Development Info J.E. Sawyer & Sean K. Reynolds on Van Buren vehicles

[Saint_Proverbius]

Would you want to isolate yourself and your family in space for the rest of your life? Not even the moon, just a crappy space station. If I was one of the grand poobas, know I'd rather live on an isolated and heavily armed oil rig than than be stuck in a space station. Not to mention, sending up 2000 or so folks would probably cost more than the entire vault network if you assumed Apollo-style launches.

If you can live in a vault or on an oil rig for 160+ years, living in a space station without support isn't such a silly idea, is it?

Also, they didn't need Apollo stype launches. They have FLASH GORDON STYLE ROCKET SHUTTLES. The Space Station had a whole hanger full of them.

As far as vertibirds, why do we use helicopters today when we have rockets? Maneuverability. Rockets would be absolute ass from a military standpoint if you wanted to move troops around and terrify the populace.

RE: FLASH GORDON STYLE ROCKET SHUTTLES.

 

[mr. lamat]

water, oil and oxygen aren't prevalent in space. it's alot easier to raid some villages with a vertibird and some cats in power armour than it is to send a rocket. the fuel consumption isn't as great either.

i kinda like the idea. in the intro, perlman says something about great spears of nuclear fire... so that would lead me to believe they had icbms. they were based on technology from the 30's and 40's anyways, so it'd stand to reason they'd be part of the fallout universe.

 

[Spazmo]

We kinda asked Tim Cain about it. He said bombers.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

We kinda asked Tim Cain about it. He said bombers.

You "kinda asked"? Did you just go "So, bombers..." and he went "...yeah", or was it an actual question?

 

[mr. lamat]

so? it doesn't make sense and he's breaking his own canon. if china was facing a crippling oil shortage, they wouldn't have been able to launch the 1000+ sorties it'd take to wipeout north america. there are tonnes of references to 'launches' not 'airstrikes' in the game as well.

maybe it was his original idea that only bombers existed, but the game doesn't follow that path.

 

[Walks with the Snails]

If you can live in a vault or on an oil rig for 160+ years, living in a space station without support isn't such a silly idea, is it?

Sure it is. The vaults had water and air purification systems and probably ran on geothermal energy, which means you didn't need a completely closed system. It's also a lot less risky. Your space station springs a few leaks, it's over. Your oil rig springs a few leaks, you get a bucket, or at the worst, a boat.

And again, what's to say the grand poobas didn't like the scenery better at the oil rig than at the space station. Just because they lived in an oil rig doesn't mean that was the only available option. That's like saying the the fact that Florida exists means no one would ever live in Montana. They could have built their own vault, too, why didn't they? Because for whatever reason the oil rig best suited their needs.

Also, they didn't need Apollo stype launches. They have FLASH GORDON STYLE ROCKET SHUTTLES. The Space Station had a whole hanger full of them.

Does kinda change things.

As far as vertibirds, why do we use helicopters today when we have rockets? Maneuverability. Rockets would be absolute ass from a military standpoint if you wanted to move troops around and terrify the populace.

RE: FLASH GORDON STYLE ROCKET SHUTTLES.

I never really imagined Flash Gordon rockets being meant bumping around the wasteland, more for space battles. I never kept up with that series much, but did they fly the rockets around buzzing towns and shooting up the populace, or was that the time to get out of the ship and have a nice little wild-west type shootout? There's the whole matter of subtlety, too. Giant rockets blasting all over the place are a mite more noticable. Having rockets doesn't mean there's no reason to have vertibirds, they're each useful in their own way. Kinda like you give some of your storm troopers rocket launchers and others laser rifles.

 

[Briosafreak]

There were some good things in the game, like this NPC created by Sawyer:

Battery was one of Sawyer's guys. The only details I
remember are that he was a tribal who was a skilled
mechanic, and he only spoke in corporate safety
slogans.

Groovy, just corporate safety slogans

And to stop the rumours on the prison thing:

However, just before your own plan is complete, the
prison is attacked by the mysterious NCR-looking guys.
This is not a "Unknown force rushes in to miraculously
save the PC" situation. You *already* had things in
hand; it's just that these dudes happened to interfere
with *you*. Furthermore, these dudes don't
specifically care about you. Not until Act 2, at
least, when you've begun to fuck things up in the
wasteland.

