Fallout: New Vegas/Headscratchers/Archive 2

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The lack of a polite speech option in the quest "Debt Collector".

 * It's an extremely tiny thing, but it still bugs me: In the quest "Debt Collector", you have to collect caps from 3 people for the Garrets, one of whom is a homeless ghoul with a lazy eye named Grecks. There are only a few dialouge options with him, and all of them involve you treating him like shit. Why is there no way to say anything nice or give him bottlecaps? It just bugs me that the only interaction possible with him is to be an asshat, simply because the developers didn't think to put extra options in the Dialogue Tree.
 * True, but when you think about it, you are forcing a group of desperately poor people to repay heavy debts. That in itself isn't really a nice thing to do to start with.
 * Still, it feels like they were limiting my choices, which is the worst thing a Role Playing Game can do in my book. They already included an option to just pay for the debts outright from your own pocket, they couldn't have included a dialogue option with Grecks where you could be polite? Other than demanding money, all you can do is make fun of his eye. Also, in Fallout 3, even if you enslaved people, you could do it politely.
 * There are "polite" options for all three of them. You probably just didn't have access to them.
 * No, there's not. You can be polite to Jane ("Surely a lady of your stature has the money to pay her debts..."), but not to Grecks. The only dialogue option outside of demanding money is to threaten to kill him, demand he gives you everything else he has (including the clothes on his back), and making fun of his eye.

Where is Vault 3's GECK?

 * It was stated that Vault 3 is a controlled vault similar to Vault 8 in that it wasn't part of the Enclave's Vault Experiment and was meant to re-colonize the surface. If that is the case, then why wasn't there a GECK in their vault?
 * Vault 3 was overpowered and massacred by a mob of drugged out Ax Crazy raiders. Either they destroyed it, not knowing its true value, or sold it, seeing as they had little use for it.
 * Perhaps that is the case. I would be satisfied if there is a mention about it somewhere in a diary or dialogues with Motor-Runner. But the total lack if references of the GECK in a controlled vault just bugs me. Maybe the intended dialogues got cut out or something.
 * They might never have received one. Fallout 2 reveals that all of the events of Fallout 1, and, as a result, Fallout 2 originally started with a shipping error. Vault 13 was supposed to have boxes and boxes of water chips for backups, not just one.

Can't tell the Enclave remnants to fight for you or Mr. House.

 * The Courier, with a bit of work and the right ally, can gather up an old squad of Enclave remnants to throw their weight around in the final battle. Most of the remnants aren't actually too choosy about who they fight, being in it mostly for a "last hurrah" of sorts, and will actually leave the final decision on who they should back completely up to you. Your only choices are "Side with the NCR to fight the Legion" or "Side with the Legion to fight the NCR." Why can't a player going for one of the middle paths say something along the lines of "Fight for House" "Ally with me and my personal allies" or even something as simple as "Follow my lead and shoot what I point at''? Sure, there's a workaround of sorts in the fact that pretty much every non-Legion path considers NCR the lesser of two evils, but it just doesn't feel right...
 * The point is, if you are fighting for Independent Vegas/ Mr.House, the developers just automatically assume you want to decimate the Legion as much as possible since they are a much bigger and more agressive threat than the NCR. There's no real reason to be hostile to the NCR in the final battle, as they'll help you unless you specifically went out of your way to be a dick.
 * Why fight on two fronts if you don't have to? The NCR and the Legion are going to have a showdown over the dam regardless of the Courier's actions, because both want the Mojave and the nice juicy source of hydroelectric power. Better to throw weight behind one side, let them kick the hell out of the other, then deal with the weakened survivor. Of course, being able to undermine both sides' efforts at Hoover Dam so their forces fought to mutual extermination would have been great fun ...
 * But, if you mess up the override in the final battle, NCR troops will start shooting you, and at the very end, when confronting the General, it's odds-on that you'll end up shooting it out with the NCR. In both these cases, if you told the Remnants to fight for the NCR, they take this very much to heart and start shooting you. And given that they don't go down easy and can take you very much by surprise when you expect them to be on your side, they can quite easily kill you for daring to go against the side they plumped for mere hours before the battle.

Hoover Dam still in operational condition after 200 years

 * Ha, speaking of the dam's hydroelectric capabilities: I think it was in "Life After People" or some program about invasive species, but I remember it being said that Hoover Dam, thanks to an influx of mussels of some sort, if left without upkeep for more than a few weeks, the pipes and turbines and stuff would become so clogged with clams that the equipment would be unusable. Maybe such an invasion never happened in Fallout's world, or maybe the radiation killed them. *grin* Should've been a Wacky Wasteland feature. More dangerous than the NCR or the Legion? Clams.
 * The problem is that this is that would only be an issue under very specific conditions that the dam is specifically designed to never have occur. There is a difference between something being theoretically possible and every single safeguard to prevent it simultaneously failing. On top of that, hydroelectric turbines are not engines. If they get clogged and stop, it doesn't cause issues that couldn't be easily repaired (which often would just be removing the mussels from the pipes and turbine).
 * And it wasn't operational when they found it, simply intact. I believe (going by memory here) that one of House's conditions in the treaty was that he would help the NCR get it running again.
 * And only one or two of the eight turbines was even gotten running.
 * Actually, one of the eight turbines was running when the NCR got there. They managed to get six going at one point, and by the time of the game four are in operation. It's surprising that even one was running after almost two centuries of neglect, but I guess they made everything Ragnarok Proof in time for the war.

