Why would anyone in the fallout universe buy a gold bar

[spectrenihlus]

Also to the people saying it is valuable because gold is used in tech. Well you will need a foundry and a processing plant to turn that gold into parts necessary for your electronics. Places like that aren't exactly down the street in post apocalyptic america.

Please see my above post:

Snow Globes sell 2000 Caps to a crazed collector.
Remember our crazy Nuka Cola fan girl from Fallout 3?
There are some oddities in the wasteland and given that gold is probably pretty rare (and just plain pretty), common sense would tell the salesman in you that you could dupe someone into buying it (with you yourself not knowing its actual worth).

Gold is money. It's been that way from the beginning of history, and it's only recently that we've found practical uses other than looking pretty.

The real question is, why use bottle caps as money? How difficult is it for someone to make a bottle cap factory even in a post apocalyptic wasteland? There's no long term value in them at all.

Oddly enough there was a sidequest dealing with shutting down a bottle cap press.

Ok but said collector is a man who has been alive since before the bombs fell and thus knows how rare a snowglobe is in this world. The nuka cola girl was obsessed. A random traveling merchant is not going to know about the worth of a gold bar. Yes a scientist from the ncr or a member of the brotherhood of steel might and would pay you the large sum of caps it is worth but a random traveling merchant won't.

 

[Joe Deadman]

Also to the people saying it is valuable because gold is used in tech. Well you will need a foundry and a processing plant to turn that gold into parts necessary for your electronics. Places like that aren't exactly down the street in post apocalyptic america.

Well the pitt had an ammo press and they where just a random group spanning one city I wouldn't be too suprised if a bigger group like the Brotherhood of Steel or the Enclave had some kinda major forge works to help keep all their shiny tech working.

Selling gold to those groups might prove problematic though but im sure some of the merchants have some good contacts.

 

[spectrenihlus]

Also to the people saying it is valuable because gold is used in tech. Well you will need a foundry and a processing plant to turn that gold into parts necessary for your electronics. Places like that aren't exactly down the street in post apocalyptic america.

Those traders likely know people, they get supplied tech, they likely have contacts who know how to use the resources.

yeah, but gold is rare and has always been expensive. some merchants or, more likely, scavenger would want it..

Would they pay the 10,750 caps it is worth on the off chance that a collector might one day come around and purchase it.

10,750 caps is a lot of money.

 

[dexxyoto]

yes people would buy a gold bar, well mostly the brotherhood of steel and other tech people. mostly because gold is a vary vary good conductor! also people are like monkeys they like shiny things

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Lots of technology in the Fallout universe, and gold is an excellent conductor. Gold has extensive uses in industry as well, and I'm guessing that if you grew up in the Fallout universe you'd grow up knowing gold was needed to repair prewar tech, maintain current tech (what with all the robots and everything) and produce new tech. Chances are gold would be even more valuable in Fallout than it is today, because there's not a commercial gold mining industry in the Fallout era, so it would be a lot rarer.

OK you are a scavenger, you have no knowledge about any of the properties of gold and you find a safe. You crack it open and find a plasma rifle with some microfusion cells and a gold bar. You can only carry one which one would you take?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here (not really knowing much about plasma rifles) but one of gold's many uses is as a very effective heat reflector. Since plasma is ludicrously hot (up to 10 to the power 8 Kelvins) I'm assuming that many parts of a plasma rifle would be gold-plated. Therefore, to know about one would be to know about the other.

 

[AVATAR_RAGE]

methinks gold would rack up a bit more than 5 caps

an ashtray is worth 2 caps and it has more use to you as a simple shopkeeper than a bar of this shiny metal. You could probably use it as a paperwight but another guy came in and unloaded some actual paperweights to you already and they were much cheaper to buy.

Gold has no use now but people still want it.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Ok but said collector is a man who has been alive since before the bombs fell and thus knows how rare a snowglobe is in this world. The nuka cola girl was obsessed. A random traveling merchant is not going to know about the worth of a gold bar. Yes a scientist from the ncr or a member of the brotherhood of steel might and would pay you the large sum of caps it is worth but a random traveling merchant won't.

And therein lies the sales pitch.

*Courier presents gold bar to merchant*
Now this travelling merchant has seen many things, he stocks many things, but this is something new to him. It's shiny, it's weighty and he might know a guy who might be interested in it. He might not, he might just think he can flog it off to a guy with too many caps in his pockets.

