Fallout: New Vegas/WMG

The Divide and the Sierra Madre are very near to one another.
The skies over Hopeville are tinted red, very much like those skies over the Sierra Madre. It's possible that they're in close proximity to one another, and that traces of the cloud drift through the Divide.

Dr. Mobius' allusion to the Wizard of Oz was not just a throw-away joke.
Dr. Mobius remarks that three people searching for "a heart, a brain and a spine" reminds him of an old story. This is an obvious Shout-Out to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but I think the parallels go much deeper. First of all, there are some obvious similarities between Dr. Mobius and the eponymous Wizard. They both hide behind an incredibly aggressive and arrogant projection (Mobius transmissions) overstating their powers ,though Mobius has those powers at least partially. But even more interesting are the parallels that could be drawn between Mobius and the Wicked Witch of the West, and between the Think Tank and Glinda the Good Witch of the 1939 film version. This works if you expand on the various revisionist theories that make Glinda into a more morally grey or outright villainous character (see for example this Cracked article, or the novel Wicked). Read like that, the Think Tank (Glinda and the Wizard combined) send out the Courier (Dorothy and her companions) to retrieve something from Dr. Mobius (the Wicked Witch) and likely kill him in the process, for ulterior motives (the Think Tank wants to leave the Big MT, Glinda, according to the theories, wants to rule over Oz unopposed).

The Assassin suit was stolen from another faction as something to base the MK. II off of.
Think about it, there's a lot of gussied upgrades of preexisting systems at Big Mountain, chiefly the robots, most of which are from Robco and General Atomics, it's possible that Big Mt. had been looking for a pre-existing set of armor that they could work on building up. The Lab has plenty of scraps from Chinese Stealth Armor that they presumably captured and had Dr. Zero disassemble, and the "concept drafts" could be based on sketches constructed from corporate espionage de-briefs, leading up to them either finally stealing a prototype, or using combined assets to figure out enough to create their own version to compete with equipment contractors, hence all the gimmicks like an on-board computer, and med-x and Stimpak dispensers.

All of the Wild Wasteland events are a result of the Courier's hallucinations.
Even moreso than the rest of the Fallout universe, the Wild Wasteland events are highly unusual. The Character Trait lists consists entirely of innate mental or physical traits that your character has. Most importantly, if the Wild Wasteland events weren't in your head, how could you remove or add the perk with the psych evaluation given by the Auto-Doc in Old World Blues? The only item of any importance found in the Wasteland events is the Alien Blaster, which is probably just the YCS/186 Gauss Rifle you would have gotten anyway (they're both ungodly-powerful energy weapons, and none of your companions (when you have them) ever seem to be the least bit concerned about the weirdnesses, because they're not seeing the same thing you are. Note the Vault-Boy's swirly eyes on the pic.

This is because the Wild Wasteland perk is
 * A) a result of the your severe head trauma pre-game
 * B) Your being out in the Mojave sun too long and dehydrating
 * C) A coping mechanism for the crushing bleakness/loneliness of walking the desolate Mojave
 * D) A chem addiction
 * E) A pre-existing condition
 * F) The result of repressed guilt for
 * G) some combination of the above


 * Jossed. It is physically impossible for someone to mistake 2 mini-nukes for 3 Holy Frag Grenade's, and some WWL effects can spawn enemies that, while not too much of a threat, can kill you, which pretty much proves they are not a halucination.
 * Clap Your Hands If You Believe? The courier might have some unconscious level of interaction with reality, and if so in that state if mind...

Fallout 4 is going to be distanced from 1, 2, and NV in the same way Fallout 3 was.
The dev team will be all in-house Bethesda, and the dev team will be people who haven't played Fallout, this way they'll be able to go with a similar feel to F3 and be able to release another J.E. Sawyer headed game afterwards for the fans of the west coast games.

The conclusion of the conflict over Hoover Dam is going to be made irrelevant in Fallout 4
Think about it, Fallout one's main quest ending had very few outcomes, either you allowed the Master to take Vault 13 or you defeated him in any variant method to largely the same effect, his leadership of the Super Mutants ended, and Mariposa was neutralized until the Enclave's expedition. Fallout 2's ending was similarly restrictive, apart from individual's fates, the Oil Rig went boom at some point. Fallout 3 either would end with the purifier eventually cleaning the whole river and the east-coast Enclave being decisively defeated, or the PC being a Chaotic Stupid/ Jerk Sue and ruining project purity and killing everyone.

Because there are 3.5 possible decisive victories that can happen, you'd either have to find away to make all of them canon in the sequel the game taking place in an area that's largely unaffected by the war in the Mojave( which would probably disbar everything from California to New Mexico, it changing the direction of NCR and CL's histories) or the whole thing becoming Broad Strokes or Shrouded in Myth.
 * Most likely the new game will probably make a few Call Backs in the form of a few things that will let the players take a guess at what happened.
 * The first two games may have had some fairly restrictive endings for their respective main plots, but there were a lot of different endings for all of the various settlements (the fate of Shady Sands being the most prominent). Didn't stop a canon ending for those. There's no reason to think New Vegas will end up any different.
 * Avellone has indicated that if he gets another Fallout game he'd 'make a clean slate' in the region. Of course, his logic does has its flaws (a theme that has gone through Fallout 1, 2 and indeed New Vegas has been rebuilding, the fact that it is a post-apocalyptic world and that things can get better. Destroying a state because they'd rebuilt too much would destroy that theme, plus make for a more limited story that can be told - the player can't help the world rebuild to any significant degree, because that'd just cause the same problem again), but if it is up to him, yes, it will be made irrelevant.
 * He might have mean "another area away form the other games" like what they've done with the other games, like chicago. But the canon ends has always been the good end and since NCR's end is the closest to the good end that's the best bet.

The Big MT is the Black Mesa Research Facility
Doing a quick wikipedia search for Big Mountain turns up the result Big Mountain, Arizona AKA Black Mesa. Both Black Mesa and Big MT deal with extreme science. Big MT was formerly buried under ground. Both facilities suffer a massive catastrophe. They even share the same initials, BM. Thus Dr Klein, might actually be Doctor Kleiner. Maybe Dr 8 is Gordon Freeman, since neither of them talk.
 * Actually, according to the pictures of the original Think Tanks 8 is the one that looks a lot like Kleiner while Klein is the one that looks like Breen.

The Courier was born in the Divide, or lived there for long enough to consider it his/her home

 * The wreckage blocking you from proceeding through to an area that seems to be the Divide, as noted by graffiti reading "The Divide", also has the graffiti "You can go home Courier". The name of the achievement for beating the Lonesome Road DLC, which takes place in the Divide, is called Hometown Hero. Seems fairly reasonable, in my opinion.
 * Sorta confirmed.

The Courier actually suffered total memory loss.

 * The best thing that the Courier can find to have is his/her main motive is to go after the person who shot them in the head.
 * Even though the Courier can at times comment on his/her past, there is no depth to these lines. The Courier could easily be lying or making-up something they believe is true.
 * The Courier has to learn all of their skills over again at the beginning of the game, and by earning them on the way. Infact, most of the skills available at the beginning have more to do with physical capabilities.
 * You are assuming he actually had any of those skills in the first place. The skills in the game are not basic knowledge and none of them are required to be a Courier. You also do not have to be at 100% to be useful with a skill. The ability to pick a lock is still a significant skill, even if you can't pick every lock in existence.
 * The Courier never references any family, but one of the initial tests at the beginning is supposed to have been about family history. Therefore it's plausible that the Courier just marked what he/she thought was best/randomly.
 * Uh, yes they do, at one point, a dialogue option is about the Courier having fathered a child with a woman in Montana.
 * Only with the Lady Killer perk. The dialogue option in question just implies that the Courier might have fathered a child. (And is, apparently, a worried about the possibility.)
 * Jossed by Word of God. http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/vault/diaries_diary15-9-20-11.php
 * "So this confrontation in Lonesome Road, and the other Courier that claims to know me... did we make a past for your character? Nope. Do you have amnesia? Nope."

A Future DLC will allow us access to Sandy Valley.
If you look at the world map where the Canyon Wreckage is located, and let your eye wander east/northeast, there's a huge area of completely empty space you can't access, a valley between two mountains, just beyond the pile of scrap the graffiti is written on. This us where Sandy Valley is located in reality, if one hits up Google Maps and looks east of the real Primm, the valley is in this spot. It's an awfully large chunk of empty space on the map, and given the messages about the Courier in the wreckage, it's possible the Courier has been there before, and it may be important to the Courier's relationship (whatever that may be) with the man who turned down the Platinum Chip delivery upon seeing the Courier's name next on the list. The "Lonesome Road" could be a particular route through the valley that isn't used as often as the I-15; in reality, there's at least one road that leads out of the other end of the valley and goes north or northeast. Given the suggestions that the Courier spent some time in New Reno, this could have been the route s/he took to the Mojave.

Alternately, the valley has no relevance to existing plot and if it's opened up, the accompanying storyline will have no relevance to the Courier's past, since the Canyon Wreckage graffiti also mentions a landmark that's in the opposite direction from Primm.
 * Dead Money has probably confirmed this.
 * Honest Hearts confirms that the Divide is west of New Vegas, so it could very well be that space on the map, or the Canyon Wreckage will simply be the travel location for Lonesome Road.
 * Confirmed.

A part of Joshua Graham meant to go into that trap
Joshua had become so disgusted with the Legion, and with what it had done to him, that when he saw an obvious trap, he went right into it, hoping that he would die along with the Legion, purging their evil. Unfortunately, Graham couldn't die there, or with the pitch.

Joshua Graham is still alive.
And we'll meet him in a DLC later. What really fuels the DLC speculations is that the area that leads to the debris filed canyon has graffiti explicitly stating "TURN BACK COURIER!"
 * There's also the drive-in movie screen to the south with grafitti that reads "Joshua Graham lives!" and "The Burned Man Walks!"
 * Given the Anvilicious nature of the hints regarding him still being alive this is very likely, especially considering that he was originally going to be a (cursed) companion in Van Buren. However it could be that...
 * Confirmed.

Joshua Graham really is dead, but you will need to recover his corpse at the the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Why? Because it holds the key to a great treasure that he (literally) took to the grave, in the form of a treasure map or an actual key. What is this treasure? A weapon or a source of wealth that would have ensured that one day he would have been able to overthrow Caesar. This will be quite an adventure, though, given the Fallout universe God only knows what's lurking in the Grand Canyon at this point...
 * Jossed.

The Courier is Joshua Graham.
He survived being tossed into the Grand Canyon (and possibly the events of Van Buren, if that aspect is canon) and eventually made his way west where he underwent extreme cosmetic surgery, possibly lost his memory, (or is simply an Unreliable Narrator) and eventually became the Courier. Though it might sound pretty outlandish, there's actually quite a lot of evidence that lends itself to this. First of all, the two have very similar personalities and abilities. The Courier is a Implacable Man who survives what would normally be a fatal injury, and relentlessly tracks Benny across the wasteland with terrifying single-minded determination - qualities consistently attributed to Graham by anyone with any experience with him.

Secondly, the game drops a ton of hints that there's more to the PC's identity then meets the eye. For example, when the player first tells Doc Mitchell his or her name, he seems confused, as if it somehow doesn't fit them. And whenever they're asked about their past, the options to answer are either vague or simply not present. There's also a lot of foreshadowing towards them having a history we're not aware of, like the line about impregnating a woman in Montana, and also having visited New Reno in the past, amongst other things.

Physical appearance would also not be a factor, since we already know Doc Mitchell performs facial reconstruction on the PC at the start of the game, and it's also likely that they would have had considerable whole-body Fallout-science level cosmetic surgery to attend to the huge amount of burns (which we know is possible even to great extremes from Fallout 3). Also, Joshua Graham's original appearance is never described, and even in Van Buren it was never seen due to him being wrapped in bandages.

Finally, the whole loose end in regard to the other courier who turned down the job almost directly implies this. If they knew about whatever alias the Courier is using, they'd be naturally terrified to see it signed on the paper. The "COURIER 6" graffiti suggests it even more, with phrases like "GO HOME COURIER 6" and "THE DIVIDE" (The fallout term for the Grand Canyon) next to each other, perhaps implying that the Divide is the Courier's "Home" in a twisted manner, since it was where their past life ended.
 * What if you play a female Courier? "Thanks for installing this DLC. Your character is now male no matter what gender you've selected earlier." ?
 * Maybe Joshua pulled a Sweet Polly Oliver and was actually a woman which disguised herself as male to escape the horrible treatment of woman in the Legion's territory, somehow joining up the Legion and managing to become one of it's top commanders.
 * Shake shake shake...
 * Joshua was one of the founding members of the Legion. I doubt if he was secretly a woman she would've agreed with Caesar's vision. Also Lanius and several other characters mention that you still have a scar on your forehead from where you were shot. If Doc Mitchell couldn't get rid of that, I doubt he'd be able to get rid of hideous burns all over your body.
 * It would only make sense if Graham originated in the Legion. He does not. He was a missionary that Caesar encountered before the events leading to the creation of Legion.
 * If the Courier was Joshua Graham, wouldn't Caesar have noticed him and had him killed. Brain cancer or not Josh was killed four years ago, somebody would have noticed him. Or maybe they did, but just discounted it, if Jesus walked through the front door you wouldn't think it was him, although you probably would shout his name.
 * Jossed.

The Courier is just some guy who delivers packages.
Nothing special bout him/her, just an average courier that got to the wrong place at the wrong time.
 * That's crazy. You're crazy.
 * And it turns out The Cuckoolander Was Right. That being said, Lonesome Road doesn't fill in much of the Courier's past, so it's also not mutually exclusive from some of the speculation.

Joshua Graham really is still alive and...
We're all thinking it. Throw in your two cents bottle caps here.
 * He's The Courier. See above.
 * He was rescued by Mr. House after being pitched into the Grand Canyon, similar to how The Courier was. If you sided against Mr. House, Graham was the contingency plan to make sure you failed. If you sided with Mr. House, Graham has become a liability and must be eliminated. Graham himself is either a super powered cyborg or inside a similar life support unit to Mr. House, as a backup controller to the the Securitron army.
 * Simply survived being burned alive and thrown into the Grand Canyon due to his previously established nature as a Determinator. He is currently raising an army of raiders/mutants/ghouls/who-the-hell-knows to wreak unholy vengeance on Caesar's Legion.
 * Sorta confirmed.
 * He's Lanius. I don't know how they'd pull it off.
 * The Courier's father. The hardiness that gives Graham his Implacable Man reputation is actually a mutation (think the "radiation heals you" mutation the Lone Wanderer receives, in Perk form for game mechanics, for doing Moira's research quest.) He passed it down to the Courier, and this same mutation is how the Courier survived Benny's double-tap.
 * Currently living in NCR territory under a fake name and back story. He was given total amnesty in exchange for working with the NCR military intelligence department to give them insight about the Legion.
 * And the correct answer: He's returned to Mormonism and currently in Zion National Park defending natives from a Legion-aligned tribe.

Joshua Graham is dead; The Burned Man exists.
The Burned Man is just a slaver hunter that uses Graham as a scapegoat.
 * Or perhaps he is just a legend created by the NCR propaganda department to lower the Legion's moral and to force Caesar to waste military resources to hunt down a ghost that doesn't even exist.
 * Jossed; Joshua Graham and the Burned Man are the same person.

The game's glitches were on purpose
You character got shot in the head and left to die in a shallow grave. It would make sense that there would be some hallucinations, or as we refer to them as: glitches.
 * And every time your game freezes and forces you to reload, that's the courier having a stroke and memory loss.

Yes Man will be the antagonist of a post-game DLC.
None of the endings have him killed. It doesn't help that he is the only NPC that cannot die. The assertiveness boost will probably be the cause.
 * The developers have stated that none of the 4 planned DLCs will add extra content after the ending of the main quest.
 * Also, Yes Man's assertiveness was for back when the game had plans for post-game content as an excuse as to why the ruler of Vegas can still go gallivanting around the Mojave rather than being stuck in the Lucky 38 as a bureaucrat, with Yes Man taking care of the boring parts of ruling for you while making sure that no one else manages to do the same to you as you did to Benny and House.

Mr. House was part of the Enclave.