Once the attack has occurred, the PC's free to leave
or stay. Unlike in BG2 or Lionheart, no powerful force
chasing you for nefarious purposes. The prison's
mainframe will eventually self-repair and start
sending out retrieval bots to go grab any prisoners
who wandered off, but it's not a life-or-death
situation. Most PCs will deal with the prison
supercomputer just to get it off their backs. Of
course, in doing so, they'll find out more about
what's going on.

The prison was also intended to be a town-like area
the PC could build up. After all, it's a pretty safe
place in the wasteland, and many of the prisoners
don't *want* to go anywhere else. There's food and
water and big thick walls all around. We were thinking
the PC could use his skills to bring in supplies and
make improvements and basically turn the prison into
its own town.

There were just two functional shuttles to send the PC to the space station if he wanted to.

 

[Briosafreak]

And yet again thanks to kumquatq3 for this bit:

There was no Enclave in FO3. You might run across
stories about them, or maybe a ruin or two, but that
was it. Enclave suffered a critical blow in FO2 and
that was it for them. No APA except for what a Science
Boy could make.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The Enclave, back at the time of the Great War, decided to pack up and move to the oil rig. If they had a fully functional SPACE DEATH PLATFORM, I'm saying they would have moved there instead.

As for vaults and getting stuff, they didn't have oil in Fallout. That was well established in FO and FO2. Some vaults had underground water supplies, but you could easily get away with recycling the water in a closed system, the same thing goes for air. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out, so all that water and air that's in there when you enter there is always in there. You just have to convert it back to usable form after it's used. With air, that's a simple matter for the hydroponics area of both the vaults and most likely the space station. With water, that's just a matter of using a purification system and dehumidifiers to pull evaporated water from the air. You don't even have to stretch anything with that. If a vault can do it, so can a space station.

 

[RGE]

The way I see it, if there are laser pistols and sentient robots, rockets and space flight aren't out of the question. To hear people argue otherwise boggles my mind.

Unless the president said otherwise, he might very well have fled to the space station during the nuclear war, and stayed up there together with a group of bodyguards and scientists. Then as things calmed down and it might be possible to live on earth, he could have descended and set up the enclave on the oil rig. The rest of the soldiers and scientists could have been holed up in a special vault or something.

Why not use fancy rocket ships instead of vertibirds? Well, remember that crashed vertibird? I can easily see how the enclave would want to minimize the risk of losing all their rocketships, because those ships are their only link to their space station, which might come in handy if they ever want to nuke someone again.

It wouldn't have bothered me if Van Buren had ended on a space station - I played and enjoyed Wasteland, and it was way more weird than that. Tradition be damned, I say. At least the plot of Van Buren seems to not have been about finding the thing to save the peoples. Anyone who's willing to tell a new story has my ears, and if they make it a non-linear story with lots of choices that matters, then they can have some of my money too.

My dislike of cars in Fallout is a matter of taste. I just don't like seeing my character stick out like a sore thumb because they have the only working car in the known world. And I suppose Van Buren might have had too high emphasis on hightech for my taste as well, but that's really hard to say when I only know about the beginning and the end.

 

[Walks with the Snails]

The Enclave, back at the time of the Great War, decided to pack up and move to the oil rig. If they had a fully functional SPACE DEATH PLATFORM, I'm saying they would have moved there instead.

Is that a conceivable scenario? Yes. Is it an inevitable one? No. You wouldn't think our nation's capital would be in such a strategically vulnerable spot as it is, but it is. Why? It's a long story. Why didn't the Enclave live in Alaska, or Hawaii, or Guam, or Anarctica, or under the ocean? Because they didn't, that's why.

There are lots of problems with living in space. The inherent risk of catastrophic failure has been covered. There's also the matter of radiation shielding. It's tough to beat the Van Allen belts and a few hundred miles of atmosphere. Some lead-lining and water shielding would help but still not be perfect. Given the Enclave's obsession over genetic purity, that alone could be a deal-breaker to living 160+ years in space. Living in space in itself is also a major pain in the ass. You've got to exercise all the time, your internal clock gets screwed up, and we still don't know what all the risks are. There are a horde of plausible reasons a bunch of pampered elites wouldn't want to go up there permanently. And what if the Commies had their own space station or super-duper armed rocket ships? Nice way to make yourself a target, flying the Prez and his 2000 closest friends up there while the world's blowing up. Not to mention there's a hell of a difference between building a functional military weapons platform and one made to house a ton of people in pampered luxury for over a hundred years. We're talking orders of magnitude more complexity, price, and things that can go wrong. Politically, it's also easier to divert a few billion here and there to build a secret base in an oil rig than to build a multi-trillion dollar resort in space. Flash Gordon rockets or no, you've still got to haul all the crap up there, put it together in a very hostile environment, maintain it in a very hostile environment, protect it from getting shot down or sabotaged, etc. Not cheap or subtle.