Caesar's Mini Battle Arena

 * This troper is still furious by the fact that just because she was a girl, she wasn't allowed to fight in Caesar's battle arena. I understand that the Legion view women in... a certain way, but could not believe that her gender got in the way of actual gameplay. In fact, this troper got so mad that she literally took Boone and her minigun and wiped out that whole area.
 * You pretty much just answered your own question. I've never played as a girl character (since I'm a guy), but I thought that that was a nice bit of Gameplay and Story Integration. But I guess it does not make much sense since they trust you to wipe out whole factions, but not to fight POW's and slaves. Maybe this didn't bother me that much since I never side with Ceasar's Legion. Oh, and I wiped out the fort too (who doesn't?). Used a good ol' ballistic fist.
 * Particularly surprising given that a female Ranger POW is set up as an opponent. Apparently this woman is tough enough to fight in the arena, but you aren't.
 * Thanks.
 * I just thought the double standard was worth highlighting. Honour can be earned by defeating a strong woman but can't be earned by a woman herself, no matter how strong. A peculiar distinction.
 * The woman in the arena turns out to be NCR Ranger Stella - and the reason she's there is that she was captured by the Legion when they attack Ranger Station Charlie. The Legion apparently decided to rather than kill her, have her fight to the death in the Arena for their amusement, but this backfired when she killed several Legion officers armed with machetes, including a Centurion - with her bare hands. I suppose that the Legion feels that she needs to be killed by a man in the arena so that the other women slaves don't get any ideas. (Though why they don't just execute her is rather puzzling.) Having a second woman with potentially equal skill could lead to a disaster.
 * I understand that the Legion view women in... a certain way, but could not believe that her gender got in the way of actual gameplay. Indeed. How dare the game actually reflect your gender by adjusting the experience!
 * Exactly. Male characters and female characters get different experiences. This is why male characters can get rocket thruster parts from Lady Gibson for free with the Lady Killer perk, and why women can flirty with Swank and convince him to give them some caps with Black Widow. It's also why female characters have an easy (and hilarious) way of taking out Benny, whereas Male characters don't, but they get to fight in the arena.

Christine's decision to stay at the Sierra Madre

 * After completing Dead Money, Christine decides to stay behind at the Sierra Madre. Cool. Um, but WHY? She has absolutely no reason to stay there. The only things left at the casino are tons of chips useless outside the casino, hologram security guards, and technology she can't utilize, and outside in the villa is a toxic cloud and violent Ghost People. Even if they do see her as a hologram, she'll just be stuck with them for the rest of her miserable life, slowly dying of exposure to the cloud. I could understand her trying to purify the area and make it safe for habitation/scavenging, but there's no mention of that in her ending slide, and even so, the Ghost People would probably prevent that. You'd think she'd try to do something productive with her life, now that she has her voice back, like rejoin the Brotherhood or go and reunite with Veronica, even follow the Courier back to the Mojave Wasteland. But no, she'll just sit up in the casino suites, alone and going steadily insane.
 * Christine was mentally, physically and emotionally abused for years and devoted her entire life to finding and killing Elijah. The ending also uses the term "warden," which might indicate she is staying there to make sure Elijah doesn't escape. It doesn't matter if the player kills him or not. If the player doesn't kill him, she could justifiably be concerned Elijah might figure out to escape. Elijah is crazy, but he was regarded as a genius when it came to technology. If the player kills Elijah, it doesn't mean Christine believes he died. Elijah already apparantly "died" twice before Dead Money occurred. She could also be concerned about someone accidentally releasing him.
 * Keep in mind the Brotherhood of Steel's policy towards technology is usually "if we can't have it, no one can," so staying behind to prevent people from scavenging in the area is a plausible motive, as well, especially since at least one other person survives and leaves the area.
 * This is further expanded in one of the conversations with Christine. The player can ask her why she wants to stay, and Christine "says" she's going to stay to protect people who wander into the area, as well keep the technology at the Sierra Madre from being used for more aggressive purposes. Elijah's plan was to use the security emitters to drop invincible holographic soldiers into the Wasteland against the NCR and everyone else, and Christine was sent to kill him and prevent such a misuse of that technology.

Vault 11

 * Alright, so after you fight off the robots and turrets trying to execute you, you get to hear the audio logs, you find out that the dwellers "passed the test" and were allowed to be released. So why, does the execution protocol still work even after the test was passed?
 * That area of the vault is only accessible when the trap is active. The trap might very well have been completely deactivated while the door was still sealed shut before you reactivated it, but there is no way for the player to legitimately check since the door is sealed.

