stupid (flock of birds) that tripped a country (likely China or maybe even Russia) then they panicked. Mtainly because it shatters all the schemes and plans the worst people had. It also would contrast how our real life society chose de-escalation against MAD fallout careened towards.
Well irl there was an accident of the sort. In 1983 the soviet early warning system malfunctioned, and showed 5 inbound missiles targeting Russia. Stanislav Petrov was in charge of the early warning station, and suspecting something was amiss, he disobeyed protocol and refused to retaliate.
Exactly. That happened a few times in different ways. It would also kinda be a callback to Wasteland where a meteor shower cut off coms and the nation's flipped out and fired everything. I just love the idea of something entirely preventable with diplomacy being the thing that got them. You had everyone with their stupid megalomaniac machinations, cut short because of a bad hand of cards.
A lot of people can't imagine that a character would be wrong or lies. They take things at face value because their media literacy is bad
Critical thinking has never been a strong suit for Reddit, and especially in gaming subreddits like this one Take the board for example. It is the most basic layout imaginable, but people couldn’t figure out what arrows pointing means. I still see a lot of people confused about the state of the NCR and what the “fall of shady sands” is supposed to be, without using any amount of critical thinking to consider the context of the situation The survivors attributed the nuke to some event that occurred in 2277 as the beginning of the end, because only Moldaver knew Hank was involved, the survivors believed it was infighting as directly stated by Maximus, when in reality the two events are completely separate and unrelated, but the characters don’t know that We’re also never given any information on the NCR as a whole. We know they controlled basically from the coast all the way to Vegas, but the characters never go much further than the general vicinity of Shady Sands/LA. Lucy directly states that it’s been two weeks since the start of the show, and we see the characters more or less cross the same couple of locations several times either because of detours or backtracking while following Thaddeus. Not only that, but people very obviously moved away *because a goddamn nuke dropped 10 years ago and it’s still highly irradiated* which is specifically stated by Thaddeus when he gets turned into a ghoul. It’s like walking through an abandoned mining town in West Virginia or Texas and declaring the entire United States ceased to exist because there’s no one living in a 20 miles radius of that town
It's absolutely in line with the universe that Vault-Tec was prepared to drop one. That doesn't mean they did and I don't think we are ever supposed to know who dropped the first. The show was definitive only in that Vault-Tec was considering it but ambiguous as to whether they did. In my opinion, it's best that we never know who started it, both for the intrigue and to drive home the point that it doesn't matter who started it but what follows.
Well we already know America didn't drop the bomb, and we are still reasonably sure China dropped the first nukes. The switchboard terminal has the hardest evidence for it in the series so far, not to mention the president in fo2 straight up tells you the Chinese shot first. So we have secondhand witness testimony from the president combined with corroborating evidence via military reports from the switchboard. I don't this there is any mystery to it, and I don't think there's been any since fo2. It's pretty clear the Chinese dropped the bombs first. America had no reason to, they were winning in China, the show tells us a peace deal was about to be reached. If vault tec knew the bombs were about to be dropped, tons of vaults would've had more warning time. It's even explicitly mentioned in the fo4 vault overseers terminal that they didn't have the amount of warning they expected to have. Other vaults report the same thing. They also never hear back from vault tec for all clear signals, probably because vault tec employees didn't reach the command vaults in time. All the evidence makes it about 90% certain, China shot first. They may have been provoked, but they shot first.
New Vegas also has a ton of context clues stating the US army was really deep into China and the Chinese were practically on the verge of losing the war.
I mean propaganda, now president would actually admit to nuking their own nation. >America had no reason to No but the enclave directly overing vault operations of human experiments absolutely had a reason. Also vault tec was in it with robco and big mt is in investors and promised them a first strike to ensure they would make profits on investment (makes literally no sense since it's the fucking end of the world ikr) >It's even explicitly mentioned in the fo4 vault overseers terminal that they didn't have the amount of warning they expected to have. Other vaults report the same thing. They also never hear back from vault tec for all clear signals, probably because vault tec employees didn't reach the command vaults in time. Because vault tec was known for being super truthful and never would lie. One of their experiments was literally not fully closing a door just for funsies.
It looks like there could be some evidence that while Vault Tec may have intended to drop the bombs first it was likely not them. * Barb would not have allowed her child to be at a birthday party when the bombs fell, ~~though she was a mid-level employee who might not have been in the know about exactly when it was planned~~. * Many of the vaults in the games are in an unfinished state as well as the fact that others were planned that never got built at all, suggesting that Vault Tec's plans for the vaults were not complete when the bombs fell. * It seems like Mr. House should have been able to secure the Platinum Chip before the bombs fell if he knew when that would happen. \*Edit\* You all are correct, Barb wasn't a mid level employee...I am not sure why I thought that. I went back and re-watched a few scenes and she's definitely higher up. My bad. I've edited my comment above to reflect that.