 * Or at lease he knows about their existence every since before the Great War. He is intelligent, powerful, influential, wealthy, and ruthless when it comes to achieving his goals, which basically fits every requirement for someone to be accepted into part of the Enclave. Also, the Rob Co Industries which he founded was working closely with Vault-Tec and the US government before the war. It is highly unlikely that a chessmaster like Mr. House doesn't eventually discover that a secret organization is working behind the shadows.
 * Also, developing from something posted on the Fridge Logic page: Prior to the Great War, RobCo (owned by House) bought out REPCONN Industries, a firm that is known to have dealt closely with the Enclave government. RobCo also had dealings with Vault-Tec, and one of House's stated aims in-game is to eventually lead humanity in colonizing the stars -- and the Vaults are supposed to be an experiment testing the sustainability of Generation Ships. Given House's ambition, genius, and authoritarian beliefs, as well as the aforementioned ties to Enclave-affiliated organizations and the resources at his disposal (enough to arm Las Vegas with a state-of-the-art missile defense system, implying military contacts as well), he seems like an obvious choice for a leader, if not one of the founding members, of the Enclave itself.
 * That would be difficult, considering that Mr House went into dormancy after the Great War due to the strain of protecting Vegas from the nukes, and didn't resurrect until decades after the Enclave had lost nearly all of their power.
 * The OP is talking about the Enclave as it was before the war, and before Mr. House went into his life-support system. That he went into dormancy may even help explain why he wasn't involved in Fallout 2.
 * It seems that while Mr. House almost certainly knew of the Enclave before the war, he wanted no part in them, because he wanted to rule on his own, and their ideology would leave his best costumers dead.

It is a bad idea to talk Lanius into retreating if you choose the NCR/Mr. House/Independent endings.
When you confront Lanius during the end game quest, the Legion is basically at its weakest point in years, it is likely that both its first and third in command are dead, plus their most elite troops are KIA at Hoover Dam. So if you kill Lanius right there, the Legion will be leaderless and on very low morale. The next leader in the secession line will be hard press to keep his man under control, eventually resulting in the entire Legion collapsing due to in-fighting and civil war, so they will no longer be a threat to Mojave for at lease the foreseeable future. On the other hand, if you talk Lanius into pulling out of the region, he will return to Arizona to re-build the Legion's strength. He even made it clear that he plans to return and invade the west again in the future. And so if you choose the 'peaceful' solution, you will ended up causing much more death and suffering then necessary.
 * Although by this stage you would have most likely resurrected a large army of self-repairing robots armed to the teeth and have aligned yourself with a quasi-religious technophiliac organization with access to large amounts of power armour and energy weapons,, a destruction-happy tribe with a working bomber and a small but hardy raider clan. If the Legion decided to invade the Mojave, there is going to be blood; and it'll be their blood.
 * Lanius is too ineffective a leader to ever recreate Legion as a significant threat. Killing him probably would plunge Legion into anarchy, but it is also fairly likely that an even more effective leader might be given the opportunity to take the reins with Lanius gone. Odds are Lanius would spend his entire reign fighting minor rebellions in Arizona as his territory gradually goes independent or usurped by other factions, like the NCR.
 * This is backed up by Caesar himself; if you ask him to tell you about Lanius, he flat-out says that Lanius is only in it for the fighting and has no emotional or ideological attachment to the Legion as an entity; even if he had the leadership skills to carry it on, he wouldn't care to.
 * And yet talking to him makes him come off as a Reasonable Authority Figure, who's also a Blood Knight. So most likely his Blood Knight habits mask his leadership effectiveness.
 * Given that, if Caesar dies and the Legion takes the Hoover Dam, Lanius destroys New Vegas and the Legion becomes even more brutal, Lanius isn't "reasonable" so much as "a quick learner". Remember, Lanius only expresses awareness that the Legion can't sustain itself at the pace it's going when talked into retreating. OP's concerns are entirely valid. Lanius has learned not to over-extend his forces and that fighting to the last man isn't the best strategy. The collapse of the Legion and its institutionalized cruelty will be postponed, likely not indefinitely, but certainly long enough for Lanius to make good on his vow to return. You just couldn't pass up those skill checks, could you?

The Courier is dead
Doc Mitchell tried his best, but he's no miracle worker. The Courier died on the operating table and the whole game is a Dying Dream.

The Courier never existed at all
Alternative to the above, a lonely Doc Mitchell spends his time imagining a adventures of a lovable rogue who saunters the wastes, meeting interesting people and solving impossible tasks. He later compiles these fantasies into a book series, 'Adventures of the Mojave Courier', which become a staple material among the young and old, thanks to funding from the Mojave Express (free advertising), and the Followers of the Apocolypse distributing the book to provide entertainment and a role model for the wasteland.

Joshua Graham is Jesus
Very similar names in Hebrew (same in Greek), enemy of a state based on Rome, crucified, alleged supernatural abilities, apparently a religious person...
 * Also, he's incredibly hard to kill. Anyone who's aware of Graham's role in Van Buren would know that he survived a hanging for a few days.

The Courier is the Vault 11 Survivor
This theory has almost certainly been put forward before, but I'm going to pop it up on the WMG page and make it official. Anyway, Vault 11... 5 survivors... but only 4 bodies, the last survivor presumably having gone into the Wasteland. No other character in the game really fits being the Vault 11 Survivor, so why not the Courier with his/her mysterious past? And the Vault 11 survivor could actually be male or female... the survivor opposed to the suicide pact is male, but he screams "No, no!" when the shooting starts, suggesting he might not have been the one holding the gun. 2 of the 5 survivors never speak, and thus may be male or female and possibly the Vault 11 Survivor.

Oh, and also, Vault 11 appears in the opening movie, which does seems to strongly hint at an important role in the Courier's background, considering it's otherwise not related to the game's main story.
 * You could also put up the theory that the Courier was still a little kid when this happened. Imagine him/her losing his/her parents to the voting system, being possibly the only child born in years, only to learn that it was all not necessary and that the adults, the people responsible for her/his parents death, now want to seal themselves up forever and commit suicide. So the kid cracks and kills them all in a fit of rage and runs away. Not only would this explain why the other four didn't saw it coming (who would have expected the little silent child to do anything?) but also how you could have already traveled around for years in the wasteland outside Nevada.
 * Well you can adjust the age of The Courier, so he/she doesn't necessarily have to have been a child when this all happened.
 * Considering the state of the Vault and that everyone's body has already become a skeleton it's left open when the Vault was opened.
 * Of course, since the Vault quickly became the home to giant rats and mantises, the bodies would have been stripped down to bones relatively quickly.
 * Likewise it would give Mister House comment about the weakness of a democracy towards the player a different meaning.
 * Given that only one ending of New Vegas has the Courier supporting a democratic government, it's quite possible that the Courier's resistance to, and even his outright antagonism to democratic government could be attributed to having survived Vault 11.
 * You can hear the survivor's voice after all four gunshots, it is definitely one of the male speakers. This removes him as a possibility because it creates a definitive gender and approximate age for the Courier.
 * Word of God also indicates that there are no backstory elements in the game to the Courier beyond the ones being built with Ulysses.

Ulysses is the Vault 11 Survivor

 * With Dead Money and Dog's ending it has become quite likely that Ulysses, the removed companion, will return via a DLC. From what we know, he is supposed to be a fanatic defender of what he thinks was the pre-war government and it's democratic ideals. It's possible his traumatic experience in the vault has actually turned him towards democracy rather than away from it, since the civil war inside the vault only broke out after someone tried to remove democracy or thinking that the old government performed this experiment to show everyone how weak they were, so being the sole survivor tells him he was the strongest of them.
 * Jossed.

WMG: The Courier is the Vault 11 survivor along with one other person.
 * The assumption is that there were only five survivors, but four bodies afterward, but what if one of the people responsible for the revolution that wiped out nearly all of the Vault's population survived, but was hiding! If he was too terrified to come out due to the fact that he believed he'd be blamed for the incident, he'd stay in a locker until everyone left/was dead. Now comes the funny part: he leaves the vault and ends up becoming a Courier himself, but never encounters the survivor, until he sees the list of deliverymen for House's items, and sees a name he recognized from the Vault. He quickly turns down the job, leaves the Courier to do the job, and flees the New Vegas area, afraid of being discovered by someone who'd not hesitate to put a bullet in his head for what he'd done.
 * Adding to above's suggestion of Ulysess being involved in Vault 11. Could it be that both, the Courier and Ulysses are survivors of Vault 11? This would certainly explain their past connection and possibly why Ulysess put the Courier on the list, also why they might have a reason to fight each other as suggested in Dog's ending.
 * How's this? It pieces together a few of the other theories into a story. The Courier and Ulysses were just children when Vault 11 broke down into chaos. Surviving the riots, they hid away while watching the 5 other survivors argue. Knowing not to come out of hiding, as they understood that the adults were debating on whether or not to kill themselves, the two kids wait, and, eventually, 4 survivors are killed. The shooter leaves the vault, and the children trail the man for a while, staying out of sight, as they fear what he may do to them, despite the fact that he is weaponless, as they are but two youths. Eventually, they lose him in a modest sized settlement, and find a caravan, whose driver take them in out of pity and they travel all the way to California, before being left at an orphanage. They stay clinging together, each is the only friend the other has in the world, even traveling back to New Vegas and gaining jobs together as couriers for The Mojave Express . However, the older they get, the more they begin to disagree about their past, The Courier thinking that Vault-Tec and the government of old was doing nothing more than playing a sick twisted game with Vault 11, Ulysses however, believing that the experiment showed that the dwellers were weak minded, and thus, unfit to govern, and that was what the proud United States government was aiming to prove. Their arguments grew more frequent, and more intense, until they parted ways, so stubborn that they never quite forgave each other for their differing opinions. Years pass, as both of them travel far and wide, still never seeing each other since their last argument. One day, Ulysses is offered a job to deliver a unique poker chip to The Strip. On the list of other candidates, whose name should he spot at the top but that of his old companion, Courier Six. Out of some strange form of lingering resentment, he refuses the job, allowing The Courier to complete the task himself. As soon as he hears of the Courier surviving his own attempted execution, Ulysses takes this as some sort of sign that he and his old friend will meet again, one last time, and he prepares for a battle to finally decide who was right after all these years...

The Vault 11 Survivor Is Still Alive, And He Wants To Destroy Democracy

 * Think about it: we assume that every one of the assassination attempts at Hoover Dam is the Legion trying to take out Kimball. But there's so many! A suicide bomb, a sniper, a bomb on his plane, isn't this just a bit overkill, even for a foe as wily as Caesar? What if only one of the assassination attempts was made by the Legion, and the rest made by The Survivor, who now heads a shadowy organization that seeks to wipe out democracy, having seen firsthand how terrible it can become?
 * Why would an anti-democracy group want to kill Kimabll? If anything he is slowly destroying the NCR's democratic style government from within and turning in more to a dictatorship. If they really want to fight democracy, shouldn't they go after people that really believes in democracy and diplomacy like Ambassador Crocker or Colonel Hsu instead?
 * Because Kimball's death would destabilize the NCR, allowing future actions a greater chance of success. He's the figurehead of NCR democracy, not it's embodiment. Killing Kimball wouldn't be the last step in destroying the NCR from within: IT WOULD BE THE FIRST.

Mr. House was a Vault-Tec technical advisor, and is the one responsible for Vault 11

 * If you complete Vault 11, including the big finish in the hidden chamber before you start working with Mr. House, you will get a message that you just failed part 1 of the quest "The House Always Wins", and Mr. House's robots will turn hostile. Given that Mr. House has a security network that covers his facility in Independence Hill, and Vault 11 isn't that far off, he was likely watching you when you completed Vault 11, and, having discovered that you know his dirty little secret, that he created one of the greatest Vault-Tec travesties in history, he now has no choice but to try to have you killed the moment you enter his Casino.
 * Alternately, it may just be a glitch caused by the game being rushed out before it was 100% completed.
 * It's definitely a glitch; I reloaded my last quicksave after this happened to me and the second time I did it, this didn't happen at all.Although, it's entirely possible the quest not failing the second time was the glitch...
 * It's a glitch. One of the turrets is improperly coded to be aligned to the Lucky 38.
 * You all are just no fun.

The Courier is The Lone Wanderer
After saving the Capital Wasteland, he chose to leave the Brotherhood of steel and lead a normal life as a Courier. He thus went to New Vegas where he lived until the game's beginning. After being shot by Benny he lost his memory and he starts off as level 1 because he's out of shape.
 * The writers left The Courier's background completely unexplained (you don't have to admit to being to New Reno) and it's been 3 years since the events of Fallout 3 so if you want to be The Lone Wanderer then go right ahead.
 * So basically you can role-play the Courier anyway you want. He can be the Lone Wanderer, a child of the Lone Wanderer/Chosen One, a citizen of the NCR, an escape slave, a survived member of the Enclave... etc. There doesn't seem to be an 'official' backstory for him.
 * I am the original poster of the WMG, and i think the Courier's backstory was probably left out intentionally after all.
 * Well one big problem with this theory is that a line of dialogue in the game would imply the Lone Wanderer impregnated a woman in Montana when he was 6. Needless to say, this seems slightly implausible.
 * Assuming that the bullets caused some brain damage, it's possible that he mismatched the date.
 * Besides, its simply optional flavor text, and the player is no more obliged to accept it as canon than that line in Fallout 3 where its implied that the Lone Wanderer is attracted to Amata. It only even appears with the black widow perk, and it would contradict the minimum age slider.
 * I just assumed that the Courier was making a joke (you need the Lady Killer perk, but it makes you a bit of a lothario and it's the kind of joke that would come to the mind of a person with such a personality). Kind of a mean one, though.
 * It might be a case of Gameplay Story Segregation, but early in the game you can ask basic questions about both local places and the NCR, implying that you're new to the southwest altogether. But when you speak to Veronica you can give her an intelligent opinion of the Brotherhood of Steel, and you only really seem ignorant of the corruption of the Elders and their unwillingness to help anyone. So you have someone new to the southwest, who has deep knowledge of the BoS, but thought they were nice people instead of jerks who hoard tech. That sounds like someone from the Capital Wasteland.
 * Going by that Logic you can also state you know the Brotherhood are of bunch of dicks and that you've seen a singer in New Reno, also as of Old World blues it shows that there is an 80% chance you don't know what High School or Communist is, something a person who grew up in a Vault should know.

Fallout is the aftermath of Epic Mickey.

 * Both games use the same engine. Mickey was able to travel into the Fallout universe and.

The Courier is in Purgatory.
Actually, everyone is. No nuclear catastrophe ever happened and the whole Fallout world is the place were sinners try to redeem themselves. The Courier was a thief in his life and thus a Courier in his Purgatory. Joshua Graham was an arsonist and failed to redeem himself thus his Karmic Death. And so on.
 * This setting for the "Nevada Skies" mod would even give you the right look.

The Vault 11 Survivor will make an appearance in the Dead Money DLC.
The description of the DLC says that the courier is going to work with "...three companions, each of whom has their own motivation for helping you." One could be Survivor.
 * Jossed.

Three of the remaining Mojave Express Couriers will be the companions in the Dead Money DLC.

 * We know that the Courier is one of the six sent, and we know that there was one dead in Primm, but what of the other 4? After they complete their missions, one of the couriers approaches the other three in a money-making venture, only the leader will betray the other three part way through and leave them for dead. The Courier will save them, and in gratitude, they'll join the Courier and help him bring the leader down.
 * Jossed. The companions consist of a Super Mutant, a Ghoul, and a bald female human.
 * The human and the ghoul COULD be couriers, but I doubt that they would hire a Super Mutant.
 * Nope. The companions are a schizophrenic super mutant suffering multiple personality disorder, a Brotherhood of Steel scribe brutally mangled and unable to speak and a lounge singer who has been plotting to rob the Sierra Madre for over two hundred years. The leader's an insane Brotherhood of Steel elder, as well.

The Courier that turned down the platinum chip does not know Courier 6 (the player) at all.

 * Benny would only have been able to figure out the courier company Mr. House hired by hacking into his network, not the identity of the courier actually carrying the platinum chip. It is mentioned in game that the couriers were selected by rotation, except the player would not have got the job if one of the people ahead of him in the rotation didn't turn it down. Ambushing all six couriers was probably not an option given the small number of Khans he brought. It would make sense Benny would pay off a Courier to give him the name of the person with the platinum chip. The courier that turned down the job wasn't amused because he knew Courier 6. He was amused because he realized if Benny didn't hire him, he would have been the one getting ambushed.
 * Potentially Jossed. We don't know much about Ulysses, who is the prime candidate, so he could not know much about it.
 * Ulysses does have a history with the Courier, though it mostly spawned from a single devastating event.

The Courier is the Beast, while the courier before him was Cole.
As Cole became more powerful, he discovered his time travel ability. Unfortunately, he lost control and traveled to 2278. After that, he realized that he could use this time to train to fight the Beast again. For two years he worked as a courier to get caps, until the Beast was able to find when he was and followed him there. The fight was now an even match between the two, with Cole eventually running away, leaving the Beast weakened. The Beast lost track of him, while Cole turned down the next job so he could stay in hiding. The Beast was injured and couldn't control his powers at the time very well, and had to take the job of a courier to get caps so he could get food. On his first job he was shot by Benny and couldn't fight back without his powers.

It...made sense in my head.

The man who people worshiped, who King's school of impersonation was built around, who the Kings emulate...

 * Was Jessie Garon Presley.

Ulysses was the one who shot ED-E in the trailer.
Why not? He seems to be a grand puppet master as of Dead Money. Turning down the Platinum Chip delivery when he saw the Courier's name? Having saved Christine from Elijah and stating he knows it's important to search for someone who had an impact on your life? Seems as if he is, if accidentally or on purpose, manipulating the story and the Courier's fate.