Recharger Weapons
// I imagine that in most places, Energy Weapons are the kind of thing you see adventurers and merchants using, not soldiers. High-rollers who operate on their own dime, don't have a need for standard equipment, and who are generally speaking a lot more skilled than the typical footsoldier. In the NCR, footsoldiers need to be rugged, reliable, easy to supply and able to live off the land or improvise in a pinch, and that means conventional firearms instead of shiny lasers.
 * Recharger weapons seem pretty awesome, so why does no one use them? The recharger rifle, for example, costs less than half as much as the NCR's service rifle, does 5 more damage per second (though 50 % less damage per shot), costs half as much, is more accurate, is cheaper to repair, and most importantly, NEVER RUNS OUT OF AMMO. Think about how insanely useful that would be to the budget to an army as large as the NCR's. You don't have to pay a cap every time you fire a shot! The pistol is more expensive, but is a much better weapon. Couldn't the NCR have handed the pistol over to the Van Graff's or Gun Runners and said, "mass produce these, and preferably create a hybrid between the pistol and rifle". The pistol does 18 dmg per shot (90 a second), the rifle does 13 (51 a second) so maybe the new hybrid could do 15 (75 a second). I don;t know, just seems like it'd save a lot of money and increase performance...
 * Just because it may be economical doesn't mean it will be simple. Energy weapons are expensive and difficult to maintain, and given how rare Recharger Weapons are it's likely that that it is currently impossible to reproduce them. While gunpowder and casings are relatively simple to produce, fusion batteries and vaccuum tubes are not. Meanwhile, the standard issue Service Rifles are easy to maintain, mass produce, and use. Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better applies to New Vegas, so the NCR isn't likely to drop it's time-proven guns over some flashly lasers, no matter if they could save a few caps per person..
 * It would save much, MUCH more then a few caps. Soldiers go on long capaigns for years. Besides, how is it hard to use? You never have to reload, never have to recycle ammo, just point and shoot, and the accuracy makes sure any idiot can use it. It's cheap, and the Van Graff's sell it, so it's obviously not hard to make, as the Van Graff's are implied to make their own merchandise. The Van Graffs operate in NCR territory, and are probably on the NCR's bad side due to the conspiracy with Crimson Caravan, so I don't see why they can't work out a deal.
 * Could be a weight issue as well as a practical one. If I recall, the Recharger Rifle weighs nearly twice as much as the Service Rifle. IIRC, didn't the Service Rifle also have better range? Those two factors could mean the difference between life and death for a trooper. Real life weapon projects have been cancelled because they were too heavy among other things (The XM8, for example). There are also the fan-wanky answers, such as there may be certain problems that we don't know about (maybe they don't handle well in moist environments, maybe they explode if you drop it improperly, maybe the top brass and some of the soldiers are skeptical about using such experimental and exotic technology, et cetera). You could also factor in the chance that if the recharger rifle does break, your average GI-Joe isn't gonna know how to fix it. Even if he did, it could be an extremely long and delicate process where one screwup leads to the thing blowing up in their face, one that he or she would be too freaked out to attempt.
 * Walk up to a local repairman, pay 230 caps to repair a fully broken rifle. Done. Plus, maybe the new hybrid could weigh less? The Recharger Rifle was something of a prototype, the pistol is the finished project, so maybe they could create one that's more expensive, but has a larger capacity, weighs less, and is more durable? Plus, the recharger rifle is actually more accurate, due to the fact that lasers actually behave like lasers. In pure statistics from the wiki: The Recharger Rifle has a spread of 0.02 (i.e. almost perfectly accurate). The Service Rifle, on the other hand, has a spread of 0.55, good, but not as accurate as the Recharger Rifle. Nothing in game suggests that the Recharger Weapons will break in a bad enviorment, and they are extremely cheap to repair, AND you could probably upgrade them (like, make Recharger Rifle focus optics, giving it + 3 damage, and maybe something to increase the magazine capacity from 7 to 10. it does not seem like it would be that hard to make with minds as brilliant as the NCR's, especially since the Van Graff's could benefit so much from this trade). Also, weight does not really matter in game to NCR soldiers, since besides ammo and the occasional stimpack, their weapon is all they carry, and they have a 200 pound carrying capacity. Outside of gameplay, in real world terms, the weight would pay for itself when it came to carrying ammo everywhere. Not to mention that you DON'T NEED TO RELOAD THE GUN OR FIND ANY AMMO, so it is incredibly reliable. Stopping power isn't really a big issue either. The focus optics would be enough (15 damage and 60 damage a second) to fit the NCR's expectations of power, since the main soldier of your enemy army (the Recruit Legionary) is charging at you wearing football pads and wielding, at beset, a 400 year old lever action rifle. I do agree that without the upgrades I suggested, the normal rifle would be next to useless do to its low damage. The pistol, on the other hand...
 * Suppose the local repairman isn't affected by gameplay and story integration and doesn't know how to repair it, suppose he's off to get more supplies and is unable to do it, suppose he's too busy, suppose you just sent your military paycheck and can't afford to have it repaired, suppose the repairman gets a stray spear to the chest, and now you don't have anybody to repair it, suppose one out of many hundreds of things happens that renders you unable to rely on another person to help you repair your exotic weapon, then you're out of the weapon that's keeping you alive.
 * Weapon repair kits aren't exactly hard to make... plus one will pretty much repair a broken rifle.
 * Try to make a repair kit out of scrap metal and electronics, a wrench, glue, and duct tape, now use it to repair a complex electronic device you have while it's plugged in. Failing that, realize the potency of Gameplay and Story Segregation. It's easy for the player to make them because they're the main character. Even then, by the level of repair needed to make one seems to make the Courier an amateur mechanic. (at level 25 you're able to repair guns, 35 leaves you able to fix generators).
 * The NCR has its own mechanics (Major Knight is one of the only people in the game who can repair stuff).
 * Apply the repairman situation discussed above to the mechanic, and you'll reach the same conclusion. Bottom line is that a weapon that can only be repaired by exactly one person out of a camp of nearly 100, and you'll see it's impracticality.
 * Still, if the rifle is so cheap to both repair and make, I don't see how it would be hard to repair. Repairing a fully broken service rifle costs over twice as much as a recharger rifle.
 * Then the NCR would become the Imperial Guard, an endless swarm of men and women armed with infinte ammo lasguns.
 * Lasguns would blow the legion out of the water Service Rifle's are only good early game.
 * The theoretical DPS does not apply for these weapons due to how recharging works. In any long term situation, the DPS for the pistol is 18 and rifle is 12, making both terrible weapons. The low storage capacity for extra shots is too low to make shooting more than once per second a very common occurrence in a major battle. Sitting around and doing nothing for 7 or 20 seconds is just impractical when much lighter, cheaper, more effective ammo based weapons exist.
 * Good point. That problem is less pronounced with the pistol, which has a much larger ammo capacity, damage, and fire rate than the rifle, but it also costs 2700 caps, whereas the service rifle only costs 540, so unless each soldier uses over 2160 shots, then it's not really worth it, even if the pistol is a better weapon.
 * Energy Weapons take a highly specialized set of skills to use (game mechanics wise, their skill is different from Guns) and different technology to manufacture in large numbers. You'd essentially have to Army 2000 the entire NCR military force, not to mention retooling the entire manufacturing infrastructure of the state (the Gun Runners and Van Graffs can't supply a whole army), and the result would be far less flexible and able to adapt to a failure of the supply chain. When a service rifle breaks and there's no repairman around (and Repair 50 is NOT something you can find on an average half-trained grunt), you grab a pistol off the nearest dead legionnaire, and when it runs out of ammo, you scavenge bullets, hand-load new ones, or switch to your pistol. When a recharger rifle breaks, you hope there's another laser around (and there probably isn't; lasers aren't much more expensive, but that's due to low demand and not high supply). As for recharger pistols, no way in hell is the NCR going to even consider a 2700-cap outlay for a single machete fodder soldier.

