The True Purpose of Vaults in Fallout is a video blog by Tim Cain, which clarifies the original purpose of the Vault experiments introduced in Fallout 2 and the role the Enclave played in their establishment.
Video[]
Transcript[]
Today I want to talk about what my ideas were for Vault and what their purposes were and I'm just going to preface this: I don't know what Bethesda is doing with them, no idea, so this is entirely the idea that I had at the end of Fallout 1.
Let me tell you where the idea came from: It's Chris Taylor's fault. I was talking with him one day about something else and he said these Vaults that Vault-Tec are building only hold a thousand people and their most optimistic projection is they're going to make a thousand of them so that's only a million people, and there's two or three hundred million people in the US, we're not saving everyone.
I was like "Yeah", and it's super depressing if you ever read reports from the 50s about what scientists thought that full-scale international superpower nuclear exchange would do: There'd be radiation everywhere, the ecology would collapse, there basically is no Earth to come back to and then that made me think maybe that was the whole point: There is no Earth to come back to, so the head of the Enclave and probably the very highest levels of the US government were like "Let's build a starship and take it... There's no good planets to go to in our solar system, [so we] take it to nearby stars, but that will take forever.
So it has to be a multi-generational starship.
The only technology we know how to build is atomic power: We can make an atomic power plant for a starship that would last hundreds of years but nothing else we know how to do we don't know how to feed the crew, we don't know how to put the passengers in suspended [animation] (you know, cryo storage), also it would have to be for hundreds of years.
Is that safe? Would that work?
So, of course, [the] Vault-Tec director, not being the nicest person in the world, would probably just say "Why don't we use the Vaults to figure out the technology we need in the ship?"
I'll leave it to you if you can think of some of these experiments sound familiar:
- We're going to have to grow food, because a crew will have to be awake and active. That's where the multi-generation comes in, so they're going to have to have food. We're gonna have to figure out how to grow plants really well in an enclosed environment.
- We also need water for them we're gonna have to make sure that water circulates well and can get purified.
- We're also going to have to figure out how to store the crew. You know, we're gonna have to have cryo chambers and see, if we pull them out every few years, if there's any freezer burn going on in there...
There are many other problems where things they were trying to figure out how to do! So they made a Vault to test that, and every Vault was in some sense a test even if they were a control Vault. I always thought the Vault that made Vault City in Fallout 2 was a control Vault: It was designed to do everything right. It opened after 10 years, everybody came out, they had a working Garden of Eden Creation Kit and everything worked.
Vault 13 where the player was originally in Fallout wasn't designed to work: They wanted to see how long one of these Vaults would last and so the overseer - the generations of overseers in there - were told to keep people in and when something malfunctioned. They originally said "We'll try to figure out how to fix it." We don't know of anyone leaving, and when they did have someone leave, well, no one ever came back. They obviously [had] a few people [go] out before the player. When the player finally went out, he was told "Okay, he can't stay" when he comes back. That kind of explains retroactively all the stuff we'd already established.
What I love about the Vault experiments is it gave a purpose to Vault-Tec other than "Well, let's save a tiny fraction of the American population and then release them back into a radioactive dead zone." That's the thing that doesn't make any sense.
Making the vaults technological experimental beds with a purpose towards making a multi-generational starship to take our best and brightest away from Earth if there's a nuclear war - that made sense. That's what we wrote down. I can't speak to how they've been designed and developed since then, but I never view them through the lens of "Look at these wacky experiments". Each one I was, like, "Yeah I can see how that would help make a starship".
You can think of The Enclave as evil or wacky or whatever you want, but there was originally a purpose for that for all of this stuff.