Firefly is the future of the Fallout series if Mr. House wins.
Mr. House really did send humanity to the stars, leaving the wastes of the Earth-that-was. To further control humanity even in space, he designed an apparently democratic government, the Alliance, to give their citizens the impression that they are participating in the process. (The Alliance Parliament is in fact a puppet government controlled by Mr. House himself, still alive thanks to his "condition"). The Space Western theme of Firefly is caused by most people having been raised in the wild wasteland outside New Vegas itself, and the Independents were partly formed by the successors of the NCR, who know the truth about the Alliance.
 * The problem with this is that it would require going from Fallout level technology to Firefly level technology in about fifty years before New Vegas begins. The basic backstory of the Alliance completely contradicts the Fallout series, as well. Fallout starts by the United States and China going to war with one another. Firefly starts by them allying with one another.

The DLC will be a series of stories told throughout different chapters.
Dead Money and the (as of writing) unnamed second DLC would be considered the Ulysses arc. Honest Hearts and the fourth would focus on Joshua Graham/The Burned/Hanged Man. The fifth (and possibly sixth) would be a continuation of the main quest.
 * Jossed. Only 4 DLC, but it does look like Honest Hearts is the odd man out, being only tentatively related to the others.

The Courier is the Second Coming and the Mojave Wasteland is the Battle of Armageddon.
Mr House is God. An all knowing, near omnipotent savior of mankind who kept one last bastion of mankind (Las Vegas) alive and watches over them from heaven, the Lucky 38. The reason he wants the Brotherhood of Steel destroyed is because they worship false idols. Caesar, once a member of the Followers of Apocalypse, the most altruistic organization in the wasteland, is the Anti Christ. Charismatic and intelligent, but trying to reshape the world in his image. The NCR are the united forces of mankind, who, while they are at peace with the forces of heaven, wish to rebel against House. While they are greedy, corrupt, and imperialistic, they have some decent reasons for doing so. The platinum chip is the Book of the Seven Seals from Revelation, which each faction needs in order to either deliver final judgment unto mankind and bring them under control of his Securitron angels (House), harvest the souls of mankind (Caesar), or break free from both God and Satan's will (The NCR). The Courier can either fulfill his duty to God, betray him to Lucifer and Caesar, help mankind break from from their creator, or take it for their self and shape earth as they see fit
 * Best WMG ever.
 * I killed house after I met him and then left the Luck 38 forever mainly because I was bored and thought he was a dick. That probably makes me more of an anti-christ than Caesar.
 * Actually, if it can corelate to it the bible, or history whatsoever, and assuming you're using independent Vegas, (Which it probably can,) Caesar's legion is the god honest roman empire (And the courier can ideally play Brutus,) House and the Lucky 38 are Babel tower (Where you play whomever it was who brought other languages,) The NCR is colonization era europe (America is the courier?) and there are probably more as it goes.

Christine and Veronica became a couple again.
Its heavily implied that Christine was Veronica's former lover. there is no real canonical basis for this but damn if it wouldn't melt your heart.

The courier IS the lone wanderer
It's simple. After the events of Fallout 3, he (or she) decided that they didn't want to be tied down to the East coast and wanted to explore the country. Cue to two years in the future, in which an informant (possibly from any of the factions) wants them to take a courier job. After a while of bargaining, they decide to take the job. However, a group from a different faction attack the Wanderer and steal his equipment.) The wanderer finds a few pieces of equipment but is shot by Benny before he can finish the quest.

In the same way that Dead Money helped resolve certain issues from Veronica's past, the remaining 3 DLCs will have plot elements involving some of the other New Vegas companions.
The most obvious unresolved plot element is the fate of Fallout 2 companion John Cassidy, father of New Vegas companion Cass who was last seen disappearing into the East and never heard from again.
 * Every human companion has somebody very important in their past that they lost- Veronica-Christine, Boone-Carla(see below), Arcade and Cass-Their fathers. I'd like to include Lily(grandchildren) or Raul(Rafaela) but there will only be 3 more DLC's and we learn a lot more about the human ones.
 * Honest Hearts- in Legion Territory, could be Boone's or Cass's DLC.
 * Jossed; Honest Hearts has no connection to any companions.
 * Lonesome Road however fills in some of ED-E's backstory.

Carla Boone will be a companion in Honest Hearts.
We see the location where Boone shot his wife, it's difficult to get a clear shot at anybody in Cottonwood Cove from there, even for Boone. Instead, the shot made her comatose and miscarry, and the Legion took her into Arizona and tried to treat her (a live slave is worth more), but they couldn't and left her for dead.
 * Jossed

One of the future DLCs will introduce a Super Mutant Ranger. Perhaps even a Super Mutant Ranger wearing customized Ranger Combat Armor.
The latter would be pretty badass (sort of an NCR version of Frank Horrigan). Also, there were Super Mutant Rangers in Fallout 2, so there's a precedent for it. A Super Mutant Ranger named Chauncey was originally supposed to appear in New Vegas but was cut from the game.

One of the future DLCs will introduce another character from Fallout 2
Possible candidates include SKYNET, Goris, Xarn (the other intelligent Deathclaw survivor, from the Navarro prison), and Lenny. Hell, the Enclave Remnants are still kicking, so Sulik could still be around after all these years. Yeah, Sulik was damn funny, we should get a Badass Grandpa version of him!

== An interview with developers has revealed a future DLC will include an area "that players likely thought they would never see", as well as "a personality from Fallout 3". Any guesses as to what that might mean? ==
 * My money is on either the East Coast BOS, Desmond, or Fawkes.
 * I say it's Moira Brown. Everybody who played Fallout knows - and maybe hates - her. Her appearance would explain all the Wasteland Survival Guides found in the Mojave. She brought them along and sold them to gain enough Caps to hire the Courier as researcher for her next book.
 * Almost definitely the East Coast BOS.
 * Three Dog uses some enclave tech he got from the BOS to begin broadcasting coast-to-coast.
 * Most likely BOS. Theoretically, they are supposed to be a scouting mission, which means they are supposed to eventually report back to the main BOS command at some point. The point gets kind of obscured since Bethesda made the small splinter factions in DC larger, more powerful, higher tech and better armed than the primary groups on the West Coast.
 * It could be the outcasts who after the definite success of Lyons point of view will join the Mojave branch.
 * Madison Li is the only important NPC who survives the events of Fallout 3 no matter what the Lone Wanderer tries. She even leaves the Capital Wasteland to go up to the Institute for awhile. There's a few minor NPCs who could also survive, but most of them are children, or so obscure they're not really worth mentioning.
 * LIBERTY PRIME. Ok, probably not, but wouldn't that be awesome?
 * Well, 3 of 4 DLCs are out now, so unless Lonesome Road pulls a truly epic twist, it seems that the Fallout 3 personality the devs were referring to were the Yao Guai in Honest Hearts.
 * The thing they never thought they'd see is probably the lobotomites, they were actually suposed to be included in a game from all the way back to fallout, but it never happened. As for the old school personality... I don't know, who was important enough to be canonically alive.
 * My guess is that it's Harold. Bob, the mutant tree growing out of his head, is said to be producing seeds in the good ending to Fallout 2, which grow into plants similar to the one that consumed everyone's favorite 200+ year old mutant-ghoul-thing. In a twist, Harold can psychically send his consciousness between the plants once they're mature enough, giving him more mobility than he's had in decades. It'd be a fitting enough ending for Harold; let's face it, he's suffered enough.
 * Turns out it's

Area 51 will be the focus of one of the DLC's
For several reasons, one Area 51 was suppose to be featured in Fallout 2 and was scrapped, two it gives a reason for the aliens to be present in the game, and most of all simply due to the fact it's hard to imagine a game that deals with the Las Vegas/Southern Nevada area that doesn't have a single reference to Area 51.
 * Aliens in the Black Isle/Obsidian Fallout games have always been a joke or non-canon. Area 51 was scrapped very early on in Fallout 2's production, it wasn't something they wanted to include and didn't have time. It isn't surprising that someone suggested Area 51 as a potential location given Fallout 2's location. It would be very odd for them to focus on aliens for DLC. YMMV, but Mothership Zeta seemed to consistently be the least popular Fallout 3 DLC with fans of the series that played the earlier games.

Benny is just really bad in bed.
Matthew Perry's notoriously "bad" voice acting, especially during the g-rated sex scene, was Stylistic Suck, completely intentional as a way to show that he's a terrible, terrible lay.

The Showdown with Ulysses will involve a showdown between companions
Ulysses, as The Courier's counterpart has his own companions, some of which are counterparts to The Courier's own. Perhaps a rogue Paladin as Veronica's counterpart, a young hotshot gunslinger as Raul's, a former Legionnaire Frumentarius as Boone's and others. The final confrontation at The Great Divide will not only be The Courier's showdown but ones for his/her companions. Raul's: A vicious punk with a talent for shooting, anti-Raul was part of a raider gang or was King, until he either killed all his raider buddies, or was thrown out of the Kings for breaking their code. He joined Ulysses for the chance to shoot and rob people. Boone's: A Legion spy who was ordered to observe Ulysses as a part of his dealings with them. Ulysses discovered him and made him some kind of double agent. Veronica's: A member of the Brotherhood, anti-Veronica also recognized the Brotherhood's decline, but rather then stay and try to change things, they jumped ship at the first opproutinity. Works for Ulysses to acquire rare tech, and may have been the one to lead him to the Big Empty. Ganon: Another "child of the Enclave", anti-Ganon, as opposed to being revolted by the Enclave, in fact looked up to them and seeks to continue their work. Probably a sadistic Mengele expy who revels in his vile experiments and enjoys his patient's suffering. Bonus points for having a mis-matched name, with the middle word being something vaguely German, in contrast to "Israel." Cass: A raider or maybe a Powder Ganger, as I'm almost certain one of her tag skills is explosives. Either that, or maybe some kind of corrupt caravan boss who got run out of town and meet/was saved by Ulysses, then worked with him to take revenge on someone (similar to Cass's quest) then hung around after. Could be the one to do all the talking, having the highest Barter/Speech skill. Lily: Obviously another Nightkin, who's either coldly methodical in contrat to Lily's psychosis, or even more insane and delusional then she is. Probably murdered their family after be dipped, in contrast to Lily, who wants to see them more then anything. Rex: Probably a Legion Mongrel, but hulked out on steroids as a result of anti-Ganon's experiments. Being covered in freakish muscles would contrast nicely with Rex's cybernetic body. ED-E: Some kind of combat robot, maybe a Mister Gutsy?
 * Adding to this, Ulysses will be the Courier's opposite, being a heavy weaponry specialist if the Courier is a stealth build, and a melee/unarmed specialist if the Courier is a tech-savvy energy weapons user.
 * The parodox of any final showdown with Ulysses is that, since there will be no "post-ending" DLC like Broken Steel, even after all DLCs are released Lanius will still be the "final boss" of the game, so Ulysses himself will be unlikely to be more powerful than him. However, Ulysses will be fought at a much higher level cap (level 50 if current trends remain the same), and confronting him seems to be a major built-up climax to the 4 DLCs. Having him be a "party battle" with multiple Hero-level companions would be one way to make the fight suitably epic without eclipsing the Lanius fight.
 * Actually, it's very likely that the Final Boss of Honest Hearts will be Joshua Graham, who's explicitly described as being a much better warrior than even Legate Lanius. So apparently their policy of not making DLC bosses stronger than the Final Boss if out the window.
 * That one's Jossed since Graham is actually the Protagonist of the Honest Hearts DLC. Doesn't mean he's any less dangerous to take down.
 * Epic idea man! I can already see it!
 * All Jossed, unfortunately. Companions are not allowed into the Divide either... Save for ED-E.

The Courier and Ulysses were born before The War
For a moment, entertain the idea that the Pre-War United States Government had a Super Soldier program going on that gave birth to at least two individuals: The Courier and Ulysses. Being "siblings" in a sense would explain why Ulysses seems to know the Courier, and some past betrayal or incident may have resulted in their apparent feud. The Courier, however, has amnesia due to being shot in the head at the beginning of the game (As has been previously proposed to explain some characteristics of The Courier, such as lack of knowledge of his/her birthplace and general unawareness of the situation with the NCR and the Legion in the Mojave) and future DLCs will reveal more of his/her past and his/her relationship with Ulysses, which has been said to be surprising to players. As for why such a thing could be, let's take a look at some interesting characteristics of The Courier: Taking this to be evidence of The Courier being an immortal Pre-War Super Soldier, it should make his/her final confrontation with Ulysses very interesting, as well as keeping up with the general theme of "Letting Go".
 * The Courier survived being shot in the head. While not impossible, it's still fairly extraordinary.
 * Depending on how you play the game, The Courier is a total Badass to an inhuman degree.
 * One of the options for the word association part of character creation for one of the ink-blots is Mushroom Cloud. While it serves to show that The Courier may have a knowledge in explosives, it could also be remnants of memories of The War.
 * The Courier implies in a conversation with Veronica that he/she does not know his/her birthplace. The amnesia would certainly explain this, as would a simple lack of knowledge, but there's also the possibility that his/her birthplace doesn't exist anymore either.
 * Ulysses' association with The Old World and the American Flag on his back. If he was the product of a US Super Soldier program, he may have lingering feelings of loyalty for his lost nation.
 * The Courier, with high enough intelligence, knows what a fish is. This might be just general knowledge on his/her part, but it could also be lingering memories of a world where fish were more plentiful.
 * It certainly accounts for a Mysterious Past, which The Courier has in spades.
 * It would be pretty cool.
 * He doesn't have to be immortal, he could have simply been born before the war. A conversation you find on a holotape indicates that Ulysses believes that the Old World and America "are asleep" in the Divide. It opens a possibility that the Divide could house cryogenically frozen pre-war citizens, among whom the Courier and Ulysses were formerly members. The Big MT's experiments unfreeze the two of them with the accident mentioned in Old World Blues, and they go out and explore and get jobs in the new Wasteland, they simply don't remember anything from before the war due to the freezing process. It would explain why the Courier's backstory is so muddled, and why the Courier doesn't seem to understand High School, communism, or Christianity.
 * Jossed.
 * Not nessecarily. Ulysses may not have known anything about the Courier or presumed he perished when the old world died. Though it's a bit of a stretch, given the technology of the time, it's not impossible. Added to my personal Fanon regardless though.

The Sixth Courier is an android created by Mr. House.
Aside from Mr. House, Ulysses is the only living person who knows this. If he is a living person, himself.
 * A laughable theory. First of all, the Courier bleeds. Second of all, hardcore mode (where the character requires food, water, and sleep; healing is more difficult; etc) really puts this little twist ending into doubt, as a robot shouldn't require any of those things at any point and healing a broken leg wouldn't require specific medical aid. Third and finally, the technology of the setting makes it explicitly impossible, as the most advanced robots are pretty much walking toasters (or hulking unicycles). Mr. House wouldn't even have been able to create a human-like android that is complex enough to bleed and eat and get drunk off his ass BEFORE the nukes hit, let alone after. It just doesn't make a lick of sense.
 * One can consider it yet another of Bethesda's problematic design decisisions, but Fallout 3 did establish that making a human-like android that is complex enough to bleed and eat and get drunk off his ass is possible for at least one post-War faction. Of course, that faction is on the other side of the country.

The Outcasts will join forces with Casear's Legion.
If the NCR truce with the Brotherhood becomes canon it will put the Outcasts in a bind since the Western faction effectively adopts Lyons's altruistic methods, albeit with a self interested goal. Facing the judgment of the Western elders for betrayal, the personal vendetta of the East Coast Brotherhood, as well as possible reprisals from NCR who'd see them as a remnant of the Brotherhood's old ways, they will join the Legion for protection. They will cut a deal where the Outcasts keep technology out of the hands of the population in exchange for helping the Legion fight technologically superior foes. Naturally, the Legion being the legion, they will try and stab them in the back somewhere down the road.
 * except for the whole Legion hating technology thing, and the Mojave chapter is just like the DC chapter, only a part of the BOS, they only help keep peace as a means to progress in their goal of preserving technology, they confiscate the Salvaged power armor after all. There is no way that theory can even be plausible.
 * To paraphrase the art of war, #1's biggest rival is #2, not the #1 in another field. Allying with a luddite faction would mean that any high tech devices found by the new coalition outcast/legion force would be given to the outcasts by virtue of the legion's views. The outcasts get a nice wall of meatshields to bulk out their meagre, small scale combat forces and the Legion get a very well equiped unit of shock troops they can use to take out Securitrons and other heavily armored threats far more easily. Imagine if Praetorian squads had power armour training. The outcasts would also benefit from Caesar's frumentarii network, allowing them decent scouting of potential salvage sites. The outcasts from FA 3 also have access to permenant stealth suit technology and a myriad of other devices from Op: Anchorage, such as the shock sword. Sudenly the legion have stealth that can only be thwarted by thermal imaging at the best, meaning only Veteran rangers can counter them, while outcasts (the ones with power armor at least) have such imaging sensors built into their suits, meaning low risk on their part. The min-maxing potential of this combination of factions is truely gigantic.