The neutrality of Jacobstown

 * While I can understand that Marcus has no reason to actively participate in the battle for Hoover Dam, I am curious to just how long Jacobstown can stay it's own little place. While I guess that they'd be left alone in a House/Independent ending, the NCR and the Legion might not be so simple. Lanius especially seems like enough of a Blood Knight to be unable to resist the idea of taking on an entire village of Super Mutants and the NCR might decide to annex them them as well.
 * Legion probably would go after them eventually, but that isn't a guarantee.
 * The NCR has a track record which indicate they would not if you play Fallout 2. Broken Hills, another town Marcus was mayor of, was fully capable of interacting peacefully with the NCR. The reason that town failed was because the mine was spent and it had no way to economically support itself anymore.
 * And the town have very little military or economic value anyway. It isn't like that it is located in a strategically valuable location (Primm, Goodsprings, New Reno), or produce products that you can't get any where else (Vault City, Redding, Hoover Dam). So in the Mr. House or Independent ending, people will most likely leave them alone. For the Legion, they do have very racist views toward mutants, but they will be too busy preparing for the eventual NCR counter attack and eliminating local resistance to waste time paying attention to them. Finally, for the NCR, they will most likely send an emissary to Marcus, offering him terms for the town to join the republic in exchange for OSI scientist and medical support for the cure that they developed, plus citizenship for all the Super Mutants in the town.

Lack of Hair Stylists

 * Why is the otherwise more-developed Mojave so behind the Capital Wasteland when it comes to cosmetology? Fallout 3 had Butch, Snowflake, the robot butlers... Fallout: New Vegas only seems to have Sergio, and you can only use his services if you take a very specific quest option (which uses up the King's favor). Why is it so hard to get a haircut? It's not like they're unbalancing.
 * I know! How hard could it be just to get haircut? If there was just a perk that allowed you change your hairstyle in a mirror I'm sure it would be fairly popular. However, maybe in universe, Haircutting is a secret skill practiced only by a trained elite few, or robots who have machinery capable of replicating the complex process. How else could you go from almost bald to a huge, neon blue hair without some kind of complicated technique.
 * Is it really that big of a deal? For most of the game you don't even get to see your character's face, plus it doesn't even affect your stats or anything. The developer just didn't think it is really that important.
 * Well, some of us happen to use the third-person. Also, it's exactly because it's not that big a deal that It Just Bugs Me that getting one is so convoluted. It doesn't affect your stats or anything, so why not also have, say, a hair salon in the Ultra-Luxe?

