Fallout 3/Headscratchers

Read at your own discretion, as spoiler tags are about as common as a pretty-looking Ghoul.

This way to Headscratcher Vault 1.

The Ending
The ending bugs me. Okay, you have to choose between sacrificing yourself in the highly irradiated control room or convincing Paladin Lyons to do it. Cool, I can dig that. Noble Hero, or Craven Coward? One problem: during this difficult decision making process, Fawkes (your Super Mutant sidekick) is standing- nay, hulking - in the background. Fawkes who is, we have been told, IMMUNE TO RADIATION. A rather grating example of Gameplay and Story Segregation if there ever was one.
 * I'm waiting for the Brotherhood of Steel expansion where it gives you the option of picking up a nearby stick, opening the door up only a little bit, and poking the buttons with the stick.
 * Poking stick schematics: requires three crutches, a tin of wonder glue and a railway spike.
 * Page maker here: But seriously, if you pop a Rad-X before going in, and with six or seven endurance, it's only like 20 rads a second (IIRC). Even if it was higher, I had a hoard of like 50 Rad-Away by the end of the game. Why, oh WHY, did they have to make it RADIATION that killed you?!? Would it have taken that much more effort to come up with something different? Hell, it's a giant water tank, they could just as easily DROWNED you. That would have been just as cheap, but not as Wall Bangeresque.
 * Hell, drowning would have been a much more Karmic Death; you've been working all this time to provide a source of water that will save millions of lives from the effects of radiation, so what's a better ending? Being killed by the same radiation you've been dealing with for the whole game, or being killed by the purified water itself?
 * Apparently, it is not the high amount of rads that hit you but a dangerous spike that occurs after putting in the code (think vault 87 radiation).
 * But by that token, it is possible to get to the door of Vault 87 without cheats using gratuitous amounts of rad-away.
 * No. I tried it once. It's not the building radiation that will kill you, it's that even with every anti-rad perk available, at around five meters from the door, it spikes to a level that will kill you almost instantly. You have a little under a quarter of a second of movement before you must go back to the Pip-boy and completely flush your system. While theoretically possible, the need to navigate over rocks and hills here means you will find something that stops you from reverting in the small window. You also cannot fast travel to escape, as you will drop dead from radiation poisoning upon arrival. This makes the (main) entrance to Vault 87 the only unreachable waypoint on your pip-boy.
 * I have seen a YouTube video of someone reaching the door an making it back, with no God Mode. Equip the most rad-resistant gear you got, pop a few Rad-X and put Rad-Away on a hotkey. Walk backwards to the door (you won't have time to turn around!) while spamming Rad-Away. Once you get the "new location discovered" message, immediately start walking forwards. If you're lucky you'll have enough Rad-Away to make the trip.
 * Did it last night, actually. Did exactly this - had Radaway on a hotkey and hammered that whilst using auto-run. Ran forwards till the "You have discovered Vault 87" message appeared, then turned round with the mouse and ran away again. Burnt through 87 radaways but got it!
 * Disappointingly, though, the game doesn't let you open it. Gameplay freedom, my ass!
 * Bu interestingly, you can spawn an NPC there via console and they'll do just fine. NPCs are not programmed to feel the effects of radiation.
 * You know what's worse? Colonel Autumn survived the same blast of radiation that killed James right away DESPITE having only a longcoat on, and yet you can't just take the guy's longcoat and survive the trip into the radiation. If they'd just explained that the 'activation of Project Purity will also activate the GECK and the player will be consumed by it', then it'd be easier to swallow the whole 'one person must die' thing.
 * The reason given for this is that Autumn had taken an advanced enclave radiation medicine (that you cannot get in the game despite going to their main sanctuary).
 * Well, you can take Autumn's trench coat on any version of the game with a small glitch with the 3rd person perspective, but it still doesn't offer anymore protection than the standard Power Armor.
 * Even worse than having Fawkes? Having Charon. The ghoul. Who is healed by radiation. Anyone know what lame platitude he gives?
 * Just played it with Charon. He says "he's bailed your ass out enough times already. This one's all you." Right. The guy BRAINWASHED INTO FOLLOWING MY EVERY ORDER is giving me backtalk. Damn.
 * Not really. He does say that his contract only specifies helping you out in combat, rather appropriately saying that he's not your goddamn errand boy. If anything, him not feeling like doing it just to spite you makes a lot more sense than Fawkes refusing to do it out of a weird sense of honor.
 * And none of this absolves Clover, who not only is your slave (and batshit crazy), but has an explosive collar on her neck which you aren't allowed to threaten to detonate if she doesn't go and press the button.
 * Okay. Perhaps Fawkes' radiation resistance would be overwhelmed. Perhaps Charon would also be flash-fried. But you can purchase "Sgt RL-3". Who is a robot companion. For crying out loud, what's his excuse?! The radiation would mess up his sensors?! GAAH!
 * Admittedly, RL-3 has that sort of gung-ho personality that he wouldn't just do it for you. "You gotta finish what your daddy started!" is something approaching his exact quote in the purifier room (and ******, it was hard to get him to the purifier as he stops scaling with your level at 9.)
 * Nope. Fawkes is literally immune to the effects of radiation. He's tagged with a perk called "immune to radiation" in the game files.
 * He's not immune to scripted death sequence, which is the destiny of anyone who punches in the code, clearly. Or it's piercing radiation that ignores his immunity to radiation. Y'know. Gameplay and Story Segregation. Or I'm just fanwanking, perhaps.
 * It's was worse on my playthrough. Fawkes followed me into the control room anyway. He must have been tired of life.
 * You can talk to him and he tells you he doesn't want to deny your destiny. Your destiny that you can skip by sending in Lyons.
 * An entirely absurd and illogical destiny that is entirely inconsistent with the style of the endings of previous Fallouts and even Elder Scrolls. What made them think it was a good idea to prevent your character from going on further adventures?
 * In previous Fallout games the game stops at the end; however it doesn't stop because of the arbitrary and annoying death of the main character in such piddly levels of radiation that they could have stood there all day had they not pressed the "you die instantly now" button.
 * Actually, Fallout 2 didn't stop at the end. You were allowed to go on playing. Just thought I'd point that out.
 * Just RE: the whole 'destiny' thing, it is a bit silly, but it does kind of vmake a little bit of sense why someone would leap to that conclusion; consider, after all, that the player-character has pretty much single-handedly enabled Project Purity to get restarted, has enabled the defeat of President Eden and the Enclave, recovered the G.E.C.K which has made the salvation of the Capital Wasteland possible (albeit the Enclave pretty much mugged him / her immediately afterwards, but still), etc. It's not entirely impossible that someone already inclined to believe in destiny might believe that they had a special role to play in these events, and might be loathe to intervene.
 * Come to think of it, has anyone tried convincing him to go with maximum Charisma and/or maxed out Speech skill? who knows, it might actually be possible, right?
 * Sure is. See below.
 * Convincing Fawkes, not Autumn. When it comes to persuading your companions to deviate from the Script, Speech will not avail you.
 * Script might.
 * I understood it a little differently, or maybe I'm just thinking this wrong. When James set off the machine the radiation went to levels that would kill humans, save for Autumn who has Plot Device serum. By the time the Enclave captures you, it isn't the amount of radiation in the room that's the killer, but rather the temperature in the room. The rads heat the room and since it's surrounded by water a crapload of steam is generated. Super heated steam. You don't die cause of the radiation, you literally cook to death in your own personal metal hot box...then the radiation turns you into goo. And when the system is started, due to the blockage mentioned by Dr. Li, a massive surge of steam blasts through the room, flash frying you. Maybe I read too much into this or know too much about how radiation works, but that's what I assumed. Fawkes is saying the same thing as Charon basically, they don't wanna die. Also you're The Chosen One, so there.
 * Which, of course, is all very good Fan Wank, but the game explicitly tells you it's the radiation itself that's supposed to be lethal. Also, why does a water purification system have something that damn radioactive in it in the first place?
 * Besides which, that's junk science, much less junk SCIENCE! Rads don't heat up anything - the reason that you have coolant in a fission reactor is because it's not the 'rads' doing the heating, but rather that the heat is a byproduct of the fission process - as in it's not just alpha, beta, and gamma radiation being let go by the reaction, but also some thermal radiation as well. What we refer to as 'rads' in Fallout is the lethal gamma and other highly-ionizing radiation. And, as others have explained, the game itself states the problem is that the radiation would kill a human being, period. This ignores the radiation suits, the Rad-X to boost your radiation resistance, the Cyborg and Rad-Resistant perks... and of course also ignores the possibility that someone ELSE could walk in there to punch the buttons. Even if everyone tells you to do it, you're an ass if you turn the question back on them. Yeah... great writing there.
 * Actually, science doesn't necessarily works in Fallout the same way it works in real life. Remember that the Fallout world is not a common After the End setting, nor is a Alternate History setting (this is a pretty common mistake). It is, instead, a whole Alternate Universe. It's not like the Fallout world worked exactly like our one, then sometime in the past the timeline diverged for some reason and a nuclear war started. It has always been different. Slightly similar, but different. What's different? The whole world doesn't follow real life science rules. In Fallout the Weird Science, which is a fictional tool in real world, IS the actual science. The physics rule of that universe are based on Weird Science. So microchips were never invented, the technology stopped in the 50's, STILL it evolved in a weird way allowed by the odd physics rules that are underlying that universe, therefore allowing the creation of computers, robots, androids, nuclear weapons, nuclear portable devices, vintage-futuristic cars, laser guns and so on. There are several hints of that in the game, like the crashed UFO ship with the alien corpse and alien blaster who looks EXACTLY like a vintage portrayal of an alien invader, like in the Mars Attacks! movie, or maybe rotary dial phones with antennas. It is perfectly possible that radiations works in a totally different way in Fallout, therefore producing heat or doing anything else, like creating mutant people and animals instead of killing them in first instance. It's not an opinion, either. What i wrote has been clearly said by both the original creators of Fallout and those who made Fallout 3.
 * Actually radiation does cause heat. The Apollo missions were powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
 * What, don't you know how radiation scrubbers work? The ghost of Thomas Jefferson goes around physically removing the evil, evil radiation from the water making it nice and clean and places the leftover evil radiation into a nice safe rotunda where it can be sealed in a can. Didn't you do the research?
 * This appears to be actually the case, since as you turn Project Purity on you see the statue of Jefferson inside the memorial, separating water and radiation like church and state with the force of his stony gaze.
 * By building a wall?
 * No, actually, Madison builds the wall. Jefferson just comes up with a clever name for it.
 * Wait, which is which? Is the church radioactive?
 * With the caustic ideals of politics, and the fact that the First Amendment and the idea of separating Church and State was to protect religion from government regulations, it seems that Politics is the Rads and Church is the Water. Remember, Water is made by punching in codes from religious books.
 * Alternatively, if you believe the Sons of Atom, then yes. The church is radioactive. Don't stand too close.
 * This whole thing would have worked so much better with a few more dialogue options. Fawkes? Remember what you said when you found that Gatling Laser? About how much evil you could destroy with it? Well, I'm a good guy, you know that or you wouldn't be hanging around with me. Think how much evil I can destroy if I survive this. Charon? I'll give you your contract if you go in there and push the damn buttons for me. And if you're thinking about killing me afterwards, like you did with your previous master, remember who has the Powered Armor, Plasma Rifle and more stimpaks than God. RL-3? My science is maximum, hold still while I reprogram you. If the Ghouls of Underworld can do it, I'll be damned if I can't.
 * The real crazy thing is that they could have skipped all this griping simply by having any followers temporarily not with you for the last scene, just you and Lyons. Seriously. Or have a scripted event kill them.
 * A perfectly sensible, and in-character, solution with minimal change to the game would have been to have the Brotherhood veto sending in the ghoul, the Super Mutant or the unhinged robot. "Sarah will do it, or you will, we don't trust anyone else".
 * By the time I got there, both my companions were dead... So maybe that's why I don't suffer from this widespread case of Unstoppable Rage?
 * I personally think most people would be pissed over an ending that kills the main character of a sandbox game... Fridge Logic just made the hate worse.
 * Yay! The ending is fixed! And it makes sense! They somehow manage to pull you out just before you die. If you choose Fawkes, he gives a more sensible answer, along the lines of, "Oh, I am immune to radiation. Sure I'll go in. You know, I almost thought that I shouldn't deny you your destiny, but you've already changed mine. I do owe you my life, after all."
 * Yes, but then the narrator still chews you out for sending "the real hero" in to do the job. That's like chewing out Batman for letting Superman handle the space meteor.
 * Actually Batman wouldn't send Superman to handle the space meteor, he'd do it himself in his own custom built bat-shuttle. If you've seen some of the DC animated universe movies, you'll know Batman never allows the potential sacrifice of the logical hero who is best equipped to save the world; he shoulders that responsibility himself.
 * Didn't you read all that Gameplay and Story Segregation? It doesn't matter if you have Power Armor a Batshuttle or not. It doesn't work against this radiation meteor. Only Fawkes Superman can stop it and live.
 * There's one massive problem with all of these theories. Your character is wearing Power Armor. Gameplay mechanics aside, Power Armor=Complete protection from radiation. In fact, the only reason why those dudes in PA died at the glow, as evidenced by their holotapes... is that the armor broke. It was just an Ass Pull ending with your character suddenly lacking plot armor. Yes your suit might have been damaged before getting in there, but you could have just gotten another one.
 * It just gets better when you think about it - there's no good reason for radiation to be present in the control room at all. The generators (presumably nuclear-powered) are in the basement, based on the fact that you had to go down there to turn on the power for the machinery upstairs, and those wouldn't logically release their radiation into the control room. And then take into the account that the Purifier appears to be a reproduction of a municipal water treatment facility. Large-scale water treatment plants use rapid-sand filtration (technology available well-before the 50s and still used today, and fully capable of removing radiation particles), and those are cleaned out only when the machinery is turned off so the built-up sludge can be washed out, and then you'd actually have to physically go into the filter or the filter runoff to expose yourself to the radiation particles. It bugs me, because now the control room appears to be a booby trap when you take into account that giving Autumn the wrong code for the Purifier seems to kill the person at the controls. With what? Probably the radiation, which has no other good reason for being there. Furthermore, you'd also think that if that were the case, the Enclave would have removed the source of the radiation before sending one of their own to their death. Or at least giving them a radiation suit and some rad-x.
 * Weird science remember? We're talking about a device so advanced that it was only perfected using some form of near-magical terraforming technology. It's not a stretch to imagine that the purifier does not merely filter out radioactive materials, but actually transmutes them into something harmless. It's easy to imagine such a process producing high levels of gamma radiation.
 * That's not really a good rationale. Basically you're saying that the Purifier, whose sole intent is to create clean drinking water on a mass scale, now creates lethal levels of radiation while eliminating low levels of radiation from water. What. How exactly is that different from simply filtering out the radioactive material? You're taking radiation out of water and creating clean water and putting the radiation somewhere else. And remember, Fallout 3's description of the GECK isn't in keeping with previous descriptions of the device, making it a Genesis Effect sort of thing that kills whatever is in the way to restart life, rather than an Agricultural starter kit. Project Purity is basically taking that effect and just prolonging it, making it a long-term device that's now constantly generating lethal radiation and clean water. Talk about putting all your eggs into one basket, hrm? Not like a water filter, which can be easily replaced. No, all of that expectation is on a device that's only designed for short-term use (Vault 8 and Vault 15 use up their GECK kits founding their respective cities, and if you -activate- the GECK in Vault 87, it's used up on the spot and kills you). What happens if the Vault 87 GECK breaks down? It wasn't exactly easy to get one GECK, finding another to replace it?
 * I actually convinced Fawkes to go in and do it (you can do that once you have Broken Steel installed). I figured that this way the world is saved and everyone would live (which happens anyway with Broken Steel). But then in the ending movie it said I was a coward and went back on everything I stood for! How does that work? If you see a minefield, you send in the minesweeper; that doesn't make the leader a coward and a hypocrite!