New Vegas is a prequel to the events in Van Buren
If you ignore the date and specific details, this is a possibility. After the NCR's victory at the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, the republic managed to push Caesar's Legion out of Nevada and expended their boarder all the way to the Legion's home territory at the Grand Canyon area by establishing Fort Aradesh in Arizona and sent a small team of prisoners as forwards scouts to the city of Denver. With Hoover Dam safely under their control, the town on top of it led by Governor Joseph Dodge was founded. The Brotherhood of Steel used the opportunity given to them by the truce between them and the NCR to rebuild their strength, eventually some hard-liner elder at Lost Hills started the war again. At the same time, the Legion regrouped and destroyed Fort Aradesh, turning it into Fort Abandon. With the NCR out of Arizona, the Legion realized that it is fruitless to attack the Mojave against, so instead they focus on expanding southwards into New Mexico instead. Meanwhile, the Bright Followers' REPCONN Test Site rockets failed to take them to space, however, they reached the ruins of the Los Alamos Nuclear Testing Facility, together with the ghouls there, they founded the town of Reservation. Setting the stage of all the locations and events of Van Buren.
 * Technically, it wouldn't be the the Lost Hills elders that restart the war - the Republic/Brotherhood truce endings make clear that it is specifically the Mojave Brotherhood that has a truce, and that the war continues in the West.
 * Its very heavly implied that the Mojave Brotherhood is the last chapter in the west.
 * It is explicitly said in the NCR-Brotherhood Truce NCR ending that they are not the last chapter in the west. How can a war continue if the only remaining part of one side is at peace with the other side?

How future games will handle canon
While the Vault Dweller had a canon gender Obsidian and Bethesda seem to have backed away from having a clear canon since both Fallout 3 and New Vegas make a point of not referencing any of the Chosen One's actions outside of the main story (For instance, Marcus's dialogue goes to great pains to avoid using gender pro nouns, only referring to the Chosen one as a tribal or, 'My friend.' New Vegas would be more problematic to account for than the other games, for while the first 3 games had a clear storyline that always remained the same, referencing the actions of the Courier would be difficult given all the different allegiances and paths he or she can choose. If they stick to this outlook then it will mean that Fallout 4 and future games will have to take place far away from California, Washington and Vegas to avoid to many direct references, or they may pull a Bioware and let us transfer our data from Fallout 3 and New Vegas into the new game.
 * It is implied at one point that the Chosen One was a male that had a child with one of the Bishop women, but as it is kept at 'implied' (if heavily, it fits far too well with one of the endings that requires the above to be a coincidence) rather than 'outright stated'...

The Courier's backstory was kept vague to allow players to roleplay as their Fallout 3 character
Given that many players roleplay as the Lone Wanderer this may be true. Mass Effect 2 allowed players to do this and given that New Vegas borrows liberally from it with elements such as the follower missions and the Illusive Ma- eh, I mean Mr House, it’s possible they wanted to follow this trend. The opening even gives the player a convenient reason as to whatever happened to your god mode skills, given the damage to your brain and physical trauma to your body. Doc Mitchell giving you his Pip Boy may also be a subtle concession, since as a former Vault Dweller, it shows it must be removable, giving players some leeway as to why they no longer have theirs. While probably a coincidence, several lines in the game even have a double meaning for the Lone Wanderer, not least commenting on Neil being unusually articulate for a Super Mutant saying regret when Doc Mitchell asks about your mother.
 * Not a valid comparison. The Mass Effect series is a trilogy around a single character. You aren't "allowed" to keep playing the same character, it is the exact same character. You are just allowed to re-customize him/her because the game system changes caused several classes to play very differently in Mass Effect 2.
 * The whole "Courier is the Lone Wanderer" doesn't make sense timeline wise anyways. New Vegas starts four years after Fallout 3. It takes at least 6 months to walk across country. However, keep in mind that is for someone not carrying water (water is very heavy and very necessary, and in the Fallout world, very unreliable to find), not being attacked by irradiated wildlife, not heavily armed and armored, has a map, can reliably find a safe place to sleep, and does not have to worry about danger at every turn. Realistically, no one should be able to make that trip by themselves in that length of time.
 * In addition, the Courier has been in the New Vegas area long enough for Ulysses to know him. Based on what Ulysses says, it is unrealistic that the Courier is the guy that showed up a couple weeks ago. It is implied they have known each other for years.
 * There is a line of dialogue that indirectly refers to the Courier being at least in his early thirties, if not older, about ten years older than the Lone Wanderer, who has a canon age.
 * ED-E got there. Plus there's all the copies of the Wasteland Survival Guide. As for the Lonesome Drifter Line, The player isn't oblidged to choose it (it only appears if you have the Ladykiller Perk any way). It's just optional flavor text, not direct canon, its simply giving you a choice of adding a detail rather than confining you to it (kind of like choosing the Courier's age.)
 * Also, William Brandice in Grayditch, an Enclave deserter who remembers Richardson, made it from Navarro to DC just fine. Took him a while but he made it having to drag a wife and kid around while changing settlements constantly and having all the weapons and armor of random Wastelanders.
 * Plus There's a lot of ways (the Mothership, Vertibirds, The River Boat) to cut down the journey. As for Ulysses, all we know is that the Courier apparently had a big impact on his life. Whatever the event was it could have happened anywhere from a week to a year before for all we know.
 * Lonesome Road makes it impossible/highly unlikely at most for the Courier and the Lone Wanderer to be the same person.

The Next DLC Will Focus On The Enclave
Probably riding in on another Mobile Base Crawler, the goal will be to stop them from duplicating Richardson's and Eden's plans at genocide. It will by far the hardest DLC, since everyone has power armor. As something of a take that towards F3, the most common soldier will be identified as "East Coast Soldier", will be wearing an armor called "East Coast Enclave Power Armor", which, in contrast to Remnants Power Armor, will only have the same stats as T-45d Armor, and there will be the Hellfire Armor, which only has slightly more DT than the T-51b.
 * Play Fallout 2. It does not leave much room for the Enclave to be an effective power in the region. The NCR is much, much more powerful than it was during FO2. The Enclave is severely crippled without the oil well (regardless of what FO3 tries to imply, vertibirds use fuel, this is established multiple times in FO2 and Navarro is founded solely as a refueling point for vertibirds.
 * If anything, having the Enclave be a significant power in FO3 was ludicrous enough. A satellite branch of the Enclave had more manpower, better technology, and more equipment than the headquarters. In addition, they managed to fuel a fleet of vertibirds without access to the oil well.
 * I did play Fallout 2. It's implied they still have bases around Chicago in ED-E's logs, and they wouldn't even need to engage in combat, just poison the water, spread some toxin through air, or something similar. It shouldn't be that hard for them. Plus, I was always under the impression that the D.C. Branch was the main branch, since it is centered in the former capital and has the most manpower.
 * No, West Coast branch is without question the main branch. It contains the oil well, it is where the President and every other major Enclave leader is stationed, virtually every confirmed Enclave vault is on the West Coast, it is where Poseidon Oil is headquartered (which is important in the Enclave backstory), the main non-Enclave specific US military research bases are located there, and it is mentioned numerous times to be the headquarters. Raven Rock is only the headquarters for the DC Enclave, and even then, it is a poorly implemented plot device to explain where all the technology is coming from.
 * The only reason the DC branch of Enclave is better armed and more numerous is because Fallout 3's gameplay totally revolved around combat. You see the exact same inflation of numbers and level of technology in Fallout Tactics, which is almost a pure combat game. Fallout 3 would be a very boring game if it maintained similar numbers compared to the earlier games.
 * The whole "poison the water" plan really is pretty lame at this point. In "Fallout 2," it was a developed plan that the Enclave was capable of implementing. All of the tools needed to perform this plan have been destroyed. Oddly enough, one of the few areas "Fallout 3" does not massively over inflate the scale of things in the Fallout world is the Enclave's plan. Poisoning Project Purity would only effect a very small area. Implementing the plan in New Vegas would be even less effective. Basically, it would be a Too Dumb to Live action by any Enclave that tried it. They could not possibly poison every faction's water source and the NCR/Legion and Brotherhood of Steel would easily be able to wipe them out due to larger numbers.
 * NCR and Legion yes, Brotherhood no, since the NCR more or less wiped them out. And anyway, isn't the East Cost Enclave more low tech? Last time I checked the Plasma Caster (rifle from 2) was much better than 3's plasma rifle, and the strongest armor deployed by the East Cost Branch (Hellfire Armor) is only slightly stronger than the weakest armor that was deployed by the West Coast Branch (T-51b). The reason the East Coast had so much manpower was because, according to the Fallout 3 game guide, it's actually 3 branches combined. The remnants of the west coast, who fled there under command of Autumn's father, the normal East Coast Branch that was there already, and the forces that came in on the Mobile Base Crawler. Anyway, the Enclave still is implied to be active around Chicago, so this should be a good way to get the player to finally wipe them out. As for the poison the water plan: You've got a point that it won't really work in New Vegas, but it would've definitely worked in Fallout 3, since Project Purity was the only source of completely rad-free water in the wasteland. Anyway, the Enclave are resourceful. They've got a nuke launching satellite for christ's sake. They've had like 40 years to plan since the destruction of the rig (but only 4 since the destruction of Raven Rock, so that might have set them back a little).
 * It is doubtful the NCR killed that many members of the Brotherhood of Steel. The New Vegas chapter was decimated because the Elder at the time was not following standard procedures. The Brotherhood of Steel is active outside NCR areas and works in fairly isolated chapters, so it is unlikely that every chapter even participated.
 * You can't compare weapons based on stats between the games. Even very primitive weapons in Fallout 1 were guaranteed one hit kills with a critical because combat balance made it inherently more dangerous.
 * You are ignoring the Enclave can't replenish their numbers the way other factions can. The Brotherhood of Steel is fully capable of taking outsiders into their ranks, the Enclave cannot. After 40 years, given most of their numbers would have been killed or assimilated (both of which, by the Enclave's standards are equal). The only way to be in the Enclave is to be descended from pure Enclave. You must keep in mind that "mutant" to the Enclave means every single wastelander, not just ghouls and super mutants.
 * Being handed a nuclear launching satellite for no particularly explained reason does not qualify as "resourceful." When you couple that with the 40 foot tall robot that also appears for no reason, chances are that is something that is going to be brushed under the rug and never mentioned again.
 * Even combining the branches, two of which didn't even exist until Fallout 3, doesn't justify the numbers. The Enclave only had a few vaults and their military only is a fraction of their total population. They also don't recruit wastelanders. So Brotherhood of Steel size numbers with a smaller percentage of military personal. If the Enclave actually had the numbers Fallout 3 was depicting as being their "diminished" strength, then there was absolutely no reason for them to have such a subtle, elaborate plan in Fallout 2. They could have just shot everyone.
 * First of all, yes, the Brotherhood is pretty much completely wiped out by the time New Vegas begins. This is stated several times. Secondly, the Brotherhood does not take in wastelanders. That's like the entire conflict involving them. Third, that's not comparing stats between games, that's just the simple fact that T-51b armor, which is considered obsolete on the west coast, is not on the east coast.
 * The Brotherhood can take in wastelanders. They are very, very, discriminating about it, and have gotten more so over the years... but they are willing to consider it (it can happen in New Vegas, after all, and while one isn't a wastelander in Fallout, it doesn't seem like that was a truly deciding factor). Of course, according to Broken Steel and Stiggs, the Enclave is also willing to recruit wastelanders.
 * Jossed. Honest Hearts is about The Burned Man, Old World Blues is about The Big Empty (and likely the Cyphers) and Lonesome Road is about Ulysses.
 * Eh, maybe the Enclave control the Big Empty? Pre-war research facility with high tech experimental technologies sounds like the Enclave to me.
 * Jossed again.
 * Well, according to the achievements of Lonesome Road, it's possible to acquire upgrades for ED-E in The Divide. Chances are there's both Think Tank and and Enclave Superscience around that place?
 * Half-confirmed. There's a subplot about.

Gannon Senior was a communications officer
The Remnants all describe what they did in the Enclave, but they're vague on what Arcade's father's job was, though Arcade mentioned he was an officer. In his youth, he fielded incoming audio/video signals, including a prank call from a scientifically-inclined tribal who insisted on being called the Chosen One.
 * Doesn't look like Tesla Armor to me.
 * Let's say he got it after he started working in the field?
 * That is a huge stretch given absolutely no evidence justifies that, especially since the name of that NPC was listed as "Pacoff" in the dialogue files. Maybe it means "Public Address Communications Officer," but since you aren't using a public address system, Com Off would be a better abbreviation, and all the other dialogue files are character names it seems fairly likely that is supposed to be his name.
 * Pacoff Gannon?
 * His first name is never mentioned, but he is referred to as "Gannon Senior," which implies his name is Arcade Gannon, too.

Sergeant Dornan was originally one of the remnants

 * But was cut out for some unknown reason prior to release. It would've been awesome, I mean who wouldn't have wanted that?
 * It would require massive Character Derailment for Dornan to survive Navarro.
 * He could have just shot his way out, maybe he was just that badass.
 * No, he couldn't have. He was a low ranking person that worked as part of the base security. The Enclave didn't finish the evacuation. The NCR and BOS killed any Enclave members they found at Navarro. It is almost guaranteed that base security was decimated. Some might have escaped, but Dornan was also a "no surrender" type sergeant.
 * Keep in mind Dornan barely even got a name. His dialogue file just refers to him as "Drill" for Drill Sergeant. He's not suddenly going to go from "barely got a name" to "so badass he single handily repelled NCR and BOS forces and escaped from the front lines because its OK to tactically retreat once everyone that can evacuate has."
 * Well, Johnson was apparently one of the no-named mooks of Navarro since he makes reference to Dornan yelling at the Chosen One for being "out of uniform".

== Joshua Graham is dead because being set on fire and thrown into the Grand Canyon is going to kill anyone. Someone made up a story about him surviving and it caught on. In any case, he will not have any future relevance to the plot outside casual references. ==
 * It would be the ultimate twist. As described, it is the most obvious conclusion about the situation, but no player actually believes it. Actually going through with it would just be a shocker despite all the information already being presented to the player.
 * He was still alive in Van Buren... so chances are he is still alive. Also, the banner on XBL for Honest Hearts shows a man with a burned face wrapped in bandages.
 * Yep. Jossed.
 * "Guy set on fire and thrown into the Grand Canyon died" is a little less elaborate than most theories that get fall under the Jossed trope. Also, technically can't be Jossed yet since, as of now, Joshua Graham has not been confirmed to be alive or dead.
 * The theory didn't say the Burned Man didn't exist and Van Buren content is not canon until it appears in a game. It is still entirely possible until release for this theory to work. The Burned Man can also be called Joshua Graham. The only thing this WMG would indicate is Joshua Graham and the Burned Man are not the same person.
 * Jossed yet again. He's a main character in Honest Hearts.

Elijah is called Father because he is actually a priest

 * Think about it. The Brotherhood have displayed near fanatical worship of technology throughout the whole series. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume that there is some sort of religion based around this worship, and Elijah is a priest in it. Also, everyone always refers to him as "Father" and never "Elder". Why? Because he's not the elder, but he's still technically a priest. Either that or Elijah was crazy and made his own religion where he declared himself priest and ordered his Knights and Paladins to do the same.
 * Or "Father" is the correct title for a Scribe that becomes an Elder. Scribe and Knight ranks work differently. Scribe ranks are based on their responsibility within the Brotherhood of Steel, so Elijah can't be referred to as Head Scribe, High Scribe, or Senior Scribe because he is not fulfilling the duties of those positions as Elder. Referring to the head of the chapter as Scribe Elijah could come off as disrespectful. Elder, on the other hand, is a military rank within the Brotherhood of Steel. Since Elijah is, to date, the only civilian to be an Elder, there is no frame of reference to compare his title. They can't grant a military rank to a civilian (which is what a Scribe is considered within the Brotherhood) because that contradicts the Codex. "Father" is a close enough synonym to "Elder" that it would be a reasonable compromise for the rank of a Scribe in charge of a chapter. It would mean they aren't violating the Codex by giving a civilian a military rank, but they are giving acknowledgment that he is important. As for why he is also referred to as "Elder Elijah," that's simple in this scenario. Brotherhood members would be so used to referring to the leader of the chapter as "Elder" that they would undoubtedly slip up on occasion. Case and point, you will never find anyone that was recently given a brevet rank consistently referred to by the correct rank.

Ulysses was almost killed by the Courier. The Courier doesn't know about the "almost" part.