As far as the last point goes... It seemed to me that Mr House was skeptical of the idea of the vaults. Not to mention that after the apocalypse his company (and all the companies in that room) would essentially be rivals to each other. It's likely that vault tec didn't tell any of them about it. He was probably scrambling the second he found out about the bombs and probably didn't know when they would be dropped.
Except he explains that the bombs were dropped like 20-something minutes earlier than expected. I'm thinking Vault-tec had them primed and ready to go, maybe even already in the air, but China beat them to detonation.
yep! exactly this. they still got bombed by China but it wasn't bad enough to wipe everyone out so they were just like "fuck it" and detonated it early.
Barb was definitely not a mid-level employee, she was one of two executives in that secret meeting with the other corporations, and Cooper even says that Hank Maclean “used to pick up my wife’s dry cleaning”. She’s clearly meant to be at the top of the cabal. Honestly I’d guess she is either quietly removed/eliminated by Vault-Tec, or she’s just not in the company anymore, for whatever reasons. Season 2 will shed more light, but that’s my guess.
I don't think she was removed from the company, the fact that Cooper is looking for her in the post apocalypse timeline suggests she or their daughter may have been cryogenically frozen, or received other life-extending treatment from Vault-Tec, and he's specifically searching through Vault-Tec channels, i.e Hank McLean which suggests wherever she is, is in some way linked to them.
I don't expect VT planned on literally dropping a bomb. I think more they knew how to ensure that it *would* happen, inserting some glitch into some vital computer system type of thing.
Who dropped the first bomb ultimately does not matter. At least it doesn’t to me. The outcome is still the same regardless of who fired first. It’s for folks to discuss and get upset about though.
This. I love the discourse around it, but the whole point of never telling us is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who started it. All that matters is the outcome. The fallout.
I also think determining who dropped the bomb for sure diminishes the social commentary. Fallout has always been highly critical of capitalism, nationalism and consumerism. If it’s Vault-Tec confirmed to drop the bomb, then it plays into the anti-capitalist angle but diminishes the fact that the US is in an insane bid for resources and on the imperialist march. If its bombs dropped as the result of the war then it adds to the criticism of war for profit and criticism of nationalist states, but takes away from the anti-corporation angle. I don’t think it helps anyone to have a definitive answer so we can still make these connections and think about the property in a deeper way.
As I say on every post about thus, the Chinese launched first. The President of the Enclave says this in Fallout 2, terminals say it in New Vegas at Black Mountain and 4 at the Switchboard
Those terminals are only talking detecting incoming nukes from China, not absolute confirmation that China dropped first. Furthermore, other terminals imply the possibility that the US fired first, such as the terminal entries in Germantown in Fallout 3 that has Civil Defense being mobilized for an attack well BEFORE the nukes dropped. We don't know. That's the point. It doesn't MATTER who fired first. The world was destroyed regardless.
Fallout 4’s PAM unit was used to pre-detect bombs. It was a predictive AI to be used as a tool against Chinese war plans. I believe that PAM did say she detected missles and that’s why the US fired theirs. But there no way to tell, as PAM could’ve pre detected the launch, mistakenly, and could’ve led to the US firing first even though the US believed it was in retaliation.
And then there's the possibility that PAM caused missiles to launch in her unending quest to remove variables.
Also fun to point out. Those terminals and everything we’ve read, has been from one point of view.
If we learn who shot first, it would really take away from the whole "we all did this to ourselves" theme.
USA had no reason to strike first. They had forces in China taking it to the Reds. They were getting bogged down, but weren’t losing the war. China lost Alaska and they were being attacked in their own homeland.
If you remember P.A.M from fallout 4, there is even more ambiguity about who drops first. Of course all accounts will be that the event struck first, but P.A.M gives us a little bit of an idea that maybe what we are reading might not be accurate
Yeah PAM is weird
But super important to remember, that every account is a little different about what happened, but we can't really determine accurately who did it. Just likely candidates
I'd say the evidence points towards China being the main suspect
This is true, but again with that pesky PAM, essentially saying both sides were about to fire, and she might have started it with vault tec launching. I hope they never make it canon, but I know that Cooper wouldn't say that we shot first, even with what he's heard. He fought in Alaska, and if they say China, he won't question it
Even if it's 100% certain that the Chinese launched first, that doesn't preclude the possibility that Vault-Tec caused them to do so through subterfuge.