James's Sacrifice
OK, this is a little modified from my original post. Why was James willing to sacrifice his life and, potentially, all of Project Purity just to keep it out of The Enclave's hands? OK, so Eden's plan was to use it to spread FEV, but did James know that? And if he did, then surely the Brotherhood would as well, in which case why didn't they Brotherhood keep the Project going without James?
 * Quite possibly - this is a couple of decades after the last attempt in Fallout 2, and the Brotherhood of Steel apparently knew about the Enclave and its plans in California, probably due to the Vault Dweller passing the data along. And James was working with the Brotherhood the last time, before his wife died and kicked off this whole series of events.
 * Your dad was Genre Savvy, he knows that in any After the End story, the U.S. government is Exclusively Evil.
 * He had just seen them blow a woman's face off. That's not the sort of action you expect from someone who likes what you doing, but just wants the credit. The Enclave is pretty well known to be the sort of folk who'd cut out an eye to spite their face.
 * His instincts are good, too; later on, you're put in a similar situation, and if you do provide the code, Autumn's gratitude takes the form of several 10mm rounds.
 * It's not that his instincts are good, it's that he tries to shoulder burdens by himself, never thinks of consequences, and has repeatedly been a horrific judge of others' character or situations. It starts with him trusting the Vault 101 Overseer and thinking that you will be safe if he leaves you behind - which starts that Escape Sequence where Vault Security is trying to kill you. Then he hops into Tranquility Lane without leaving himself a back-up plan, with no evidence that he can get out of his Pod - we know how that fares for him. The last bit is somewhat circumstantial - if you haven't cleared out the Jefferson Memorial before he brings everyone to start working on Project Purity again, he tasks you - his only child - to go in and clear out the super mutants by yourself, because he's no good in a fight. Despite all this, he still thinks you don't have a chance against the Enclave and takes it upon himself to try and take out three of them - with no regard for you. If not for James' scripted death, I believe that you could have killed Autumn (who isn't much of a boss anyway - he could have a bigger bad do the rest of the bad guy thing later) and the two Enclave soldiers, escaped with Dad during that Escape Sequence, drop him off at the Citadel, and it wouldn't have altered the story at all (In Broken Steel, he could have taken the place of that one busy bureaucrat at Project Purity or been found wandering around the Purifier). IJBM that there wasn't an alternative to this, and that his sacrifice had to be seen as the act of a saint, when it was really Stupidity Is the Only Option.
 * The problem with the purifier is that three different factions want it for different goals. Eden want the purifier to retry Richardson's evil plan from Fallout 2. James want to help the wastelands (though the water problem is arguably minor, loads of men and women seems to live old and tumorless). Autumn probably want to use it as a basis for making the Enclave more powerful than ever, probably bringing order to the wastelands in the progress, using something along the lines of "join the enclave and get fresh water". Too bad we don't get a "Autumn win" ending, because I have the feeling that he was pragmatic enough to understand that full-blown genocide wasn't the solution. Who knows, if things had been different (and the story less screwed up) we could have got something like Autumn and Lyons bringing order and peace to the wasteland together. Hell, the Brotherhood of Steel is not so different from the Enclave. They both shoot mutants, raiders, and ghouls, and want nothing more than making the country strong and ordered again. Why they didn't ally once Eden was out of the picture is just bugging me.
 * The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less. Autumn wasn't willing to commit all-out genocide, but he was still quite content having Wastelanders checked for mutations and killed if they had any. Given that the Brotherhood of Steel were kinda focused on saving Wastelanders as step one, this might be what you call an irreconcilable difference of opinion.
 * There's also the Brotherhood of Steel's original purpose, which was to preserve higher technology and to keep it out of the hands of the unwashed masses - and the Enclave was like an evil version of the Brotherhood, which saw the Brotherhood as part of the great unwashed.
 * Only the Citadel branch of the Brotherhood of Steel believed in helping the outsiders. The hardliners broke off and became the Outcasts. The Enclave could have made common cause with them.
 * Except the Enclave wants the Brotherhood Outcasts dead. They're 'mutants' too, after all.
 * "though the water problem is arguably minor, loads of men and women seems to live old and tumorless" As I gathered, people seemed to doing okay, but the radioactive water made vegetation nigh-impossible. Without plant life, the ecosystem is unsustainable and humanity is circling the drain until the pre-packaged food supply runs out.
 * Since James took off, Madison Li and friends have been working on the resurrection of agriculture through hydroponics, presumably aware that the food supply won't last forever. One would presume that whatever water purifier powered Megaton's water supply could be used to create the water necessary for hydroponic agriculture on a semi-workable scale, at least for a small population, so the Capital Wasteland wouldn't go completely tits up. By extension, Project Purity may very well be the first step on the road to bringing the area back from the dead completely.
 * The science behind Project Purity is just one big case of Did Not Do Research, intentional Zeerust, or the writers just didn't care, what Dr. Li is researching is much more difficult and more important in dealing with agriculture. Pure drinking water isn't the issue when dealing with vegetation. Water itself does not hold radiation, just the impurities in it. The soil itself has radioactive fallout, and what is in the soil is what is being absorbed into the vegetation, so any radioactive isotopes still releasing their energy from the soil moves on into the plants, where it is concentrated. Humans or animals who ingest those plants will concentrate the radiation again, and then that's where the issues form. Several people in southern Utah for instance, would drink milk from cows who had eaten grass from irradiated soil left over from nuclear testing. The isotope Iodine-131 built up in their thyroids and caused a lot of damage (particularly in children, who are more susceptible to this sort of damage). For this reason, this is why people in Japan after the recent tsunami and the subsequent nuclear plant situation were given iodine tablets - the tablets are there so that the population would not absorb radioactive iodine into their systems, but rather the safer non-radioactive iodine.
 * This part of the plot makes so little sense that it just about ruined the whole story for me. Your character is the only person who MIGHT have been planning to do anything with the purifier other than purify water with it. Yet, for some reason, everybody is killing and dying over who gets to flip the on switch. I simply could not feel the sense of urgency to stop Autumn from activating the purifier when that's exactly what he was planning on doing anyway.
 * It was implied that Autumn would control the water supply, rationing it out as he saw fit for his own gain.
 * How was he going to do that when his forces had been destroyed and there was a nuke-throwing robot outside waiting for him?
 * Well, gee, maybe that was why you were attacking the purifier in the first place. He kind of can't take control of the pure water supply with you having crushed his army. Once Liberty Prime reached the island, you won, except that you still had to actually clear out the purifier to prevent sabotage.
 * Yet, for some reason, everybody is killing and dying over who gets to flip the on switch. I simply could not feel the sense of urgency to stop Autumn from activating the purifier when that's exactly what he was planning on doing anyway.  Except that if you'd actually stopped and bothered listening to the discussion among the Brotherhood before the final assault, you'd have actually heard why the assault was so urgent; if you don't attack soon, the Enclave will continue fortifying their position and retaking the purifier would be impossible - at which point, Autumn controls the only secure source of clean water in the Wasteland. But its entirely understandable how you'd miss that, considering Sarah Lyons only says it very clearly and explicitly in a scene of dialogue that is almost impossible to skip, considering you're frozen in place during the scene in question.
 * Retaking the purifier? Nigh impossible? When they've got a nuke-bot ready to go?
 * None of you understand. He's questioning why Colonel Autumn having the purifier is such a bad thing in the first place.
 * That nuke bot gets nuked itself in the DLC, it's hardly invincible. Given time to dig in, the Enclave could easily have bought itself enough time to bring its killsat to bear and leave the assault foundering.
 * For me, James' sacrifice was the most frustrating part of the story and game, and what solidly set me against the game's approach to the story. Earlier in the game, there's a similar situation during the Justified Tutorial where you can interrupt an interrogation where someone close to you is being threatened with violence, or just let it play out. I was looking at the situation with James and Autumn the same way - the first time, moment I got to the purifier and heard the first few comments, I was looking for a way to open the airlock and save dear old Dad before something happened, but alas, I'm stricken with Cutscene Incompetence and this one door is the only one in the game that I can't open by lockpicking or hacking or fixing something or pressing a button, and I have to watch with no way to fix or change this. It's not like Fallout 2, where you're not even present to stop the village being kidnapped or a similar scene in Star Trek 2 where the room is already filled with radiation before you get there - it's a situation where you should have had an option to act, but the way it's written simply makes you sit on your hands.
 * Exactly, at that point in the game I'm decked out in indestructible power, loaded to the gills with alien weapons, and have a badass ghoul sidekick. Why doesn't dad just open the door and let me kill the three guys holding him hostage?
 * James was thinking "If I die here then I won't have to go to all the trouble of finding the damn G.E.C.K. or putting up with those whiny scientists god i hate them now i remember the real reason I quit project purity"

Power Armor
What about the Power Armor? In the old games, the Brotherhood-standard power armor was the military-issue T-51b suit. This was the basic armor. The Enclave had more advanced variants, that provided better protection. In this game, the best armor is the T-51b. Nobody else has one, and it provides better protection than any of the armors developed by the Enclave (which has spent the last 200 years improving pre-war tech). This wouldn't bother me, except that Bethesda was pretty good about virtually every other bit of canon.
 * I'm betting that they'll use It Got Worse as the justification, with the Enclave and apparently this branch of the Brotherhood having forgotten how to make the 'good stuff'.
 * Since you find the T-51b power armor elsewhere, it's presumably because the Brotherhood is using the crappy armor the Army was using during the liberation of Alaska. It fits, given that most of their presence in DC is now made up of Wastelander recruits. But that's a whole other strain on credulity, since it forces you to believe that the freaking Pentagon did not have a large supply of the best weapons America had prior to the apocalypse.
 * The Pentagon is not supposed to be a supply depot.
 * The Pentagon is the command-and-control hub. You don't keep the weapons there, you need them on the front lines.
 * You do if you're General Chase!
 * The canon explanation is that the Brotherhood never intended to set up a permanent outpost until they found what was in the Pentagon. Namely, dozens of suits of functional (if obsolete) T-45d Power Armor and Liberty Prime. It's implied that the Brotherhood sent an expedition so far east because their numbers were growing and outstripping their available equipment. One of the reasons they set up shop in the Pentagon was that all the suits meant it was possible to outfit their entire chapter with Power Armor (and even train more), instead of the semi-powered combat armor the lower level Brothers wore in Fallout 2.
 * You know, The T-51b really isn't that great when compared to the Brotherhood armor or even the Enclave armor. It resists a lot of damage, true, but it lacks the Strength enhancements that make the other suits so useful. Maybe in the intervening decades the Brotherhood decided to go with armor that was more versatile even if it lacked some protection?
 * Strength enhancements don't mean much if your strength is nearly maxed out anyways - and the armor doesn't 'carry' itself, which means it's taking a lot of your maximum 250-300 lb weight limit as-is. The extra radiation and damage reduction is, however, very useful in the middle of a radioactive wasteland. What really bugs me is that the Advanced Power Armor and Mk II don't show up in this game - or at least, it doesn't show up as being any stronger than the T-51b despite it being literally centuries newer and supposedly improved with lighter ceramics and composites as it was in Fallout 2. But that's why mods exist, I guess.
 * Maybe if you were playing a character who maxed out strength. Some of us played characters who went for things like Agility, Charisma, Perception and Luck.
 * And those of us who did aren't especially interested in bulky heavy armor that often comes with an AGI penalty. Ranger Combat Armor or Chinese Stealth Suit all the way.
 * The T51-b armor did have a strength enhancement (+ 3), why it got dropped from Fallout 3 is anyone's guess. Except that the armor was only included in the initial release as an easter egg. So it's possible that's why the strength bonus was dropped.
 * Maybe that certain piece of armor was being tricked out by the R&D lab before the bombs fell to see how far they could enhance the armor they currently had rather than issue a new model. That would explain why (according to the Fallout wiki, never found it myself) it's in an R&D lab and behind a stasis field.
 * It's locked up behind three unpickable doors that need keys to open, which may be why you didn't find it. Whether it was tricked out or if it was just that they Did Not Do the Research is up to debate. Or else it could just be a Shout-Out to the first game, where the T-51b really was the best suit of armor in the whole game. One thing noted again in the extras in the Collector's Edition of the guide is how proud they were of the fact the armor looked exactly like it did on the cover of the first box.
 * Oh, please, they did the research. I'm quite the fallout fan and I'm still surprised of the HUGE numbers of tiny details from previous Fallout that they got right. Hell, they were even right on things that weren't in the final version of Fallout 2, like the Harold and Herbert thing, that come from the Fallout Bible. Only die hard fan have read it. Now, for the power armor, I think they designed their functionality with gameplay balance in mind, rather than just copying the armor stats from Fallout 1 and 2. Also, Fallout 3 T51 is that good, because 1) It was made when the U.S. was damn rich 2) It has been, unlike any other power armor you can find, never used. It's completely new, in perfect shape, hell, it was in a stasis field for the past 200 years. Even enclave armor are not in such a good shape.
 * Except that the Mark II armor IS more advanced (as listed in the Fallout 2 description and comments by the Brotherhood in this game), and was built by an Enclave which still understands and researches the technology, which is why the Mark II in the second game had ceramics to make it lighter and stronger. Plus they're the only ones still fielding plasma weapons on a regular basis, and have developed Tesla Power Armor Mk II. But in the third game, the old T-51b is better than the Mk II - a reversal of the situation in a previous game. This isn't BattleTech, where they're using devices they barely understand because they killed off all the scientists; the Enclave was manufacturing equipment, and didn't just happen to have it all lying around in the open for the past two hundred years where it'd start to break down.
 * Turn out there is a stronger armor than the T51. The enclave shocktrooper armor has a DR of 55 plus rad resist and energy weapon boost. It is semilegendary, many people thought it is only accessible through cheats, but it can be found during the escape from Raven rock. So in fact, it seems that the enclave mostly manufacture cheaper armor for practical and economics purposes. Make sense if you ask me.
 * Never mind, I've been fooled by another wiki. Shame on me.
 * That was the "Armor Rebalance" mod - which is why I said 'I guess that's why there's mods' with the Mark II.
 * The second bit, that the Enclave likely manufactured cheaper Power Armour, is still fairly plausible - after all, they DID have a slight setback when the //Chosen One nuked Poseidon Oil in the second game. And quite possibly wiped out Navarro as well. I'm surprised they've still got any sort of manufacturing facilities in the first place.
 * I'm not - the Enclave Oil Rig may have been the main facility, but I doubt it'd have been the only one as they'd have a hell of a time fitting a Vertibird manufacturing facility on there, and they did set up the base in Navarro. It's possible they (and the Brotherhood) are manufacturing cheaper armor now which is worse than the T-51b, but that still bugs me that the oldest armor is still the best, like it was some sort of Ancestral Weapon. I still say that the T-51b being the best armor in the game is either an oversight, or more likely, a Shout-Out to the first game where it was the best.
 * The Brotherhood can't manufacture power armor, they're using 200 years old T51-b. Said armor have been constantly refitted and repaired, thus the minor difference of look on the the shoulders and the back between the brotherhood ones and the pure, untouched T-51b from Fort Constantine.. Kind of Warhammer 40000-ish, if you ask me. Now, I really don't know from where the prototype medic armor comes from. While the design (and ex-wearer) is definitely brotherhood, the holodisk you found beside make it sound like it's a prototype from prior the great war.
 * Again, that's Fan Wank - this is the faction which manufactures combat implants and cyborg parts, which turned Star Paladin Cross into a cyborg after she took some massive injuries eleven years back, and which had that armory in Fallout 3 which showed them assembling a Powered Armor suit. They can build the things, as the prototype medic armor shows; it was found on a Brotherhood of Steel soldier who was field-testing it, and there are files in their computers at the Pentagon if you do some looking around. Plus if it was a pre-war prototype it should look more like the T-51b which was the state of the art at the time... and it doesn't; its model is standard Brotherhood armor, and it has the same in-game protective values of the Brotherhood armor rather than the more-advanced (in comparison) T-51b. Again, I have to repeat that this isn't BattleTech, where the Brotherhood doesn't understand what they're working with - they started with a military unit and a bunch of scientists who survived the Great War, which is why they were the only folk with powered armor and advanced energy weapons until the Enclave showed up. The real question is 'why is the Enclave making their Mark II armor less impressive than it was in the previous game'?
 * They don't, storyline wise at least. Enclave armor looks like it doesn't worth a penny for us players, but it's still pure gold for, say, Paladin Casdin of the Outcasts. Gameplay and Story Segregation is the key here, along with game play balance. Even on very hard, the game is easy-peasy with what we call the nerfed power armor, so they really don't need to make them as powerful as in Fallout 2.
 * Fixed the link for you. I still say it was somewhat stupid to 'downgrade' it this way - they could've just left the T-51b with the same stats as the Brotherhood armor and nobody would've been the wiser. By making it better than the newer stuff, they were inviting some more Fan Dumb ranting.
 * Well the Medical Armor have something that looks to be a US Army insignia so I doubt it was created by the Brotherhood of Steel, also the force field terminal says "medical armor prototype" that seems to indicate originally it was the Medical Armor was supposed to be in there but somehow it was replaced by the T-51b.
 * The brotherhood is supposedly equipped with T-45 power armor, which wasn't as advanced as the T-51b, but it is still definitely prewar tech. While the bulk of the T-51 armor was off on the front lines. It doesn't explain why you never see ANY other suits of T-51 armor though, since the Brotherhood would have reasonably brought some suits over from the west coast.
 * Judging from developer's comments in the hardback Player's Guide, it looks like the T-51b was a late addition to the game (I think he said it was finished less than a week before the game went gold). If I had take a guess, the Medical armor was supposed to be the prize for completing the Ft. Constantine side quest. Once the T-51b got added, that armor was hastily moved to its current location, and the script that closes out its quest was attached to the T51-b suit. (I could go further, but I'd end up in WMG territory if I did).
 * There's also the fact that the BoS has been in DC for about 20 years now, it's highly probable any T-51b armor they brought with them is too shot up to be of any use anymore, and the T-45s were in great supply in The Pentagon/Citadel (according to the back story anyway), thus necessitating the change. And it makes sense if only because the T-51b was a front line power armor and Washington DC was most decidedly not the front line of the war with China at the time. Most of the T-51b suits that weren't found by the BoS out west were probably being used in Canada, Alaska, and China at the time the bombs fell.


 * I'm waiting for operation Anchorage in order to see what brand new T51 was supposed to do.
 * Nothing really different unless you count the new paint job and the millions of points worth of durability.
 * To make this clear once and for all:
 * Fort Constantine T51b is really more of an easter egg than anything else. Canon wise, forget that it even exist.
 * Enclave power armor is really superior to Brotherhood power armor, but this subtle. See, Enclave PA has something like 1300 hp, while Brotherhood PA has 1000 hp. Thus, Enclave PA degrade slower, keep a higher protection level for longer. It also has better rad protection, and is lighter. The Tesla PA is even better, with more DR, no strength neither agility enhancements or degradation, and 1500 hp.
 * At the end of Operation Anchorage, you get a T51b, different from Fort Constantine one. 45 DR, sound better than even the Tesla PA, right? Not really. There is two versions of that T51b. The simulation version has 10 million HP, while the version you were suppose to get in the armory after the simulation has only 1000 hp. Due to a bug, you get the simulation version instead of the wasteland version. The wasteland version of the Arctic T51b degrade effectively faster than any Enclave PA. 45 DR won't do you much good if it drop to 0 under ten minutes. You get the idea.
 * Of course you could just be a smart player and take the Chinese Stealth armor. 15 stealth bonus. Let's just say you find the sneak bobblehead, the agility bobblehead, and take the Silent Running perk (who wouldn't?). Combined with the Chinese armor you only need your base Sneak to be around 55-60 to get 100 by default. This makes you COMPLETELY INVISIBLE TO ALL ENEMIES ALL THE TIME as long as you don't fire a gun. So basically you can just sneak up on an enemy and melee them to death without them EVER seeing you. And I mean any enemy. Enclave, ghouls, robots, super mutants.
 * And if you get The Pitt add-on and get the silenced assault rifles (Infiltrator/Perforator) you might as well be playing Oblivion with the 100% Chameleon suit. Completely invisible, silent including your weapon, it's downright absurd.
 * We have yet to see the truly high-end Enclave PA. Wait until Broken Steel is out...
 * Here's my theory: That suit at Fort Constantine was enhanced. This is supported by the fact that the Winterized Armor at the Outcast Outpost has 5 less DR. The normal T-51b you find in the outpost is a firm Game Breaker because of its 10 Million item HP, but thats a glitch and not canon obviously. The normal Enclave Armor has 49 DR (with helmet), the same as T-45 power armor. They probably manufacture this because it's cheap, and nearly every other factions armor is inferior anyway. When they need more powerful armor, thats what they have Telsa Armor for. It has almost he same DR as the Winterized (normal) T-51b, (T-51 with helmet: 55, Telsa Armor with helmet: 51), and an insanely useful energy weapons boost (+10 Energy Weapons). And remember, this is the cannon fodder armor, not their best. No, that would be their Hellfire Armor, which has more DR then the "normal" T-51b and the same as the Fort Constantine one (60 with helmet). So their second most common armor is roughly on par with the T-51b (with the energy weapons boost and lower manufacture cost probably making up for it), and their least common armor is actually better. Makes sense I guess. Plus, handing out inferior power armor probably is what the cost was for making sure all your personal have it. Remember in Fallout 2, many Enclave soldiers had combat armor or the older models.
 * The thing that bugged me the most is that there's a random throwaway line in a computer found in the Citadel that refers to the Power Armor used by the Enclave as "Advanced Power Armor Mk II." This is what the very last Power Armor the Chosen One got in Fallout 2 was named. The problem here is that the Enclave Power Armor in Fallout 3 doesn't look anything like the Advanced Power Armor Mk II from Fallout 2 (oddly, the Remnant's Power Armor from Fallout: New Vegas looks just like—and is—the old Mk II suit). It would also imply that the Enclave ceased Power Armor development between 2241 and 2277, as Mk II was cutting edge in 2241 and Hellfire Armor is just exiting prototyping during Broken Steel (c. 2278). All it would have taken was for that terminal to call it "Mk III" or "Mk VII" or to just not exist and allow the aesthetic difference to be imply a new model.