As for vaults and getting stuff, they didn't have oil in Fallout. That was well established in FO and FO2. Some vaults had underground water supplies, but you could easily get away with recycling the water in a closed system, the same thing goes for air. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out, so all that water and air that's in there when you enter there is always in there. You just have to convert it back to usable form after it's used. With air, that's a simple matter for the hydroponics area of both the vaults and most likely the space station. With water, that's just a matter of using a purification system and dehumidifiers to pull evaporated water from the air. You don't even have to stretch anything with that. If a vault can do it, so can a space station.

Cool ideas and all, but none of them are in-game canon AFAIK (except it's known at least the Necropolis vault had outside water), so none of it is really binding. The vaults may very well have not been completely closed for matters of cost, convenience, feasibility, tolerance to failure, etc. Having a totally closed system sounds easy, but we still haven't pulled it off on even a relatively small scale and limited time period, despite high-budget attempts. See Biosphere 2. The unexpected keeps happening, and entropy is a bitch.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

FLASH GORDON STYLE ROCKET SHUTTLES.

For reference:

Why didn't the Enclave live in Alaska, or Hawaii, or Guam, or Anarctica, or under the ocean? Because they didn't, that's why.

... because China had annexed Alaska... and they did live under the ocean, doofus.

There's also evidence in Fallout 1 that the Nuclear Fire was caused with missiles. From memory, it's not clear cut though. I'll try and fish some out. In truth, Fallout's a pretty fucked up franchise whenever it comes to consistency.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

There are lots of problems with living in space. The inherent risk of catastrophic failure has been covered.

There's also catastrophic failure possibilities on an oil rig sitting in the ocean during a nuclear war, too. In fact, I'd say the best place to be during a nuclear war on a planet is OFF THE PLANET, wouldn't you?

There's also the matter of radiation shielding. It's tough to beat the Van Allen belts and a few hundred miles of atmosphere. Some lead-lining and water shielding would help but still not be perfect. Given the Enclave's obsession over genetic purity, that alone could be a deal-breaker to living 160+ years in space.

The genetic purity thing came about after they landed on the coast and noticed that there were mutations, not something that's pre-war.

Living in space in itself is also a major pain in the ass. You've got to exercise all the time, your internal clock gets screwed up, and we still don't know what all the risks are.

You don't have to exercise all the time if the station is spinning to simulate gravity. I seriously doubt the station in FO3 was a zero-g condition, do you?

There are a horde of plausible reasons a bunch of pampered elites wouldn't want to go up there permanently.

And living on an oil rig in the middle of an ocean is better than that? Eh?

And what if the Commies had their own space station or super-duper armed rocket ships? Nice way to make yourself a target, flying the Prez and his 2000 closest friends up there while the world's blowing up.

Versus going to the biggest target on Earth? The last known working oil rig in a war that's fought over resources?

Not to mention there's a hell of a difference between building a functional military weapons platform and one made to house a ton of people in pampered luxury for over a hundred years.

Okay, keep in mind you're arguing FOR an oil rig here. Oil rigs are not likely to be featured in Lifestyles of the Rich and Pampered any time soon.

We're talking orders of magnitude more complexity, price, and things that can go wrong.

Versus quick escape speed. How long does it take to breach the atmosphere versus flying from Washington D.C. to a few hundred miles off the coast of San Franscisco. The stratosphere is only about 30 miles up versus hundreds of miles of travel.

Politically, it's also easier to divert a few billion here and there to build a secret base in an oil rig than to build a multi-trillion dollar resort in space.

Once again, the oil rig was hardly a resort, so even bringing this up is foolish.

Flash Gordon rockets or no, you've still got to haul all the crap up there, put it together in a very hostile environment, maintain it in a very hostile environment, protect it from getting shot down or sabotaged, etc. Not cheap or subtle.

So, which side are you on? You're saying it would be hard to build even with the Flash Gordon rockets, yet it exists anyway?

