Do4600 said:
The reason it's in the game is because Bethesda made a sequel. Today making a long overdo sequel means you have to bring back every last memorable part in the game but miss exactly one glaring incongruity that anyone who even had a passing interest in the original game could tell you is a bad idea, it has to be law by now. The point here is that Jet was created on the west coast some 40 years before Fallout 3, meaning that in those 40 years the east and west coasts have been connected enough to share illicit drug recipes. The problem is that that's supposed to be nearly impossible. The first two games cement the fact that nobody knows what happened to the east coast, only rumors. Even when the Brotherhood of Steel tries to go east they barely make it through because of massive lightning storms over the rocky mountains and they can't contact the west coast anymore, if the Brotherhood of Steel barely makes it through intact in a mass migration and never returns or is heard from again, what chance does anybody else have?
The first two games also have no real civilization or central government, with the advent of organizations like the NCR, and Caesar's Legion, who have the ability to pool mass resources together, long distance, cross country, travel is FAR from impossible.
The BoS is a bunch of dying, tech cultists, who care more about hording crap then actually learning how it works or how to make it better, that they, with little to no resources, were able to pull off a cross-country migration shows that anyone else has a FAR more likely chance of pulling it off.
The comments made during Fallout 1 and 2 are from a time of lawlessness, where superstition and rumors reigned over all facts. there was never any real credible evidence that getting to the East was impossible, just that almost no one ever tried, and thus it was impossible because no one had done it.
Also the Mid-Western BoS silence isn't due to inability to reach the normal BoS, its due to an unwillingness to contact the group that exiled them and left them to die.
Do4600 said:
This simply isn't the case here and it misses the point of Vault-Tec completely. Vault-Tec is a several trillion dollar company that pre-fabricates a little over one-hundred of these extremely advanced long lived facilities. It fits into the 1950's aesthetic of mass producing and prefabricating structures because of the G.I. bill, and also with the idea of a modernist ideal man which is why Pip-Boy is used to represent every person in every vault ever, even when there are more than one shown. The whole aesthetic they represent is the idea of hundreds of thousands of families who look exactly the same, who live in tiny houses that look exactly the same but for a slightly different shade of paint; except here it's thousands of families in hundreds of vaults that look exactly the same. Look no further than the Fallout 2 intro movie. Another reason all Vaults are built exactly the same is because they are all experiments and experimental enclosures need to be identical to have comparable results. This was already established when Fallout 2 was in development and can be seen in many of the decisions that are made in Fallout 2's vaults.
I am sorry but this argument doesn't fly.
Even in an era of mass production, there are always several variations of products based on where they are made, to accommodate that large region's specific tastes, or necessities, be they economic, or environmental.
Vault-Tec being a trillion dollar company, with a headquarters on both coasts, gives strong credence to the fact that there would most likely be regional design variants based on were the Vaults were built because of the large area they covered.
Nothing about it goes against logic, or the aesthetic of the Fallout series.