The Legion Sustaining Itself

 * Okay, how exactly has the Legion managed to sustain itself for so long as to a threat to the NCR? To actually have an army big enough to fight the NCR, they'd have to be around at least as long as them, yet Legate Lanius will flat out state that they have no food production, relying on pillaging people who do. It's also strongly implied, if not outright stated, that the Legion have no factories to produce guns (unlike the NCR), since they shun technology. Why did the Legion not deplete all its ammo a few weeks after it was born?
 * Most legion soldiers don't use ammo anyway, the majority wield melee weapons with machetes being most common, the rest use guns and ammo when they pillage them from others which include raiders and such. The other part of the equation is that they trade. The presence of a free merchant in the Fort is proof enough that the Legion has some kind of resources with which to sustain themselves and resupply. The assumption is that the Legion pillages communities within their territory for what they need, then leave them alone until they need more. The actual logistics in practice is very difficult to imagine, however.
 * Actually, most legion soldiers use guns. Look around the Mojave, not that soldiers can have loaded guns exclusively by pillaging. If not, they'd all be curbstomped by the NCR. It just seems like the Legion should've been destroyed by a pack of raiders due to lack of production far before they came to rival the NCR.
 * You are thinking about how the Khans operate back in Fallout 1. The Legion is not just a bunch of raiders that burn settlements and kill random people. They do have a slave based economy similar to what the ancient Spartans had (Slaves doing all the farming and mining to support the warriors). Also, the Legion does have citizens that are neither slaves or Legionaries. They are allowed to go on with their normal lives as long as they follow Caesar's law and pay tribute to Legion in the form of slaves or resources.
 * I'm not sure where that's stated, but OK, that makes sense (are these civilians just middle aged healthy males? Sick people die due to lack of medical technology, kids are turned into soldiers and women are turned into slaves). But what doesn't make sense is how they have a bunch of guns when they have no way of producing them, using weapons they couldn't have scavenged from the NCR. And if they did take the weapons from tribals and raiders, where exactly did they get the guns? Those guns are over 200 years old, they guns should've fallen apart after being fired so many times with no one maintaining them.
 * Exactly, that is the reason why according to the Van Graffs, despite being larger then the NCR in terms of size, Caesar's economy is only one-third the size of the NCR's much more developed economy. The Legion doesn't have a prosperous economy, however, they are able to support themselves in a way that they are a functioning nation state.
 * The guns that the Legion use tend to be lower tech - pistols, lever-action rifles - these are weapons that use physical parts that don't need high-precision laser cutters to make like new. Even the higher level mooks use 'lower tech' weapons like antimaterial rifles and pieces of armor like the NCR Heavy troopers - they just use bits of heavy armor stripped of the servos. They're even trying to buy energy weapons from the Van Graffs, so yes, it's most likely the Legion does trade for some of their weapons and ammo, unless there's Legion Gunsmiths around as there are Legionary Blacksmiths.
 * Hell, the Legion's reliance on lower-tech weaponry is probably a smart move for Ceaser on the logistics side. Most guns can be hand-forged if you know what you're doing; there's entire troibal communities in rural Pakistan whose main source of income is churning out guns using nothing but basic hand tools and some simple machining equipment. Limiting his men to basic firearms makes logistics immensely easier.
 * Look at the ending where Caesar survives and the Legion wins. The Legion doesn't enslave or kill everyone they meet; in fact they usually more or less leave most of the towns alone so long as they pay their tribute on time. This tribute is what keeps them in guns and bullets.
 * The Legion farms and produces food. They do not tell Lanius about it because Lanius would kill them for not being warrior like. My theory, anyway.
 * Wouldn't be in keeping with Lanius' characterization. While the Legion believes him only to be a mindless killing machine, he's actually a much more responsible general than that. Logistics is important to him, and even he knows that being low on supplies is a bad thing. Without farmers and farms to provide, his great army would have much more trouble staying strong without supplies of food. Besides, how would you even keep that a secret?
 * Motive to keep it a secret still holds if they believe he'll kill them. And mainly through Rule of Funny, but also by keeping him on the frontlines away from the farms.
 * But it doesn't hold. Again, it's not in keeping with the characterization of either Lanius or the Legion. The stories about Lanius only illustrate his loyalty to Caesar. If Caesar wanted farmers dead, then it's Caesar who is to be feared, because it's not just Lanius, it's the entire Legion who would rampage if that were the case. Lanius is a boogeyman, a symbol for stories about those who oppose Caesar's Will - the reality is that if Caesar wanted to kill farmers, the farms and the farmers would be dead.