Plot Holes
The plot in general, in fact, and its numerous plot holes. Allow me to be anal and list them for ease.
 * Vault 101, with the clear objective to never open its door, as you can find out through terminals, did, in fact, open their doors. However, they, for some reason, let your father in, despite the various signs outside the vault door begging to come in.
 * As with most other Overseers, the one in V101 had shady dealings going behind the scenes...and "rules for thee, not for me" (ie; don't open the door) were standard practice.
 * It was stated by the Overseer himself in the "Trouble on the Homefront" mission that they all kept quiet about it so that future generations would actually think that "no-one ever enters and no-one ever leaves." Simply put, they lied.
 * They apparently were curious about the outside and wanted to see if they could live out there yet. I'm guessing he had a very high Charisma score and seemed like a nice guy.
 * Previous Overseers had sent out scouting expeditions - . You can find their reports in the Overseer's office if you check out his computer.
 * It is implied (in the guide I think) that the previous Overseer was killed in secret by a small group of isolationists led by the current Overseer when he was wandering in the Wasteland, specifically because of his open vault policy, and the other inhabitants, while not outright voicing this accusation, was at least suspicious of the group's involvement in the Overseer's disappearance. The skeletons outside the door is perhaps not war victims, but core supporters of the previous Overseer, forcefully thrown out of vault on some dubious basis because attempting to make them "disappear" would raise the suspicion of foul play further.
 * I always assumed they really needed a doctor (which is what your dad's job appears to be in the vault), particularly since the only alternative they have when he leaves is the Ax Crazy robot. If you listen to the dialogue during the flash forward after you've chosen your appearance it supports this to a degree ("We need a doctor, not a dentist").
 * I thought he said "We need a doctor, not a scientist.".
 * I was certain it was "We need a doctor, not a deadbeat." implying that they only let him in due to his skills and that he had to pull his own weight.
 * "We need a doctor, not a dental nurse. If you fail to live up to my expectations...". Both a doctor and a dental nurse are medical practitioners, but one is far more qualified than the other. The Overseer was basically saying, "You'd better not be lying to me, or there'll be hell to pay".
 * What bugs me isn't so much why they let him in, but nobody seems to acknowledge it. Wouldn't all the Vault 101 residents realize that this new guy just popped up out of nowhere? If they did know, then it seems unrealistic that they would all be in on the plot and wouldn't tell you about it, especially Amata (assuming you take the good path and don't treat her like a jerk). The survey teams sent out, too, would probably be missed after not returning. You'd think that someone would get wise. Then again, judging by the questions on the "infamously difficult" G.O.A.T., the people in the Vault might not be all that bright.
 * They did acknowledge it. During "trouble on the homefront" the none dialogue NPC's say things like "We never should have let your father in." etc.
 * Considering that all the other kids are the same age as you, it is not likely that they would have any idea that you were not born in the Vault unless one of the adults told them. You were already in the Vault when you were a year old after all.
 * I suspect they're just very, very good at feigning ignorance or just refuse to acknowledge anything that bother them. Or maybe they just shoot people who disrupt the status quo and shove the bodies into a recycling unit. Given what happened to Jonas and almost to your character this seems quite likely. No wonder Vault 101 looks so empty...
 * The old lady that gives you a sweet roll remembered, as the crazy lady passing you a poem on your tenth Birthday, and a few of the security guards that don't try to kill you on sight. They were almost certainly trying to keep things quiet so that the new generation didn't end up with wanderlust, and when the guy in charge has all the guns and a lot of folk willing to shoot first and ask questions later, you do what the guy in charge says.
 * There's also Moira in Megaton commenting on how people were leaving the Vault every few years, up until the time your father got in. It looks like Amata's dad was more hard-line on the whole 'no exposure to the outside world' part than other Overseers.
 * Moira will also give you an Armored Vault 101 Jumpsuit after recalling life in the vault for her book, she says she made this suit for a girl from the Vault around "10 or twelve years ago," but the girl never returned to pick it up, leading Moira to speculate that she may have died.
 * They do acknowledge it, but it's not so much they keep up a facade so much as, in that time period, it wasn't something you were paying attention to. Odds are, they did talk about it, just never in front of the PC. Hints of this are in the hidden conversation between the Overseer and Officer Kendall during the birthday party segment, and Allen Mack's rant through the window during your escape.
 * There's a hint of this in the conversation with Palmer during your birthday: "It feels like only yesterday your daddy came." Not born. He came to the vault.
 * The guy's also a doctor. That's a pretty vital occupation (especially in an underground bunker which, it's clearly hinted, is beginning to fall apart through social strains well before he came along anyway), and it's suggested that he performed his duties well up until he suddenly abandoned the vault; chances are, outside of some gossip behind his and his child's back they just accepted it. After all, outsider or not, no sense in pissing off the guy who's keeping you alive.
 * "Vault 101, with the clear objective to never open its door..." Not so clear. The opening narration suggests this, but a review of the Vault tech files on the various known vaults in the Capital Wasteland shows that the purpose of Vault 101 is classified. Its purpose might not be to explore what happens if a vault is sealed forever, but simply how do its inhabitants start to behave if they think they're sealed in forever.
 * Which amounts to pretty much the exact same thing from the point of view of the inhabitants who don't get to leave, really.
 * If I remember correctly, the purpose of v101 was to experiment with the effects on a population led by an all-powerful Overseer. The Vault was supposed to stay shut to prevent the population from going through a rotation - trap them with their dictator with no option to leave, basically.
 * Though Butch is canonically a year older than the player, so he might have been held back.

The age of fellow Vault Dwellers
It seems a bit weird that not only is the Vault 101 population so small (and the vault itself for that matter) but that all of the children are around the same age. During the G.O.A.T. exam when you are 16, every single kid in the vault appears to be present. It is understandable that there'd be restrictions on breeding for population control reasons, but it's odd that all the kids were apparently born in the same year.
 * It makes a lot of sense if you think about it though, all the kids will have friends available their own age, and for education they'll all be at the same level so you can teach them as a class. If you have to control the population anyways, and it has to be this small, that would be the way to go.
 * In Fallout 2 it's explicitly stated that Vault City only allows children to be born at certain times. Pregnancy cannot occur without medical assistance. The woman in Vault City's Vault who tells you this is somehow not age-synchronized with the rest of the population. She complains about everything being geared to a retirement age population when she's not nearly that old.
 * Plus the vault depressive disorder was affecting half the inhabitants. (the sad poem lady and one of the tunnel snakes in Dad's computer at the least.) Depressed people who think there is no future being locked in a box never to leave, don't really feel like bringing more people into their little prison.
 * Also consider that there have been several generations since the war. Only the first couple would have to be strict about it. After that the subsequent generations would sort themselves out fairly naturally.
 * You also have to consider that it IS a video game. The Vaults population capacity (as is stated in various terminals) is supposed to be in the hundreds at least. For the sake of gameplay coherency, do you really think they'd display that many people? Suspension of disbelief.
 * In both your trips to the Vault, there are some doors marked INACCESSIBLE that you can't get through. It's easy to surmise that they might lead to other areas of the Vault. The possibility that occurred to me was that the Vault was divided into dozens of Sub-Vaults, each one largely isolated from the others and using separate power and recycling systems, so that a catastrophe in one Sub-Vault might be contained rather than taking down the whole Vault. Intervening doors would be sealed except for essential maintenance and emergencies. The most obvious means of division would be that each Sub-Vault contains a different generation of children - thus they all grow up together, and take their G.O.A.T.'s together. The Overseer's Sub-Vault is the one near the door, naturally, and your Dad lucked out in that they were currently raising a generation of kids around the same age as his own.

Little Lamplight
Okay, so when the children in Little Lamplight reach the age of 16, they get kicked out and have to make their way over to Big Town. Where has Little Lamplight been getting replacement kids for the last 200 years? I don't recall anyone in Big Town mentioning having kids and taking them back to Little Lamplight either.
 * I don't think it's too much of a stretch when we have middle-schoolers getting pregnant in RL. Although I shudder to imagine the mechanics of romance in an isolated, adult-free society.
 * There'd probably be a few orphaned kids wandering the wastelands trying to avoid raiders, slavers, etc who might hear talk of this settlement for kids in the caves and go there for sanctuary. Also, as noted below, the possibility of teenage pregnancies from those who enter puberty early.
 * I also can't be the only one who wished for an option to slap those little brats, even if they were made immune to being harmed. Is it any surprise a mod was released that lift that restriction?
 * Teenage pregnancies, anyone?
 * Just because the Big Town residents didn't mention it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. Then there's also the Lamplight scav teams finding orphans, the aforementioned teenage pregnancies (3–5 years is certainly a long enough time for them to pop out a kid or two each, especially considering they don't have contraceptives or society's qualms about under-age sex), and former residents that didn't move to Big Town (like Machete in Canterbury Commons) telling kids about Little Lamplight.
 * Not only that, but the kids in Little Lamplight seem to have no major problems keeping slavers and super mutants at a safe distance, but the moment they get to Big Town, who's wiping out their settlement? Slavers and Super Mutants! Do the bad guys suffer the same stricture against killing kids that the player character does? Do the Muties sit around thinking "soon as you turn 16 I'm gonna eat you"?
 * It's all about location: LL is underground - out of sight, out of mind. There's also only two ways to get in and one of them is from a Vault inhabited by monsters with an entrance irradiated so bad it instakills any 'normal' person that gets close.
 * Kind of Supermutants need people to turn into new Super Mutants, but kids don't turn into super mutants they become centaurs so the super mutants just wait a while until the kids become old enough to go to big town and attack there.
 * Defending Little Lamplight is a LOT easier than defending an open town. The cave only has two entrances with long tunnels and existing barriers in front of both. The scav teams seem to be pretty successful in bringing in munitions, perhaps stealing from the Super Mutants. In contrast, Big Town is "protected" by a bridge across a moat and doesn't have any major settlements nearby to steal from.
 * Still doesn't explain how come a little band of 100th generation of boy/girl scouts in the middle of nowhere have assault rifles and rocket launchers in their sold in their souvenir shop.
 * Scavenging, again. There's lots of weaponry floating around the Wasteland and lots of people who get killed who drop them. The assault rifles / etc are when they happen to have lucked out and found a few on their various expeditions.
 * Even if there were teenage pregnancies, there doesn't seem to be anyone within with the knowledge of how to deliver the babies. Not to mention the fact that any of them have any level of education, I have high doubts that knowledge can be effectively taught over 200 years by preteens and teens. They also have skills that they really shouldn't have for their ages usually, like I doubt the mayor had developed those leadership skills in 12 years. Are they just born with working knowledge? There's more than just a little fridge logic in Little Lamplight...
 * The title of mayor is given to anyone who beats up the previous mayor. Leadership skills has nothing to do with it, and he said it himself that it's basically anarchy in the caverns. Plus people have been giving birth for millenia, I'm pretty sure people were still being born before hospitals and proper medical care existed.
 * If you're in a situation where it's basically 'learn how to do something' or 'die', you learn how to do something and pass it on to the next guy.
 * Joseph explains that he's responsible for teaching everyone what they want to know from all the books they bring back from scavenging. As for the Mayor, he's hardly an iron-fisted administrator: he says it's anarchy and everyone likes it that way, with the mayor being responsible for knocking heads when someone gets too far out of line. Seems pretty low-skill to me.
 * Look it like this. In every generation of Little Lamplighters, there is bound to born a few kids who manage to mature faster than others and start taking interest in learning important things like fighting or treating illnesses. Those who start honing their skills early on will learn it faster, since child's ability to pick up new things is greater than adult's, despite the cogitative disadvantage. In addition, those with skills might be teaching their piers and younger kids and in the process, learning their their trade even better. Those few skilled individuals (the Mayor, Lucy and Joseph) are more more than enough to keep the show afloat while others dick around until they hit the puberty.
 * There's no real reason for Little Lamplight to exist the way it does, except that the Developers just wanted a town full of nothing but children (every settlement is entrenched in Fantasy to some degree - for instance, Tenpenny tower is full of rich people who are there just because they say they're rich, Megaton is a town built around a nuclear bomb, Rivet City is a city inside a wrecked aircraft carrier). The real simple question with no answer is: why, in 200 years, did not one of these kids simply beat up the mayor and say "I'm mayor now and I'm changing the rules, I'm not leaving and neither is anyone else" - 200 years of anarchy and poor education is a long time for everyone to follow a rule like "You're 16 now, get out!" simply because the previous adults left to try and find help. Child Cruelty be damned be damned, at some point, these kids have probably taken shots at each other over dumb arguments. Why hasn't anyone over the age of 12 matured to the point where they think of something better? They have the resources to bring back more kids and more food, but they enforce the rule that they have to kick out adults with the only reasoning being "we don't have the room or resources" - food is required for adolescents far more than at any other time of life, except for pregnant or lactating mothers - yet they bring more children into Little Lamplight, enough weapons to fight off super mutants (and sell to complete strangers), produce enough food for the entire population with enough to spare the Lone Wanderer, and then there's plenty of room in their gigantic cavern, with some intact buildings outside which they could pull apart for more supplies.
 * First off, "beating up the mayor" is exactly how the leadership works. Whoever beats up the previous mayor gets to replace him. The thing is everything seems to be working so smoothly for them that there's no reason they should feel the need to change the rules.
 * Things are working so smoothly that it's complete anarchy and they have to kick people out because they think there's not enough food and not enough space. Real smooth. If there's not enough food or space, why do they keep bringing orphans back, and why do they keep making more babies? No matter how one tries to Hand Wave those issues, there's a great deal of faulty logic going on there.
 * ^ Well, for starters, if they didn't bring in new kids now and then, well, then they'll all eventually have no one in the caverns at all. And as the mayor said, it does run smoothly with complete anarchy, the monsters and raiders are at bay, there are no serious violent take overs, and they ration supplies properly to survive, and everyone follows the strict moral code to leave when they come of age, even if they don't want to. Maybe the kids decided long ago that eventually they all need to leave the caves and go outside and accept reality. Maybe they just didn't think the details through because hello? They're kids.
 * Hello? They're kids, and that's exactly the problem. They're uneducated, unguided, and no, they don't think the details out. There's always kids who think they know best, and many of them will think 'tradition' is stupid and try to change it. Simply put, the constant use of the word "Maybe" in your argument simply supports that there's no good, rational explanation. You have to stretch really far to make it work. Number one, the place is absolute chaos, the Mayor and everyone else says so. There's no strict moral code that you speak of, except a misplaced belief that children always do the right thing (again, the population is made up of children found in the Wasteland or teenage pregnancies already within - not necessarily a moral upbringing if you're going to use that word). Number two, it's blatantly stretching the line of believability to think that none the 'adults' from Little Lamplight wouldn't give up a whole lot of children in exchange for their own freedom (Big Town is one of the places slavers and the Super Mutants pick up 'new recruits' after all). Maybe one of the adults who grew up in Little Lamplight might turn into a Complete Monster like the kids think you turn into when you become an adult. Maybe it's just coincidence or really good luck that no one ever has ratted out the place until the Lone Wanderer does. Especially after they leave. After all, they had it good in Little Lamplight. What's to say that later in life, they get second thoughts about the place, and decide to fight for one of the Wasteland's only renewable food sources that is radiation free, etc. etc.
 * Continuing on, if I were a Complete Monster like a slaver or something, I could just park in front of the only entrance into Little Lamplight and repeat a message saying that I'll collapse the tunnel if they don't open their sheet-metal gate. Win-win for me, I can enslave a bunch of kids or I can cut off one of the possible access routes into or out of Vault 87 in case the Super Mutants eventually bust through Little Lamplight.
 * And again, if supplies are so limited that they have to be rationed out, why do they keep bring more children back? After 200 years, children would get the idea that they need more food as teenagers than they did in the years before. So why cut down on your own food supply or the food supply for the people who are your 'family' - blood relations or not. Again, it's a community based on a Fantasy concept, rather than on any sort of realistic expectation of children. Can children be selfish? Yes. Can they be cruel? Yes. Hell, it's possible for children to be even more cruel than adults, even to other children. We're expected to believe that Little Lamplight will shoot people to death if they try to come in (not that children can even fire guns in the game), but they wouldn't have killed each other over the title of Mayor? It's the game and the programming of Fallout 3 that prevents child mortality, not a reality of their situation.
 * Okay wow that is a long wall of text that you decided to make into several different posts for some reason. Things didnt go to hell in the caverns because the kids in there behave relatively nicely and they aren't suicidally stupid. I can only assume when the kids genuinely start putting a serious risk in the stability of the caverns the mayor and other kids wouldn't be afraid to kill the person trying to kill them all. Slavers are a serious problem, but the kids manage to fend them off pretty well, and really, all of your complaints are just what-if scenarios. The people of Big Town and the kids in Paradise Falls can attest that their system isn't perfect, but the game never tries to say it does. Chillax
 * The problem that makes Little Lamplight a Headscratcher is that it's two hundred years since the founding of Little Lamplight and there has been zero change in how the 'system' operates. With all the issues plaguing the Capital Wasteland and Little Lamplight itself, some kind of change would have happened. But Little Lamplight remains exactly as it was just after the bombs fell. It's been said above that the situations and communities of Fallout 3 would have made more sense twenty years after the bombs as opposed to two hundred, and no example is more obvious than Little Lamplight.
 * Was it ever explicitly stated how long it took for the "system" to be put in place, or how long the "system" has been in place? They might have taken decades to figure it out.
 * It's hard to say, but if we take the story at face value, it didn't take long at all. Every adult would leave, and at some point, as the kids grew up, the eldest left when he turned 16, so everyone else simply turned that into a 'tradition.'
 * The game explicitly says that they started exiling the older kids is because they blame adults for the [crapsack world]. The resource thing is just part of it. Does no one remember that the REASON we hate the lamplighters is because they are insulting little pricks? Little kids are easily convinced that grown-ups suck, and thus its not at all surprising that the "system" stays in place. Little Lamplighters believe that, as we grow up, we turn into arrogant, know-it-all jerkasses who make life hell and destroy the world. If you're going to bother to bicker and argue about pointless fanwanking logic trouble, pay attention to the the pointless fanwanking details
 * We -are- paying attention to the pointless fanwanking details, if you can't be bothered to note. As for the reason some fans hate Little Lamplight, it's called Alternative Character Interpretation. While some people hate the Little Lamplighters for being whiny, insulting little pricks, others hate the fact that they are designed to be a nonsensical fantasy community. Once again, why do Little Lamplighters hate "mungos?" Mac Ready likes to say that people change when they turn into an adult, but how would he or any of the other children really know, since they've gone well over a hundred years without adults living among them - they all end up leaving for Big Town, as the tradition goes.

Dad
Your father in general. He sacrificed the future of humanity and helping the world because he freaked out. So after 20 years he decides to have a change of heart. Yeah, okay, sure. Then the Enclave, who has been a totally unknown entity up to this point, comes to Project Purity to take the credit for turning on a Brita water filter. Your father seems to be pride-stricken, as he is willing to kill himself and others to NOT turn on the purifier. Good job Watson, you've just did the opposite of what you were trying to do! Oh, and not to mention that he sabotages the room in general, as it never seems to clear out of radiation. Good thinking, dad!
 * The Enclave was also going to use the purifier as a club to rally support. I don't think James wanted that, and I don't think that the Enclave is an unknown to him and the Brotherhood.
 * And yet he still inevitably denies the process of still proving clean water in the area. I'm not sure how the Enclave were going to use purified water as a rally support either, considering all the water in the area would be purified. What were they going to do, station troops at every watering hole and river? Bomb towns when it rained? Yeah, I bet everyone would love the Enclave then.
 * The fact that it still was not working when the Enclave arrived and that Autumn would not listen to Dad surely backs up his actions, if he didn't turn it on he would have been shot to death or kidnapped, tortured and then executed, if he did turn it on and they noticed it was not working they probably would have killed him anyway. So I assume Dad took the only option available to him, sacrifice himself, sabotage the generator, kill a few Enclave and buy some time for his child and the scientists to escape and locate the G.E.C.K. Presumably he would have sent his son to retrieve it once they had located one anyway had the Enclave not interfered and I guess he would have expected his child to carry on his legacy. I also assume that Dad suspected the Enclave would have betrayed and killed him and his child anyway even if he had accepted their demands, considering the Enclaves reputation and a lot on instances in Fallout 3 where they happily stab someone in the back at a moments notice. Plus sabotaging the project would have slowed down the Enclave anyway while they worked out how to repair it until his child, the Scientists and the Brotherhood could regroup and reclaim it. They would have seen his notes and realized they needed a G.E.C.K anyway and since they were in on the vault experiment they could easily locate one nearby. This works on the assumption Dad backed up his notes and didn't just leave them on holotape. To sum up, Dad did what he did because he had no other option and the project still wasn't working anyway, he was backed into a wall, and I think he hoped that his final action would have allowed the time needed for his child to finish the job. I still can't account for how the Enclave found out about the project and how convenient their arrival was, his also assumes he had accounted for several variables so considering the chaos caused when he left the vault despite his hopes to the contrary it depends on the opinion of the player.
 * It's just that Dad was a smart scientist, but a really poor judge of situations or people. He's way too trusting and naive, and had zero thought as to the consequences of his actions or the realities of what he was doing. It's recurring throughout his interactions. One of dear old dad's friends in nearby Megaton is resident Jerkass Colin Moriarty, for instance. He thinks it's okay to leave his child behind in Vault 101 - shortly after he leaves, Vault Security is out to kill you. He gets into Tranquility Lane without some sort of way out. What bugs me is that he didn't really do what he seemed to be doing - if he was trying to keep the Enclave from taking over the purifier, he failed. If he was trying to buy time for his child to escape, how would he have known if that would work? He only tries to kill the three guys closest to him, and his kid's on the other side of the door - how was that supposed to work if there were Enclave soldiers right outside the door? And if he had a thought for his kid to return to finish his work, how would that have happened if it were the Enclave still controlling the building? He couldn't have known that Liberty Prime could tip the scales in the Brotherhood's favor. It just bugs me that people like Star Paladin Cross revere James as an impossibly good person when all evidence kind of suggests he's more bumbling than brilliant.
 * Leaving the Enclave in control of the only source of purified water in the Capital Wasteland is a Bad Idea. Doesn't the game make this explicitly clear? Its not a case of pride, its a case of handing over a massive strategic resource to someone who is planning on effectively engaging in a happy spree of ethnic cleansing. I don't know about you, but I really wouldn't want them in control of my water supply.