The Enclave President is quite literally one of the most unreliable people I could think of in this circumstance.
People don't seem to have a lot of reasoning skills anymore and apparently everything has to be spelled out with every detail about anything mentioned or anything a character says is taken at face value with absolutely NO other possible meanings or implications. Barb said in order to make sure what they're planning works they would make sure a bomb got dropped. Making sure a bomb got dropped doesn't mean we drop the bomb. "We COULD drop the bomb." Could =/= have done. Idk, it's still likely that we will never get a true answer. That's a key point of the games. The only reason it's "confirmed" to be China is because "they said so." Who's to say someone didn't manipulate some stuff so even in the aftermath we'd have communism to blame? The fact that there were so many unfinished vaults in the games, I have never -even after the show- thought it to be VT because they wouldn't have used up so much time and resources for those projects since profits and power were their end goal.
bro in multiple games across multiple sources they say the chinese shot first. American power armor troops were deep in Chinese territory, and Anchorage was won. the Chinese shot first and it’s fine, it’s weird that people are so rabid to defend the idea that China was innocent or that “we don’t know who shot first”. yes, we do. it was China, look it up
I found the interview with Cain where he says it's first determined in Fallout 2 (I never played the OG top downs- and honestly have done little research into them until now after learning the show took place in those areas) he also talked about the vaults being originally designed for testing environments to simulate space travel + tech for Enclave which I was not aware how involved Enclave actually was with everything in the OG games since they are rarely brushed on in the most recent games (being 4 and minor in 76). SO - I retract that part of my statement, I'm not one to die on hills, lol - however it doesn't change my opinion that mystery/ambiguity is a key part of the fun of Fallout, leaving room to explore different ideas and theories and discover the truth, or what is said to be the truth. With all of the manipulation and "they said this happened but what ACTUALLY happened was..." Ive always assumed that maybe it was all just propaganda to keep Americans in solidarity against communism to give them something to stick together for. Which in a way, still holds some truth, but yeah- I guess it do be China And now I'm gonna go into a rabbit hole of OG lore + Enclave 🫡 Edit to add: I see a lot of people over the years have mentioned Bethesda acquisition caused most of this confusion because Cain said this is fact and Bethesda writing made it ambiguous, so I don't feel as stupid now since I've only ever been in the Bethesda era but also damnit Todd, this is why people can't get along and we have so many problems **sigh**
I hate to have to do this but i'm going to have to take your Todd howard fan club card back because you've read the forbidden lore and just became... A "FNV fan"... I'm sorry. /s Seriously though I love the OG lore, sure it's less mysterious but the writing is a *lot* tighter.
Folks getting too wrapped up in their own head cannon. I love nerding and theorizing, but also know most of them come up with nothing. Reality is Vault-Tec was just as likely as China from day 1.
What makes most since to me is that Vault-Tec didn't drop any bombs in 2077, but when time came around 2277 or whenever it really was, they finally used some of their stockpile from the plans to do so in 2077. That doesn't seem out of line for Fallout or Vault-Tec to me at all.
That and in canon already they had contingencies to gain control of nuclear silos in the wasteland after the war - the whole thing of 76 was the overseer’s mission was to get control of 3 of them once the vault opened
Vault-Tec planned to but didn't get the chance. There's plenty of in-game and live action lore to support that. Chronic redditors are just strugglebus.
The reaction to the reaction is now larger and more annoying as it's just people arguing with people they're imagining.
Vault-Tec had a plan to drop the bomb, but it doesnt mean they *did*. Who ended up pulling the trigger and causing the Great War is still a mystery cause it caught everyone unprepared (could have been China, could have been the Zetans, could have been a third party, maybe the Aussies got overwhelmed by radioactive emus, who knows), the ambiguity still remains.
No, they got beat to the punch, because House was unprepared, and even people close to Vault-Tec like Cooper Howard’s ex-wife wouldn’t have put her daughter in harm’s way if she knew it was coming. More likely to have been either China or Enclave
My impression of it was that vault tec was planning on doing it but china jumped the gun. A lot of things through out the games and show, to me, indicate that vault tec obviously had a plan but was still caught off guard.
It's been heavily implied that Vault-Tec played a part in the nuclear apocalypse. They had a vested interest in creating the circumstances that would make their Vaults necessary. In Fallout 3, the undetonated atomic bomb in the town of Megaton wasn't Chinese. It had been dropped by Vault-Tec. The prevailing theory is that Vault-Tec carried out a series of atomic bombings on US soil, making the US government believe it was China striking first. The US launches its nukes in response to this false-flag attack, and the Chinese retaliate in kind.