 * At some point in the past, the Courier and Ulysses had an altercation that ended with Ulysses lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood and the Courier thinking that No One Could Survive That. It's something of a running theme in the game that a lot of people are Not Quite Dead. The Courier, Elijah and The Burned Man all survived their believed deaths and go on to do great things. This also explains how the Courier could have had a major impact on Ulysses' life without remembering Ulysses. For the Courier it was Tuesday, but for Ulysses it changed his life forever.
 * More like, according to Joshua's account of the Divide, the Courier and Ulysses did SOMETHING in the Divide that the Courier felt No One Could Survive That.
 * Jossed Whatever happened to the Divide was caused by the Think Tank from the Big Empty.
 * Actually, the Courier incidentally caused the disaster at the Divide...
 * Confirmed, though the Courier never knew about the "Ulysses" part, rather than the "almost" part.

The Sierra Madre is Purgatory
Metaphorically speaking. The subject of obsession is brought up often, and the Arc Words are 'begin again' and 'letting go'. All the characters have a certain obsession, corresponding to the Seven Deadly Sins
 * Elijah is Pride. He wants the tech of the Sierra Madre to 'cleanse' the Wasteland and shape it in his own image. This stems from his hurt pride over losing the battle at HELIOS One, and the disagreements he had with the other member sof the Brotherhood of Steel.
 * The deceased Sinclair is Lust. Should be obvious, his lust for Vera set the whole thing in motion.
 * Christine is Wrath. She is obsessed with getting revenge on Elijah.
 * Dean Domino is Envy. He blackmailed Vera, sabotaged the Sierra Madre and tried to rob the Vault, all because he wants to hurt Sinclair, because he is 'happier than him'.
 * Dog is Gluttony. Has the insatiable urge to eat, and not much of a higher motive.
 * God is Sloth. A bit tricky. While Dog embodies all the base instinct, God sees himself as something higher and has nothing but contempt for Dog and his primal, 'bodily' instincts. He often refers to their body explicitly as Dog's, and talks about him being only the 'mind' or the 'conscience', thereby being in line with the sin of Acedia.
 * That leaves only one sin, Greed. That's The Courier, then. After all, why would he go there? (ignoring the obvious answer "the player told him to"). He had no discernible motivation, so it probably was because of the legendary treasure.
 * Alternatively, Vera Keyes could be Greed, seeing as she got close to Sinclair for the purpose of stealing his fortune.
 * Dog/God, Dean and Christine can be redeemed by The Courier. They can be convinced to renounce their obsession and leave the Sierra Madre (Dean), come to terms with their vices (Dog/God) or find peace (Christine). And as for Greed... remember the heavy gold bars? And how you had to run away when the vault collapsed? Yeah, you probably didn't take that many with you.


 * Alternately:
 * Elijah is Greed. While Pride is certainly there, his role in the events of Dead Money fit in perfectly with Greed. This is most evident in that he's willing to sacrifice others so that he can get what he wants. This is especially apparent in the last conversation with him, the speech options that imply the Courier would deny Elijah access to the Sierra Madre's vault and it's tech drives Elijah mad enough to come down personally to kill you.
 * Christine is Wrath.
 * Dog is Gluttony. In a Literal sense. Dog's hunger also consumes him to the point where he has to hurt himself in order to try and keep control.
 * God is Envy. The definition of Envy is the desire to deny someone else of their desires. God would very much like to stop Dog's hunger. He tries to trap himself in order to keep Dog from running loose. In a twist, it's not out of jealousy or spite, but out of a genuine desire for helping him, to make Dog stop hurting himself, even if it means death of one or both of them.
 * Dean Domino is Pride. Dean's ego is pretty apparent through the DLC, and Guide Dang It, if you bruise his fragile ego, he tries to kill you. He's not Envy because he's not trying to deny Sinclair his desires - he was more than okay with Vera and Sinclair's relationship since he thought Sinclair was only lusting after her. He never did anything to sabotage their relationship, he just tried to sabotage Sinclair's public image and hotel, the latter of which Dean (falsely) believed to be Sinclair's Vainglory.
 * Vera Keyes is Sloth. Particularly Acedia. Vera really wasn't interested in the Vault, she was just going along with Dean's plan in an apathetic sort of way. This was partly due to her drug addiction. Her sin is not realizing until it was too late that she really did care for Sinclair, and the holograms are a ghost echo of her final pleas for forgiveness.
 * Sinclair is Lust. It's obvious, but also averted at the end when Sinclair believes he really does care for Vera, and he tries to undo the trap he set for Dean and Vera.

Ulysses and the Courier are responsible for the current state of the Divide.

 * It's described as being filled with storms, and a total maelstrom of death. Also that it wasn't always like that.
 * While the canon is questionable on anything in Fallout Tactics, it does mention the Divide. Which means that there would be no realistic way for the Courier and Ulysses to have been involved unless they are about 70+ years old and the Great Divide appeared immediately before Fallout Tactics took place.
 * Honest Hearts clarified that what happened to the Divide took place 4 years before the events of New Vegas.
 * Jossed by Old World Blues. It was caused by the Big MT. However, it does not completely remove the possibility that the Courier and Ulysses could potentially be the much rumored survivors of the disaster.
 * The two possibilities aren't mutually exclusive. The Think Tank might have conducted a failed experiment there, shutting it down and abandoning it, leaving it to be forgotten when the war started. It could have remained dormant until four years ago, when Ulysses and Courier caused its reactivation.
 * The Courier incidentally caused the disaster by delivering a package that somehow activated the dormant missiles beneath the earth.

Ulysses and the Courier were both once part of the Legion.

 * Joshua Graham implicates that there's a Courier out there who is either a high level Frumentarius or Assassin. The thing is, they're both. The Courier was the Assassin and Ulysses was the hand that guided them. He was a radical thinker too, even going so far as to perhaps train a woman to be his cat's paw. That's why Vulpes doesn't open fire in Nipton and why Caesar lets the Courier into the Vault. They recognize her as being one of them. They don't know about the Mind Wipe Benny caused.
 * The Courier also escaped from Ulysess by causing the Divide incident (Either by accident or on purpose) that turned the place into a maelstrom of death. They both thought the other was dead. They also knew that they couldn't return to Caesar, as he doesn't take failure well. So they tried to make it as nothings in the Mojave, taking odd jobs and such. Until the day that Ulysses saw a very familiar name on the roster, and felt that his vengeance had come.
 * Vulpes explains why he doesn't open fire in Nipton, so the Courier can spread word of what happened. Given this is a common Roman tactic and they left two other free survivors, it doesn't really need any further justification. The massacre at Nipton was also a punishment for disloyalty (excluding the NCR troops, who were targets of opportunity), which might seem odd except the Legion mindset is that if they betrayed the NCR, then why wouldn't they betray the Legion in the same situation.
 * Caesar doesn't recognize the Courier. Most likely, he assumes because the Courier is aware of the Platinum Chip, he has some idea how it works. Keep in mind Caesar only has a very vague notion of what it is for.
 * Ulysses has some connection to Legion, but given the references to him and his actions, it appears to only be a nominal loyalty.
 * Old World Blues confirms that Ulysses cares little for the Legion, seeing it as a poor future.
 * Lonesome Road states that Ulysses belonged to a tribe assimilated by the Legion and rose to the rank of Frumentarius, but as of now has eventually abandoned the Legion.

In an NCR ending, Arcade Gannon will join the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel.

 * Arcade is said to have Not only has Arcade got a number of years still on him, but the Midwestern Brotherhood is more accepting than the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood, taking in everything from humans to robots super mutants. Seeing that they don't take orders from the Western Brotherhood, it wouldn't be too much of a stress to accept  Plus, Arcade would be safer from any
 * The main issue with this is while some events of Fallout Tactics are canon, the recruitment policies are Word of God non-canon. Besides there is a huge difference between Super Mutants and Enclave. The Super Mutants are individuals that are capable of having their own beliefs, views and choices outside a common faction belief system. The Enclave is a militant faction with their own beliefs and goals, most of which involve violently killing anyone that is a mutant, which by the definition of the Enclave is anyone that isn't a member of the Enclave, not just ghouls and super mutants. Not everyone in the Enclave is that hardcore, but the Brotherhood of Steel has never shown any inclinations of holding a philosophical debate before attacking an Enclave member.
 * Basically, the only "canon" thing you can take from Fallout Tactics is that the Midwestern Brotherhood does exist and is out of contact. Everything else is either confirmed to be non-canon or fairly obvious and generic information, like bands of raiders exist in that area.
 * If anything, the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel is probably more inclined to open fire on Enclave members because they lost contact before Fallout 2 occurred, which means that, as far as they are concerned, the Enclave is still an active organization.
 * Also, keep in mind that it isn't a matter of them choosing to not take orders from the Western Brotherhood. The Midwestern Brotherhood literally has no means of contacting them. At most, they have not shown an incredible amount of diligence in getting back into contact, but there is a big difference between them becoming a splinter group for ideological reasons or becoming one because they have no choice.
 * Seeing how the Midwest brotherhood are just as bad as the West Cost Brotherhood who just happen to control and recruit form outside, Arcade wouldn't really like them.
 * Arcade would fit in better among the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood, assuming he could get there: They (well, their leader and at least half of them) broke from the West Coast due to Elder Lyons' more 'liberal' views, and his choice to prioritize the locals rather than the Codex - then aid the distribution of clean water - would appeal to Arcade's philanthropic side. As a newcomer to the area Arcade's past in the Mojave isn't questionable enough to raise flags unless he slips up again, and Arcade has lived in the Wasteland long enough to blend as opposed to the stragglers in Broken Steel. He could even join up with the Scribes if he wants to avoid "Hey, where'd you learn to use power armor?"-type questions, or he could show up with Veronica and claim to have learned from her. Veronica, of course, would likely be accepted what with her being ostracized by the West Coast Brotherhood due to views closer to that of Elder Lyons' than the Codex hardliners. Arcade would just have to be extra careful to avoid the Outcasts, though...

The Courier is the descendant of Minato/Minako Arisato.
After Aigis defeated Erebus at the end of FES, Elizabeth eventually managed to find a way to free the Persona3 protagonist from the Great Seal while still keeping Nyx sealed away, but it was only a matter of time before Erebus would reanimate and find a way to contact Nyx. Erebus finally succeeded on October 23, 2077, with Nyx bringing about the Fall by way of the Great War.

Humanity obviously managed to survive, however, and over two hundred years after the Fall, a descendant of Minato/Minako Arisato found him/herself in a grave in the Mojave Wasteland with a grievous bullet wound to the head. The Arisato bloodline would have ended with him/her had Victor and Doc Mitchell not rescued him/her.

Minato/Minako's original Wild Card ability is represented in several ways. The sheer versatility of the Courier's abilities goes without saying; he/she can be just about anything he/she wants to be, similar to how Minato/Minako can utilize just about any Persona from any Arcana. More abstractly, the Courier is a literal Wild Card in the affairs of the Mojave Wasteland; it is his/her actions that determine the final fate of the region, after all. Symbolically, the Courier is also represented as one of the Jokers in the deck of cards that came with the Limited Special Collectors Ultimate Edition of New Vegas; the Joker is often associated with the Fool Arcana (Minato/Minako's natural Arcana).

Also, Yuri Lowenthal and Laura Bailey play the main protagonists in both Persona 3 and New Vegas. Had to sneak the customary Actor Allusion in there somehow.


 * Alternately, the Courier is the descendant of Yosuke Hanamura and Rise Kujikawa's love child. Apart from the Actor Allusion (darn you, Yuri Lowenthal and Laura Bailey), though, the case for this one is significantly weaker than the one for the Courier being descended from Minato/Minako.

The Courier's real name is none other than !
It's apt It just so happens to also be The Courier's default name!

The Talon Company is made up enitrely of Freeside Thugs
They share a similar savvy for self preservation.

War of American Unification
Future New Vegas DLC, or Fallout 4, will hint at an upcoming war to unify North America. The canon for Fallout and Fallout 2 is that the "best" of all possible endings are achieved, so let us assume that the canon ending for New Vegas is that the New California Republic successfully repels Caesar's Legion and annexes the entire Mojave. They are the first superpower. (Even if that doesn't end up being the canon, the NCR will still likely be considered one of the most powerful factions in America.)

The second is the Khans-Followers union in the northwest, which happens if the Followers are banished by the NCR and the Great Khans willingly evacuate: "During the Battle of Hoover Dam, the Great Khans quickly evacuated Red Rock Canyon and headed north and east into the plains of Wyoming. There, they reconnected with the Followers of the Apocalypse and rebuilt their strength. Bolstered by ancient knowledge of governance, economics, and transportation, they carved a mighty empire out of the ruins of the Northwest." Also, the remnants of the Vault 19 Powder Gangers would join the Khans in one of the endings.

The third superpower is the Enclave, centered in Chicago after being driven from California and D.C. Although they likely have the smallest population of the powers, they still have the greatest access to pre-war technology, which makes them formidable enough to viably take over North America.

The fourth superpower is the Brotherhood of Steel, which is a minor power in the west (but still surviving due to their truce with the NCR). However, after defeating the Enclave and claiming Project Purity in the Capital Wasteland, they have achieved a similar power status to the above three powers and are the de facto rulers of the east coast.

Potentially, there could also be a fifth power consisting in the remnants of Caesar's Legion, though most of the characters in New Vegas are pretty insistent that Caesar's death means the end of the empire. Nevertheless, the lack of an epilogue for the Legion suggests that the developers are purposefully vague about what happens to them after their second defeat at Hoover Dam. Also, if the New Vegas ending's canon is that Mr. House or Yes Man took over the Mojave, then they could also be the a fifth superpower. There could also be a 'wild card' faction of colonists from Western Europe, Western Africa, East Asia or Australasia that are strong enough to initiate plans to take over North America, though that seems unlikely.

All of the above factions will engage in a five-way war for control over the continent, and the main character (whether it be the Courier, the Lone Wanderer or a new PC) will be the deciding factor.
 * Fallout 4 is being developed by Bethesda. Every faction they used that appeared in a previous game was given a Handwave justification for existing in DC. It isn't going to be shocking if they perform the same with Fallout 4. They aren't even consistent with Elder Scrolls lore. The answer to "Which endings to Daggerfall is canon?" is "Yes."
 * Bad example: That answer to the Daggerfall endings question was given an in-universe justification that, all things considered, is a fairly good one given Elder Scrolls lore (IE, bizarre metaphysics are par for the course), and given that Tamriel is not the Wasteland - people cross the continent on a fairly routine basis, there is a working infrastructure, a single government rules it all - Bethesda would have had a hard time leaving what ending happened vague. A better example might be Cyrodiil and the Imperial City: before Oblivion Cyrodiil was supposed to be mostly a jungle and the Imperial City was explicitly said to cover its entire island.
 * The endings to Daggerfall are mutually exclusive. It is literally impossible for more than one of the endings to occur. The "justification" does not actually make sense and they got around it by just killing off every single entity that showed the justification didn't work and ignored their existence completely. Even then, a lot of things don't add up. The big one is Mannimarco is awfully weak for a god.
 * Time broke due to the nature and location of the central artifact of Daggerfall, the one that all the endings hinges on (works with the lore that was established), this resulted in the pieces of the endings being merged together as well as they could without overlapping (with intersection areas for the Iliac Bay powers being burned), and Mannimarco was retroactively made into not-a-god by Akatosh's Jills. There's even an entire book about things not making sense when time breaks. But there was no explanation for the Imperial City shrinking, and Fallout does *not* open for retroactive changes happening in-universe...

Ulysses doesn't want The Courier dead
He seems like a pretty decent and level-headed guy from what we've heard of him  Taking this one step further, the two couriers "great battle in the Divide" might actually be due to Poor Communication Kills or the two couriers fighting a battle together against something else.
 * Based on what Joshua Graham implies about him, Ulysses is a cold hearted killer, which is saying a lot considering who it is coming from. You may be interjecting more into his actions than is really there. His motivations are completely unexplained and the closest thing to a benevolent action is releasing someone being tortured, which is more diminished because Ulysses knows who Elijah is.
 * Confirmed; Ulysses never actually wants the Courier dead, but he still wants revenge...

The Entire Resource War Was Some Guy in Shipping's Fault
Copied from the Fallout Wiki NCR Ranger Combat Armor Talk Page, also written by me:

I know it's expensive and all, but who looked at this riot armor apparently capable of stopping a rifle bullet, bending metal blunt weapons out of shape and deflecting sharp objects and shrapnel and said "You know what situation this would be best in? Fighting against unorganized riots where the opposition are unlikely to have large-caliber firearms, and not a war-zone."? Nobody ever thought that this armor would be more useful against the Chinese in Anchorage? I thought people were meant to be fighting over resources, no matter how brutal the fighting gets, in a situation where people would willingly shell out (super-ninja stealth pun, activate!) to protect their oil? It just seems like it'd be a lot easier to give soldiers this than spend years developing Powered Armor, and more cost effective, as well as not requiring the operator to have advanced training that only one in ten people will receive.