Colonel Autumn's fake death
Same scene. Colonel Autumn survives by injecting himself with a syringe of Plot Device. Never mind the fact that the radiation in the room is bad enough to kill even Enclave soldiers in power armor in a matter of seconds. Never mind that is the actual Colonel Autumn (unless he just happens to have a twin who dresses and sounds just like him and when you toggle collision levels and get close enough to him his character is called "Colonel Autumn"). Never mind he clearly makes a dying sound and his body goes into a spasm, and then lies there on the floor of the rad-filled chamber until you leave with Li and her team. Nope, Autumn survives. He survives from an allotted amount of time to extreme radiation exposure "just because."
 * He got that ability from taking the Sound Like Foghorn Leghorn perk.
 * Even worse, again with Colonel Autumn, is that he is actually AGAINST wanting you to put in the FEV virus, which is why he rebels against Eden. When confronting him in the anti-climactic ending, he never truly reveals his purposes, nor are there any dialogues to say that you agree with his views. Nope, he's got to die. You know, just because. So he drops a unique pistol and unique armor—stuff you won't get to wear anyways, considering you're going to die (or, at least, not continue on anyways).
 * Actually, you can talk Colonel Autumn into just leaving by saying he's beaten, according to the Guide. You really can discourage him enough to make him go away.
 * It takes pretty high speech skill, but I can confirm it's possible. He'll walk away if you are persuasive enough, and Lyons will wonder how you managed it.
 * That's easy to explain - you're The Chosen One, and she isn't.
 * I assume you get different responses based on your Karma at the time, since I didn't get a 'How did you do that?' response, but rather 'You're letting him go? I'm surprised the Wasteland hasn't beaten that out of you yet. Hope it doesn't come back to bite you.'

An overabundance of raiders
No matter how many you kill, the Capital Wasteland seems to be in short supply of everything BUT Raiders. You would think all the settlements would be laid to rubble by now, what with considering the Raiders numbers versus ONE sheriff in Megaton or a few guards in Rivet City.
 * Rivet City, they have the bridge and apparently some Mirelurks hanging around the water. Also think of the Raiders as Chaos Cultists from Warhammer, they fight the player and innocent people but they most likely fight each other as well, just off screen.
 * The Raiders are also probably not that tough. The player can still take out tons of them with relative easy at about level five or so, and most town defenders are probably more experienced than that. The biggest worry for the larger population centers would probably be running out of munitions, not the Raiders themselves.
 * I second the 'Weak Raiders' motion. It's very likely that they're chem addicts, which would take a great toll on their physical condition, and if they're going through withdrawal from chems it would make sense that they're shaky and weak.
 * Take a look at all the chems and booze strewn about in the average Raider encampment. Their diet is irregular and poor. 'First aid' consists of jamming in a stimpak or, if they're lucky, a 'doctor' with filthy hands and tools. I think it's safe to say that the average Raider is in awful physical shape.
 * Raiders are also largely both disorganized and scattered. Most of the raider groups encountered in-game are very small bands, usually three to six - no credible threat to any reasonable population center in-game, outside the smallest like Arefu. The majority of the large, organized operations we encounter are a few raider bases in the hills, well removed from the major population centers, i.e. the dozen or so at the armory, the group squatting in the giant transmitter towers, and the thirty-odd raiders in Evergreen Mills. The Wasteland itself also makes raider attacks difficult, considering that unless they move in force, leaving their bases unguarded, they'll likely run into at least some trouble going anywhere; a small raider group would likely get wiped out in moments by Giant Radscorpion or Deathclaw attack. Even a big group of raiders might take casualties just moving around.
 * It's not just Simms against the Raiders in Megaton, but also Stockholm, Deputy Weld (For all the use he is), and Deputy Steel. Jericho even mentions that he assists in protecting Megaton from the Raiders whenever necessary, and his own knowledge of Raider tactics has probably led to some successful counterattacks. Given that a sheltered 19-year old without any formal weapons training can mow down entire raiding party within minutes of leaving a Vault, it's likely that Simms, Stockholm, and Jericho are that much more effective against larger warbands.
 * But it is just silly in general. The raider to population ratio, I mean. I think it is safe to say that there are more raiders than wastelanders. But raider caves have dozens of dead bodies strung up in them. Is that all from opposing raider factions fighting? I doubt it. If so, raiders would be in short supply. They can't be spending their time just killing off all the other raiders 24/7. So what do they do? Kill wastelanders? There isn't enough for one wastelander per raider in a whole raider's lifetime! And population in towns is not even close to the level required to support young guys and gals frequently running away from their hometowns to join the bandits. There is hardly enough genetic variation to sustain life at all.
 * It's implied in-game that the actual population of the Wasteland is much larger than we see in-game. A lot of the population appears to be nomads, scavengers, and traders moving from settlement to settlement, and the majority of the ground you can cover in-game is removed from the actual population centers. Note the geographic distribution of the major settlements, i.e. Tenpenny Towers, Megaton, Rivet City, and the Citadel - they're all located in the south-southeast of the Wasteland. Further north, you get smaller towns and villages - Canterbury Commons, Arefu, Big Town, etc. Its probably no coincidence that the regions in the south are safer and less dangerous than than the ones in the north (relatively speaking). If you could travel further south, I wouldn't be surprised if you encountered more population centers. Its just that the majority of the time you spend in-game, you're on the "frontier" of the Wasteland, where the population is going to be lower and the settlements will be more spread-out.
 * My two cents? The Wasteland is a bad place that can do very bad things to you. I don't think it takes much to join the Raiders. And besides, by what I can tell, its implied that Simms is a badass, even though we don't see too much of it (and indeed, Mr. Burke can kill him).
 * It seems no one goes into Springvale school and reads the computer about the raiders who tried to attack megaton at the very last post she mentions if she can't get the ants below dead and into vault 101 {which seems to indicate vault 101 stretches a long way from where you come out} that she'll end up with a bullet in the head like the last boss of the raider band except this time it wont be from the sheriff it will be from her own men. This tends to indicate raiders are too chaotic to last long in a world filled with ghouls, scorpions, molerats, bloatflies, Yao Guai, loose protectorons, sentry bots , talon company , regulators, enclave, brotherhood of steel, well armed scavengers, well trained mercs, an bridge that can be moved away, super mutants, Slavers, Deathclaws. When you consider how savage the wasteland is and combine that with the raiders tend to be somewhat "confused" {if you mezz them collar them then talk to them again they'll tell you they were just confused before and they don't want to be slave if you remove it they'll be nice to you forever] This confusion leads them to be not really a threat.
 * Bethesda just wanted to give the player something to kill until the Enclave showed up without you feeling bad. That's why they respawn all the time.
 * Which again, is why there's no good rationale behind it.
 * We're just seeing a very small part of the overall world in the game, remember. The raiders probably wander around from all over the place.

NPCs force player Sacrifice because why?
Neither the mutant who can withstand radiation nor the ghoul who is HEALED by it feel like making sure no one dies. Nope. Oh, and if you let Lyons do it (you know, that one character you see once or twice in the game so much that you can't even be bothered to be interested to care about), the noble, high-mighty, all-sacrificing woman decides to throw a hissy fit. Cue to Ron Perlman saying how selfish you are for wanting to live. Yeah, but mention nothing about Fawkes or Charon. Yup. Let's not forget how some people can resist the radiation in the room just fine. Nope, you've gotta die.
 * You forgot to mention that the Ghoul is supposed to be brainwashed to do whatever his boss says.
 * He's brainwashed to protect the person who owns his contract, but it's never said that he doesn't have his own free will. He actually kills his former master after he joins you without you asking him to, or him asking you. Doesn't actually excuse it, just shows that he's not a complete slave.
 * So... he's not going to protect me from the lethal radiation by walking a few feet and punching in a code?
 * No. Because that's not a combat scenario. He tells you this to your face. "Read the contract," he says. It would be nice if you could actually do that. God, I miss the item descriptions.
 * What sucks is how he gladly fetches the G.E.C.K. for you in another "dangerously high" radiation area. I've been real cool to him all game letting him use the T-51b until I got power armor training, and he seemed to have no real beef with me. So why is he being a dick all of a sudden? And why doesn't Lyons call him out on being a dick when he's the only one present who can save the day without dying? Why can't the two of us just threaten him with death-I mean what, I can nuke Megaton for a hotel suite but I can't get a little nasty when everyone's bacon is on the line? And what the hell is wrong with Fawkes? Why is it my destiny and not Lyons? Hell, why is Lyons ****** for me to save the day. I'm technically a volunteer member of her unit, so shouldn't the noble commander gladly lay down her life for her soldier, especially considering I'm a teenager. And why god why can't I just pop a few hundred rad-X? And why can't I get the super plot-device injection Augustus Foghorn Leghorn took to survive the very same room. Eden was pretty much backing me a hundred percent as long as I lied about using the FEV, so why couldn't have an option to say "Hey, I'm going to use the Purifier, but to survive the rads I need whatever Eden had". Why do we even have to hurry-can't the stupid super scientist warrior cult disarm whatever is about to explode and activate the purifier later after getting a volunteer from Underworld? All the enclave on the inside I mowed down and outside the super robot is done cleaning house, so why? And if I can convince Autumn to step down can't I convince him to not go on with blowing up the rotunda? WHY! WHY! WHY! (Look at that, nerd rage, and my HP is maxed)
 * They didn't blow up the Rotunda, that was project purity overloading. Which if you wait too long to do something, happens anyway.
 * It overloaded possibly due to sabotage. Li says as much over the intercom.
 * Something was clogged in the pipes and pressure was building; running the filtration was the only thing that could flush it out.
 * Just RE: the 'destiny' part, it's perhaps worth considering that the player-character by this point has almost single-handedly kick-started Project Purity, almost single-handedly recovered the G.E.C.K. that will bring salvation to the Capital Wasteland (even if the Enclave did mug him / her afterwards), almost single-handedly brought down Eden and the Enclave, etc. While Lyons, for all that it's her unit, has in comparison basically killed a lot of super-mutants. If I was someone was inclined to believe in such things as destiny and was believing that destiny had at that point guided a particular someone to be in that position, rank or not I know who I'd consider the more likely candidate.
 * Well, they fixed it. Ten dollars is the price of making everything make sense again.
 * It still does not make sense because the narrator calls you a coward and calls Fawkes "a true hero" if you don't stupidly almost kill yourself for no reason.
 * Yeah, it always bugged me that in a Crapsack World set After the End, where the common themes are survival and thinking outside the box to get ahead in life, the game itself gives you inconsistent themes about doing the right thing and being told to survive, the game ends with you being encouraged to sacrifice yourself instead of the people in your group who would live. Basically you're urged to basically kill yourself to Earn Your Happy Ending and an ending where everybody but you lives to enjoy Dad's dream. Don't kill yourself and send a radiation-immune companion in, get the Esoteric Happy Ending where everyone left lives and survives and can partake in Dad's dream. It doesn't make any sense.

Eden
For a computer, Eden doesn't seem to be all that bright. Someone apparently installed Windows Final Solution to his personality. Even if you agree to help him insert the FEV virus, he makes no attempt to help you. I mean, he DOES have a bunch of VTOLs sitting around. What, all of the sudden he can't have you hop on one in safety to take you to the Jefferson Memorial? Then again that would make too much sense and this game seems to pride itself on trying to stay away from that road.
 * Of course it could be that the Vertibirds are piloted by humans which aren't loyal to him like all the troops or he could think that you would want to find some way to get to the control room without landing on a surely guarded helipad if he can control them. It's not likely that he's programmed with how to teach people to pilot VTOLs if it is human controlled.
 * He borrowed all the other Presidents personalities... so the incompetence could be a Take That!
 * By that point in the game, Colonel Autumn and the vast majority of the Enclave (really, just about the whole thing except for the robots) have rebelled against Eden. The soldiers and scientists all report to Autumn, who is essentially Eden's human arm; nobody in the Enclave knows that he is a computer except for Autumn himself. It's quite conceivable that by that point, Eden has nobody left to trust but you, assuming Autumn has told the rest of the Enclave about the true nature of their leader. Judging by what's included in his computer/audio journals/etc., Autumn also knows some of Eden's plans, including the FEV thing, and has Eden's self-destruct code just in case he has to get rid of him. Since we never see Eden again once we've run into Autumn at the end of the game, it's quite possible that he's been destroyed by Autumn in the interim (though this doesn't explain why Enclave Radio is still going, even if it isn't a live broadcast; chalk this one up to a simple oversight, probably).
 * As I read it, the Enclave Eyebots you occasionally encountered on the Wasteland were the source of the radio signal that was receivable everywhere. Another NPC commented that they thought the Enclave Radio was nothing but a pre-war loop playing on forever. Unlike Galaxy News Radio, I do not think the Enclave's broadcast changed during the course of the game at all, supporting this idea. Granted, I have seen some Eyebots get destroyed and never lost the Enclave's signal. So either the Eyebots really are that pervasive, or it is an oversight.
 * According to the Fallout wiki the Enclave radio goes down if you convince Eden to destroy Raven Rock and the Eyebots just move along broadcasting static; indicating that Raven Rock is the source of the transmission and the Eyebots simply repeated it for those who lacked radios and possibly to boost it. Also the Enclave signal did change, exactly once after the purifier incident: "The Enclave is back! Not just on your radio but on the streets, in your homes and lives Etc. Etc." Other than that it kept broadcasting the same things.
 * I can confirm that signal disappears if Raven Rock is destroyed. I can also confirm the "The Enclave is back!" broadcast being added to the rotation after the purifier incident. It even includes a short interview with Colonel Autumn. There is one other time it changes. I don't know when it gets added, but there is a second broadcast added with Eden talking about how the Enclave is going to bring clean water to the Wasteland with "their" Project Purity.
 * You forgot to mention that you're able to convince him to kill himself with all of two sentences of dialogue. Worst. Supercomputer.Ever.
 * The reasoning in both ways in which you convince Eden to shut himself down is pretty sound, it just isn't carried out very well because the player is given whopping two lines to deliver them. The first way, in which you convince him that he doesn't have the ability to keep even his own army from falling apart let alone his master plan to restore U.S. government to power rests on him—as a logical machine—not wanting to invest effort and resources into a losing cause. The second, in which you convince him that his justification for his rule (his superb ability for rational thinking) is irrational—if a computer programmed to be infallible develops attributes it was not designed to have (such as true intelligence) it no longer follows its original programming and thus its infallibility is not unquestionable. And if said computer uses circular logic to prove you wrong, you can use its argument as proof that it is indeed conducting an illogical error. Upon finding out, Eden panics and in desperation reformats his system to erase his mistakes, which allows the player to input self-destruction commands into him in his blank state.
 * IIRC, the Fallout Bible states that the ZAX line of supercomputers were not designed to be fully sentient. Eden has more or less evolved to sentience by being on-line for over 200 years. So, as supercomputers go, he's not all that bright in Fallout terms.
 * Or in other words, Eden is operating way beyond his intended operating capacity. That could account for his oversights and instability.
 * It's pretty safe to say that as soon as Autumn found out about how Eden not only let you out of the stasis chamber but gave you back ALL OF YOUR WEAPONS in the MIDDLE OF THE BASE any mutualism among them was terminated. I'm surprised I didn't find a broken computer monitor personally.

unaffected by FEV?
Despite what mutations you might pick up in the game, you are, apparently, unaffected by the FEV virus if you choose Lyons to sacrifice herself.
 * It doesn't actually say as such... but given the backstory, that's not totally illogical. Most of the above-ground mutations are due to, excluding ghoulification and some of the mutated animals, FEV exposure in the first place, either the original form or the mutated airborne (and much less mutagenic and shorter-lasting) form. Super Mutants were completely dipped into base FEV after exposure to FEV's airborne form, the Master and his absorbed minds were dipped into FEV without much radiation or airborne FEV exposure. Deathclaws were pre-War experiments most of which were later exposed to FEV, centaurs are from throwing too many things into an FEV vat at once. The Fallout Bible adds Brahmin, radscorpions, and all the mutated rats and roaches to the list. Anything that was alive and on the surface of the continental United States was probably exposed to airborne FEV. It's not hard to imagine the Eden-modified virus to work based not on mutations, but on FEV exposure. Since the Enclave's location and the vault dwellers were never exposed to airborne FEV or large amounts of the normal stuff, the modified virus probably doesn't notice anything unusual, even Harold's blood or a radiation regeneration modification. That'd still screw the surface population, though, and killing off the Brahmin means that even many of those descended from vault dwellers would die.
 * You are affected by the FEV virus. If you drink the purified water in Broken Steel after using the FEV, you suffer a stat drain and will die after drinking four bottles. Eden said you'd be fine because you were 'born in a vault', which by then you know is not correct. Anyone who thinks the FEV won't affect them is not paying attention to the plot. Choosing to do use the FEV is a choice to poison yourself, and should give you 'Stupid Karma', not 'Bad Karma'.

Daddy still loves his Complete Monster
Dad still loves you, even if you admit to him that you set off the bomb in Megaton. He doesn't seem to mind if you shoot good people in the head too. Thanks dad.
 * No, its not idiocy, its an actual phenomenon that has been documented in real life. Parents can and will go to extreme lengths to outright ignore things their children do. They love their children and refuse to accept the possibility that they could have done something so hideous, and even if they accept it, many parents will still love their child, because no matter what they've done, they're still their children. He might be horrified by what you did, but you're still James' child, and parents are not rational around their children.
 * Would she know about it? Would she be watching me? And is there actually a 'decapitate children+ cook for dinner' mod somewhere out there? Because I, for one, have been searching in vain.
 * Uh... well there is a cannibalism perk. And a mod that lets you kill the children in the game. So yes.
 * Not really. I can't speak for the troper two responses above me, but I hope to hell my Dad would be a little concerned if I turned into a scourge of God and put me down or at least stop me from destroying everything pure and decent. Parental love is not a free ride.
 * However, parental love has convinced many that their children are 'not to blame' for whatever terrible things they do, and it's possible for people to rationalize horrific acts if those acts are committed by someone they love. James, having lost his wife and with most of the people he knew (Li and the other scientists, members of Vault 101) estranged or dead, would likely be willing to let quite a lot slide from his son/daughter. An apropos example.
 * Here's my take on this: nearly every NPC who's run into James before you kind of mentions (directly by Dr. Li, indirectly by most others) that he's got a one-track mind. Presumably, his top priority in nearly all his actions is Project Purity; he got sidetracked by getting a child (you) and losing a wife (and research partner), so he goes to the Vault to make sure you're dropped off somewhere safe and at the same time see if there isn't a G.E.C.K. there for the taking (and since there wasn't one, he left when he could; as far as the PC is concerned, he didn't really think that one all the way through, obviously). Perhaps by the point you finally meet up again, he just didn't care about scolding you anymore; or perhaps he simply thinks you're old enough that he's not going to question your decisions externally. He needs the project completed to his ideal, and he knows you're his best shot at that happening (since, you know, you're The Chosen One). So, while there's probably a bajillion holes in my hypothesis here, it seems plausible (though still disconcerting; it Just Bugs Me in that sense).
 * I don't know about you, but carrying around love letters from a suit-wearing assassin would at LEAST earn me a raised eyebrow and demands to know what the hell I'd been up to when my parents weren't looking.
 * I wondered exactly the same thing and that it would've made interesting dialogue options. You are the family's only child, 19 years old when he's... late 20's or early 30's, and he is professional assassin who is willing to blow a bomb, killing lots of people. Would YOU hand your little girl into care of such man? However, given the material of the letters, where over the time  My speculation is, that if James knew what kind of man Burke is he would have asked "what the hell you were thinking?", then calm down after seeing the Power of Love in the letters and then two other options
 * But that would require an option to pull the letters from your pocket and show them to your dad, which doesn't happen. The game just doesn't allow for that depth of interaction here, so we should assume the in-world explanation is that from the time you recover Dad to the time he dies, it's a straight line - No time to stop and chat, so Dad still doesn't know anything more than what you're allowed to talk about in the dialogue options.
 * It does make for some pretty interesting mental dialogues, though. (What, your parents never go through * your* pockets when you're not looking? Man. Guess my family either has trust issues, or they're looking for Tic-Tacs.)
 * Simple reason for this is: If you did shoot good people in the head, and set off a bomb in Megaton and did plenty of other atrocities, and he needed to get a world-saving project going, it was probably in his best interests to fake that he was proud of you and try not to piss you off so he didn't get the same treatment. You shouldn't actually give a flying crap if he's disappointed in you anyway, so what's the big deal?
 * IDK, about any of you but I was totally upset when he found out about the whole blowing up Megaton thing. I felt like he knew from the moment he laid eyes on me when he got out of the tranquility lounger. So embarrassed...but then again, my RL Dad looks/sounds exactly like James so I was about to be like 'OH SHIT I AM SO SORRY And for enslaving a ton of people and children, and eating people, and crushing Moira's dreams' but it didn't have a 'confess fucking everything' option. '
 * I suppose in the end since every family is different and every relationship within different, James is as much a blank slate as the player character is. However you rationalize or not their relationship, it simply is a very simple and straight forward relationship presented with very little actual undertones.
 * I'm not taking a side on whether this makes sense or not. But if you complete Tranquility Lane by playing along with Betty while gleefully telling her how much fun you're having in earshot of dog dad, your dad still says "You saved me" in a voice of wonder, even though he'd refused to do the same.

unknown history
The history before your exit of the vault seems to have been produced in the factory of ambiguity, packed in the box of vagueness, put on the truck of enigma, shipped on the cargo ship of obscure, and was then finally swallowed whole by the whale of implacability.
 * If it weren't such a conundrum, could it possibly have made any sense? Whether just the vaults history, or that of the entire world, explaining it would leave so many holes that we are probably better off not knowing.
 * What history? Considering that the majority of the world's books and terminals are burned out, what would people really know about the world other than 'the U.S. and China had a war, nuked the world, and now here we are.'
 * In the museum aboard Rivet City, you can read their attempts at piecing together pre-war history and some of it is wildly wrong. Not only is the history largely lost and scattered, but some in the world are actively re-shaping it for their own purposes. If you go to the Lincoln Memorial, you can meet a group of slavers who will buy Lincoln artifacts in order to destroy them. They are trying to eliminate a symbol that their slaves might rally around.
 * Oh, and what the hell is happening over in Europe during all of this? A terminal implies that Moriarty came from some other country, which we will assume is Ireland. There are also a lot of dead Chinese secret agents running around. I kept waiting for China or Britannia to show up and be the new Big Bad, but instead we just learn that Thomas Jefferson is god of all Idiot Plots. Maybe only the USA got nuked and the rest of the world decided to leave it at that and get on with their lives?
 * Europe is likely a giant version of DC: one serious target-rich environment in case of nuclear war. Capital cities and military bases all over the place (and not nearly as far apart by comparison), centuries-old feuds waiting to reignite, very few isolated places to escape to... probably the LAST place you'd want to be in case of nuclear war.