Cool ideas and all, but none of them are in-game canon AFAIK (except it's known at least the Necropolis vault had outside water), so none of it is really binding. The vaults may very well have not been completely closed for matters of cost, convenience, feasibility, tolerance to failure, etc. Having a totally closed system sounds easy, but we still haven't pulled it off on even a relatively small scale and limited time period, despite high-budget attempts. See Biosphere 2. The unexpected keeps happening, and entropy is a bitch.

Hey, Vault 13 was sealed for 80 years as a closed system. Seems pretty reliable technology to me.

The way I see it, if there are laser pistols and sentient robots, rockets and space flight aren't out of the question. To hear people argue otherwise boggles my mind.

You're also forgetting they don't even have transistor computers, LCDs, and many of the other things that are common place today. Monochrome CRT monitors seem to be the standard for computer screens, yet we have cellphones that can display the full color world wide web that fit in our pockets with room for the car keys beside them.

Why not use fancy rocket ships instead of vertibirds? Well, remember that crashed vertibird? I can easily see how the enclave would want to minimize the risk of losing all their rocketships, because those ships are their only link to their space station, which might come in handy if they ever want to nuke someone again.

Then why didn't they use the ORBITAL DOOM STATION during the Great War? If they had a launch platform in space, then they sure as hell could have saved themselves the trouble and just nuked some stuff from space. Why hold the missiles back?

As for the crashing, they're the Enclave. They managed to make vertibirds, advanced power armor, and various other things. What would stop them from making more rocketships as well if they already knew how to make them?

At least the plot of Van Buren seems to not have been about finding the thing to save the peoples.

You mean like finding a space station that's going to nuke them?

 

[Briosafreak]

I still don´t get what the Enclave got to do with this

The first two B.O.M.B. missile stations were nearly completed in 2073. Orbiting high above the Earth, all the two B.O.M.B. stations needed were main power reactors to replace the temporary generators that were put in place to maintain the bare, onboard necessities. Unfortunately, the reactors never came. The vessels that were commissioned to take the reactors to the B.O.M.B. stations never left the launch pad at Bloomfield Space Center. By the time the Hermes rockets were complete and loaded with the reactors, nuclear war broke out across the globe. The B.O.M.B. satellites became deadly, yet dormant artifacts of a paranoid age long past.Bombs drop. All Enclave personnel leave Bloomfield to either take cover or maintain “hot spots.” Sub-reactor is turned off. Bloomfield, B.O.M.B.-001 & 002, and Hermes XIII & 14 are completely forgotten.

Bloomfield became out of reach for the Enclave in the FO2 period, and they weren`t really interested, if i speculate a bit, because their effort was to kill everyone outside with the fev but not to make a nuclear holocaust again, wich would stop them from taking over the planet at their will. After they got whipped in the end of FO2 Bloomfield is found by an old pre war scientist with a Master like agenda (and stats too) .

More or less something like this, my apologies for the people that worked on the area if this isn`t entirely correct:

The good doctor was born and raised in the area formally known as Shady Sands, now known as NCR. He spent many of his years as a scientific advisor to President Tandi before his disillusionment settled in – a disillusionment fueled by the Caravan houses that ate away at NCR. When his breaking point finally came, he became determined to find a way to rid the world of chaos and human impurities, and discovered his savior in Limit 115. Through extensive research, he discovered the history of Limit 115 and its genocidal potency, and also discovered a viable means to cleanse the world. Using Ulysses, the quarantine prison, and a ballistic satellite known as B.O.M.B.-001, the way to human planetary domination and order became clear. He needed to get to B.O.M.B.-001 and use the nuclear weapons to clean the filth and wretch that currently occupied the surface.

He wasn`t the only bad guy though (and if you wanted to help him you could, evil characters would have some cool rewards) there are several other NPCs with destructive or regenarating agendas. This wasn`t the only objective in the game, hell you could even destroy the world , PARTIALLY OR TOTALLY, if you wanted to, wich would lead to new end game slides, the possibilities were great, it expanded thoughts already present in the first Fallout game but with cool twists.

And that`s a good thing, i think the first game was more tight and overall had many good ideas that could have been explored a bit better in the second.

But really i am not interested in the particular aspects of this area but if it can mean something to me to role-play and to challenge me and offer a deep experience.