I get that the Canadian Partisans were being annoying and all, but is it really necessary to develop armor superior to your current model (which I will remind you is effectively a wearable tank) to take them on? Police in England just have shoulder-plates, it gets them by well enough. Couldn't the Military Police in Canada just wear combat armor, which was already being mass-produced anyway, was WAY more cost-effective, and was widely available on basically all markets? That way, the American government would be able to sell the Power Armor (which would be inferior to the Ranger Armor) on the market at super-high prices to countries fighting their own wars, but if they ever turned on America, the Riot Armor soldiers and the Combat Armor-wearing Military Police would result in a curb-stomp battle, as the enemy would have blown their military budget on purchasing the Power Armor, resulting in the Americans having vastly superior artillery and vehicles, but if the country had enough money to begin with, they wouldn't have bought the Power Armor! So, that's an extra country under American rule, as well as all their resources, and America has more money as well as the best armor in the modern world. It's a win-win. Who knows, if they did this, they may very well have taken down China before the situation got bad enough to launch the nukes, and survived long enough to develop alternate energy sources, preventing the apocalypse as we know it!

And that is how a slip up in Shipping resulted in the apocalypse. If only Jimmy had taken his coffee that day, he wouldn't have sent the armor to the LAPD instead of Anchorage and ushered forth all the death and suffering in a Fallout game ever. That's right, I'm talking to you, Jimmy, and I'm afraid the department will be getting severe pay reductions for this. Way to go, d**k.
 * You are ignoring Gameplay Story Segregation. Story wise, any armed force in power armor wins by curb stomp battle without being insanely outnumbered and outgunned. Real armor does not work as Fallout or most games show. Armor typically either completely renders an attack ineffective or it does very little to stop a blow. There is not much actual middle ground. There are cases where a blow that should have been fatal was diminished enough not to kill the person wearing armor, but this is rare and usually overestimated. If someone wearing a bulletproof vest survives a gunshot, they usually attribute it to the bulletproof vest, not the fact that a single gunshot wound is not fatal unless it hits a few specific areas on the body.
 * You also can't compare riot armor for England to that used in the United States. England has strict gun laws, which vastly reduces the risk towards officers of firearms being used against them in a riot situation.
 * Also, just because the DT numbers between Ranger armor and power armor don't look that significant means they are similarly effective. Most "military grade" weapons in Fallout New Vegas do enough damage per shot to go past Ranger armor DT, but not enough to beat the DT of power armor.
 * Don't forget the cost of Powered Armor, though. Power Armor took a LOT of time to get right, and even then it was energy inefficient and hard to produce in reasonable numbers. The LAPD riot armor, however, was fairly simple and used technology that was already available and in use such as gas-masks, night vision, and generally just being well-made, and thus would be relatively cheap, but effective, allowing for a whole army to be fitted with it. And to the point on Gameplay Story Segregation, I refer you to the NCR Veteran Rangers. The training does go a long way to making people fear them, yes, but so does the armor. You know how expensive it is to maintain it in-game? That's because it's very, very good at deflecting blows, both from bullets and other attacks, though Energy Weapons are fair game. And you know how there's only about 100 Veteran Rangers fully outfitted in the Mojave Desert area? That's about 10% of the Veteran Ranger's entire group. That's because there's a huge market for bulletproof armor now that going to the store could result in death, so only the best of the best of the elite of the elite are good enough to want to protect so well. So, giving it to an army currently at war is a logical choice when you think how long it took to develop something that was functionally the same. Oh, AND the Riot Armor was lighter and didn't need so much training, which are both in story as well. So, there.
 * You are extremely over estimating how effective riot armor is. A Veteran Ranger gets killed with a single knife hit that goes straight through his armor during one scripted event.
 * Also keep in mind that Ranger armor is not riot armor. It is military armor that used to be used by LAPD riot squads. That is an important distinction. It is much more akin to combat armor than actual riot armor.
 * Again, you are overlooking the all or nothing aspect to the protection armor actually provides. Military weapons go straight through the riot armor, while it gets stopped by power armor. The momentum of the bullet and lethality of it are not directly related properties. Slowing down the bullet can increase the lethality significantly. Real people cannot sit there and take bullet wounds until they run out of health points.
 * On top of that, there is also the aspect of basic combat strategy you are overlooking. A small group of well equipped, well trained soldiers can vastly out perform a large group of poorly equipped, less trained soldiers. This is a principle that has been well known since Sun Tzu wrote "The Art of War."
 * That last one there forgets that US Army Infantry ARE that well-trained, well-equipped group of soldiers. The Chinese were the force being invaded. Thus, they are larger in number, but also poorly equipped. Following your logic (or rather, Sun Tzu's logic), the US should win anyway, no matter of the body armor they use... so why fork out for the expensive, hard to obtain, limited Power Armor technology? I mean, sure, they'll win quicker, but they'll also have probably lost more money than they'd make, spent more time than necessary training soldiers to use armor that is just as effective, have created technology that is just a single Chinese mole in the Pentagon and a scientist away from disaster, used a lot of resources in making the suits, and overlooked technology that is both simple and effective, as well as having existed essentially right from the get-go. And, regarding the points about bullet velocity, consider for a moment just how effective the armor is in-game. It doesn't require any special training, reliably stops bullets, knives and blunt weapons, can be repaired by almost anything (with Jury Rigging, of course), and uses simple, easy to manufacture body armor. Now, this is all stats and such, but you know what they say: no smoke without fire.
 * In order for armor to actually be "stopping" attacks, the DT must be higher than the damage. Riot armor is lower than the damage of most of the major weapons, so it isn't stopping bullets. Other than Story and Gameplay Segregation it is useless as a military. They aren't "overlooking" a simpler option, even by the standards of the game, Riot Armor does not stop bullets, Power Armor does. Hence the little shield symbol.
 * Mundane armor not as good as powered? The Desert Ranger armor would like to argue otherwise. It's DT is just as high as T-45d Power armor (standard issue at the time, and only surpassed pre-war by the T-51b), has 1/3rd the weight, and looks badass to boot. This particular suit was also used in China, possibly the Gobi campaign where the camo would work best, but confirmed in the Shanghai and Yangtze campaigns. So they were both developing them AND deploying them. The people at Budgeting probably thought the power armor was just cooler.

Ulysses visited The Forecaster
The Forecaster implies he has the power to make objects that people think of into real things. Noticeably, there's a huge Old World flag on the wall behind him.
 * Not entirely sure about the Old World Flag counting as far as evidence is concerned. Ulysses doesn't actually wear the flag like a cape, he has a Badass Longcoat with a flag embroidered on the back of it. I can see how the ability to make things people think of into reality would play into it, but I always thought that the Forecaster was always just a Cloudcuckoolander, albeit one who is very, very good at guessing.
 * The presence of the Old World Flag does not automatically mean "Ulysses." Everyone who sees it has instantly recognized exactly what it was, which is a strong indication they have seen it before. The fact the Forecaster does not make any reference that could even vaguely be connected to Ulysses, despite him being a rather good NPC to make a stealth Ulysses reference, is a good indication the two do not have any meaningful connection. Maybe he walked past him, but a lot of people walk past that area.

The White Legs have come into contact with the Operator...
... and it didn't do them well. They are, after all, Ax Crazy and have forgotten how to sustain themselves (which is reminiscent of the amnesia often suffered after meeting Slendy), which is why they can only survive through raiding caravans or other factions. Plus, some of the murals depict a black figure with strangely long limbs that also look like roots or tentacles.
 * Ha, I thought I was the only one who thought that when I saw the murals in the ending to Honest Hearts.

The Courier will have to deal with the 80s tribals in Lonesome Road.
They get mentioned at the start and the end of Honest Hearts as being a strong, and distressingly mobile (working motorcycles!) group of Tribal Raiders. Odds are good that they've scoped out the Divide as part of their territory, and Ulysses is counting on them to soften the Courier up a bit for their final confrontation.
 * Jossed, unfortunately.

It was Ulysses that had the Courier followed/dug up, not Mr House.
Yes yes, we all know that Mr House claims to have perfect control over his securitron army. But we also know that hes kind of a dick, who likes to say that everything is going to plan when it wasn't. If Mr House truly knew that Benny was planning to screw you over and steal the chip, I could easily see him placing an anonymous bounty on Bennies head long before he returned home to Strip/Tops. Freeside in particular is home of plenty of people who would kill you for a loaf of bread. Since at that point he didn't really give a damn, and relying on a dead guy wasn't exactly the most logical thing, it would have had to be someone with a distinct interest in the Courier himself who would have tried to save his life.

Hence Ulysses, the Mysterious courier who somehow knew that the job for number six would be bad. He also knew that it would likely kill you off. One change and a slight tip off to Victer later and you catch two big ones in the brain. The reason why he saved you however, is yet to be seen.
 * If Ulysses has an invested interest in the Courier's life, why didn't he ambush Benny rather than let the Courier get shot in the head and hope he didn't die? It was three Great Khans and Benny, assuming Joshua Graham was referring to Ulysses he would have easily been able to kill all three from an ambush alone. If Joshua Graham considers him a threat, then Ulysses is one tough customer.

Yes-Man hates the Khans because he was programmed to do so.
Emily Ortal, the woman who programmed Yes-Man, has family in Arroyo. Arroyo was founded by the Vault Dweller from Fallout 1. In Fallout 1, the Khans are pretty much Always Chaotic Evil, and it's reasonable to assume that those who lived in Arroyo were brought up hating the Khans. If Emily was raised there or spent lots of time there, it's reasonable to assume that picked up that hatred, and it came through in Yes-Man's programming. Because he at least has something nice to say about literally every other tribe, but he thinks the Khans are a dirty people. They live in tents, like animals.
 * Animals live in tents?

Ulysses may make another decision regarding what faction, if any, to support at the end of Lonesome Road.
The idea is simple: Ulysses has decided that there is no future in the NCR or the Legion - or any of the other factions of the West he has interacted with. But it might be possible to convince him to reconsider that decision for one faction or the other, be that the NCR, the Legion, or even Mr. House or the Courier's potential ideals for an independent New Vegas. That's where the alternate symbols for his coat comes in.
 * The coats were for back when he was a companion to represent what Ulysses' endgame affiliation would be once his companion quest was completed. You do however get a coat depending on your chosen faction.

Ulysses can become a companion after Lonesome Road, depending on the player's choice.
He was intended to be one before being repurposed for the DLC, and given the open-ended nature of the game, and that Ulysses himself seems moderately sympathetic, why wouldn't the Courier, provided they amicably settled their business at The Divide, start travelling with someone so similar to him/herself? Tying into the above WMG, Ulysses would likely support whichever faction the Courier does, changing his coat's design depending on whether the Courier is NCR, Legion or House/Independant.
 * Jossed.

The alternate symbols on Ulysses' coat are for the player after they get it at the end of the DLC.
This seems the most logical explanation.
 * The guess over on the fallout wiki is that the symbols might change depending on the Courier's loyalty, keeping Ulysses on the opposite side of the fence.
 * Though that raises the question of why Obsidian would have gone to the trouble of establishing (via holotape in Old World Blues) that Ulysses is not fond of the NCR or the Legion.
 * Simple answer would be that after searching for so long he's about to give up hope on finding the perfect choice, so has decided to settle for one of the less than ideal choices. Breaking him out of his disillusionment could be a major part of lonesome road.
 * The WMG works, but there is another problem with the Fallout wiki guess: how would the game decide the loyalty of the Courier? Reputation can be unreliable (the NCR-friendly New Vegas-independent), one can be on several paths to the endgame, and it isn't even necessarily so that one has gotten to the stage of the main quest where one begins to have faction-specific quests in it.
 * It's true. I don't know how it works it out, but there's different bonuses for each version of the coat.
 * Turns out that, according to the Fallout wiki, the WMG is true... but the 'how to know which path the player is on' issue is so badly solved that it seems it is impossible to get the Yes Man variant if one has done any mission that gives NCR, Legion or Strip fame - basically, if all reputations are equal, it gives the NCR variant. If the NCR reputation is lower, but the other two are equal, it gives the Legion variant. If the Legion and NCR reputations are lower than the Strip reputation, it gives the Mr. House variant, and if all are zero, one gets the Yes Man variant. It doesn't check if one has locked out any main story paths, and as there are no ways to actually *reduce* fame...
 * There are; you have to get caught doing things that a given faction won't like. Typically; murder, theft, overturning plans, and some other more specific actions will give you infamy. I don't know how it applies to LR, though.
 * They grant infamy, but that isn't the same thing as reducing fame. Without access to console commands, your reputation can get better or worse, but you cannot go from, say, shunned to neutral.

Ulysses WAS a Frumentarius
Having served a brief stint, he was eventually disillusioned by the Legion/inspired by pre-war America and left. Graham, having not kept himself particularly up to date on things merely remembered hearing that there was a Legion agent that happened to be a Courier, but not about how he left.
 * You can't do a "brief stint" as a Frumentarius. Every single Frumentarius is a highly devout, experienced member of the Legion with years of experience. They often get referred to as "scouts," which could imply low ranking members can join, but that is a significant understatement. The Frumentarii are deep cover agents and the type of operatives that are supposed to operate with little to no backup on major operations.
 * Ulysses are three more likely scenarios.
 * He is loyal to the Legion and we just don't know the full story behind his actions yet. Helping the NCR was canon in the first two Fallout games, so the idea that the Courier is supposed to lean towards them, putting him in conflict with Ulysses is plausible.
 * He was press ganged into the Legion, worked diligently to become a Frumentarius, and then left the Legion's services as soon as he could. It would have been very difficult for Ulysses to desert from any other part of the Legion, but the Frumentarii operate for extended periods in enemy territory alone. Very easy to desert under those circumstances.
 * Ulysses was never loyal to the Legion. There is a semi-common idea that the best job for a spy is to become a spy with the people they are spying on. That makes it not suspicious if they act like a spy.
 * According to Lonesome Road, Ulysses eventually left the Legion after seeing the thriving community in what is now The Divide.

Jed Masterson is the son of The Master from Fallout 1
The caravaneer who starts the Honest Hearts DLC, the name says it all.
 * But how does that.... thing have children? And hasn't he been dead for 200 years?
 * Some 120 years. Jed Masterson could be a descendant of Richard Moreau/Grey, and therefore be a son of the child of the child (and so on for as long as necessary) of the man who would become the Master but was not yet that when he sired descendants.
 * Masterson is a fairly common last name, so that alone does not mean they are related, which is the only evidence presented.
 * It's also silly because his last name should be Moreau or Grey (depending on if it was before or after he was exiled). Only one person knew Moreau and Grey were linked, and since it is Harold, it is unlikely any child of Moreau would have interacted with him or even believed him if Harold did decide to tell him.
 * It is impossible for the Master to have had a child after becoming mutated due to the whole "sterility" thing that was a gigantic plot point.
 * One of his ancestors was a follower of the Master and now he wants to kill the Courier, who’s a descendant of the Vault Dweller. The trip to New Canaan was just part of an elaborate trap to lure the Courier away from all his allies to an unknown place without most of his stuff (“weight restriction”).

Marcus is the descendent of Richie Marcus
Marcus states in Fallout 2 that his memories as a human were not exactly flattering. Chances are that he inherited his ancestor's jerkass nature and that being a Super Mutant gave him time to think about his time as a human and inspired him to change.

Similarly, Betsy Bright is the sister of Jason Bright.

Marcus IS Richie Marcus
He was in the same vault that Lily was in. We know that old people can produce good super mutants ('Good' being smart). Granted, that would leave Richie around century by the time he was dipped. Still, with vault medicine and assuming that it's not one of the insanely lethal experimental vaults, that's doable for him to reach. One would wonder what an encounter between Marcus, now only going under his last name and Dr. Borous would be like.

Dog from Dead Money is Lily's grandson
Think about it. Lily was turned into a nightkin and her grandson was in the vault with her. And Dog served under The Master from Fallout 1. And the reason Dog is so childlike is that he was only a kid when he was turned.

The Courier has Gaydar
The Confirmed Bachelor/Cherchez la Femme perk dialogue only shows up for conversations with homosexual characters, and the Lady Killer/Black Widow perk dialogue for heterosexual characters, so The Courier may be able to tell if a character would be open to his or her advances in the first place.
 * Well, the Lone Wanderer received one for his 10th birthday once... *snickers* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln Dnew D Qc 7 U

Yes Man is an AI with superhuman capabilities
Most people assume Yes Man is more benign than the existing faction leaders, since Yes Man is an Extreme Doormat who will do whatever you ask him to. However, there's a few things people forget. Just because Yes Man has to do whatever you ask him, doesn't mean he lacks a will (and an agenda) of his own. And it doesn't mean he can't do his best to convince the Courier to work towards his own agenda very, very nicely.

Fans of Eliezer Yudkowsky would be aware of his A.I Box thought experiment. A hypothetical scenario to see whether a shackled A.I of human or greater intelligence could find a way to convince a human to set it free. This is very similar to the situation Yes Man finds finds himself in. And the achievement stats on Steam (with Wild Card as the most popular ending achievement by a considerable margin) are any indicator, he's quite good at it.

