Design your own Vault experiment!

[King of the Sandbox]

As anyone who's played a Fallout game can tell you, some of the Vault-Tec sociological experiments are pretty twisted. Insanity-causing things like white noise being broadcast constantly, limiting survival supplies, uneven numbers of females to males, etc, etc.

If you were tasked with coming up with a Vault of your own, what would the experiment and it's effects be? What question are you trying to answer about the human condition with your gross overuse of godlike science power? Be creative.

Me? I'd have no holotapes or books or anything for entertainment but video games. First person shooters, to be precise. The only beverages available would be Bawls and Mountain Dew: Code Red. The only food, chips and Taco Bell. I'd want to see if they formed clans, both within the game and in the Vault, and how it affected their relationships with one another. I'd also hope to see the effects of close proximity to behavior through the headset, and beyond.

I'm pretty sure "Campers must die" and "Noobtubers are shot on sight" would be scrawled on the walls in blood in the first week.

 

[Kortney]

Everyone gets one hour less sleep than they would need to be fully rested - but still have enough to function throughout the day.

 

[Chibz]

First vault idea: Every resident in the vault blind since birth. No accomodations in the vault for the blind.

Second: All residents as they enter will be given a pet (Small breed of dog or cat). But the pets are deliberately set up to die within a few per week for the first few months, after the first three weeks.

 

[THEfog101]

At the end of every week, all the vault dwellers gather and vote their least favorite individual out of the vault for a week, should they survive then they must spend the remainder of their time in the vault in the same set of clothes that they came back in after the 7 days.

If evicted a second time and they manage to survive the 7 days then they are allowed to swap their cloths with somebody else's who must wear that set of cloths for the rest of their time in the vault, thus inflicting un-imaginable horror on the selected vault dweller.

Needless to say that deodorant will become very scarce very quickly.

 

[Scorched_Cascade]

I would segregate the all into 4 "tribes". Each tribe from birth to death is only allowed to play one of the major gaming systems for entertainment. So say red tribe get xbox, blue ps3, green pc and yellow wii. They are not allowed contact with each other.

After a few years I'll have the order to either: A) randomly mix people up into different tribes or b) assign each system to a different tribe and open all the doors so the tribes can interact.

Let the real life flame wars and fanboy-ism begin.

 

[Billska]

Everyone gets a single 25c coin and the only food source is a vending machine.

 

[Trippin tacos]

hmmm.... i would probably fill a large vault with roughly 500 people, then one by one, day by day i would have someone silently removed from the vault and let them back into society, it's kind of sick wanting to watch them squirm, but reactions would be worth it

 

[electronicgoat]

Not possible in canon: The vault would enact as a stasis chamber and would freeze the dwellers for 50,000 years. They would only open then, as a last resort in case humanity had died off then.
Possible in canon: Only include people with highly antisocial lifestyles. They would be put in a vault that had broken equipment and limited supplies.

 

[King of the Sandbox]

Hahaha, these are great! Keep them coming, you twisted, beautifully sick little monkeys!

 

[PurePareidolia]

OK, I'm going to keep in mind this should be an experiment so should provide interesting data rather than simply being weird. But that's how I'm going to start designing it and see where it goes from there.

The vault is filled with concealed projectors, mainly stationed in view of glass objects and reflective surfaces in general. At random, they play short animations of pale, ghostly figures. Initially this doesn't happen, but each time a vault dweller dies, a new figure is added to the repatoire or a new projector is enabled. This can be very infrequent, taking days between sightings, and might be augumented by static, heartbeat recordings or whispered voices playing across the intercoms of uninhabited rooms, such that one might overhear a faint murmur while walking by.
Additionally once things get more intense, doors may jab slightly, water may be dispensed with faint colouring in it, and jumpsuits might be extruded with slight stains, in fact machinery in general may glitch out and wear down, but never mechanically decay prior to it's expected lifespan.
Now, the overseer has to be a die-hard Atheist. Like, so rational he refuses to even acknowledge this, and rigidly enforces the idea that nothing is wrong. He should be told the vault experiment is something completely different, like maybe only people with a certain star sign are included or something, and indeed that should be accurate and horoscopes distributed, but it won't be anything more than a curiosity.
Additionally, several victims of recent familial death, and slightly, but not incredibly religious types should be included, if only to see what happens.
Finally, the key to this is each vault dweller's family is assigned a certain scent which is applied to their quarters, their clothes and so on. When people die, their family's scent can then be pumped into certain rooms via the vents, especially into storerooms, children's rooms, and bathrooms.

Ideally this involves many unrelated elements, but the purpose of the experiment is an attempt to use a variety of unrelated cues to invoke the generation of a pseudo-religious society, preferrably one with a strong us vs them mentality against the overseer's followers, as well as making the "spirits" seem to have alternately suspicious, protective or voeyuristic motives, based on the family in question, in an attempt to see how such a society treats the living members of that family. If the religious majority takes over, then the perception of the families becomes the focus of the experiment, including which families are trusted or not based on their ghost's "behaviour". If the rationalistic side wins, then it becomes focused on the paranoia generated - ideally this will end up showing which mindset best asserts itself when confronted with inexplicable phenomena, then how it behaves when given free reign over a long period of time. Compromise would be the most fascinating of all, but it's considered a low probability outcome.

 

[HapexIndustries]

Vault 78: the Vault is sealed and the inhabitants advised that there has been an alien invasion. From time to time there are simulated "attacks" against the Dwellers. They are not provided with weapons but are provided with the means to learn about and build weapons. The kink: these are all social liberals and pacifists. The second kink: interspersed among them are UFO fanatics.

Spoiler: THE BIG REVEAL

ALIENS ARE REAL AND GET IN AND CAPTURE EVERYONE

 

[King of the Sandbox]

I thought of another one. Simple, but elegant.

There are no means of writing anything down. No pens, pencils, lined paper or even computers or typewriters to print things from or on. There's not even any holotapes or books to read.

The only source of the written word is a 4 foot tall dry erase board, 1 marker (that they're told is designed to last the entire 20 year sealing period, but set to go on the fritz after 3 months), and an automatic cleaning feature that wipes the board every 24 hours.

 

[Ldude893]

Vault 108. It's built for only ten people, it's much smaller, and there's a computer where you have to type in a code of 6 numbers every 108 minutes or else the Vault explodes.

[sub]Yes, I know there's already a Vault 108, but frankly I don't give a damn.[/sub]

 

[Vakz]

I thought of one: 500 Joss Whedon fanboys and 500 Joss Whedon haters sharing a vault.

I can confirm however that it is indeed impossible to hate this man. Firefly is simply too good, and makes up for anything bad he has ever made. It's the truth.

 

[Beat14]

A vault with no hierarchy, I don't really know how that would remain as some sort of hierarchy would form, but oh well, just another technicality.

 

[nuba km]

slow gene splicing experiments, basically every person in the vault genes are slightly spliced with an animal and over the years we see what traits are the most important for human survival in the nuclear apocalypse. Before reproducing each person must go through a trail which will test their animal abilities, the trail will test different aspects needed to survive in a nuclear wasteland. In other words a vault with splicing followed by natural selection. Also I am pretty sure this would be a cool vault to encounter in a fallout game.