So i got a dev permission to put this next thing, i might have to remove it later if something goes wrong, but it`s important to see why i like so many things in the game, and even if i don`t like a few, the big picture seemed so satisfying for a Fallout game and an hardcore RPG game, this is taken from the ties to the games themes for this area:

-War… War never changes: Discovering the Dr. evil intent on “cleansing” the Earth’s surface with a new barrage of nuclear missiles, thus reinforcing the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is amplified by the fact that at least two nuclear missiles will launch no matter what the player does.
-Does anyone ever really win: This is the wasteland – a land of hardship, backstabbing, and death. No matter how well the player does in Fallout 3, someone’s going to lose and the player never really “wins.” Lives will be ruined, communities will fall, and death will reap its crop.

These two sentences are vintage Fallout for me, this type of moral questions is what really hooked me on the Fallout games, in a way D&D or typical fantasy games never could reach until now, at least for me, of course, the grey areas on anyones life, away from the hero that saves everyone and marries the big boobs princess...

 

[Walks with the Snails]

There's also catastrophic failure possibilities on an oil rig sitting in the ocean during a nuclear war, too. In fact, I'd say the best place to be during a nuclear war on a planet is OFF THE PLANET, wouldn't you?

The best place to be is a place where the enemy doesn't know where you are. Sort of a Dick Cheney "undisclosed location". You can get in a sub and quietly dock with an abandoned oil rig without it getting picked up on radar/sonar. You can't say the same thing about a Flash Gordon rocket.

The genetic purity thing came about after they landed on the coast and noticed that there were mutations, not something that's pre-war.

The leanings toward that most likely already existed, though. And regardless, it's still an extremely big consideration for anyone planning an extended soujourn for themselves and their great-great-great-great-great-grandkids.

You don't have to exercise all the time if the station is spinning to simulate gravity. I seriously doubt the station in FO3 was a zero-g condition, do you?

It would have fit the concept of a missile base. You would want to go spartan with as few things to break down as possible. I think it would have been fun to tromp around in magnetic boots myself. Unless they developed anti-grav technology, the thing would have to be spinning, which again requires it to be BIG. People don't do well in simulated gravity when the radius of the structure is too small. BIG = easier to shoot down. Not what you want in your missile base.

There are a horde of plausible reasons a bunch of pampered elites wouldn't want to go up there permanently.

And living on an oil rig in the middle of an ocean is better than that? Eh?

Better? Hell yeah. It's easier to add more room and amenities. There's also more recreation options available.

And what if the Commies had their own space station or super-duper armed rocket ships? Nice way to make yourself a target, flying the Prez and his 2000 closest friends up there while the world's blowing up.

Versus going to the biggest target on Earth? The last known working oil rig in a war that's fought over resources?

Certainly. I don't remember the thing being operational, anyway. It would make the most sense if it was an old decomissioned rig. Otherwise, why did they go there even in the absence of a space station? There had to be some reason.

Not to mention there's a hell of a difference between building a functional military weapons platform and one made to house a ton of people in pampered luxury for over a hundred years.

Okay, keep in mind you're arguing FOR an oil rig here. Oil rigs are not likely to be featured in Lifestyles of the Rich and Pampered any time soon.

Seemed pretty decent to me from what I saw. And again, we're talking in relative terms. It's like saying the ocean is less salty than the Dead Sea. That's quite true, even if both are pretty salty.

We're talking orders of magnitude more complexity, price, and things that can go wrong.

Versus quick escape speed. How long does it take to breach the atmosphere versus flying from Washington D.C. to a few hundred miles off the coast of San Franscisco. The stratosphere is only about 30 miles up versus hundreds of miles of travel.

Um, what's that got to do with anything? You escape, you escape, it's not that important how far it is to get somewhere. I don't remember how far the oil rig was, but it's not that relevant. And this certainly is not as important as all the other myriad problems. It's infinitely easier to escape from an oil rig, too. At the worst you get a lifejacket and tread water for 6 hours before the scouts come back to rescue you with their boats and vertibirds. As far as escape vehicles, there's also more room for error. That explosion knocks a hole in your boat, you plug it up or run the bilge pumps. It damages your spaceship's heat shields, well, say your prayers.

And BTW, you're quite mistaken if you think 30 miles up is a good place to put an orbiting space station. The spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit we've got up there now are 22,236 miles up, not 30.

Politically, it's also easier to divert a few billion here and there to build a secret base in an oil rig than to build a multi-trillion dollar resort in space.

Once again, the oil rig was hardly a resort, so even bringing this up is foolish.