You're viewing this from a very 2D point. When you look past the mechanics and actually at the Fallout universe, there are multiple reasons why one might buy a gold bar. Collection, electronics, engineering, crafting or further trading.

 

[Communist partisan]

You can put'em in your room so it looks better and you'll look like....wait for it, a boss.

 

[Hugodastrevas]

Yeah i tried making a caps necklace for my girlfriend but for some reason she still prefers thats useless (except for electronics-shop-owners) shinny metal we saw at the pre-war vintage shop the other day...

 

[Lord Kloo]

So they can sell it to the muties as 'bling'..

I mean, have you ever come across a mutant gang lord WITHOUT a gold bar dangling around their neck..?... didn't think so..

 

[SenseOfTumour]

I think the most important thing is that rich people love buying expensive shit just to show off how much more they have than other people.

If I had my way, as soon as you go buying gold plated sports cars or platinum coated iPhones, or, how about this, having diamonds fitted into your damn teeth, I'd have a law kicked in that fines you 90% of your current wealth, because you're obviously too stupid to handle having that kind of money.

There again, I can see that it at least keeps the money moving around, so maybe, while I personally find it reprehensible, it's better than those who sit on fortunes of billions, just to stare at how many zeros there are in their bank balance.

In short, gold is valuable to people who want to show off, while not having a real world value after the holocaust, it would still be a rare metal. I seem to remember in QI that the world's entire gold reserves would fit into a 30ft cube.

 

[spectrenihlus]

Ok but said collector is a man who has been alive since before the bombs fell and thus knows how rare a snowglobe is in this world. The nuka cola girl was obsessed. A random traveling merchant is not going to know about the worth of a gold bar. Yes a scientist from the ncr or a member of the brotherhood of steel might and would pay you the large sum of caps it is worth but a random traveling merchant won't.

And therein lies the sales pitch.

*Courier presents gold bar to merchant*
Now this travelling merchant has seen many things, he stocks many things, but this is something new to him. It's shiny, it's weighty and he might know a guy who might be interested in it. He might not, he might just think he can flog it off to a guy with too many caps in his pockets.

You're viewing this from a very 2D point. When you look past the mechanics and actually at the Fallout universe, there are multiple reasons why one might buy a gold bar. Collection, electronics, engineering, crafting or further trading.

Ok perhaps my main problem is that someone will buy the gold it's the fact that the gold bar is worth 10,750 caps. No random merchant would pay you that much for something they have never seen before. I doubt they would have that much on them anyway. Now if you were to sell it to a representative of the Followers of the apocalypse they might scrounge up enough to match that price. However if I was a merchant and I bought that gold bar for 10,750 caps and then told my wife how much I payed for it. I wouldn't be surprised if she breaks my legs and leaves me to the deathclaws.

 

[Urialanis]

Gold is a key component in many electronic devices...surprised no one brought this up yet. What if they need a bit of gold to get a laser/plasma rifle to work, a whole bar could create an entire new armory for someone.

 

[spectrenihlus]

The only mention of gold in fallout was that a gold alloy was used in the aer12 laser rifle. It was considered superior pre the great war than the aer9's ( which used a titanium alloy )that you find now. The reason you only find aer9's is because the aer12s were not as reliable as the gold alloys were more vulnerable to the years of exposure following the great war.

 

[spectrenihlus]

For the same reason we bought it in the middle ages, and continue to buy it: it's shiny.

It has other uses as well, which would vary in a post apocalyptic type world, but at the end of the day humans are like crows, we like shiny things.

A plasma rifle is also shiny and for the same amount of price as the gold bar is I could have bought 10.

 

[Kebabco]

Well man, the value of gold lies in the fact that: 1) its scarce; therefore little inflation of value and thats why you can use it to store your monies
2) its easily divisible, and therefore you can chop a piece off and use it to pay someone

Tadaaa! Do i win a prize?

 

[spectrenihlus]

Was doing some reading and found out that the NCR backs it's currency with gold. So i guess I was wrong. I have to remember that the West is not as screwed up as the fallout east. Well i guess that is what I get for not playing Fallout 1 and 2. Ok i tried playing 1 and 2 but god damn that gameplay just has not aged well.