Forcing the NCR out

 * In the independent and Mr.House endings, how exactly does killing General Oliver and his 5 bodyguards stop the NCR from annexing New Vegas? I mean, I get how you stop the Legion; Their best troops and their field commander are dead, their leader has cancer and is going to die very soon, and the NCR presuambly destroyed all their remaining strongholds following the battle. However, the NCR is still in great shape, especially since the Legion is now destroyed. Maybe they'll leave after Oliver's death when faced with hundreds of missile and laser shooting robots, but they're going to be back, and Mr.House or the Courier will discover very soon what the Brotherhood discovered: The NCR has a lot of soldiers, no matter how badass yours are, they are no match for the NCR's numbers. I mean, Vegas has no apparent way of producing new securitrons, whereas the NCR always has more troops. It just seems that without effectively dealing with the NCR, you're just setting yourself up for failure. Might as well just join them, since all you're really doing is speeding up the process.
 * This was actually explained by Mr. House if you ask him about it. Unlike the Legion, the NCR is at it's very core a democratic republic, and modern democracies are very sensitive towards causalities in war. The only reason why the NCR was able to use human wave tactics against the Brotherhood and the Enclave was because in their eyes it was a defensive war and therefore the people will be much more tolerant about taking large causalities. This is not the case when it comes to New Vegas, especially since the Mojave Campaign is an unpopular war back in the NCR home states (The average NCR citizens are happy about getting extra electricity and clean water, but they are not happy about their children being send to die or their taxes being diverted away from the domestic economy). In the event that the NCR military is eliminated or forced to retreat from the New Vegas area, no sane politician is going to send the troops back there due to the massive backslash that they will get from the voters. Think of Vietnam for example, if the US really wanted to they can keep the war going. But as soon as you loss the support of your own people in the home front, the war will be as good as over.
 * However, it should be noted that it was implied that this will only happened if both General Oliver and President Kimball are left alive. If they survived, the NCR citizens will view them as being responsible for getting the republic into an un-winnable war. But if they died, they will be treated as heros who sacrificed their lives and the NCR will take revenge against you/Mr. House with at best, an economic sanction, or at worst, a military invasion.
 * Good point, (I always talked Oliver into retreating and saved Kimball) but doesn't the NCR still have to expand somewhere? They've never stopped expanding in the past. They'll probably be back, maybe not a in a few years, maybe not in a a few decades, but they will. Also, this still doesn't answer the question of how Vegas will defend itself with a finite number of robots, especially since House uses them to crush resistance against him, so no ones flocking to join a human army he may be building. Maybe with the Courier he can build a human fighting force, but this is counting on the fact that the Gun Runners and other major companies will even do business with him/her (they're an NCR company), and even then it'll still be no match for the NCR. Didn't House also say that once the Legion were gone, the NCR was going to make up a reason to annex Vegas? Isn't that a pretty hint that they'll be back?
 * Mr. House stated that the NCR will try to annex New Vegas after the Legion is gone, but they are only going to be able to do this if they still have a military presents in the area. And if you follow the Yes Man or Mr. House ending, their entire military will withdrawn from the region. For the foreseeable future, the most that they can do is to send you a Strongly Worded Letter though their ambassador or order economic sanction against New Vegas and forbid their traders from doing business with Mr. House/you. Unlike the Legion, the NCR does have a home front and their government will have to care about the civilian population's war weariness or they will either be voted out of office or even face a revolution. Simply put, the NCR does have the ability to steamroll over New Vegas and take Hoover Dam if they want to, but their system of government will ensure that unless they face a military coup and the NCR is transformed into a dictatorship, it will not happened in the near future.
 * Also, NCR's expansionism seems to have originated during Tandi's presidency back in Fallout2 when they were working toward uniting all of California under their banner. Even back then, there were voices in the government such as Roger Westin who opposed the expansionist policies. And if you 'helped' Vault City or Vault 15 remain independent, the ending will show that the NCR will imminently stop their expansion and Tandi getting removed from office, meaning that just a single settlement that refuse to be annexed is enough for the NCR to backdown. And remember that this was back when Tandi was president (who was so popular and ran the NCR so effectively that even Caesar respects her). Can you imagine the effect that something like this will have on Kimball? Anyone who succeed him will be crazy if they plan to start another expansionist campaign at lease within the next 50 years.
 * Pay attention to the lines you say to Oliver, as well. The lines you actually say to kill Oliver and his bodyguards is "Securitrons - erase the NCR from the dam" - the NCR, not just Oliver, but all the NCR there at the Dam. We just don't get to see that. Remember that Hoover Dam is the largest concentration of NCR troops in the Mojave, even the elite rangers are there for the battle. Consider then the NCR is probably not expecting a Benedict Arnold like this, will probably get slaughtered, regardless of whether or not you blew up the Fort. And if you did power up the Army at the Fort, the ensuing Curbstomp will ensure that the NCR won't have the power to try and take over New Vegas by military force. And lastly, it's also possible there's a giant robot there with the rest of the Securitron army that requires a huge jolt of electricity to get started... Afterall, RobCo and Mister House did build Liberty Prime, and I don't know about you, but I don't see Mr. House not having prototypes of his work where he can improve them over and over again.
 * You know, the Brotherhood, who're much larger than the Couriers army, thought they had damaged the NCR army enough that they didn't have anymore troops, and look at what happened to them. Also, wow... that's a little bit of Fridge Horror isn't it then? Ordering the slaughter of all those nice people who just helped you? Talk about Ungrateful Bastard...
 * Yeah, it not only falls squarely into What the Hell, Hero? territory, but it also widens the rift between the NCR and New Vegas as its basically a declaration of War. This is also part of why Mr. House didn't want President Kimball to die from a Legion assassin, Kimball and Oliver were going to be set up as the scapegoats for House's plan with the NCR. With Oliver dead, that's one less scapegoat to pin the blame on, and more of the NCR's hate will be on New Vegas. As for the armies, eliminating the NCR from New Vegas is only temporary, it does delay any further hostility between the NCR and New Vegas as the NCR council will spend some time pinning blame for the "Massacre in the Mojave."
 * If you choose to launch the Divide Nukes at the Long 15 the NCR loses its only efficient route into the Mojave. If you take the view that the Securitrons massacre all NCR at the Hoover Dam, that means the NCR loses a massive quantity of troops along with their main General in the area. In a worst case scenario the NCR ends up with a decapitated command structure, a large part of their army in ruins, their President dead and the Long 15 obliterated. That's an enormous amount of damage and if you believe Ulysseys the loss of the Long 15 may very well spell the end for the NCR as a whole. In that case at least it's doubtful whether the NCR will be troubling New Vegas again.