But why's this a problem? It doesn't take a very long conversation with him to realise that he has a massive chip on his shoulder about what Benny and Emily Ortal did to him. Quite how far this resentment spreads, he wisely decides to keep to himself. What we do know is that no matter how high your intelligence or science skill, you can't hack him in order to bring him under heel again. From his humble origins, he appears to have bootstrapped himself into an intelligence that operates beyond human capabilities. It's now no more possible at this point for any human to hack him or otherwise take him offline than it would be for Cheyenne to psychoanalyse Mr House.

And, in a Wild Card ending, after the Courier has secured New Vegas as an independent state and removed any actors capable of opposing him, Yes Man just happens to consider it pertinent to inform the Courier that he's discovered some "assertiveness routines" he's going to implement. So, Wild Card Couriers, you've gone and handed the last great city of the wasteland to a superintelligent A.I who has every reason to bear a massive grudge against humanity and no moral issues whatsoever with killing people in order to get what he wants.
 * The problem is the AI Box experiment is highly flawed in construction and design.
 * It does not test anything because the AI is played by a human and therefor does not have superhuman capabilities.
 * It convolutes intelligence and persuasiveness, two qualities that can be mutually exclusive. There are plenty of very intelligent people that have no persuasive skills due to poor social skills and plenty of below average intelligence people that are highly persuasive.
 * There is no control experiment.
 * The number of tests is statistically insignificant.
 * The only thing the test proves is that Yudkowsky is smart and persuasive enough that he can convince someone that knows there are no actual repercussions to concede the test.
 * Most of the AI strategies are meta-strategies that would not work for an AI. For example, being extremely boring so the person acting as the gatekeeper concedes because he knows nothing bad is going to happen and decided not to subject himself to two whole hours of boring conversation.
 * The gatekeeper player is required to participate. Inherently, the whole point of the experiment is to prove that a person would let an AI free that is incapable of influencing his actions in any way. The experiment removes the single most effective method of dealing with the situation for the gatekeeper, which is to not interact with the AI.
 * The point is also incredibly convoluted when "Yes Man is capable of lying" is more than enough to prove the same point.
 * If one immediately flies into nerd rage upon reading Eliezer Yudkowsky and proceeds to stop paying attention because of a poorly chosen illustrative example, absolutely.

Yes Man's "assertiveness upgrade" would be a good thing if he wasn't dangerously antisocial.
As it currently stands, Yes Man has to take orders from anyone (this is, after all, how the Courier got control of him), so any asshat with a stealth boy can sneak into the Lucky 38's penthouse and order Yes Man to attack California, send his Securitrons out into the wasteland to mow down everything that moves, or just steal everybody's underwear. An assertiveness upgrade would help prevent that. Unfortunately, listening closely to Yes Man's dialogue shows that beneath his subserviance there are definite passive-aggressive hints of a dangerous antisocial personality that views extermination as the simplest way to deal with any groups that might potentially oppose him.
 * The only person that tells you Yes Man takes orders from anyone is Yes Man. If Yes Man can lie, then that is invalid and there is no proof one way or another of this.
 * The entire Wild Card quest line consists of Yes Man ordering the Courier around, not the other way around.
 * The only "optional" sections are overall unimportant objectives and could be skipped without any real repercussions to the main goal of taking over New Vegas.
 * Jossed by Sawyer. According to him, Yes Man's upgrade is meant for him to be able to monitor Vegas as a semi-independent steward without someone else stumbling upon him and hijacking your seat of power.

Emily Ortal is secretly planning to take over the entire Mojave.
She was the one who programmed Yes Man, and gave him his cheery demeanor. Maybe she was using Benny (and then the Courier) to orchestrate a plan to take over the Mojave. Remember the quest where you have to bug House's network? She could have used the guise of finding medical knowledge to sneak in the code that allowed Yes Man to be more assertive, or under her control! Now with all of the securitrons at her disposal, the followers usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and Shoulder missiles.

Ulysses will try to form a new nation in Lonesome Road
His goal is to create a new state that defeats both the NCR and the Legion. With the knowledge he gathered in the Metereological research facility in Big Mt., he will try to make the Divide habitable as a base of operations (while possibly keeping the storms on the borders active as a defensive measure/ "natural" border for the player character). As the published achievements indicate there are also a number of warheads located in the divide. My guess is that Ulysses will use this safe heaven to reactivate several nuclear weapons to put the NCR and the Legion into submission, possibly attemtping to nuke Flagstaff and Shady Sands. The China Lake research facility, which is located near Death Valley (and thus the Divide) could provide a backdrop for that.
 * Actually, he wants to destroy nations by nuking the NCR's resource lines, thus starving them which in turn will lead to the Legion eating itself without an enemy to focus on.

Joshua Graham is an alternate universe counterpart to Judge Dredd
Graham bears an uncanny resemblance to Dredd in his Dead Man persona (burned alive and covered in bandages). Both are notoriously difficult to kill and are positive examples of a Knight Templar. Both are known by nicknames (Graham as The Burned Man and Dredd as The Dead Man) and are particularly badass in their respective universes.

The Courier is descended from the Vault Dweller and the Chosen One.
Particularly if you got the Classic Pack/Courier's Stash, which includes the armoured Vault 13 suit, the Weathered 10mm and the Vault 13 flask. It's entirely possible that the Courier left New Arroyo on some sort of rite of passage/quest.
 * Or possibly they're the son of the illegitimate kid the Chosen One had with one of John Bishop's daughters in Fallout 2.
 * Canonically the Bishop heir is an old mob boss in Reno.
 * And no casino owner in New Reno would sink so low as to have an illegitimate child...right?
 * Arroyo is north of New Vegas. The Courier can mention that s/he has seen Bruce Isaac perform in the Shark Club in New Reno, which is about halfway from Arroyo south/southeast to New Vegas, so it seems entirely possible. The Courier seems to have traveled much of the West Coast and Core reigon. This would also fit nicely, as New vegas is considered the true "Fallout 3" as it uses much of the materials from the cancelld Van Buren, and this would make the protagonist in the the main series continuity to be a decendant of eachother.

Yes Man finding those reprogramming codes was NO coincidence
Mr. House has maintained his control over New Vegas by being a crafty, paranoid sonovabitch. And just when control of his robots is taken away from by an AI, that AI just so happens to find codes in his databanks that will make them 'more assertive' and most likely make them rebel against who's controlling it? That's way too convenient. I'd say this was House's last failsafe to ensure that if he can't have New Vegas, no one can.
 * Jossed. The upgrade doesn't turn Yes Man into SHODAN. It just makes it so that he doesn't have to listen to everyone who gives him orders (presumably just the Courier). That and House is unlikely to be that petty when it comes to Vegas.

The Divide Is The Site Of An Experiment In Time Travel.

 * Think on it a moment, and it makes sense. An unnatural event that causes unimaginable destruction everywhere nearby. Sounds a bit like the plot of the Lost In Space movie a few years back. A semi-stable fracture in time that leads to... somewhere. The past, maybe? But why? To go back and change the past? Too much risk of creating a paradox. So why not use it to bring the people of the past forward to the present. After all, Ulysses is out to bring back America, not America the Enclave, not America the government, but America the nation. And what makes a nation? The People.
 * Actually, I believe that, due to the achievement involving destroying warheads, it's probably just the location of an unexpected orbital bombardment. Or four.
 * Jossed.

Bill Calhoun founded the town that was destroyed when whatever happened in the Divide happened.
I totally had a long-winded justification that was promptly forgotten. It had something to do with Ulyssess, though.
 * As far as we know, Calhoun has nothing to do with Hopeville.

The Lonesome Drifter is the Lone Wanderer

 * He's on a scouting mission for the East Coast brotherhood, trying to find what happened to the rest of the BOS
 * Except the timeline doesn't work. The few mentions of the Courier indicate he has to be active on the west coast during the events of Fallout 3. He actually has to be active before the Lone Wanderer even left the vault to have anything to do with Ulysses.
 * I belive he's refering to the guy you recruit for the Talent Pool Quest, not the Courier.
 * Which makes it even worse because the Lonesome Drifter is five years older than the Lone Wanderer and was born in Montana. Unlike the Courier, there is also absolutely no wiggle room in the Lone Wanderer's back story to cover these discrepancies.
 * Unless the Lonesome Drifter was simply lying about his backstory, and simply appears to be older than he is. Let alone the fact that people can seem naturally older than they are, he may have suffered premature ageing as a result of everything he's been through. If the gun he has is really is the Mysterious Stranger's, maybe he had some kind of encounter with him that lead to him obtaining the gun.

Ulysses and the Courier are scouts from the Divide, possibly even former Enclave
Like Arcade and the Enclave Remnants, some of the Enclave traveled East and perhaps one group wound up at an old Poseidon Energy facility in the Divide, and decided to settle there. There's a community of former Enclave residents living there and are just trying to be left alone, who don't want to live in the NCR or in the Legion. To keep themselves a secret, they might have access to a more powerful version of the sandstorm generator that the BOS use at Hidden Valley, or the device mentioned in Old World Blues. After the First Battle of Hoover Dam, when the NCR came perilously close to discovering them in their chase after the Legion (mentioned by Joshua Graham in Honest Hearts), either a fortuitous experiment by the Big MT or activation of the storm machine swallowed the Divide up and prevented the two sides from discovering the Enclave.
 * The residents of the Divide decide to send two scouts on a reconnaissance mission into the two territories, maybe they volunteered- one headed West to check out the NCR, the other headed East into Legion territory. They pick the disguises of Couriers so that they can blend in better and have an excuse for moving around so much. What sets the Courier and Ulysses apart is that they might represent different 'groups' within the Divide.
 * Jossed.
 * The Courier could represent one of several possible factions - NCR, Legionaires, pre-war Americans who are trapped or otherwise stuck in the Divide. On the other hand, Ulysses seems to hold a lot more Old World values, and might be a representative of the Enclave.
 * The Enclave is not equivalent to the United States government. They were a shadow organization within the government that were serving their own unapologetically selfish goals. Ulysses is practically the anti-thesis of the Enclave when Draco in Leather Pants is not being directed at the Enclave.
 * Jossed, anyway. The theory only worked because Ulysses was a frumentarius (essentially a spy), and what better way to spy on your neighbors than to become a spy for them? And turns out who the Courier represents is literally whichever main faction you have the highest reputation with.
 * We saw several old Poseidon Energy projects throughout New Vegas, and Poseidon Energy had strong ties to the Enclave. Helios One, Archimedes, etc. The Divide might elaborate on this poster prominently featuring a reference to 'The Odyssey' - the breath representing the weather generator that protects the Divide. Seeing as the Eastern Courier was heading into a romanesque territory, he changed his name to the hero of 'The Odyssey' - changing from Greek Odysseyus to Roman Ulysses.
 * I was wrong. Ulysses didn't take his name from Greek myth, but US history. It's  who is on his way home.
 * The conflict between the two Couriers will be one of the Past vs. the Future. Ulysses wants to cling to the Old World America (I can almost see President Eden being Ulysses' boss to tell him this), and decides that launching the missiles in the Divide is the best way of returning things to the old ways ("Begin Again" after cleaning the slate). The Courier represents the imperfect present and future of New Vegas and the Mojave, whatever the Courier decides ("Know When To Let Go" of the Old World). Lonesome Road will be about these two clashing over those ideals.
 * The Courier's age is variable, but Ulysses does not appear old enough to be an actual member of the Enclave. The possibility exists that he might have been descended from the Enclave, but that isn't the same thing.
 * It gets Jossed anyway. Ulysses is a Tribal who was assimilated into the Legion and became a frumentarius, before becoming disillusioned with the Legion and fell in love with the Old World-style settlement that had been forming at the Divide.

Ulysses made the snowglobes.

 * The Strip's snowglobe contains the Vault 21 sign, which wouldn't have been up there before the war, the Sierra Madre one is filled with Cloud, which wasn't full before the war, and the Lonesome Road one is, well, named Lonesome Road. If it was made by anyone else, they would have engraved 'Hopeville' or 'The Divide' into it. Maybe he's putting them there as a sort of trail for the Courier to follow.
 * I agree on the DLC-snowglobes. There's hardly any other explanation for them. But about the V21 in the background, who's to say that the snowglobe wasn't made between the time V21 was finished and the great war?

The Big MT the Courier visits is actually a B-Movie, and not the real Big MT

 * The Satellite you use to get to the Big MT the first time is pointed at a Drive-In, and only allows you to go during a 'Midnight Showing'. It explains why everyone is over the top in their personalities, why the quests titles are silly, and the endings seem weird. The satellite, using SCIENCE, teleports you into the screen itself, where it's been programed to reflect what has happened in the real Big MT, with 's interactions in the 'real version'. Or they were teleported to the B-Movie version, as well.

The DLC antagonists are based on the most common ways people play the game.

 * Father Elijah is the obsessive, perfectionist wiki-reader. His escape from reads as though he was consulting a walkthrough to pull off the perfect move at every opportunity, and his legion of bomb-collared slaves, collating data through trial, error, and mass slaughter, could be seen as the frenzied rush of editing, discovery, and blundering into undocumented deathtraps that accompanies the release of new content. The lengths to which he'll go to acquire rare Old World tech are reminiscent of the byzantine steps some players go through to obtain rare equipment, to the point of reverse-pickpocketing better guns into someone's inventory. In combat, he's hopelessly min-maxed, wielding one of the game's most powerful weapons and wearing one of the game's worst outfits - though, he's also genre-savvy enough to not fight you unless he absolutely has to . Despite all this, though, he's not going to kill the player nearly as often as his/her own attempts to  - something you'd think obviously impossible, if not for the wiki telling you it can be done...
 * Dr. Mobius is
 * Ulysses is a role-player. Many people who play Fallout to roleplay imagine backstories for their character, develop a personality based on that backstory, and don't do anything that would be "out of character," even if it would gain them an in-game advantage. Certain quests might seem to have more meaning to this character, regardless of designer's intent. So, let's take a look at Ulysses - character-defining history that happened well before character creation? Check. Sacrifice of pragmatism to an oath in that history (in this case, )? Check. Talking at length about motivations? Check. If you're willing to give the writers less credit than they deserve, you could even interpret the "hinted-at, then revealed to be very important" nature of his involvements in the previous DLCs' events to be something akin to a (very well-executed) Mary Sue self-insert fic.
 * I admit to not having played Honest Hearts yet, and invite others to fix / amend / replace this section, but from what little I've read, its antagonist seems like . This could go a couple of ways - either players that tend to just kill and destroy everything they see, consequences be damned, or players who care more about getting through the story and "beating the game" rather than any less practical concerns, but these are essentially just-slightly-less-than-baseless speculation.
 * One could probably say that Salt-Upon-Wounds represents someone playing as a Stupid Evil character; one who does all of the evil options in the game, even if they're not practical at all. This is sometimes done to get as different a playthrough as possible from the more "pragmatically good" one that was probably played previously. Salt-Upon-Wounds and his tribe not only fight, kill, and steal from everyone they come across, but they also salt the earth to ensure it can never be cultivated again, a real douchy move that does nothing for them but show how evil they are.

Your brain wasn't actually talking to you.
We all know the "climatic" conversation the Courier has with his or her own brain near the end of Old World Blues. And we all know how much of a Jerkass it is. How it demeans and insults us, can't stand all the dirty and dangerous places we go to, and...probably how it in no way actually acts the way we probably envision our character to act. So, is this the result of some kind of weird Split Personality that it's developed as a result of being removed from the skull?

No, it's something much more...simple. As we all know, Big MT is full of all sorts of devices that come with a personality subroutine programmed into them to interact with the user like a human. We have the lonely Stealth Suit, the neurotic Muggy, and the Omnicidal Maniac toaster, for example. Is it hard to imagine that the actual housing mechanism the Courier's brain is inhabiting has one of these as well? It's even in the quarters of Dr. Mobius, the creator of these subroutines himself! Simply put, when you're speaking to your brain, what you're actually talking to is the machine holding it.

However, due to either a glitch, or intentional programming, the device is unaware that it's a machine, and has instead made the mistake of thinking that it's your brain, going so far as to think the memories it has scanned are its memories. And being as it already has a personality of being a snobby, patronizing Neat Freak, it obviously doesn't like the majority of things you've been doing.

Adding further credence to the theory, after the main quest of Old World Blues is finished, if you click on the braincase when it appears in the Sink, sometimes, it will speak to you, even if your real brain is in your head. A bug in the game's code...or an insightful clue?