 * Then we have Tenpenny, who admits to being a stereotypical high-class Englishman, who came over from Europe and found his tower completely intact and decided to use it as his own personal palace. To be fair he is pretty delusional so he might just be imagining it, bit still.
 * I agree that Tenpenny is just freaking nuts. He doesn't even have a proper English accent, and dresses like a British Redcoat soldier minus tall furry hat, so yeah, he's probably just an old, rich guy obsessed with and probably mis-informed about British culture. End irrelevant chiming-in.
 * Let's assume that the communication cables around the globe are broken. Not even slightly implausible... hell, most of the endpoints will have been nuked, bombed or EMPd. Also, communication satellites are dead. After 200 years, near certainty even if they survived everything else. This means no long range comms at all, and it isn't like people are tripping over working transatlantic or pacific aircraft or shipping. You wanna find out what is in Europe? Prepare to spend a few weeks on a yacht, and hope your navigation skills are pretty good, and that the weather isn't dangerous, and that giant mutant seamonsters don't eat you. Then hope it isn't a worse radioactive wasteland than the US. Oh, and then come back and tell everyone about what is going on.
 * For that matter, what's happening over in Malaysia, Timbuktu, Brazil, Japan, or Freedonia? They're not the focus of the game, just like they weren't in the first two games. This is a weird thing to be Just Bugged By.
 * It is relevant, because it strains the plot to suggest that Europe and America would be cut off from each other for two centuries. Unless there are sea monsters like the above troper suggested, someone would have tried to cross by now and bring news. And if one side of the pond were significantly better off than the other, there would be refugees. But no one even mentions it.
 * Did you miss the part about how freaking hard it would be just to try and get there? Considering how deadly walking across the street is, why would ocean travel be somehow easier? Hell, there's not even any communication between Washington and the next state over, let alone the other side of the country. Cross-country trips are notably rare in this series just because of it. Humanity has to start entirely from scratch - they have no infrastructure, no resources, and still have to deal with constant conflict and giant man-eating monsters. They have to reinvent everything and then reinvent it in a hostile environment - and consider that on top of how long it took humanity to travel long distances in the first place and how dangerous sea travel was for centuries until the technology finally existed to make it safe enough. Seriously, how is anyone going to build a boat when there's no trees and a working factory is a rarity and likely a life-or-death affair? And lets not even forget the scarcity of food and utter lack of potable water - a long ocean voyage to Europe requires provisions out the ear and there's no practical way of getting them in those quantities anymore. Plus the ocean is likely dangerously radioactive, so you can't eat fish (raw fish, no less) and even if sea water wasn't already a sure-fire way to die of thirst on an ocean voyage, you'd likely die of radiation poisoning. That's why you don't find out. Because as far as we've been shown, there's just no plausible way for this to happen and after the aftermath of nuclear war and the rebooting of humanity, not much will to make it happen until people can manage to sustain themselves where they are, let alone elsewhere.
 * Two words: The Kraken. If garden-variety crabs get turned into 6-foot horrors, imagine what a giant squid would become.
 * Mirelurks are what the effin Crabs became, just think for a moment about what the damn Sharks are now! I wouldn't go near the Ocean for all the caps and ammo in the country.
 * I wonder how Australia is doing during all this.....Oh god, the mutant kangaroos.
 * Conventional wisdom says that, in the even of nuclear war, Australia will but utterly untouched, uninvolved, and will collectively be saying "WTF, mate?"
 * not to mention mutant platypus! EEEK! (perhaps they mutate into normal animals like ducks or beavers).
 * Haven't any of you heard of ham radios? Operating at certain frequencies, radio waves can be bounced around the world - its certainly possible to receive radio transmission from Japan, for instance, in the continental United States. Assuming the requisite technology exists, there's no reason people in the US couldn't have received transmissions from other areas of the world, and vice versa. The only real reason is the limited scope of the setting of the game.
 * Ham radio use assumes that the ionosphere isn't massively screwed up still as a result of the nuclear war. Because Fallout uses SCIENCE! and not Science, it's entirely possible that longer-distance ionosphere bounces are impossible or at least take very fancy, very rare equipment.
 * This makes the assumption that people have retained the knowledge to communicate worldwide with a ham radio. With the amount of historical and technological data lost, it's not a huge stretch to say that people are too busy trying to stay alive to bother rediscovering worldwide radio communications.
 * Plus we do get radio messages, they're just all from China. (I don't mean mama Dulce's, I mean the various Chinese remnant hideouts. And the dead Chinese commando with the working radio under his corpse.) How many people do you think know Chinese when they don't even know who the first presidents were?
 * Have any of you played Fallout? The first game? In the intro movie, we are told, basically, that Europe's political systems degenerated into little countries that hate each other and want each others' resources. When countries hate each other and want each others' resources, the result tends to be war. I think it's safe to assume that while China and the U.S. were destroying their civilizations with nukes, Europe was busily doing exactly the same thing with conventional weapons. Think of Germany after WW 2... it was a big pile of rubble... now imagine the same thing if the war hadn't stopped, and every single one of the allies immediately started fighting each other over what was left. That's probably Europe in Fallout: many small nations, living in bombed-out cities, faced with constant famine and disease due to the destruction of their old infrastructure, and locked in perpetual war with each other. It's possible they eventually stopped fighting, but unlikely they did so before creating a new dark age. I doubt they have much interest in anything outside of Europe. The More Things Change...
 * The creators have said that Tenpenny came from England (or whatever it is now) to try to carve out a better life, and he said that he did this to inspire imagination among players on just how BAD the rest of the world is for people to come here to get away from whatever is where they came from. Make no mistake, the entire series says quite clear the entire world was bombed to hell and back.
 * We have no idea how bad off Europe is, but if Tenpenny is actually from the U.K., things are probably not that great. It's safe to assume all the European powers had nuclear weapons and probably few qualms about using them after the general U.S./China war kicked off while they were already fighting. Then again, Tenpenny is a ruthless entrepreneur who promotes living a pre-War lifestyle, so it's entirely possible he's supposed to be a example/commentary on naturalized American tycoons like Carnegie, with less Scottish thrift and more English upper-class entitlement.
 * We certainly have many clues. The Resource Wars prior to the Great War featured a limited nuclear exchange between the European Union and the Middle East just before the oil ran out. They fought for a little while longer and then quit just in time for the US and China to go at it.
 * A certain character in Point Lookout is strongly suggested as being a covert agent for a European power, however, so if they entered the former USA after the war, it might point to at least some European organizations being still at work.
 * Hell, what happened to Mexico! The U.S.A. and Canada are not the whole continent! Since we've been a pretty neutral country since the 1900's, I kinda doubt anyone would care spending their bombs on us. And the center of the country is surrounded by very tall mountains, which might have isolated it from the radioactive winds. Makes one wonder.
 * Mexico likely degenerated into a patchwork of drug-lord run feudalisms when the occupying US forces were decimated. The sad thing is, that wouldn't be too far of a fall from what the country is right now.
 * Well, I assume Mexico didn't change much. The rest of the world just became a nice Mexico.
 * According to the Fallout Bible it was occupied by the US even before Canada was, in order to seize control of their resources. And now we got Raul in New Vegas, who confirms that at least Mexico City was in fact bombed.
 * In the first or second game of the series, you can recover a holodisc mentioning some of the pre-war events; among other things, we hear of the European powers arguing with the Middle East over the last oil. Last mention of Europe is in regards to this conflict, and says merely "limited nuclear exchange".
 * 'Course the other thing you could take from this is that if Moriarty and Tenpenny came over from Europe, then 1) there are still people living there, and 2) they have the ability to make long-range boats. In some ways that's surprisingly optimistic for Fallout. Perhaps they trade with the Commonwealth and leave DC alone.
 * A major point of Fallout games is that most people don't know what happen during the great war, those that are old enough to remember only give very vague details like going with Fallout's theme of letting go of the past, "its over let's move on and rebuild" if anything Fallout 3 tells you the most about the great war.
 * Where are you getting all this from? Fallout's overall theme was never about "Letting go of the past." It was always about the cycle of violence repeating itself ("War never changes"). Fallout 3 told very little about the Great War, as it repeats what had already been told in the previous Fallout games.
 * Dude, "letting go of the past" is kind of the entire message of Moira Brown's speech to you, and is the underlying theme throughout New Vegas. Also Fallout 3 featured Operation Anchorage and tons of computers and tapes from people during the war and bombings, as well as a ghoul or two to tell their own story.
 * What are you talking about? "Let Go And Begin Again" is the theme of the DLCs of Fallout New Vegas, not of it's main questline, nor is it the underlining theme of Fallout 3. As a matter of fact, Fallout 3 cannot let go of the past. The various Ghouls in Fallout 3 often cannot let go of the past, as we have seen with Desmond, who is completely obsessed with his 200-year-old rivalry with Calvert. In two separate storylines, two different ghouls have problems with Alistair Tenpenny and are fixated on killing him for past grievances. Even non-ghouls are fixated on the past. Agatha's Violin is all about getting an item that she's not sure ever actually existed that's in a place that, for all she knew, could be sealed up and inaccessible. Abraham Washington is all about digging up the past. The Slavers and escaped Slaves in the Capital Wasteland are warring over ancient Lincoln relics. The problem with Operation Anchorage is that the simulation has been given many layers of doubt as the in-story character logs outside the simulation make note that the General in charge kept changing the simulation until was completely divorced from reality.

Amata
The Overseer has ordered you killed. Not arrested—killed. He's already demonstrated his determination to cause the funerals of everybody who he so much as suspects may have been involved in James' escape—Jonas has just flat-out been gunned down, and they shoot to kill when they see you without even a pretense of attempting to detain you. You've just shot your way out of Vault 101. I never got out without killing multiple security officers, including Chief Hannon. You did this with the Overseer's gun. He has to know where you got it—in fact, he's certain enough of Amata's involvement that he orders that she-his own daughter-be tortured for information, at which point you come in, kill the guard ordered to do it, and basically threaten the Overseer with his own gun. Amata is now just as involved as you or Jonas, people the Overseer had issued "shoot-to-kill" orders against. But Amata, a known accomplice to what has to be the greatest rebellion against any Overseer's authority in Vault history, thinks it's a good idea to stay when you open the Vault and invite her to come with you.
 * This situation SCREAMS for a mod.
 * Amata and the others retreated into the lower part of the vault and barricaded themselves in. You know, where you found them? Yeah the clock may have said years have gone by, but the storyline assumes you do everything as soon as you leave the vault.
 * What do you mean "his own gun?" Unless you're just thinking of every gun in the vault as the Overseer's gun.
 * You've gotta stick with your family, I guess. Plus, Amata and all the other Vault 101 residents are basically taught that leaving the Vault means a slow, horrible, painful death. It makes sense that rest of the people there are surprised to see you when you return, because they probably would have given you up for dead by that point.
 * I guess the Enclave Power Armor, Plasma Rifle, Laser Rifle, Alien Blaster, Fat Man mini-nuke launcher, and the two companions I had in tow (a Brotherhood of Steel soldier and a dog) had nothing to do with those odd looks...
 * Seriously, why wasn't anyone in the vault curious about the super mutant sidekick or my super armor? And why did the eviler! overseer try to kill me with a rifle? With a nuke launcher, attack dog, and "meta human" with a gatling laser, and power armor he clearly shouldn't try to kill me. Oh, and the first thing they say to you when you return? "I didn't recognize you with all that outside dust and grime!". Maybe you didn't recognize me because of the extensive facial surgery. Or because of the metal mask.
 * The Overseer was also in full Knight Templar mode, doing anything he could do to save the vault. He wasn't going to throw away the only trustworthy Overseer candidate in said vault.
 * You know, for that matter, when Amata wakes you up, she says that Vault Security is "looking for you." They didn't think to check your bedroom?
 * I recall there being a dialogue option in which you use this as assumed evidence for being suspicious of Amata - how did she get here before they did?
 * And then there's the fact that there's Officer Kendall right outside your room, being momentarily distracted by those radroaches. Remember where you got that first Vault Security Armor?
 * What bugs me is that every time you're asked by your dad (or Doc Li) why you left the Vault you interestingly can't answer that the Overseer wanted to see you dead.
 * Especially to James. "Well, I wanted to stay, Dad, but there was that little thing with the Overseer sending all his goons after me and trying to have me KILLED. Thanks for that, by the way."
 * I thought that too. Maybe, whether you're the Last, Best, Hope or the Scourge Of Humanity, Calling the Old Man Out is just too mean.
 * Yeah, but you can tell him to "go ****** himself," so, that theory may be out the window.
 * To expand on this, James is built as this paragon of justice and with a Good Karma total of 9001. Therefore, he is immune to taking responsibility for his actions. That means running out of a safe shelter from a post-apocalyptic hellhole without even informing his son/daughter to work on a project that didn't even work the first time around, but now that you have a really sketchy and dangerous lead it's alright.
 * Fixed the above for you. Also, James's tapes, and Li's words after you find her in Rivet City, indicate that the project would have worked if it hadn't been for internal divisions and James needing to find a safe place for his child. Similarly, I'm not exactly sure why the Overseer decided that 'a guy escaping with no intention to return' is grounds for issuing shoot-on-sight orders, but assuming that he'd been a little more rational there really would be no safer place for James' kid than the Vault.
 * Fixed the above for you as well; no need to emphasize daughter.

proof Overseer wants you dead?
Is there any proof the Overseer actually wants you dead just because your Dad left? It's stated pretty clearly that "Anyone caught outside of their rooms will be shot", or something similar. Perhaps the Overseer did just want to talk, and the guards were only attacking because they'd been ordered to shoot anyone wandering about?
 * If you talk to him, agree to surrender and give him your weapons, then he tries to kill you. With your own weapons.
 * Don't forget that Amata told you they shot Jonas—they didn't even BOTHER to arrest him. And if you read his terminal later, it's implied that he had the previous Overseer, who let James in, murdered in order to prevent others from getting in.
 * I seem to recall her telling me that they beat Jonas to death? Not that this changes anything, but still.
 * What really sucks is how the game punishes you by installing an even more corrupt overseer during the trouble on the homefront quest if you off Amata's dad. Amata being mad at you is understandable, but it's really the Vault's vault for not trying to replace the sick puppy I put down. Amata's dad tried to kill me, killed Jonas, and was responsible for the guards I had to kill, and its very evident that he is, yet no one sympathizes. Its clear why they ask you to leave-they feel ashamed when faced with your common sense.
 * I didn't believe that it was the game necessarily punishing you: Your actions convinced the Vault dwellers that the old Overseer was right, so naturally they'd elect someone who was if anything even more rabidly anti-outsider than the old one, taking the old Overseer's beliefs to the next level if you will. A pretty natural response, I think; they definitely wouldn't elect a nicer or more tolerant Overseer, since the general belief would be the old Overseer not being hard enough.
 * There needs to be a mod that makes the Trouble on the Homefront quest make more sense, and also makes it so that you're not locked out afterwards.
 * There's a mod on Fallout 3 Nexus called Vault 101 Revisited.
 * It makes sense, the Enclave regardless of which side the Wanderer is working for is going on a witch hunt. Remember what happened in Fallout2 where the Enclave greeted the Vault 13 dwellers with gatling guns. They will not welcome the overseer with open arm and instead gun down anyone who resists.