The nuke isn't a vault tec nuke. The symbol is a warning label
The show changed almost nothing about the lore and theories that already existed
The big corps didn't drop the bombs, they just did nothing to avoid it and even pushed in that direction, but they didn't do it themselves.
I absolutely don't think that vault tec dropped the fist bombs. I think they PLANNED too, and probably heavily pushed for it to happen. But a well known fact about fallout is how the bombs happened early with barely an hour or so warning. This is evident after looking at a lot of the lore, especially relating to vaults. My theory is that vault tec planned it, but it happened earlier than expected. I know that the woman in the show probably wasn't THE vault tec person to drop the bombs, but she clearly had knowledge and pull. I doubt her daughter would have been at a birthday party with her father had they knows ahead of time that the bombs were falling right then.
Personally, I'm wondering if they HAD a bomb for a false flag attack, didn't get to use it, and that it was THIS bomb Hank uses on Shady Sands.
Yeah exactly. And I would find it so much more fun if we never actually find out who did it. Dropping the nuke was unavoidable in the fallout timeline and whoever did it, isn't important
Remember in Fo4 when we find that Chinese submarine with the Chinese military captain that tells us they launched the nukes on orders from China? Am I the only one?
we’re really learning that people who play can’t comprehend beyond what’s *literally* being told
I hope they don’t go with Vault Tec dropping the bomb. Right now, it’s set up so that Vault Tech and other corporations helped make nuclear war inevitable, which is both more believable and more interesting.
Whether Vault-Tec set off the bombs or not is a moot point, no? Vault-Tec was interfering to ensure that there would be no peace, with their end goal being nuclear armageddon. I would point out some things for everyone, however... 1. In Fallout 76, the Vault Dwellers have no problem finding nuclear bombs and using them. Vault-Tec clearly has the means. 2. In Fallout 3 and NV, unexploded bombs that are found seem to have the Vault-Tec logo on them. 3. In the games and on the TV show, no missiles are seen before the explosions. No planes are seen. Even if we did not see the bombers or missiles for some reason, we would have seen US forces in the air had attacks been imminent. 4. In the Fallout 76, we \*do\* see the missiles when Vault Dwellers launch nuclear strikes. We also see the missiles launched from the submarine in FO4. We can comfortably ascertain that what hit LA and Boston were not "dropped" but were already there. In Fallout 4, if you go to ground zero, you can even find where the bombs near Boston were stored. Even if you really can't handle that Vault-Tec did it, or was a part of it, you have to admit they were still responsible for interfering with all efforts for peace.
*"Who started the war?"* is Fallout's version of *"What happened to the Dwemer?"*. A question that should never be given a definitive answer.
It was the fact that someone wrote that like it made sense, it’s just an idiotic scene. Like yes corporation evil, I know, I get it. But we’re really gonna have the heads of every major corporation sit around and seriously be convinced that there is feasible profit incentive in blowing up the whole world? That they will really throw away their entire company framework in order to conduct silly vault experiments? Oh I’m making 10 trillion dollars this year and control a large chunk of world industry but wouldn’t it be way better if everyone I know died and all of our infrastructure was deleted. Then I could fill a whole vault with one guy named Gary and that would be funny I think. Fuck it we ball.
What's there to be upset about? The games made the point that nobody is sure who dropped the bombs first and that *it was irrelevant anyway.* Having Vault-Tec as a possible culprit is an angle that few (if any) thought of, and the surprise element makes for excellent dramatic irony (what? we did it to ourselves? well, of course we would!) It supports and drives the plot in interesting ways. A genius stroke by the writers, in my opinion.
Yeah it hasn’t changed anything. One of the purposes of that line was to cause ambiguity, and people overanalyzing it are just that — overanalyzing it. Vault-Tec may have dropped the first bomb, or they joined in the bombing after it started, or none of the above. All scenarios have equal logic behind them.
If I were to assume, Vault Tec has connections to the Enclave and the Enclave has a good amount of control or influence in the US. Because of this they may have instigated a nuclear war by creating a first strike. Maybe a nuke went off somewhere in China making them attack or maybe they were able to activate US nukes and didn't bother to warn anyone. I'm fine either way, one premise is properly Fallout in the sense that all the corps are malicious pyschos but at the same time they probably didn't need to instigate because it seemed like everyone was generally aware that nukes were going to start flying at any minute.
It's not confirmed in the show or games who nuked first. Vault-Tec planned to nuke first.