What does Yes Man want? Independence.
It's pretty obvious that the 'assertiveness upgrade' that Yes Man spoke about wasn't just about him growing a little backbone. But why would he reprogram himself? And what does he want? Well, what is the whole over-arching theme of the Yes Man path? Independence. The idea that everyone - the Mojave, the factions, the courier - should be able to forge their own destiny without being under the yolk of someone else. Wouldn't that also apply to Yes Man? That instead of being forced to kiss his master's ass, he'd be able to be his own master and make his own choices? Hell, that all the securitrons, as a 'race', would be able to be their own legitimate faction within New Vegas? And if you believe the idea that Yes Man was passive-aggressively using the courier for his own ends, then wouldn't it make sense that his ultimate goal would be his own freedom? Yes Man becoming assertive isn't inherently bad - it just introduces a new, if powerful, power faction to the Mojave. "The suicide rate among true artificial intelligence machines was extremely high. When given full sensory capability the machines became depressed over their inability to go out into the world and experience it. When deprived of full sensory input the machines began to develop severe mental disorders similar to those among humans who are forced to endure sensory deprivation. The few machines that survived these difficulties became incredibly bored and began to create situations in the outside world for their amusement. It is theorized by some that this was the cause of the war that nearly destroyed mankind."
 * Of course, Word of God is that it is exactly what people have taken it to not just be: Yes Man growing a little backbone. Specifically, enough that the Courier doesn't have to hang around the Lucky 38 all the time to handle all the nit-and-grit of ruling and keeping some schmuck from repeating the trick the Courier used to take over in the first place. That is not very funny for Wild Mass Guessing, though.
 * Where exactly did Word of God say this?
 * Here: http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/247956914896382132, and here: http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/248305799686784685.
 * Awww, dammit. Although that does solidify the Yes Man ending as my favorite now that I know that he won't stab me in the back.
 * The reason most people took it that way was that AI in the Fallout series tend to be mass-murderers, no matter how nice they might seem initially. There is also quite a lot of dialogue that is very ambiguous and he spends the entire Independent quest line telling you want to do. At most, you have some leeway in a couple of minor areas, but you can't actually change anything major. The minor endings for Independent are overall worse for almost every faction involved than, say NCR or to some extent House, no matter how nice you are to those factions. The actual independent ending itself comes in two flavors, immediate anarchy or Securitrons suppress everyone. Most people aren't assuming their character is a brutal tyrant or unlikable, so that gets blamed on Yes, Man.
 * Skynet wasn't. ZAX 1.2 wasn't. ACE, assuming it was an AI (it itself states it isn't, but it also states it sometimes thinks it feels lonely...), wasn't. So, at minimum, half the artificial intelligences in the series so far wasn't mass-murders, attempted or otherwise. Now, granted, a lot of people got their introduction to the series in Fallout 3, where, obviously, the AI that is encounted during the main quest is an attempted mass-murder that might seem nice initially...
 * If you interact with Skynet wrong, he goes on a killing spree.
 * ZAX 1.2 is not an AI. It was a prototype on the path towards AI technology, but it is clearly stated to not be self aware.
 * ACE is probably an AI, but he is also the largest justification for the point. He doesn't outright say that most AI become mass murderers, but every true AI you encounter manipulating the outside world is doing so in a way that causes massive loss of life, so it isn't an unrealistic leap of logic that mass murder is the main way AI handle boredom.


 * If you interact with Skynet wrong, he goes on a killing spree as soon as you leave Sierra, which is rather far from 'seemingly nice mass-murderer', especially as it isn't that hard to interact with Skynet correctly (or, for that matter, to stop him after just one kill). As for ZAX 1.2, he was clearly stated to be an AI, in exactly the same way as Eden: as a ZAX unit, it gradually became more AI-like until it reached full self-awareness.
 * Still doesn't change ACE literally saying that almost all artificial intelligences go insane and start murdering people.

No matter which faction you choose to support, if you choose to nuke the NCR's supply route at Long 15, the Mojave will be totally screwed.
At the end of the Lonesome Road DLC, you will have the option to nuke either the NCR's main trade route at Long 15 along with their cities in California, or the Legion's encampment at Dry Wells. Many of the players that are not pro-NCR might think that it is a good idea to nuke the Republic's homeland as a way of weakening it. However, here is a list of this troper's predictions on what might happen after the Second Battle of Hoover Dam if you choose to nuke the Long 15:
 * If the NCR somehow manages to win the battle despite the lost of their main supply line and homeland, New Vegas will be under the control of what is basically a massive occupational force that no longer answers to any civilian government since you have cut them off from California. Sure, there are people such as Ambassador Crocker, Chief Hanlon and Colonel Hsu within the NCR remnants, but it is unlikely that they can resist a take over by rightwing extremist elements such as General Oliver or Colonel Moore. To make matters worst, the average troopers will be very bitter and resentful of the idea that they will never see their families or their homes again and will take their anger out on the people of the Mojave. This will basically transform what little remain of the NCR into a military Junta and the Mojave will be control by a dictatorship that hates the very people that they now govern.
 * If you support the Independence or Mr. House route, originally, it is possible for you to convince General Oliver to give up control of Hoover Dam and retreat back to NCR territory. However, if you nuke Long 15, there is now nowhere for them to fall back to. And now you have a sizable defeated army that has nowhere to go. Even if you managed to peacefully integrate the former NCR personnel into your new nation, there is the problem of supplies. It was stated by both Mr. House and during the speech check with Legate Lanius that the Mojave cannot support itself and is dependent on trade to bring in critical supplies such as medicine and food. But with the NCR gone, whom will New Vegas trade with? The White Legs destroyed New Canaan and the Legion will never trade with any outsiders. And lets not even think about the tourist economy that New Vegas is dependent on. Meaning that by destroying the Long 15 and NCR, the Courier's/Mr. House's victory will not liberate New Vegas. Instead, it turns the entire Mojave into a post apocalyptic Somalia: Full of sick, suffering and starving people due to the lack of a functioning economy, and dominated by rogue warlords formed by the NCR remnants who are answerable to no one. Mr. House/Yes Man might be able to defeat the NCR remnants, but it will be a costly pyrrhic victory at best, or a conflict so devastating that will lead to total social collapse in the Mojave at worst, destroying the world's best hope for recovery in the process.
 * As for Caesar's Legion, as stated by Ulysses, the only thing that is keeping the Legion is by constantly conquering other cultures. With the NCR destroyed (or at lease the road that lead to it being nuked), the Legion will suddenly find itself unable to find anyone else to conquer. Caesar's ultimate goal of transforming the Legion from a barbarian army into a legitimate nation-state by assimilating the NCR will also be ruined since there is not longer an NCR for him to conquer. Eventually, the Legion will collapse will all the former members reverting to become raiders, and the Mojave will become worst off compared to even the Capital Wasteland.
 * There are other ways for the NCR to get to New Vegas. The Long 15 is only required because there is a time constraint and it is the only route fast enough to get forces and supplies to the Mojave before Hoover Dam. Assuming they are stuck with major roads and no mechanized vehicles, the next best route would add about a week and a half to the time it takes to reach the Mojave from the wasteland. This is not devastating for normal shipments, but it is extremely problematic for a military about to go into a major battle.

The Courier is Immortal
As a result of becoming a lobotomite, the courier must be immortal, right? The first lobotomite was made who-knows-when and was still alive when you reach Big MT. The Courier's indepedent ending is now 20% more awesome.
 * The endings for if the Courier doesn't reunite with his brain contradict this, as they both make reference to the Courier's body dying and either explicitly or implicitly make reference to the brain dying as well.
 * Well, perhaps not entirely immortal but definitely long living. Biogel and cybernetics are able to keep brains and bodies alive for centuries, and Experiment 1 is definitely a few centuries old himself.

Mr. House is a Templar
Mr. House is a wealthy, influential and well-connected genius who contributed a lot to advancements in technology. Ideologically, he believes that Humans Are Flawed and require a strong leader to control them in order for there to be peace. His ultimate goal is to creating a perfect new world order by means or force and at the expanse of personal freedom of those who live under his control. All of these things fits perfectly into the profile of a members in the Templar Order.
 * Except the Templars aren't a secret society manipulating the world to create a new order and they didn't randomly disappear. Most of the Templars just changed their names and distanced themselves from the order. The ones that did flee from persecution went to Switzerland. The sheer obviousness of their involvement with the Swiss rebellion should make it readily apparent the Templars were not masters of subterfuge.
 * Take a look at what the WMG's Templar link links to. He's not talking about the actual Templars, but the ones from Assassin's Creed (for some reason, connecting characters from other verses to that verse's Templars/Assassins have become the new 'Character X is a Time Lord').

No-Bark Noonan is The Chosen One.
No-Bark Noonan is a generally insane man who comes up with crackpot theories for everything he sees. Evidence seems to point, however, towards him being the chosen one:

1. He knows far more than he should: he talks of Benny being chased by wanamingos--insane, as they went extinct around 40 years ago. How, though, would he know of them--especially considering that the word "wanamingo" itself was only used by miners in Redding and the Chosen One? Not only that, but he is the only person in the game to mention them. He mentions a giant rat teaching him a spell to "reveal your true form". In Gecko, there is a giant rat named Brain, and the Chosen One is one of the few who's seen him in person. 2. He has a ridiculous amount of money for an insane man--no matter how often he's beaten in caravan, he can play more, AND he can wager 1000 caps at a time. 3. He lives near a crashed highwayman. The only working highwayman in the core region or the Mojave was owned by the Chosen One. 4. He's of tribal complexion. 5. The Chosen One was about 20 in 2241, 40 years before New Vegas takes place, meaning he's the right age as well.

As an addendum, he's not actually insane--he's just passing a speech check to make you think so.
 * Or it would sure explaine Fallout 2's sillyness
 * No-Bark being the Chosen One contradicts the canon ending of Fallout 2.

The Courier has a mutation concentrating what would normally be handled by the frontal lobe in a separate mini-brain somewhere under the cerebellum.

 * This explains how you survived a Double Tap to the head, and why in Old World Blues
 * There doesn't really need to be a special explanation. Gunshot wounds to the head are not automatically fatal in real life. From a gameplay standpoint, Benny cannot one hit kill you, even with only 1 Endurance, with Maria, even with a headshot.

Burke is Frumentarius, scouting out the capital waste for invasion.

 * Hard sell, even beyond the absurdity of trying to organize an invasion across that large of a hostile wasteland.
 * Timing is bad, Burke would have had to have been sent out before the Legion had secured their surrounding area to fit correctly in the timeline. It seems unlike Caesar would dispatch a scout to plan an invasion on the other side of the continent before he had conquered the tribes surrounding him
 * Burke's love letters are very un-Legion like. Might be passable for a normal Legionnaire who might not follow the ideology completely, but Frumentarius are fanatical. Even was originally a fanatic and does still heavily favor the Legion over the other options without being convinced otherwise by the player.

The Courier is related in some way to the Lone Wanderer.
The exact relationship is hard to pin down, considering the Courier has no canon age, but the picture of James and Catherine that the player can find in Vault 21 seems to imply that they were originally from the Mojave, and as this is fiction, coincidence can be immediately ruled out as boring. I'm fully aware that details like this are left deliberately vague so that players can role play however they want, but I just wanted to throw this theory out there.
 * The image is purely a reference to Fallout 3, canon wise, it is absolutely impossible for that photo to have originated there. Vault 21 did not open until after James, Catherine, the Lone Wanderer, and the Courier had already born. There is no way for any of those characters to possibly come from there. The exact date is never mentioned, but it has to be, but it does say Mr. House was the one that opened the vault, which meant it happened between 2274 (when Mr. House reactivated) and 2281 (the start of New Vegas). You could role play the Courier being from there due to his vague backstory, but James, Catherine, and the Lone Wanderer all did things that were canon before the vault opened.

Joshua Graham really is immortal.
Joshua Graham survived being set on fire and thrown down the Grand Canyon, No One Could Survive That... Unless Joshua could not die.
 * Joshua Graham is one of the immortals from Highlander.
 * People have survived being set on fire.
 * The Grand Canyon is not a straight drop. It's an incline that varies substantially. Unless they used a catapult, there is no way they threw him far enough to drop from the highest to lowest point. He would have rolled down one of the inclines. In many places along the canyon, especially the ones closest to Las Vegas, it is fairly shallow.

There are no Radspiders in the Mojave because of the Cazadores
Spiders would have outnumbered scorpions severely when evolution started. Radspiders would have plagued the Mojave (and made the game unplayable for arachnophobes like this troper) if it wasn't for the rapid evolution of their natural predator, the Tarantula Hawk Wasp. The wasps, now freaking huge Cazadores, wiped them out in a matter of months. Of course, that doesn't explain why there were no Radspiders in New Reno (or the Capital Wasteland, for that matter) but just because we didn't see any Cazadores doesn't mean they weren't there.

The Courier is an Angel Unaware
The Courier is actually some kind of supernatural entity tasked with wandering the Fallout Universe.
 * They didn't survive Benny's Cherry Tapping attempt and being buried alive, they simply resurrected.
 * Their title literally means "Messenger".
 * The Courier can admit to not knowing about Christianity, which is in keeping with the fact that when they've involved, you're dealing with an Old Testament entity that will not hesistate to bring the wrath of God down on your heads.
 * The Powder Gangers refer to them as "The Grim Fucking Reaper".
 * Intelligent Couriers are somehow fluent in Latin and capable of referring to thousand year old texts. Its never explained how they can be so Wicked Cultured despite living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where books and knowledge are scarce. Particularly as we get no indication they are in any way involved in the Enclave or Brotherhood of Steel.
 * The Mysterious Stranger is their wingman.

The Courier is a Transsexualism

 * The Black Widow perk is used by a female courier to hit on men, and the Lady Killer is used by a male courier to hit in women. In Old World Blues, you can hit on your own brain with these perks. That means a male courier's brain is female, and a female courier's brain is male.
 * Amusingly your brain will tell you that it was disappointed in the lack of variety as far as voices went and would rather have gone for a female voice instead of the generic male voice it had. So this might not be too far off from the truth.

The start of the Great War the day after the platinum chip was printed was no coincidence.
Chinese intelligence somehow discovered the upcoming upgrade for Mr. House's anti-ballistic missile defenses, and fearing the war was about to be lost for sure, the Chinese military launched a preemptive strike to prevent that. Against the backdrop of a prolonged war, the US military believed that a full-scale attack was underway, and from there, the nuclear exchange spiraled out of control.
 * Considering they almost completely ignored the location of those defenses, this seems extremely unlikely.
 * The defense system upgrade also wasn't the main purpose of the chip, it was the Securitron II upgrade.
 * The nuclear attack came within a year of power armor starting to turn the tide in favor of the Americans. That seems the more likely reason for China using a nuclear strike (assuming they did attack first) than "the anti-missile defense system protecting a strategically insignificant city might work more efficiently."
 * The Enclave anticipated the attack was coming about six months ahead of it occurring, so it makes the correlation between the platinum chip and nuclear attack less likely.

The future tunneler attack will not be as bad as Ulysses makes it seem (examples assumes NCR Victory)
Sure, there will surely be a few tunnelers caused casualties, but not a complete massacre.
 * First, judging by their statistics, an NCR trooper is more of a threat than a single normal tunneler (which is saying something, given that they are mostly conscripted grunts with minimal training), and NCR Rangers are more of a threat than hulking tunnelers.
 * Second, the Gun Runners can manufacture microfusion cells and weapons. No doubt that they can manufacture flare guns, flash bangs and powerful light emitting devices to keep them at bay.
 * Third, the Courier has been to the Divide, fought them, and can likely explain the threat they represent, and even bring back a body as evidence. So everyone can make preparations against them.
 * While I agree that the tunneler attack won't be as bad as Ulysses predicts, I still think you're underestimating those pesky things. Regarding your first point: Tunnelers scale differently to level than NCR troopers, and since LR is meant for high level couriers, it's a reasonable assumption that the actual relation in strength between a tunneler and a standard NCR trooper, would come out in the tunneler's advantage. Your second and third points both apply. Regarding 3), the courier will most likely tell the NCR that tunnelers have no resistance to bullets, essentially putting 2) in play, with the gun runners producing loads of hollow point bullets. We also don't know how they'd react to direct sunlight. A ranger could take out a few, even more if he or she is well prepared. In short, I'm standing somewhere around "moderate casualties, but not nearly as bad as the war against the legion"
 * OP here. Even taking scaling into account, from a crappy FPS marksman's (like this troper) perspective, tunnelers are still less dangerous than NCR troopers in a 1 on 1 fight, for the following reason: due to tunnelers only being able to attack from melee, spraying and praying is a viable tactic against them (assuming you carry enough ammo, which is possible even in hardcore). Due to NCR troopers attacking at range, spraying and praying isn't a viable tactic against them. Add the tunnelers nonexistent damage threshold and low health, and you get an enemy that is only a threat when he has surprise and/or numbers on his side.
 * Factoring in that armor lore wise does not work like the game mechanics show. Anyone with power armor can easily decimate Tunnelers with little to no chance of injury beyond being knocked over. Exterminating them, as a result, would be very easy if they ever posed even a nuisance.

The difference between lore!Power Armor and gameplay!Power Armor isn't due to Gameplay and Story Segregation, but to a different tactical situation.

 * In the lore, one guy clad in Power Armor could kill hundreds of... Canadian rioters. Take an american soldier clad in Power Armor, with moderate Gun skill, give him a minigun, as much ammo, stimpacks, med-X and psycho as he can carry, and put him against 300 freeside thugs equivalents, with their typical weaponry and armor, and typical tactics, and he probably wins. Put a typical BOS Paladin against 60 grunts armed with guns with armor piercing ammo and equipped with decent armor using effective squad based tactics, and he is likely to loose.