Cannibalism is evil
It bugs me that, in a post-apocalyptic setting where food and clean water is scarce, you are automatically considered evil for engaging in cannibalism regardless of circumstance. Sure, killing people in order to eat them like the folks in Andale should still be considered evil, but eating human flesh when no other sustenance is available should not be anything out of the ordinary in a wasteland riddled with slavers, raiders, feral ghouls and supermutants.
 * Notice that those slavers, raiders, feral ghouls, and supermutants are the one eating their neighbors, not the normal townies. And you expect to be a cannibal and then to be treated better than those other cannibalistic psychos? It's kinda hard to be neighborly with someone who looks at you as a walking Happy Meal. Beyond that, the wasteland isn't nearly desolate enough for people to be starving to death, which means that eating people as a first or second (or third) resort is, like now, seen as an uncivilized and barbaric choice. There's definitely other food out there - buildings full of 200 year old canned goods, and others who raise brahmin and the like. Unless extreme starvation conditions are in effect, most Western-derived cultures (which would include the United States) are not going to look kindly on cannibalism as a first course of action. Especially when only the bad guys knowingly eat people.
 * True enough, though the fact that old prepackaged food is still viable after 200 years is one of those "gamey" elements of the setting. It is mostly the fact that cannibalism makes you lose karma even if no one sees you do it that bugs me, implying that it is an inherently evil act regardless of circumstance - even if the circumstances that would justify eating human flesh are unlikely to occur in this relatively hospitable wasteland.
 * Notice what you just said - 'circumstances that would justify eating human flesh are unlikely to occur'. That's the key to why it's BAD; there are alternatives to eating humans, and if you don't take them you're doing so out of malice rather than need. That's the key to the karma issues here... on top of the fact that karma's an overall measure of your innate selfishness/selflessness; if you constantly steal things, you're going to be seen as something of an evil or at least petty figure even if you kill slavers, whereas if you take the occasional item which belonged to a slaver you just killed (which is still theft, albeit from a dead person) people won't think as badly of you as they would that new guy from Vault 101 who has a reputation for eating people.
 * So if someone eats unhealthy food as opposed to healthy food when they have a choice makes it an "evil" act? No one is in danger here. If you come across a corpse and you're starving in a wasteland, then what exactly is "evil" about it? Bethesda even overshadows this as being "A Okay" with The Family, where you take a NEGATIVE karma hit when you kill cannibals who are obviously intelligent enough to arm, clothe, and provide excellent accommodations, but no, they've still gotta hunt down HUMANS and eat them (or as they put it, "drink their blood." Oh good, polite cannibals. Now I've heard everything). Fact is, the karma system is bunk.
 * You completely missed the point of that quest. The Family isn't eating people, they are literally just drinking blood. The people of the Family used to be cannibals, but Vance took them in and trained them to only drink blood to satiate their desire. If you take a peaceful route in the quest, you can work out a deal between the Family and Arefu in which Arefu gives bloodpacks, and that also has the bonus that the Family no longer sets upon unwary wastelanders.
 * You can eat Human Flesh that is looted from Feral Ghouls without taking a Karma hit, so it appears that the real sin here is desecrating a corpse.
 * I thought it was more that the sin was knowingly eating a human, whereas the stuff you pick up off a Feral Ghoul is actually ghoul flesh, which was once human but is not acknowledged as such anymore.
 * It's worth noting that devouring a corpse only gives you -1 karma. Compare this to using someone else's computer, which is -5 karma.
 * Yeah, and...? Dude, don't touch my computer or I will flip out. Touching another man's computer without permission...EvenEvilHasStandards.
 * The karma system was based on our morals folks. You know the people that design, code and play the game? Not the people in the post apocalyptic wasteland. People today find cannibalism wrong, so it's wrong in the game. Being given the option at all is already pushing it.
 * Er, well, if they're basing their morals on contemporary models then they're doing a rubbish job of simulating an apocalyptic wasteland.
 * Bullshit. The Karma system is based on a post-apocalyptic morality, as it should be. You get positive Karma for killing raiders - not incapacitating them, providing them with lawyers and setting up court cases for them. As such, consuming human flesh in a hellish wasteland where there are no crops and food is few and far between is not only acceptable and justifiable, but in some cases, absolutely necessary. If you're going to start claiming that the Karma system should be beholden to modern morality, you wouldn't be allowed to go around shooting people with guns in the first place. And really, provided you didn't kill someone to do it, what is it about cannibalism which makes it so exceptionally evil that it should not belong in a world where you can take drugs, sell people into slavery and commit genocide?
 * ^ Gee, I dunno, the fact that you are eating PEOPLE like some kind of wild animal despite being surrounded by wild life and forage-able items, making you seem less like a person and more like a monster?
 * So eating people is bad because it involves eating people? Sound kinda circular. I assume that the troper above wondered why a Capital Wasteland Cannibal should seem like a monster in the first place!
 * Capital Wasteland or not, the majority of people will still most likely view cannibalism pretty negatively. As a couple of entries above me pointed out, there are plenty of wild animals around to hunt and there's also a fair amount of food that can be scavenged from ruins. In this wasteland, cannibalism just isn't necessary. Therefore, people will be uneasy when they see someone going around eating dead people when there are easily accessible alternative food sources around.
 * So, cannibalism is wrong because it's yucky?
 * -1 karma is so little, it's probably the equivalent of something that would get you a dirty look, but everyone's forgotten an hour later. It's not Evil, it's Slightly Unsettling. The penalty makes perfect sense if you take the scale into account.
 * Fridge Brilliance for anyone who has seen The Book of Eli or The Road - frequent repeated cannibalism is popularly believed to damage the nervous system and induce psychotic behaviour (whether or not this is true in our reality is unimportant, Fallout reality is dictated by SCIENCE!). The Karma hit - even if nobody sees you - therefore makes perfect sense; your cannibalism-induced insane behaviour is noted as evil by others.
 * Read more here.

Who buys slaves?
The slavers in Paradise Falls catch and imprison slaves, but nobody in the Capital Waste seems to be buying them. Not even the communities that would easily accept the concept of slavery, like Tenpenny Tower. The only slave outside the Falls seems to be Gob in Megaton, and not even he seems to be "officially" a slave, just badly in debt.
 * There are slaves in Evergreen Mills, owned by raiders. And you talk to some free slaves who were privately owned.
 * In Fallout 2, there were places that officially used slaves - and places that seemed to tolerate it. But for the most part, slaves seem to be sold mostly to criminal interests, raiders, and (occasionally) butchers to judge by how a certain restaurant came into being. But again, the Capitol Wastelands the past ten or thirteen years has been scourged by the Brotherhood of Steel's local forces, who have taken a harder line towards certain practices than they did in California.
 * Well, the Commonwealth provides the slave collars. Probably they buy a large portion of what's brought in, especially if the slavers are as prolific as it's possible for the player to be.
 * If you talk to one of the Lyons' Pride, he describes growing up in a Hell on Earth town called "Pitt" (Pittsburgh?). I guess that the Brotherhood of Steel, Lyons branch is the only force for good in the entire Eastern US, and so most of the slaves are probably sold to owners outside the explorable map area.
 * Yeah, The Pitt is officially Pittsburgh.
 * It was confirmed in the DLC that slaves are sold to the raiders in The Pitt.
 * If all the slaves are sold to the raiders of the Pitt then why does Eulogy charge extra for Squirrel because he's good with computers? And why would child slaves be popular if their only purpose is to be killed in an arena?
 * The idea is that younger slaves are easier to brainwash and control than older slaves who are more likely to be stubborn and retain some of their personal identity. Child slaves can be trained the way their owners want. A child like Squirrel with an aptitude for technology is good to have around and is much more useful to people like Ashur, whose goal is to get the Pitt 'producing' again. We don't see any children in the Pitt aside from little Marie, so any child slaves or skilled workers there are probably stashed away somewhere else, being forced to work on tech. The older, unskilled worker slaves seem to be the ones being fed to the bloodsport of the arena.

Wanderer can't be pure-strain
A Fridge Logic moment that occurred to me after beating the game. I just realized that your character is probably NOT, in fact, a "pure-strain" human. Dad and Mom were from Rivet City, not Vault 101, and you were also born in Rivet City. Dad just took you inside Vault 101 to escape the Wasteland after your mom dies. Dr. Li tells you as much. Knowing that, there's absolutely no reason to believe you'd be in any way immune to Eden's FEV final solution, since you're actually descended from Wastelanders and not Enclave or Vault Dwellers.
 * It's not clear where Dad and Mom were originally from, but the first point of origin the game gives you is Rivet City, so unless they're Enclave defectors or escapees from a recently opened Vault (which the game never gives you an indication of), then it's reasonable to assume that they were Wastelanders and thus, along with you, vulnerable to Eden's FEV.
 * Well if they were Enclave defectors that would explain why dad is so eager to keep the Purifier out of the Enclave's hands when they show up.
 * You were right. In Broken Steel, the FEV-infected Aqua Pura (the bottled water that is made from Project Purity) causes a debuff, and can eventually kill you if you take too much of it. I'm assuming Eden doesn't know the exact specifics of your PC's history, and simply believes through Enclave intel that you are simply a Vault Dweller.

Convincing President Eden
It really bugs me how easy it is to convince President Eden to suicide himself and take the Enclave along with him. All it takes is a fairly high Intelligence score, or a single speech check of average difficulty. You don't even really present any sort of particularly convincing argument to him, either. You just basically tell him that he sucks and should die, and he just agrees with you. You'd think a 200-year old Evil Genius supercomputer would take a little more convincing persuasion to influence, especially given the incredibly self-assured, megalomaniacal nature of his constant radio broadcasts. "John Henry Eden: The question has been raised, I know, as to just how I came to be elected to this most illustrious office. Or whether or not I had been elected at all. To that I must answer; of course. Of course I was elected, sweet America, of course. Isn’t the right to vote the very foundation of a democracy? Unfortunately, in the interest of national security, I am not at liberty to discuss the details of the election, you understand. But rest assured, I am your president because the appropriate people of this great nation decided I should be. I am your duly elected representative."
 * Hell, the speech check against Colonel Autumn is much harder than the one against Eden; you have to pass two consecutive speech checks to get him to stand down, and they're both of pretty high difficulty too.
 * I mean, in Fallout 1 you had to have a really high speech skill AND complete a sidequest to be able to talk the Master to death. Even in Fallout 2, you needed a really high speech score to convince the Enclave soldiers to help you defeat Horrigan. I blitzed through the main quest and got to Eden with a level 7 character with only average speech skills, and still managed to easily get him to off himself. Convincing Eden to kill himself isn't even necessary or particularly beneficial (he still has his robots clear the exit for you if you simply agree to help him deliver the FEV), so there was absolutely no reason why Bethesda had to make it so easy to kill him. Destroying Eden and the Enclave should have been a "bonus" triumph, making it so easy really robs you of the sense of accomplishment.
 * He's supposed to be an amalgamation of every past US president, so he shouldn't be all that smart, some of them naturally watered him down.
 * Well, he's supposed to have their personalities together. But really it's like the programmers just blended the worst parts of Nixon, Hoover, and Buchanan. Where do we see Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt?
 * Maybe they were deemed "un-American" by Enclave's idiosyncratic interpretation of the ideals of the United States? We're talking about people who model their officers' uniforms after the Nazis...
 * We see Roosevelt in the Radio station broadcasts at least, they are based on his "Fireside Chats" according to the Fallout Wiki. He probably was designed so that the presidents that appeal to the Enclave make policy while the ones that appeal to the public make speeches.
 * You have to remember that the Fallout universe diverged from ours around the 1950's, where the 50's continued for another 150 years. So Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt are watered down by 150 years of Joe McCarthys.
 * I talked Eden to death by accident.
 * I was very disappointed that Eden did not respond to his rather pitiful attempts to talk him to death with "You fool! I was constructed with paradox absorbing crumple zones!"
 * While Eden has the personality of every president, he probably doesn't have the intelligence. And sure, he is a 200-year old evil genius, but you forget that he's a MECHANICAL 200-year old evil genius. Anyone with a computer will know that they wear out after a few years. Expecting a somewhat humanoid AI to be perfectly sane and intelligent after 200-years, even with maintenance (don't forget that the enclave can't exactly go down to PC world to get new parts) then you are thinking very unrealistically.
 * I'm pretty sure thinking unrealistically in the fallout universe became impossible after I convinced a robot wearing a powdered wig that I was Thomas Jefferson while dressed up as Abe Lincoln in order to steal the declaration of independence from it.
 * There again, you have an isolated mechanical mind long overdue for proper maintenance.
 * I just assumed Eden had been on the fritz for a while and his dragons had been picking up the slack. It explains why Eden was able to give an order to assure your character's safety while s/he went to his office, and then five seconds later Colonel Autumn gets on the intercom and says "Disregard that, please" and nobody bats an eye at disobeying a presidential order.
 * I already gave his thoughts on the Talking Monster To Death in prior entry but let me say it again: the reasoning used in both dialog paths is fitting and fairly smart, it is just written too short and requires too little understanding from the player. Convincing Eden that his work is futile because he cannot get it done without the help of subordinates like Autumn whom Eden can't control or convincing him that his programming/sanity is flawed are credible reasons for a sentient computer to give up what its doing. As for how easy it is, Eden's character is pretty much written on the theme of how impossible it is to control human behavior.
 * Part of the problem is that only some of the dialog paths make any sense, the other paths involve speech options that Eden himself has already disproved in his addresses on the radio.

"Lone Wanderer: You can't be president! You weren't elected! John Henry Eden: You're right. *Begins the dialog path to self-destruction*"
 * But then this kind of collapses in a single sentence:

"Lone Wanderer: [Speech] This has to end, Eden. You need to destroy yourself and your base. John Henry Eden: [Success]And why would I do that, when I am clearly the best hope for the people of the Wasteland? Lone Wanderer: You can't just decide to take over, and force everyone to follow you. John Henry Eden: What alternative would you suggest? Without the Enclave, what would the world do? Lone Wanderer: If you don't stop it now, where will it end? It's up to you to do what's right. John Henry Eden: Yes, I suppose it is. Very well, you shall have your wish. Once you have left, I will put an end to the Enclave."
 * Um, look again. Telling him he wasn't elected does absolutely nothing towards making him blow up. He basically says that the USA is in a state of emergency and under martial law, therefore democracy is suspended. He's just plain lying when he says he's a "duly elected representative".
 * Look again. You are given three different speech options at that point, and they all end with the same exact Logic Bomb about infallibility. He doesn't exactly have "paradox-absorbing crumple zones." The fact that he is president because he says so is part of the whole logic bomb and why his argument falls apart so quickly. Of course, this pales to the other speech options that make even less sense, where the questions are very quickly skipped over:


 * Actually, this does make sense. Eden became what it is over time by modeling himself after the US presidents, the ideals of democracy, etc. It essentially self brainwashed itself to the point that the BS is now literally indistinguishable from reality in its mechanical mind, so AI Is a Crapshoot works in the Lone Wanderer's favor here, because the logic in telling it to destroy itself because it's a despot is essentially reminding it what it believes itself to be: a democratically elected US president who also happens to be a logical, semi-sentient computer. The logic of its mechanical side merges with how seriously it's come to believe it's a president of the U.S., and hence it decides to fall on his sword because it is both a betrayal of everything it believes itself to personify (and Autumn never saw fit to disabuse it of its illusions, since they were essential to getting his hands on a HQ for the Enclave forces) and a logical fallacy to be a despot, so since it can't perform its role without being a hypocrite or running into an unassailable Logic Bomb, self destruction would be the only logical choice. In effect, you caused it to have a (partial) Heel Face Turn on the grounds of exposing the illogic of its hypocrisy. Note, Eden still wants the modified FEV to be distrubuted, but that just goes along with it's 1's and 0's programming about what's logical (the purification of the Capital Wasteland), not what's moral (since it's not human, this wouldn't factor into the equation).
 * The problem here is that Eden cannot be logical if it either knowingly lies or is deluded enough to believe it is the President. Canon sources point out that Eden's intended purpose was simply to monitor communications, not to continue the Enclave's work by either working towards genocide or by rallying the Enclave as its President. The next question becomes: If Eden can be convinced it's not actually the president, why can he not be made to understand that he might be wrong about its other illogical decisions? Eden can only be made aware of -one- issue with its so-called Logic, but not others, such as "Self-destruction" being the only "logical" choice, as discussed below. And Eden certainly is never given an option to discuss its plan to annihilate the wasteland, which is also ingrained into the Enclave mindset as much as Eden being president. But for some reason, the destruction of the Wasteland is hard-wired into Eden's systems, as you cannot leave Raven Rock without the FEV, even if you use Autumn's override code.

Convincing Eden (cont'd)
On a related note, it bugs me that once you've convinced Eden he's wrong the only option is to blow up Raven Rock. No option to somehow, you know, use the Enclave's highly advanced technology and organisation for the good of the Wasteland or anything. Eden seems to be well-meaning, even if he is rather amoral, so once you've convinced him he's wrong then it would surely be a better idea to convince him to do a Heel Face Turn- the Enclave is shown to be far more competent than the Brotherhood of Steel or anyone else in the game, and they have far better technology than anyone so with their resources you'd have a much better chance of actually rebuilding the Wasteland. The Enclave seem to be the only major group who are both capable and interested in doing more than squatting in the ruins of the pre-war world so it's annoying that they have to die unless you want to take a MIRV to the Moral Event Horizon.
 * I haven't played 3, but going by Fallout 2 the vast majority of enclave are purity obsessed Nazi stand-ins. Convincing the computer of its error won't deprogram the rest of them.
 * Yes, but in Fallout 3 we obviously see that Eden is the only villain in the spirit of 'true Enclave' while the rest of Enclave doesn't give a shit about him and follow Autumn who's a whole lot less radical and generally has a lot more in common with the Vault Dweller and the Brotherhood. Maybe it's just my Alternate Character Interpretation ,but F3's Enclave sans Eden were just Well Intentioned Extremists whom I found hard not to side with, given the game's crapsack world.
 * No, Autumn held the values of the enclave, too. He just didn't want to kill everything in the world outside the enclave, when instead he could just kill the mutants and raiders, and keep the normal people as citizens or slaves or something. Can't rebuild America if there's no people.
 * I was really hoping for an 'Autumn Wins' ending in which he takes over the purifier and uses his newfound power set up a new government that eradicates the Super Mutants and creates a stable if a bit radical society as opposed to BoS and the Wastelanders who have been sitting on their lazy asses for over 200 years.
 * Did you miss the part where Autumn was going to commit genocide on everyone who pretty much wasn't born in a vault? Including ghouls? And as Uncle Leo and Fawkes shows, not every single Super Mutant is chaotic evil, either.
 * Also, remember that even though Autumn didn't want to massacre all Wastelanders, he did want to destroy all other organizations such as the Brotherhood of Steel, so that the Enclave could rule the Wasteland with an iron fist. Just because Autumn wasn't completely genocidal doesn't mean that his plans are the best for the Wasteland.
 * Going back to Eden, it still doesn't answer the question of why you can't give him a new purpose to help the Brotherhood of Steel once you outlogic him? Yes Autumn and the Enclave soldiers aren't going to be convinces so easily, but you have to deal with them anyway no matter what.
 * Because he is completely ineffectual - as a sentient program tied to his box in Raven Rock he needs people to carry out his plans but due to his immobility he is unable to keep a short leash on them which is why Col. Autumn was able to betray him so easily. In short, if Eden can't do it in Raven Rock with couple of robots and security cameras, he is utterly useless in anything short robbing Enclave of their base.
 * I assume the question was why couldn't the Lone Wanderer convince Eden to help the Brotherhood instead of the Enclave. And to that question, I say it simply Bethesda keeping the Enclave unrelatable Exclusively Evil Complete Monsters. It's simply not in keeping with the rest of the setting for a bad guy to become a good guy. To wit, even if you don't blow up Raven Rock and leave on amicable terms, in Broken Steel,

Alien craft
A pre-war computer entry at the Citadel tells about a fallen alien craft that was never found or retrieved. You, the player on the other hand can find such craft, which not only emits radiation, and a radio signal, but has also crushed houses while falling. If this is the same craft, then the US military intelligence is the worst investigative office, ever in the game's world.
 * I'm pretty sure the message was about another alien craft, after all there's been an alien crash site in every one of the three games(Though one is a Star Trek thing and probably not canon). Given that the houses around are splinters and blackened by the blasts and that the alien body is just lying around next to the ship, I'd say it landed after the nukes not before(The body would go flying at least).
 * There's a truck on the far side of the wasteland shipping alien power cells, so they probably came from an earlier ship. The ship we find JUST crashed, since Mothership Zeta shows up to claim it. And yet another ship crashes and drops a Firelance on your head if you're lucky.
 * Heck, there are at LEAST two different alien crashes in Fallout 3. Looks like Earth is a major interest to this alien race for unknown reasons.
 * Aliens are not supposed to be canon in the Fallout universe. At some point during making the DLC, Bethesda apparently forgot that, which is why there is that discrepancy. Fallout New Vegas did revert back to the "aliens don't actually exist" policy.
 * I dunno canon, Easter Eggs and previous Fallout games from a hole in the ground, so I'm not about to wade into that whole quagmire, but since the entire aesthetic of Fallout is essentially 1950s 'raygun' science fiction taken to a Darker and Edgier post-apocalyptic setting, and since aliens and alien invaders were an integral part of 1950s science fiction, it makes perfect sense that aliens would show up in Fallout at some point.
 * Actually, there are several alien references in New Vegas, if you have the Wild Wasteland trait. There are no other references to aliens in New Vegas, otherwise.
 * Why the hell are aliens so interested in this miserable planet that was nuked to hell and back and is still war-torn? And if they're so interested, why haven't they taken any action? Their technology is so far superior they'd curb-stomp what's left of humanity in... what, a matter of hours? And yet they just fly about in their nigh-invulnerable ships, the biggest of which can blow up an area the size of a nation every few seconds, and not actually doing anything.
 * They're waiting until humans have cropfields for them to draw circles in and one-headed cattle for them to mutilate again.
 * The only plausible explanation I could come up with is they find humankind a source of amusement; much like a child watching an anthill. They can't possibly need resources from our radiation-poisoned planet. We never posed a threat, never even had a clue where they could be. But life-bearing planets are rare - nevermind planets with complex life. Earth is literally a galactic "winning lottery ticket" with intelligent lifeforms to observe and experiment on.
 * The only plausible explanation I could come up with is they find humankind a source of amusement; much like a child watching an anthill. They can't possibly need resources from our radiation-poisoned planet. We never posed a threat, never even had a clue where they could be. But life-bearing planets are rare - nevermind planets with complex life. Earth is literally a galactic "winning lottery ticket" with intelligent lifeforms to observe and experiment on.