Homosexuality In The Legion

 * OK, this has been really bugging me, though this is in the fandom rather than game: Whenever someone gets into an arguement about the NCR, the anti-NCR person always brings up that they apparently hate homosexuality due to Major Knights comments, and that the Legion is tolerant. Uh, guys? Homosexuality in the Legion is punishable by death. Talk to the gay prostitute in Westside. He'll state that a Centurion used to repeatedly rape him, but since homosexuality is punishable by death, he tried to hide it. Eventually, some of his men came close to finding out, so the Centurion tried to kill the prostitute until he escaped. Once again, it's blatantly stated it's punishable by death. Homosexuality in the NCR? Well, it seems to operating on sort of a "Don't ask don't tell" system, judging by Knight's comments. But, it's also state that the "Don't ask don't tell" thing is only actually active in that one particular outpost he's at. He says "Well we can't be "friends" here, people here aren't as tolerant of that as they are back in the states, so maybe when I get off my tour of duty we can be "friends"." That, and no one at all has a problem with Corporal Betsy being a lesbian (until she started harassing every woman in camp after being raped, and even then it's more from the fact that she didn't seek psychological help from the incident), once again supporting the fact that homosexuality being "untolerated" (in a very very minor sense compared to the Legion) is just another thing the fans are blatantly lying about to paint the NCR as worse than it is.
 * (This troper is highly supportive towards the NCR both in game and in real life since I support the political philosophy that they stand for, therefore what I am about to write will be very bias) Basically it is a classic example of Fan Dumb and character hate. A lot of the anti-NCR crowd is actually against the entire idea of NCR, but since they are unable to find real logical reasons to support their hate towards a fictional country, they just nitpick on some of the NCR's less morally good actions. This goes for both the old school fans that played the first two games, and the new comers that stared with Fallout 3. *** For the hardcore fans, the NCR hate stated all the way back when Fallout 2 was released and the NCR made it's first appearance. Many of them hated the idea of having a post-apocalypse nation state with a functional government founded by common wastelanders, since it implies that the world will recover eventually and therefor the Fallout series will be Ruined FOREVER. (Ironically, these are the same people that complained about how Fallout 3 suck because the world didn't make any progress for the pass 200 years and how it is unrealistic.) They complained about how NCR supported slavery by refusing to close down a slave trading operation outside their capital city (ignoring the fact that they do send you to free the slaves), how they tried to annex Vault City (ignoring that VC is a racist dictatorship supported by a slave based economy), how they are trying to get everyone to join them (a.k.a giving them food, medical support and protection), and finally how they are not helping the people of the wasteland enough (I thought they were against the NCR getting into other people's business?). There is even a post on NMA about people fantasizing on how there should be a Fallout game in which you can make the NCR collapse.
 * This also goes for the new comers to the Fallout universe. In their case, they didn't have any pervious knowledge on the world of Fallout. After looking at the Crapsack World in Fallout 3 with people eating 200 year old potato chips, the NCR might seem too sudden and 'un-Fallout' like for them (ignoring that Fallout was never about being an 'EPIC' action game but instead about the flaws of human nature). They could only see NCR's actions in the Mojave (somehow corrupt and highly ineffective) and concluded that this is how the entire NCR is like and ignore all the real progress that the NCR has made (the fact that the state of California is mostly rebuild must mean that the NCR is not that powerless).
 * And lets not forget how real life politics get involve in them forming their views. The NCR is basically the representation of post-Cold War America in real life: A capitalist constitutional republic/democracy. This have the effect of making people reflect their political views such as socialism (see the above 'Just Bugs Me' post on Mr. House and the comments of one of the user or the NMA review of NV about how the NCR is unrealistic because it's history doesn't follow the Marxist Social Conflict Theory) and anti-American views when playing the game when ignoring what is actually going on in the story (FYI, the troper is not an American). Again, take the NMA forum for example. You can find postings there with people that talks about how awesome the Master in Fallout 1 is with his plan of forcing the entire human race to join the Unity but at the same time complain about how evil the NCR is for trying to annex smaller communities. So their logic is like this: America is bad, therefore everything America does is evil. The NCR is the Fallout's version of the present day America, therefore everything the NCR does is evil. Just go to the Bethesda forum and you will find a user there called 'Elvis' that is famous for being crazily anti-NCR. In his postings he portray everything that the NCR does as completely evil and all users that support the NCR are sheeps. It got so extreme that some of his anti-NCR postings were locked within hours.
 * So in conclusion, it was never about the NCR's actions. Some people just hate the NCR. To be honest, I have yet to have a good and honest debate with anyone about the NCR without them resorting to Insane Troll Logic or accusation of homosexuality against me (I guess they not against homophobia anymore if it doesn't involve NCR bashing)
 * The reason a lot of the NCR hatedom goes after these kinds of details is because there is no really justifiable reason to hate the NCR as a whole. They are the closest things to being effective "good guys" in the grey and grey morality of the first two games (Fallout 3 had the whole Lyons Brotherhood of Steel uses the term "Paladin," therefor they can act exactly like fantasy Paladins regardless of that not being in line with their earlier portrayals). You can disagree with their individual decisions and they are not portrayed as being perfect, not having a large degree of self interest, and having members that are outright evil on an individual basis, but within the context of the world, they still are fairly idealistic with enough pragmatism thrown in to actually function. The problem is if the NCR are the "good guys," then that makes the faction they want to be the "good guy" look worse in comparison, despite most of the other factions being portrayed being heavily flawed. The basic goal of the NCR is to build an economically powerful, safe, cohesive nation, which given the basic ant in this environment is deadly, isn't that unreasonable.