Seemed nice enough to me. And resort or no resort, the fact remains creating a large, long-term livable space station (out of a weapons platform no less) would be a lot more expensive, and noticeable, than converting an oil rig.

Flash Gordon rockets or no, you've still got to haul all the crap up there, put it together in a very hostile environment, maintain it in a very hostile environment, protect it from getting shot down or sabotaged, etc. Not cheap or subtle.

So, which side are you on? You're saying it would be hard to build even with the Flash Gordon rockets, yet it exists anyway?

I'm on the side that says if the weapons satellite did exist, it would be unlikely to be a place the Enclave would want to live in for 160+ years. And it's doubly unlikely they'd design the thing to such a purpose, anyway.

Hey, Vault 13 was sealed for 80 years as a closed system. Seems pretty reliable technology to me.

Seems like that's jumping to conclusions. I don't remember them saying it was totally closed. Also, there was no way to test such a system for 160 years before the vaults existed. Given the nature of the vaults, I could see the Enclave taking more chances with them than with their own habitat.

 

[Sammael]

And what happens if a nuke hits the ocean and a tidal wave wipes the oil rig off the face of the planet, eh?

 

[Walks with the Snails]

If a nuke hit the ocean, it would warm up a bunch of water. Nukes have lots of thermal energy, not kinetic. That's why all those underwater nuke tests you hear about didn't wipe out California.

I don't think any tidal wave would really affect the oil rig, anyway. They're bad on the shore when the wave energy has nowhere else to propagate, but that far out it would just be a really damn fast ripple.

 

[Jed]

Sorry, Saint, you should hang up the Elites in Space bit. Walks is right: an oil rig is better, safer, and all around more tenable on every level. Hell, micrometeors and potential for loss of atmosphere alone are enough danger to make living on a post-apoc planet way safer.

 

[Spazmo]

Well, okay, but if it's really no good at all for the Enclave and has likely already blown itself up... how come it's okay for DOCTOR EVAL in Van Buren? Setting aside the fact that the space program never existed in Fallout, any space objects left unattended for so long wouldn't really be functioning anymore for the reasons you've described. Hell, without booster rockets to adjust its course, its orbit would have decayed years ago and the damn thing would probably have crashed into the ocean or something. Basically, if it's possible for the doctor guy to just show up over a hundred and sixty years later and the whole thing works (hey, maybe he needed to fix the Mr. Coffee), there's no way in hell that the entire Enclave with its teams of technicians and engineers couldn't keep the place running.

 

[RGE]

The way I see it, if there are laser pistols and sentient robots, rockets and space flight aren't out of the question. To hear people argue otherwise boggles my mind.

You're also forgetting they don't even have transistor computers, LCDs, and many of the other things that are common place today. Monochrome CRT monitors seem to be the standard for computer screens, yet we have cellphones that can display the full color world wide web that fit in our pockets with room for the car keys beside them.

I wouldn't consider them out of question either, unless it breaks the already established canon. Did the Fallout canon ever say that space flight couldn't possible exist in Fallout? And I simply associate space flight with robots and lasers - they go hand in hand. Blame generic sci-fi.

As for the crashing, they're the Enclave. They managed to make vertibirds, advanced power armor, and various other things. What would stop them from making more rocketships as well if they already knew how to make them?

I assumed that they had most of that stuff since before the war, but I don't know.

At least the plot of Van Buren seems to not have been about finding the thing to save the peoples.

You mean like finding a space station that's going to nuke them?

Well, maybe I should've used "item" instead of "thing", but I still think that finding a place is more interesting than a quest for a holy grail. Games are just shock full of searches for lost artifacts and other items of importance, though the Fallout games did have the PC search for the places where the important item ought to be. But from what I've read it didn't seem as if the PC was being sent off to search for the orbital space station, but rather that the PC may have found out about it during the game and might have a reason to go there, kind of like the oil rig in Fallout 2. I suppose that ever since Wasteland the game has to end in the preserved (military) remnants of the old world.

He wasn`t the only bad guy though (and if you wanted to help him you could, evil characters would have some cool rewards) there are several other NPCs with destructive or regenarating agendas. This wasn`t the only objective in the game, hell you could even destroy the world , PARTIALLY OR TOTALLY, if you wanted to, wich would lead to new end game slides, the possibilities were great, it expanded thoughts already present in the first Fallout game but with cool twists.

Looks like Van Buren would indeed have been fun to play. Thanks for all that info.