Vault Dweller interactions
The developers seemed a bit lazy when it came to scripting your interactions with the other Vault dwellers in the prologue. Seemingly the only person of your age group that actually likes you is Amata, and Butch will always attempt to bully you. Maxing out Charisma does not make an iota of difference to your social status, and having high strength does not make Butch afraid of provoking you.
 * True, but they were going for a Justified Tutorial, so they probably had to be sure that the player saw everything necessary.
 * More ridiculous is the fact that Butch doesn't care whether your character is a sixteen year-old boy or sixteen year-old girl. One could think that Butch wouldn't try to punch a girl, but in fact he doesn't seem to care.
 * Actually, everyone probably hated you because you and your dad are weird and deviations from the norm are frowned upon in Vault society. Especially that. Also, Butch was about to smack around Amata, the Overseer's daughter. Why would he be afraid of hitting any other girls?
 * At least Butch is an equal opportunity bully. And it is possible through your interactions to make Amata despise you (kill her father and act unapologetic about it), and/or get Butch to open up to you (rescue his mother from the Radroaches or pass a Speech check to give him the courage to do it himself).

Super Mutant in Capital Rotunda
How did that Super Mutant Behemoth get into the Capital Rotunda? Did they grow it in there like a ship in a bottle?
 * It could fit by crawling through the wider doors.
 * The Capitol Rotunda has a large hole in it, visible from the outside.
 * Forget the fact that the Capitol Hill rotunda doesn't follow the contours of the outer dome at all...
 * Are you referring to the game? Because the real Capitol Rotunda is indeed right beneath the dome.
 * Super Mutants grow over time, making the largest mutants the oldest. Thus, the Behemoth is really a US Senator that is merely continuing his absurdly long filibuster.
 * And he was just kind enough to let them set up laser turrets around the room while they were preparing to attack him?

Enslaving Raiders=Evil, Killing Them=Not?
Why does enslaving a raider result in negative karma when killing them doesn't? Your options are: Running, leaving a murderer to roam free; attacking them, they're dead now; enslaving them, ending the conflict without violence or negligence. EEEEVVVVIIIIILLL!
 * It would be evil because though you're enslaving people who by all rights deserves much worse, you are in turn supplying, financing, and supporting the slavers of Paradise Falls. The majority of them don't have your morals about who they should and should not enslave, and with every slave you capture, you ensure, in a small way, that they can continue to do their dirty deeds.
 * Enslaving anyone, wastelander or raider, is supporting slavery and allowing it to continue. Killing them isn't good because you're inflicting pain on a bad person. It's good because you're stopping them from hurting anyone else.

Strange Meat versus Human Flesh
If "Strange Meat" is actually, why is there also in the game? And why do the two items have different attributes?
 * For all we know, the "Strange Meat" could've been  or some other flesh, but it was just too odd to be recognized. Hell, maybe it's   flesh....
 * It's pretty heavily implied to be  since in the Andale shed and basement there are   corpses and skeletons everywhere (some in cages) and pretty much every knife in the game. Then the Andale residents try to kill you for going in, unless you have the  . Then you can just say you were going in for a snack.
 * There's also the Hunters who kill humans and strip their flesh to sell as food. Their food is also marked as "Strange Meat."
 * Yup, and I've seen them chasing down and killing wastelanders with no provocation. Plus they didn't even flinch when I ran up and cannibalized the body right in front of them.
 * Reread the Fallout page. And realise there aren't any Iguanas in the Fallout 3 Wasteland... Where are all the Iguana Bits coming from, eh?
 * The fridge?
 * That's why I said 'knowingly' in a previous comment.
 * This was addressed in Fallout 2 (I believe.) "BOB'S IGUANA BITS ARE PEOPLE!"

Women in the Enclave
Where are all the female Enclave officers? Considering how limited population they are working with, they can't afford to be sexist; leaving 50% of their population out of their military effort would be ludicrous. Even if every woman in Enclave is expected to give birth to several new citizens, that can't be all that is required of them, and considering that the great majority of the Enclave's actions are military operations of some sort, it just isn't possible that women could be left out without serious problems in availability of personnel; there can't be more than a few hundred Enclave in the entire Capital Wasteland.
 * Most women aren't as combat-suitable as most men. They aren't sexist, they're just realistic. There is no such thing as Affirmative Action in the Enclave.
 * I "met" some female Enclave troopers and officers. The former look the same, thanks to the armor, and being reduced to green goo by a plasma rifle doesn't help.
 * I've only met a single one, and that was a scientist. I've stripped practically all the soldiers I've met to repair my aromour, and they've always been fairly intact since I prefer small arms. Not one female has appeared among them.
 * From what I've seen, the Enclave Officers are 50/50 Male/Female. The soldiers all seem to be male, though.
 * Confirmed by me, whose first officer kill was female. An averted case of One Size Fits All for its female character.
 * Same here. I may have encountered female Enclave Troops, but since I stopped stripping their armor early on I haven't seen any that I know of. I've met five Enclave Officers, though, and four were female.
 * Enclave Soldiers may all be male, but almost all, if not all Enclave Scientists are female. Now, you are an organization promoting pure-bred unmutated humanity, where do you want your baby factories (If you'll excuse my humorous terminology) wandering around the irradiated wastes being shot at by wide varety of enemies, where even in powered armor a Ripper or shotgun blast that punches through in the wrong spot will ruin that particular ability, or safely holed up in your underground base where they spend most of their time working in heavily protected (against environmental hazards, anyway) suits? One assumes Enclave Officers are partially female because they need authority figures. All the officers I've seen are near Deathclaw cages, the kind of thing that probably needs supervision. Why they give officers some cloth to protect them from the hazards of the wastes is not something I'm going to debate with them (Especially since I always blow Raven Rock to hell, and stand outside until the explosions stop.). And hell, for all we know, female officers can only get promoted to that position after popping one out for humanity. (Which brings up the possibility that you kill babies when you blow up Raven Rock. Let's hope that they all get safely evacuated before the poop hits the fan)

Enclave's oddly specific timing
Unless I missed something, how come that the Enclave choose that moment (while you're repairing the purifier, after cleaning the complex, after finding your father, after having gone through hell and back in the wastelands) to show up ? Pure coincidence (not impossible, just lame)? They somehow spy on you (would make sense, but there is never any reference to the existence of secret service in the Enclave)? They were keeping an eye on the purifier complex all along(Hey, that dude is about to repair and activate the damn thing, move on men!)? Even more ridiculous is the fact that the Enclave is for all purpose absent from the DC area(except for the eyebot and broadcasts) until THAT ONE GODDAMNED MOMENT. The second you see a vertibird near the purifier, Enclave outposts, and troops, and robots, and vertibirds magically appear all over the place.
 * I recall meeting one of Dr. Li's assistants in Raven Rock during the escape, claiming that she had defected to the Enclave. I didn't really listen to her side before jamming a frag mine into her back pocket (I hate defectors). It's possible she switched sides earlier on and was informing the Enclave that James was getting close?
 * Hate to burst your bubble, but she wasn't a mole, she was captured while they you were escaping from the Jefferson Memorial.
 * Enclave Eyebots, maybe? You do encounter them all around the wasteland, although they're so widely spaced that it's hard to believe that they were able to keep effective tabs on you or anybody else. That seems the only logical explanation, though.
 * A better possibility is that they already knew about Project Purity, so were explicitly keeping tabs on that location, which is why they attack immediately after people start working there again. (Then the real problem becomes, wouldn't it be easier simply to wait until the system is working and then swoop in?)
 * They likely wanted to make sure the project was started up correctly and to their specifications.
 * I figured it was a call back to Fallout 2. In Fallout 2, when repairing a computer in Gecko's power plant, you can accidentally 'prank call' the Enclave. The thing that happens right before the Enclave show up at the Purifier? That's right, you turn on the Mainframe, which possibly signals to the Enclave that the facility was active (or at least someone turned on an old pre-war computer).
 * The prank call is just a humorous bit of dialogue. It is nothing to do with triggering the Enclave showing up. You should have encountered them at least once before even reaching Gecko. Plot wise, the Enclave doesn't show up because the player does anything. The Enclave is looking for the exact same thing the player is looking for, so eventually their paths cross as a result of that.
 * It does not help that one of the options in that conversation itself is the ability to talk the Officer into sending a Vertibird assault team. They simply don't show up because this is one of the unfinished events in the game that is cleaned up in the Restoration mod.
 * On a side note, why the enclave even bother to expose their troops to the wastelands' hardness when they could keep them safe in Raven Rock until the final battle? Do they have so much troops and power armor and plasma weapons that they can afford to waste them in the wastes?
 * Yes, yes they do. They do have an unlimited supply of either oil (which vertibirds are established to use in Fallout 2 and it is a fairly major plot point) or technology to retrofit every single vertibird with a nuclear reactor so light and powerful that it can provide unlimited energy.
 * They needed the G.E.C.K. to make the Purifier work, so they were out looking for it (and you).
 * They've been around beforehand. I remember once encountering an Enclave soldier shortly after leaving the Vault for the first time, even killed him after expending most of my ammo. 'Course it could be just a bug.
 * Because that is when it was dramatically correct for them to appear.
 * The Enclave were taking control of the Wasteland. In order to do that, you need to get boots on the ground, enforcing control, establishing patrols and presence. You can't do that with everyone holed up in Raven Rock.
 * Plot convenience. The player is far enough in the plot that the Enclave are supposed to be the main antagonists, so that is when they show up.

Tenpenny and Roy
The Tenpenny/Roy quest. Quite possibly the most ridiculous quest to ever be found in an RPG. All outcomes except one involve a negative karma deduction as well as good ol' Three Dog, who will praise you at one moment, and then blast you for this one. Keep in mind the only choice in the quest that doesn't have a negative karma outcome is where Roy KILLS EVERYONE. Uh, does Bethesda not understand the concept of what karma is? Add that to the fact that if you kill Roy afterwards you gain NEGATIVE karma. Yep.
 * Wow, a there's more complexity than Mother Teresa or eating babies... Is it that hard to do a bad thing for a good reason?
 * Welcome to Fallout, this happens sometimes. It's partially a reference to Fallout 1, where the original plan for Junktown was to have the Law and Order faction become unhinged and authoritarian if given your support, while the Money Making Libertine faction would mellow out and product real growth and stability for the region if you backed them up. It was taken out of the shipping game because it infuriated people new to games like Fallout, but helped to build part of the legend of that game - few game developers were considering choices that innovative and complex in RPG's of that time.
 * Roy's a good person? He's the ghoul version of Tenpenny. After he's killed everyone for no odd reason at all, Mr. Burke pays him a visit to exact revenge against Roy for Tenpenny's death. When Roy talks him down and Mr. Burke tells him he's going to bomb Megaton, Roy gives him the thumbs up, saying he wouldn't mind if he "burned down that smooth-skin shit hole." Getting into Tenpenny Tower was never about safety or a better quality of life for Roy—he just wanted to get in.
 * The Tenpenny/Roy outcome is also true to life. It's fairly common for a formerly oppressed group to get more than a little carried away once they get their hands on the guns and the power.
 * Especially considering that if you got that ending, you've gone through convincing/chasing off the most strident bigots; Roy's nonchalance about the massacre hints that he may have been planning to do so regardless.
 * When you first talk to Roy and if you ask him about his plan to get in, he tells you up front he intends to kill everyone in the building. It should be no surprise that he does it anyway even if you find a peaceful way for him to move in as he was already planning to do it in the first place.
 * Many players may have been expecting him to change his 'kill all smoothskins' plan once a peaceful truce was brokered; I know I was.
 * Especially considering that after you tell Roy he's been let in, he says something like "I guess I don't have to kill them after all."
 * I don't see what bugs so many people about this quest. Even if I was really pissed off the first time I realized Roy played me like a fifty cent kazoo, I find this is actually an excellent example of how things would probably work in Real Life. There is no "good" outcome, there is always a crusher and a crushed. And it's either leaving the status quo in place or switching positions.
 * But here's the thing. We get that Roy's a ****** . We just don't get why killing such a nasty piece of work is judged (by the karma hit) as bad as killing a kid's parents and eating them.
 * I also only have a problem with the karma hit you get for killing Roy, before or after he moves in. Roy proves that "Ghouls are people too" because he's a murdering scum bag, not a poor oppressed rotting zombie. But why must I get a karma hit and Three Dog whining like a bitch because I had the foresight to see that? Three Dog has already proven he has clairvoyant powers by solving the "Who blew up Megaton?" mystery with next to no evidence. Its like the only time Three Dog hasn't got the full truth of the story, and you have to listen to him guilt trip you for killing someone no better than a wasteland raider. Either Bethesda are dumbasses (which I wouldn't put past them), or it was just a minor botch in the mission.
 * If you kill him after he wipes out all the humans, you don't take a karma hit. You do take a karma hit for killing his buddies though. Roy is obviously a bad person from the first time you talk to him. Whether his mind is going or he's just an asshole is up to you to figure. I think he was just a bad person, considering there are pre-war ghouls who are of MUCH sounder mind. (Carol) Besides if you kill Roy early on, it's obviously unjustified unless you're psychic (in-game that is, obviously YOU know Roy is an evil prick. but it hasn't come out in-game yet) so the game considers it an evil act, as you've just killed someone who did nothing to indicate they deserved it.
 * Actually, I can confirm that you do in fact lose karma for killing Roy after the massacre. And yes, I did go through all the events beforehand (asking where the humans are, finding the bodies in the basement, then confronting Roy).
 * The real problem I have with this quest is that it tries to enforce Gray and Gray Morality in accord with Good Is Dumb. A good character is unable to (in-game) spot Roy's obviously hateful and murderous attitude towards smoothskins, unable to set conditions to his entry to Tenpenny Tower ("Pull your feral friends out of the basement or I'll sic Gustavo on your ass!") and even if Roy has an exploding pants accident on his way to Tenpenny's, everyone still gets slaughtered plus Roy's pals will turn hostile. Hey Bethesda! If you are trying to tell me to consider the outcome outside of clear-cut morality and preconseptions could you please not railroad my options to Stupidity vs. Amorality?
 * Because everyone knows Tenpenny is an evil bastard. Since Tenpenny wanted Roy dead, by proxy you are helping Tenpenny in his goal. Everyone including Three Dog knows of Tenpenny's contempt for everyone. He considered Megaton's destruction as entertainment.
 * Tenpenny is not an evil bastard. Every vile thing that you get ordered to do is being ordered by Gustavo and Burke, whereas Tenpenny seems completely unaware of whats going on. If he really was an evil bastard, he would've just sniped Roy from the top of his tower when he had the chance, and he wouldn't have given you 500 bottle caps for negotiating a peaceful solution.
 * The very fact that you can get a huge karma boost for killing Tenpenny suggests that he very much is an evil bastard; one who might be able to eventually see the logic in allowing ghouls into the tower (as Three Dog says, it's theoretically more paying customers for him), but evil nonetheless. Just because he has flunkies to do his dirty work doesn't mean his hands are clean.
 * It's not just about Tenpenny. Every human in the tower is killed, even the ones who were a-okay with the ghouls going in, even Herbert Dashwood, who is an all-round nice guy with a ghoul best friend/ retainer. How come Three Dog doesn't grill Roy Phillips for all that?!
 * Either Three Dog Didn't know Roy done them all in or how deep down Roy is just a Ghoul version of Tenpenny. People on the wasteland already knows Tenpenny as a Wasteland hating man who sees everyone else who isn't better off as him as a source of amusement.
 * There's always a third option, don't complete the quest. First time through I investigated the Towers after hearing Three Dog yabbering about it every 10 minutes. After I talked to everyone I decided that Roy was going to kill everyone no matter how he got in (duh) and not all of the residents were total bastards. And even if it's vile, being a bigot doesn't deserve death. So I eventually left them alone. Now if there was a way to cap Tenpenny and Burke and take over...
 * I convinced the Tenpenny residents to allow Roy and his ghoul friends in, killed the asshole residents and then killed Roy and his gang from him. I felt like it was a fairly happy ending. I don't recall receiving any negative karma at all either.
 * That won't stop the massacre though. Go bak to the tower and everyone except a few generic ghoul residents will be missing.

more on F3 quests
In fact, quests in general. Leave it to Bethesda to stick to their guns in there usually being three paths in a quest line; good, neutral (which means, "Pay me and I'll do it" for Bethesda), or evil. All of which usually involve violence. Did anyone in the studio ever think of trying to apply logic to a situation? Like, "Hey Roy, instead of living in Tenpenny Tower, why not, gee, MOVE TO THE UNDERWORLD? You know, that ghoul city where you can live rent-free amongst people who will accept you for who you are?" Nope. Not gonna happen. Bethesda intricately laid out scripts and voice acting for the violent path and they want you to appreciate their "hard" work.
 * Agreed. Even for a post-apocalypse world, it seems like there should be a few more options for dealing with problems.
 * Roy's pretty clearly not interested in it for the quality of life. He's an ass, and he wants revenge on the idiots at Tenpenny that made fun of him. As You Gotta Shoot Em In The Head demonstrates, he's not the only one (and not too unjustified for Tenpenny).
 * For me, it's just the options (though not particularly less than the other games; except that your stats don't seem to affect gameplay as much). What if -I- wanted to become overseer of Vault 101? Why can't -I- be sheriff of Megaton? Why don't I have greater control over the endings? I mean... I love the game and all, but... just a -few- more non-combat options maybe?
 * Compared to Fallout as a whole, it seems like there's a lot less non-combat options. But really, as someone who played Oblivion and compared the two, Fallout 3 is actually an improvement by Bethesda's standards. I was genuinely surprised, for example, that having a high science stat led to a unique solution to the fire-spewing ants problem. Yes, I'd like more options...but I was just happy to see progress considering who handled the game and all. Hopefully the expansion content will improve further.
 * Am I the only troper here that sees just how hilariously impractical the above suggestion is? Find just one game, just ONE game, that you can do *ANYTHING* in. Bethesda can't program EVERYTHING. This game isn't about, say, overseeing a Vault. This game isn't about, say, looking after Megaton. You're the Lone Goddamn Wanderer; you can't just settle in a Vault or a city...
 * NetHack.
 * Which was updated for 16 years. Yeah, I wish they never completed Fallout 3 and try to add more options forever, requiring more and more gigabytes just because people need more options. Not to mention that Nethack doesn't have a main plot ("Your goal is to grab as much treasure as you can, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and escape the Mazes of Menace alive")... or graphics, for that matter. I can see how a text-based Fallout with no main story would be great. But this is a FPS/RPG. For this type of game that requires more than a few kilobytes for every bit of expansion, there is a Sliding Scale of Game Length vs Details. This game is practically in the middle, maybe a little more leaning to Length. I can deal with it.
 * Sliding scale of length and detail? The two are in no way mutually exclusive. Bioware's last few RPGs have had lengths much longer than Fallout 3, with a huge amount of detail -and- nonviolent solutions to sidequests.
 * Yeah but those aren't sandbox games. The more freedom the game gives you, the harder is to add an option for every single player action.
 * Although a game where you can clean up a section of the wasteland, nice or nasty, without pratting about with GECKS and water chips would be cool too.
 * In no particular order, Tranquility Lane, The Superhuman Gambit, The Replicated Man, Head of State, Blood Ties, Oasis, The Power of Atom, Tenpenny Tower, and Trouble on the Homefront all have non-combat solutions. Note that some of the quests still have combat in them, because you have to fight monsters to find certain people, but those monsters aren't actually relevant to the quest itself (for instance, in the Blood Ties quest, you have to fight some monsters to find Vance's hideout, but that doesn't mean that you actually have to fight him or any of his friends to complete the quest).
 * Fighting monsters is combat and violence. However, Tranquility lane requires you to kill everyone one way or another (one path kills them permanently, the other kills people over and over again). The Superhuman Gambit requires combat to get to the people you need to talk to. Compare all of that to Fallout 2, where it was possible to finish the game and get a good ending without firing a single shot, either in self-defense or as part of a random monster encounter. Of course, I'm not sure if poking Horrigan with a mutated toe counts as 'violence'...
 * You could just sneak or run past those monsters, which you'd also have to do in Fallout 2 for a non-violent playthrough (the tanker hold, for instance). Also, finishing Fallout 2 without firing a shot locks you out of quite a few of the game's sidequests and several good endings as well.
 * Right, running away from combat in Fallout 2 or past monsters is what I was referring to. The fact remains is that you can do it in Fallout 2. You may not get the most optimal endings for doing so, but it can be done. Fallout 3, on the other hand, is written where you cannot advance without killing at some point. The Tranquility Lane simulation is part of the main quest, which -requires- you to kill people, either for good (which seems like a pacifist solution, but it does not count, as it's you who presses the button and it is your intent to kill everyone as part of the quest's solution) or as part of that recurring nightmare (direct violence). I've also never managed to escort Dr. Li through the sewers to the Citadel without engaging in combat, but seeing as she's Set as Essential, I'm sure she could make it... you and the three other guys you're escorting might not be so lucky. And then you can't complete the primary quests in the DLC without, at some point, engaging in combat and violence. The Pitt has the Arena. Broken Steel . Operation Anchorage, being a combat simulator, has a mission that require you to kill everyone in a building in order to continue. Point Lookout's main quest ends with you killing  . Mothership Zeta has you engage in violence right at the start in order, and there's not much you can do to sneak around, etc. etc. Not to mention   (only you can press the buttons).
 * I'm sorry, but the two options in Tranq Lane use completely different definitions of "kill", and require you to work out whether to commit euthanasia or leave people physically alive but in torment. You set yourself an arbitrary moral code of "never kill anyone"? Fine, leave them there to think they're being killed over, and over, and over... perfectly non-violent on your part. Admittedly, the fact that the game reviews your actions and assigns them an objective morality score after the fact rather undercuts that message, but I find it was one of the more interesting and genuinely thought-provoking moral choices in the game. If anything, the fact that Thou Must leave Braun alive but alone for eternity was the moral quandary there, despite what he'd done.
 * Indeed, within the simulation, the two choices are a final death via violent and brutal end by way of a virtual Chinese Army invading and killing everyone, or eventually working your way to murdering a rather nice older woman in a variety of horrible ways, before going Monster Clown on the entire neighborhood.

