Ultratwinkie said:
maybe because the US was winning?
Except, of course, that it wasn't. Just as the US finally got the upper hand in China, things began breaking down at home and many units (including power armor) were relocated to keep riots in check. The Chinese were similarly falling apart at home, but mainly in terms of keeping control of nations they'd annexed. This means we weren't just fighting in China and Alaska, and we have no idea just how many nations were annexed.
take a look at the t-51b and combat armor MK II (not the shitty one from fallout 3). those armors put the chinese armors to shame to the point practically every battle resulted in chinese loss.
Actually, there's no such claim. According to the same timeline you referred me to at the bottom of this article, power armor was first introduced to try pushing the Chinese out of Alaska in 3067 --- the year after China invaded. Despite being "incredibly effective against Chinese infantry", it was not until a decade later that Anchorage was retaken. While the T-51b finally tipped the scales, that's all it did.
Power armor wasn't, by itself, a war-winner, despite the fact that China never came close to developing similar weapons. Instead:
"2074: Contrary to their claims of seeking only to retake Alaska from the Reds, American Power Armor units, infantry, and mechanized divisions are deployed to China, but they become bogged down on the mainland, putting a further drain on American resources and supply lines."
The reality is that the US faced the same problem the Japanese did during WWII: a technologically-superior yet numerically-inferior force, spread thinly over a vast area, and therefore unable to control more than various pockets of it at any given time. This was also the US experience in Vietnam, and the German WWII experience in Russia. Hence the US military's decision to go ahead with the FEV project to try and create super-soldiers. They also genetically engineered animals to unleash upon the Chinese, such as with "Codename Cloacina" (i.e., Mole Rats), and of course Deathclaws.
The existing troop levels, even with power armor, were clearly not believed to be sufficient to win the war.
the enclave only numbered in the thousands, and most of them died at the oil rig. the only enclave bases that -this- particular branch of enclave have is nevarro, and that only had a 30 person garrison at most.
Except, of course, that you cannot fit thousands of people on an oil rig. Not even if you packed them in phone booths. This was a converted drilling platform, not a city on stilts.
Nor was Navarro even an Enclave base until around 2242...the bombs having dropped in 2077. It was still being converted when the Vault Dweller hit it. So no, it was never one of "the" major Enclave bases.
The actual canon on the Enclave (from the Fallout 3 GOTY Guide) is they relocated to Raven Rock after the Rig's destruction not because it was the only remaining base left, but because it was the only remaining Enclave base with a
functioning ZAX supercomputer. Adams Air Force Base was taken over
after the Enclave went to Raven Rock.
Sorry, but unless you're going to insist that the entire Enclave stayed on the Oil Rig for about 150 years, they've got bases and have been doing things somewhere else. I seriously doubt they were bunking in stacks forty high.
this idea that they have a whole world under stasis is nothing but fiction.
In case you hadn't noticed, the whole game is fiction. -
The fact is, all 122 Vaults were built with Enclave involvement. They had the "go codes", and oversaw the continuance of the Vault experiments after the bombs dropped. They've been around for two hundred years, and you insist that they never did anything more than overstuff an oil rig until it blew up under them?
the truth is the thousands that the enclave once had, that was their way of repopulating the world.
That wouldn't begin to cut it for a variety of reasons: one, a gene pool of mere "thousands" wouldn't be large enough to avoid stagnation. At a minimum, these few would have to be augmented with gene banks. Two, if those gene banks were on the Oil Rig, then when it went boom that killed any chance of repopulation right there. Why would the Enclave keep on trying to implement a program it had no chance of succeeding with?
Three, if these people ARE supposed to be the repopulation stock, they'd be impossible to risk in any sort of battle line for exactly the reason that if they die, so does "pure humanity". Given that the Enclave certainly had the technology to build robots to do their dirty work (not to mention Deathclaws), they'd've had precious little reason to put the seeds of the next generations into the fire.
here, have the timeline of the resource wars if you dont believe me:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Resource_Wars
Read it (not that I haven't in years past), and it just doesn't back you up. Sorry.
PS: the vaults were supposed to serve as test moon bases.
Nope. This has recently been discussed on the Fallout Wiki, and it has been acknowledged that the entire "Vaults as space colonization projects" idea was something that never made it into the games or the actual canon.
Instead, it was cut material --- in the same way that "The Burrows" were cut material. There are no anthropomorphic raccoon tribes running around the Fallout universe, and the Vaults were not meant to test anyone for anything relating to space at all.
To the contrary, the Fallout Wiki makes clear that exactly
TWO rockets were ever built capable of getting beyond lunar orbit. Both were built to be the first manned missions to Mars. Neither were ever completed for that function. Exactly one of these --- NOT built to take more than a handful of astronauts to Mars, to start with --- was partially retrofitted as an escape vehicle by the Enclave and then abandoned.
Meanwhile, it's expressly stated that
ALL of America's space resources were committed to prepping orbital weapons platforms and converting all available moon-rockets to ICBMs.
And even that much comes from "Van Buren", which isn't even solid canon in itself. At the most liberal possible level of interpretation, there could never have been any serious program aimed at colonizing another planet.