 

[mr. lamat]

... because China had annexed Alaska... and they did live under the ocean, doofus.

china tried to invade alaska and wound up defending six square inches of bejing.

about the orbital platform... most of the communication satellites are in low orbit around earth at this time. with minimal use of fuel they manage to stay in orbit for close to twenty years, unless splashed on purpose. if the government were to spend the trillions needed to build a high orbit spacestation, they'd probably have automated rockets keeping it in place, though it'd take decades for the orbit to degrade to anywhere near dangerous.

you're also looking at the dangers of resupply as well. it's not suited to a military base to exert any kind of control on the population. it's too far away, even with the use of the flash gordon rockets. there are also the power issues. it's not terribly likely that doctor evil could have jury-rigged a fusion pack for minimal life support, but it's even less likely that the enclave could have built a fusion reactor from scratch just to keep the lights on. it's a massive operation that's exponentially more difficult to run than an oil rig a couple hundred miles off the coast of california.

oil rigs are also built to withstand tsunami grade tidal waves. most earthquakes happen in the middle of the ocean.

 

[Briosafreak]

about the orbital platform... most of the communication satellites are in low orbit around earth at this time. with minimal use of fuel they manage to stay in orbit for close to twenty years, unless splashed on purpose. if the government were to spend the trillions needed to build a high orbit spacestation, they'd probably have automated rockets keeping it in place, though it'd take decades for the orbit to degrade to anywhere near dangerous.

They had funky looking robots for keeping the station runing, but still in the timeline of Fallout3 it had some damage that came from small meteorites and stuff. The Enclave didn`t have the fuel to get there on a regular way anyhow, even if the oil rig produced oil, wich wasn´t the case, it took awhile until Dr. Presper found the solution, and the rest i won`t tell, i`ve talked too much already

Well, okay, but if it's really no good at all for the Enclave and has likely already blown itself up... how come it's okay for DOCTOR EVAL in Van Buren? Setting aside the fact that the space program never existed in Fallout, any space objects left unattended for so long wouldn't really be functioning anymore for the reasons you've described

As i said the robots keeped it clean and neat, but age took its toll. And the secret space program for military reasons was pre war. The other orbital station though fell to earth and it`s pices could be seen in another location.

And for the reason they weren`t used in the war:

2073 was a turbulent year. Nuclear proliferation reached an all time high. As a reaction to possible nuclear threats, the U.S. government completed a space station/satellite that was supposed to house two-dozen nuclear missiles. Named the Ballistic Orbital Missile Base, or the B.O.M.B., it was considered the ultimate offensive weapon. From orbit, B.O.M.B.-001 could launch missiles to reach any target in the world within minutes. However, as a safety net from accidentally launching nuclear missiles, B.O.M.B.-001 required an onboard crew to launch the missiles. The station was capable of housing eight crew members, but only required one onboard individual to effectively calculate targeting solutions and launch the missiles, as long as that individual had the proper launch codes. Without the proper codes manually entered, the missiles could not be launched, even by accident

The first two B.O.M.B. missile stations were nearly completed in 2073. Orbiting high above the Earth, all the two B.O.M.B. stations needed were main power reactors to replace the temporary generators that were put in place to maintain the bare, onboard necessities. Unfortunately, the reactors never came. The vessels that were commissioned to take the reactors to the B.O.M.B. stations never left the launch pad at Bloomfield Space Center. By the time the Hermes rockets were complete and loaded with the reactors, nuclear war broke out across the globe. The B.O.M.B. satellites became deadly, yet dormant artifacts of a paranoid age long past.

Then the story of how the NCR crew got hold of them is interesting too, but i`ll leave it for another day.

 

[Anonymous]

Fallout 3 still sucks.

 

[Briosafreak]

Well we`re discussing one area out of 16, that doesn`t give enough information about the game sucking or not, i think.

 

[Spazmo]

Well, when that area is pivotal to the entire plot of the game (heck, it's not just the pivot, it's the entire lever), it kinda is.

WITH THAT IN MIND!, I don't think inconsistency with Fallout canon means a bad game. While I agree with some that a space station doesn't really work in that universe, I agree with Brios that it sounded frickin' cool if considered independently as an idea.

No, what would make VB bad would be the butchered hybrid combat, the forced implementation of co-op play, some questionable bits of SPECIAL tinkering and the inexplicable ping-pong minigame.