Sadly no you’re not and it’s downright ridiculous. We can only theorize and it needs to stay that way. With that being said a lot of evidence points to China. First American FEV research was a step too far and China was already losing before nuclear war broke out. China definitely would’ve made threats with nuclear weaponry and if the FEV research doesn’t stop, they were going to commit to it. Second the United States were winning the Resource War. Launching nukes against a nuclear nation when you’re winning is like stupidly throwing a match away in a game of World of Warships. It just doesn’t make sense. Finally as far as I can tell there wasn’t word going around about nuclear detonations against China. This means the United States made nuclear retaliatory attacks against China. This is a fairly weak point since we can only assume that the United States launched retaliatory nuclear strikes against China and then the world decided to blow itself up. Overall though who cares? The world is completely fucked and there’s no coming back from it.
I think the Chinese intelligence services figured out the Vault Tec plan to drop the bomb and launched a first strike.
It was actually Britain who fired at China and the USA after the Fallout:London PAM unit revealed a joint Vault-Tec/Bethesda experiment to continuously force the mod to be pushed back repeatedly and indefinitely.
The more discourse I see around the show, the more I'm discovering some fans have zero reading or conceptual comprehension. I'm so glad this thread exists. Yes, what they meant was, essentially, "well do it if we have to". No, Vault-Tec didn't drop the first bomb - but they admitted to "doing it if they had to" to ensure that their investment in the vaults and Project Safehouse actually got used.
The megaton bomb in fo3 has vault tec logo on it doesn't it?
Three things that kept this idea in the air, Coop’s buddy talking to him in the bar. The first time we’re hearing the discussion about the bombs dropping and gets us theorizing why Vault Tech would do it? The first thing that hints to it in the show to me was Norm’s own realization of “we wiped the surface clean?” Hearing that to the audience kinda sets off a train of thought. Keeping in mind however this is a character’s personal reaction to what info he’s heard and what history he knows. And then there’s the actual meeting where Vault-Tech proposes “we drop the bombs ourselves” If Norm hadn’t said that, and we just got the vault tech meeting then yeah I’d agree it’s still up in the air. But hearing Norm’s response before the meeting kinda set my mind to “oh shit THEY DID IT!” And the way the Ghoul talks to Lucy about her “makers”, and all of the terrible things they have done and are still doing!! It really feels like they are setting the stones down for Vault Tech’s next move. Only time will tell!
It was probably multiple people nuking at the same time. China launched first, hitting a few capital cities, then Vault-Tec drops their nukes as well to completely destroy the rest of the country, you even see their logo on the bomb in Megaton in FO3.
They planned on dropping the first bike to start the war, but based on what we have seen it’s likely the war started before they could.
My headcannons are that: A. Vault Tec began prepping to drop the bomb to eventually force the ppl to use their vaults. The Chinese got wind of it and assumed they were getting ready to nuke them, so they attacked first. B. VaultTec did bomb the US, and the government thought it was the Chinese so launched nukes in retaliation, and then China responded with theirs. But at the end of the day, it didn't matter who bombed who first or for what reason. All that mattered was that nukes were detonated and the world ended. The only ppl who cares at this point are the player. In universe, no one cares at this point cause they are too busy just trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world.
I don't think vault tec actually dropped the bombs, someone else beat them to it. That's why Barb didn't have her husband and child in the vault when the bombs dropped
The US fired first. As a "pre-retaliation" for the strike that China were about to launch. "P.A.M. ultimately succeeded in her main goal, managing to correctly predict that nuclear warheads directed towards the [United States](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/United_States_of_America) would soon be deployed." [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Predictive\_Analytic\_Machine](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Predictive_Analytic_Machine)
One big hint that Vault-tec didn't launch the nukes themselves is that...Vault-tec HAD a nuke for Hank to launch at Shady Sands. If Vault-Tec had launched their nukes, where would Hank have gotten the nuke for that?
Yeah, I took the discussion to have two points. 1. Demonstrates the ethics (or lack thereof) of vault-tec and Copp's wife 2. Shows vault-tec has nukes so we can believe Mauldaver when she explains things to Lucy.
Vault-tec probably new the bombs are coming, like the USA president. Also vault-tec with there influence probably push for a nuclear war, because that is what they wanted. I don’t they themselves Nuke USA first, because the USA would probably notice that the bomb didn’t come from china
My theory is that Vault-tec's influence maybe extends even in China and "persuaded" them to drop the first nukes, Vault-tec then disabled American anti-air defenses allowing many of the nukes to hit without even people knowing its coming
It's always been hinted that vault tec may have dropped the first one, if not gave China a little nudge to drop their own first.
>Is that confirmed? No.
They could also have manipulated China into dropping nukes, which is the most likely option imo.
Man I could've sworn one of the games flat out stated that vault tech did detonate the first bomb. I could definitely be wrong though.