(lack of) genetic engineering reveal
Was anyone else expecting a big reveal that you were genetically engineered and that was part of the reason your mother died? (Seriously, who dies during childbirth in a hospital?) It is mentioned that you are growing up and maturing fast, and within days of leaving the Vault you easily grow into a bona fide badass who can go around killing Super Mutants with a flaming sword. (Take that, Brotherhood of "where's my minigun and powerarmor" Steel!)
 * Actually, the maternal death rate, in the United States at least, is 11 in 100,000 births. It used to be much, much higher, maybe even as high as 1 in 100 before the use of modern medicine. I'd imagine something like a nuclear apocalypse would cause the death rate to increase again since resources would be scarce.
 * You were born in a lab, which among other things had a machine that could somehow predict exactly how you'd look at the age of 19. It's not like it was some muddy cave in the middle of nowhere with a doctor who hadn't bothered to wash his hands.
 * Both your father and Dr. Li are doctors because they say they are doctors. There's no medical schools, boards, or formal training to demonstrate that they know anything about Obstetrics. Also, the Rivet City/Pinkerton labs show that hi-tech equipment and sanitation are not always hand-in-hand in the Fallout Verse.
 * Exactly. Dr. Li said herself that they lacked the proper equipment or something along those lines when the two of you discuss why your mother died in childbirth. Like I said, resources would be scarce after a nuclear apocalypse. Just because they have one thing doesn't automatically mean they have everything else. Even if they did, there would still be a very small percentage of women who would still die during childbirth even with the miracles of advanced medicine.
 * The "doctors," as far as I can tell, are chemists, not medical doctors by profession. They just happen to be smart and know something about medicine.
 * Seeing how you look at 19 was just a handwave to explain why the character customization window came up. By the same logic you are using, your gender was literally determined by your father asking you what your gender was and the GOAT exam, despite allowing you to choose the results, determined exactly what skills you are most proficient in. It isn't proof of your theory.
 * Your capabilities are not proof of you being genetically superior. It's a Bethesda game. The main character is always ridiculously overpowered with not even an attempt to handwave it. The closest was Morrowind where your awesomeness could possibly be explained by you being the divine reincarnation of a demigod, but even then, the fact your previous incarnation was so unbelievably awesome he apparently decided to become a demigod lacks any proper handwave.
 * It didn't help that the title Project Purity does sound a bit sinister until you find out it's just a Phlebotinum Water Filter.

The Outcasts
The Outcasts. In the regular game they mock you for supposedly being backward owing to being from the Wasteland ("Go bang some rocks together!"). Somehow they fail to notice that you might be wearing a Vault jumpsuit and in any case have a Pipboy wrist-mounted computer. Until Operation Anchorage, when they suddenly do. Though you can trade technological items for supplies at their headquarters in the regular game, it is silly that they do not ask whether your vault may be willing to trade advanced technology to them. The Pipboys seem to be thought of as largely valueless toys, instead of real valuable technology—it's only a very specific computer system in Operation Anchorage that'd make them pay attention for more than a few seconds. A hick walking around with a Pipboy and a Vault jumpsuit just broke into one of the vaults the Outcasts must have explored before and grabbed the last few pieces of trash... right?
 * Maybe not every outcast member knows about the simulation and that a pip boy is needed for it. The ones who DO know about the simulation don't actually appear in the game without Operation Anchorage anyway. Maybe that place wasn't even discovered by the outcasts in-game until you download the content. (Seems likely, since you get the distress signal and they're still fighting off Super Muties when you arrive, though the fact that you can wait weeks and they still won't be done fighting is fridge logic in itself)
 * Besides, even if they recognized the Pip-Boy for what it was, it wasn't even the most recent model; aside from listening to radio stations and telling the time, it's hard to say just what the Pip-Boy does within the game's universe. Does it really let you haul 100+ pounds of crap across the Wasteland without actually having to carry them?
 * You have to keep in mind that no one group ever has every single member conforming to the exact same ideals. Consider the situation at the VSS digsite for The Outcasts. They are low on manpower and heavily besieged by Super Mutants, in addition to the fact that they've been unable to find an easy way into the Armory. Morrill was expecting Outcast backup but instead gets you, the Lone Wanderer, who just happens to have the one piece of technology they've needed to get the armory open. Since they're already in a bad situation, it makes sense that Protector McGraw would strike a deal that is uncharacteristic of the Outcasts, even though he himself seems a bit abnormal for the group anyway (i.e. being far more polite than any other outcast). It also easily explains why his decision leads to Sibley and some of his soldiers rebelling against him after you complete your end of the deal.
 * In any case, there were several wasted opportunities for interesting questlines here. Instead of expelling you from the vault even if you have convinced her to open it to the outside world, Amata should have asked you to act as an ambassador the other factions, offering the advanced technology of the Vault in exchange for needed supplies and aid in surviving outside. You could have quests to reconcile the Outcasts and the Brotherhood, hunt down spare parts needed to get advanced technology working, find people knowledgeable about technology and convince them to aid the Brotherhood (like the ghoul Michal Winters, who claims to have been an engineer or possibly scientist before the war), aid them with your own skill in science or expertise in robotics, and so on.
 * Yeah I kinda hoped an enclave scientist, Doc Li, the brotherhood scribes, and a prewar ghoul scientist would design Project Purity, while the water filter guy from megaton and underworld built it, using tech from vault 101, and the brotherhood and rivet city security did security. Bringing the whole wasteland together to save the world kind of thing. Or if you're evil, just killing/kidnapping and taking what you needed.
 * Normal Vaults still should be very backwards in comparison to the Outcasts. There is absolutely nothing in the Vault that is high tech enough to be of interest to them. The Brotherhood of Steel mostly came out of the higher tech, better stocked military vaults. Only the Enclave vaults would have had a higher level of technology in them. Not to mention the Brotherhood of Steel is primarily interested in military technology, something the player's vault lacks.
 * The only way the developer could plausibly justify the player's role in Operation Anchorage was to explain that the Outcasts needed a commonly available, fairly low tech, civilian issue computer to activate a military system. YMMV whether that constitutes a plausible technological advantage.
 * The milage gets a bit better when you realize the item they need is one they would have no reason to carry around on a normal basis. Then they get stuck in a situation where that one thing goes to a desperate necessity, and oh look, here comes a vault dweller with just the ticket.

Dead Trees
Why are there dead trees all over the place? If they got nuked directly, they should have burned into the ground. If they got killed by nuclear fallout after the war was over, should they not have decayed in the intervening two centuries?
 * On a similar note, the greenish tint to everything was a great big WTF. It's forced atmosphere to the level of "oh come on now..." in order to fit with the stereotypical image of what the world would look like post-apocalypse.
 * They're alive, but only barely. Unrealistic yes, but necessary for the proper atmosphere. The same complaint could be given to Fallout 1 that happened "only" one century after the bombs.
 * Am I the only person who remembers the anti-nuclear propaganda of the 80's? Justified or not, the claims of what radiation / nuclear war would do were massively over-inflated. Fallout 3 reminded me of those over the top apocalyptic claims to a T.
 * That's the point. Everything of the game is a 50's view of The Future!. Including the aftermath of nuclear war. They put dead forests in the game because it looks like nuclear winter.

Fighting Liberty Prime
Why didn't we ever get to fight Liberty Prime? He had 'final boss' written all over him.
 * Mainly because that final boss would reduce you to a steaming pile of chunky salsa without even slowing down. It took a freaking orbital strike just to stop him.
 * Because he was on our side! Also, because we wouldn't stand a chance.
 * Yeah! You some kind of commie? Do you hate freedom?
 * I was just disappointed that we had to follow behind it for ten gorram minutes while it stole our kills and got stuck on the bridge like an asshole making us revert several minutes of boredom, instead of being able to drive it. I mean, the BoS already had trouble getting the thing to work, it would have been trivial to make the guidance systems faulty too.
 * "Stole our kills?" Please, this isn't Counter-Strike. Though I'll hand you credit about the stuck on the bridge part: Damn bugs.
 * As mentioned above, we wouldn't have stood an unmutated cell's chance in an Atomic Holocaust. It has been attempted, with predictable results.
 * He can throw a nuclear bomb at you! And not even a mini nuke, a full size one!
 * You * can* 'fight' him. Just start shooting at him while walking behind him. Nothing will happen for a bit, and then you will die because he vaporized you with his laser.
 * I didn't want to kill Liberty Prime, I wanted to control him. I guess it would be too mecha for the Fallout universe, but my complaint about having big friendly giants on my side in Oblivion and F3 is mainly that I don't get to take control of them to fight The Final Battle, and my character becomes a side-item.
 * Haha. "Stole our kills", hilarious. It's an escort mission. And you're the one being escorted. If you killed Enclave soldiers, Liberty Prime is so badass he would have every right to accuse YOU of kill-stealing.

Pre-War Advertisement posters
The ever present pre-war advertisement posters on each and every wall really started to make me pissed off. Why has an advertisement for a grocery store been placed into an elementary school? Has omnipresent media saturation by a military industrial complex seeped so deeply into society that people now plaster their own homes with advertisements?
 * Judging from the library with a sponsorship deal from a dental company, I'd say yes. (Also, if you take the broad definition of "advertisement", all those posters people put up in their bedrooms in Real Life...)
 * Hmm, you have a point there with the Arlington Library Archive. (EDIT): But they do seem to stretch what is reasonable. A little girl with a poster for a new mechanical horse or a boy with a poster for his favorite television program I'll take, but I don't think anyone is so company loyal to begin wall papering their own households with advertisements for job openings in their own store.
 * They would if they went insane. Nuclear war would do that. Also Three words. SIERRA. FUCKING. PETROVICH.
 * Not to nitpick, but this toper is confused. Did you mean SIMON PETRIKOV, or are you referencing something else? *** I always assumed that the posters were scavenged by people who had or are living in those areas, and put up for the same reason we put posters on our walls. Sure, advertisements may not be as good as the theatrical poster from Reservoir Dogs, but it's something.
 * how many people have Nike and Reebok and etc. posters on their wall today? This game is both a parody and tribute of the 50's, and people didn't spend a lot of time worrying about things like "the military-industrial complex" unless they were Eisenhower, "Commie Mutants" (go Paranoia!), or on the staff of The Atlantic.

Tranquility Lane karma and Dr. Braun
In tranquility lane, if you activate the fail-safe, you get positive karma for releasing the vault dwellers from their hell. HOWEVER, in rescuing the dwellers, you doom Dr. Braun to a Fate Worse Than Death. Why isn't there an option to forgive Dr. Braun and release from his fate? I know that he's pure evil, but why does that justify condemning him to what might 5 billion years, unable to die, and unable to make contact with anyone.
 * See "pure evil," above. Honestly, if you empathize with Braun, just give him what he wants and don't let any of the inhabitants out. Then he can torture them eternally as their vile god, just as he wanted... you sick, selfish prick . (Or pussy, I'm equal-opportunity here.)
 * No. I don't sympathize with his torturing the vault dwellers. However, I am morally opposed to giving anyone a Fate Worse Than Death. If the only way to save the vault dwellers from their fate is to kill them for real, than what must be done must be done. That still doesn't justify condemning him to fate far, far worse than death. Not only that, but consider this: it has been confirmed that at least two non-vault dwellers can leave the vault with Dr. Braun's blessing. What if, by chance, one person enters the vault, and makes a deal with Braun? One that ends with 10 more people forever trapped in the vault, waiting for someone to rescue them?
 * Most people, when confronted with the knowledge of what Braun has done, will have one of two gut reactions: "The heartless prick should SUFFER!" or "Yeah, that's cool. 'Kay, bye." Probably the developers felt that adding a third option would be unnecessary since most players would pick one of the two available options. I haven't seen anyone else complain... And honestly, since Braun was quite happy to level A Fate Worse Than Death on the others, I see it as karma, and a much better option to what most people would see as Braun being awarded Karma Houdini status. As to what happens if someone stumbles on Vault 112? If you activate the failsafe, Braun/Betty tells you that it not only kills everyone (by shutting down all but Braun's machinery) but also locks Braun's ability to communicate with the outside. Even if someone found Braun, the machinery in the other pods are as dead as the inhabitants: Braun is completely alone forever.
 * Letting Braun suffer as he made others suffer is not Karma if you're the one doing it. Its an example of eye-for-an-eye justice that many consider barbaric, which is why I agree that a third option would be nice. YMMW, but raping a Rapist as a punishment, for example, kind of fails to deliver the whole rape-is-evil-message to me.
 * The big question is why can't you kill Braun? Once you're out, you should be able to put a grenade in his life-pod and be done with him, thus resolving both the adequate punishment, and the issue with Fate Worse Than Death.
 * Okay, that's a point. Hell, since apparently the pod is all that's keeping him alive, you could just open the thing or break the glass and Braun's toast. Adding a 'kill Braun' option would have made everyone happy.
 * You can kind of kill Braun, but not directly. Destroy all the Robobrains that maintain the vault, and thus leave nothing there to keep it in repair. Eventually, the Vault would break down, Braun's pod would fail, and he'd die a slow, drawn-out death.
 * Slow and drawn out? The first time anything went wrong with his pod he'd presumably stop breathing. I guess the worst outcome would be the Lotus Eater Machine failing before everything else, leaving him trapped, fully conscious, in a life-support pod. Ick.
 * Don't forget that the 'Chinese Invasion' solution turns off the failsafe that keeps the people from being permanently killed by their simulated death. Then the karma reward assumes (as do most of you posting here) that leaving the people alive means they're trapped forever, and killing them is left the only moral alternative on the premise that their situation is hopeless as long as they live, rather than that there's hope as long as they're still alive. Huh? Just because you aren't the one with a solution to free them, does it naturally follow that they're eternally doomed? To believe that, you'd have to be a glory hound to the drama queenth degree.
 * First, Braun is established to be some kind of crazy-awesome computer scientist, as evidenced by his work, with no peers or competition in pre-war days; what are the odds that you'll be able to rustle up a computer-expert in the Wasteland? Even if one could pry open their loungers, chances are they'd be incapable of living outside the lounger due to the fact that it's been two centuries, and I doubt the life-support systems are portable. The best they could hope for is continuing to live in a useless body unable to go see anything but the ceiling of the room. It's not so much assuming that only you can do anything to help as knowing that you're the only one, because 1) Once you and Dad leave the sim, no-one else will be coming in, 2) The failsafe means that no-one else will be able to operate the computer from outside, or enter the sim, 3) just because the failsafe means Braun can no longer revive the prisioners doesn't mean he can't still affect them. Note that Braun is still immortal, and the others aren't; quick deaths are usually the morally-right thing for the player to do, although the repeated memory-erasures might mean that it doesn't make a difference for the victims themselves. And in a meta sense, as is par for video games, you are The Chosen One.
 * So wait. Your solution to the "they've been tortured for two hundred years and the only options I have are to leave them to be tortured or to release them from their torment" dilemma is to let them continue to be tortured? When you can personally save them from that hell? This is not Somebody Else's Problem - you have no guarantee that someone else could free them, or even that they'd be capable of surviving outside their pods once freed (Braun implies that they can't) and if you leave it for someone else to come along to try and free them, you're still condemning them to months or years of further torment. From all of the available facts you have on hand, the only ways out are to let them die with dignity or to leave them in Braun's hands. You, at that moment, are in a position to save them, insofar as they can be saved. With no guarantee that someone else could save them, you only really have one moral choice available from two bad ones.
 * Also, they've all been there for 200 years. The pod is the only thing that has sustained their lives, which means that they would probably die as soon as they are "freed" from the simulation. So they're either in the simulation being tortured, or they're dead. There's no third option for them, unless you can kill Braun and let them live forever without being tortured. Since killing Braun is not available, the second-best thing to do is kill them all and let Braun to his fate. He's either gonna find a way to kill himself (it's his fault if that's not possible), or physically die eventually as I doubt that the life of the physical body can be sustained literally forever. Hey, if he dies a couple of centuries later, it would be like an eye-for-an-eye solution, only milder since he's just tortured by boredom and not physical pain.
 * I'm just confused as why doing what Braun says is so evil. Granted, he tortures everyone in the sim, but, except for the old lady who tells you about the failsafe, they aren't aware of it, and they are revived thanks to Braun's Reset Button, while the "good" option kills everyone except Braun, who is trapped in an And I Must Scream.
 * Not sure if anyone here checked the computers before going into the Sim? Their heart rates were super high, their stress level was nominal...
 * Not to mention that some of them was tagged as "deceased", which seems to indicate that their bodies are decaying while their brains are kept alive. Everyone but Braun is already suffering A Fate Worse than Death BECAUSE of Braun.
 * "he tortures everyone in the sim, but, except for the old lady who tells you about the failsafe, they aren't aware of it, and they are revived thanks to Braun's Reset Button," Exactly. The old lady is aware. That's one person, yes, but would you walk away from one person being tortured, knowing full well what they were going through? Whether it's one person or a dozen, torture is kind of an issue no matter how many people are going through it.
 * If it's only one person, I'd suggest doing what people earlier mentioned doing to Braun. Plop a 'nade in her box and there you go, the rest of the people there are allowed to live on in what is more or less happiness, only with the occasional torturing when Braun feels like it.
 * As the person above noted they at least subconsciously recognize what they are going through and it is just not right to leave people with a psychotic sadist with godlike powers.
 * I found Tranquility Lane the most disturbing mission in Fallout 3. Why? Because so few people on the net were looking for a way to free Braun from his Fate Worse Than Death! A common attitude was the he "deserves" to live eternally in Hell. I cannot wrap my mind around this kind of thinking; I spent an hour trying to find a way to get the guy out or at least kill him. Heck, I shot Pumpkin the Mole Rat to save her (him?) from starving even though she would probably gnaw my face off if she had the chance. I wonder which religious/philosophical stances are associated with the ability or inability to show mercy to Braun. To me, it was that kind of wonderment which made Tranquility Lane a mission I'll remember for years to come.