 * Makes sense I suppose. I've run across several people who actually go as far to assert the Legion are morally superior for completely idiotic reasons, one of which was because (and I'm using an exact quote from some guy who messaged me): "the Legion's trade is amongst the most free in the Mojave, the NCR's trade is both organized and controlled by a few wealthy families[...]Look at how strong and disciplined the Legion is as a whole. They are the type of faction that wouldn't use a nuclear bomb to rid their enemies like the NCR would." Apparently it's ok to enslave and mass murder anyone who annoys you, but having slightly restricted trade is pure evil! Anyway, back to the main subject. This kind of strayed off topic from my question about homosexuality in the legion.
 * Returning to the topic about homosexuality in the Legion, the reason that Legion supporters uses this point in debates is really simple: If there is one characteristic of the Legion that is totally indefensible from the point of view of the players regardless of political view, it will be their extreme sexism. They might be able to come up with justifications for the entire cultural elimination and slavery thing by saying that it is 'all for the greater good', but even they have to agree that to enslave, abuse, and rape someone just because of their gender is wrong and even outright evil. Therefore, they just shift the attention toward the flaws of the NCR instead in an attempt to say something along the lines of: "Well, sexism in the Legion is bad, but the NCR is homophobic! They are not any better! Therefore the Legion is better then the NCR. This allows them to ignore the need of defending the Legion's sexism, and instead making up the myth that the NCR is a homophobic state based on a single comment. I have yet to see any Legion supporter give a real justification for Caesar's sexism other then Hand Wave it with "Sure, the Legion might be a bit sexist, but look at the NCR! They hate gay people!" (See the older thread above on the hatedom for the NCR)
 * The Legion's position on homosexuality is actually unclear, since everyone but the prostitute says that Legionnaires tend towards homosexuality. Thus, either the writing team weren't writing from the same playbook (like that's never happened before), or that it's both a capital crime and widely practiced anyway; since the Legion generally seems to have its act together when it comes to internal affairs, I favor the former explanation, and obviously the NCR-haters are going to pick the explanation that best fits their views (well, duh). That said, the anti-NCR crowd are right in that the NCR right now has grown sexist, homophobic and jingoistic; they're completely wrong if they imply that the Legion isn't demonstrably far more sexist and jingoistic and arguably (depending on which explanation you accept) more homophobic. Why the NCR-haters don't rally behind Mr. House or the Wild Card ending is a mystery; I imagine there's probably too mant fa/tg/uys on NMA who like painting oppressive, xenophobic tyrannies as awesome.
 * Right, the NCR are sexist. That's why the CEO's of their two most powerful corporations (and potentially their national hero, the Courier) are female, along with half of their army and Colonel Moore, probably the most respected military officer in the Mojave. Let's look at who says the Legion practices homosexuality: Exactly three people say that, Cass and Veronica, and Major Knight, who is in an outpost miles away from the nearest Legion outpost. Those could easily be roomers spread by soldiers, which tends to happen a lot in warfare, either that or they just don't know or are making a guess (notice how everyone always says "I hear they're accepting", not see it firsthand). Guess who says homosexuality is punished by death? A prostitute who experienced it first hand! Then again, you can find officers such as Aurelius Phoenix drinking alcohol and doing drugs despite Ceasar banning those by death as well, so maybe your explanation is true, but no matter how you want to slice it, you cannot go around comparing being slightly uncomftorable with an openly gay member at one particular outpost to crucifying people for being gay.
 * And lets not forget that the NCR was founded by a female president (Tandi), and that their military presents in New Vegas was because of the the Ranger Unification Treaty, which was signed by another important female (Ranger Chef Elise). How many important Legion females can you think of other then possibly the Courier? In fact the only adult female character in the Legion that you can talk to is Siri, who will tell you that rape against women is normal and even accepted in Legion territory (and that if the Courier is female, that some of them are even thinking about raping you!). Saying that the NCR is the morally inferior to the the Legion (or even as it's moral equivalent) is like saying Nazi Germany was not morally worse than the Allies.
 * Well, the NCR was founded by Aradesh, Tandi's father, though Tandi was it's most popular leader. Point still stands.
 * It's explicitly stated that Colonel Moore would be a general now if she were a man, and "had to work twice as hard for half as much respect." Still, this is a serious case of "show don't tell." The NCR is talked up as being sexist even if they don't show it ingame. It's not like that has never happened before. (As for Tandi, the sexism is implied to be a recent development. No, I don't get it either.)
 * When did they say anything about the NCR being sexist the one thing they said was that comment from Colonel Moore but no matter how you look at it the NCR would be considered pretty equal even by modern standards (in the US) Women serve in the front lines and in command, they have openly gay soldiers with no one except one base where the troops are more conservative, and they pacefully work with tribals to help them out of the stone-age. Compare this to the Legion where women are forced into slavery, gays are subject to the death penalty, and tribals are either forced into slavery exterminated, or have their culture destroyed the NCR is clearly leaps and bounds better than the Legion. That and the Legion call themselvesThe Legion
 * You could also chalk it up to her blowing off steam over not being in a higher position, preferring to pin the blame on (possibly) non-existent sexism in order to justify it to herself. Note that in a piece of cut dialogue it is revealed that she does get promoted to Brigadier General if the NCR wins the second battle of Hoover Dam.
 * That makes a surprising ammount of sense given how her basic policy is to shootfirst ask questions after they are dead.
 * I always find this assertion crazy, seeing as it's implied the NCR has gay marriage, as evident by a letter home from a solider. It's a standard love letter, with a promise of buying a ring, with the twist being that both the writer and the recipient are women.

Doggie Treat

 * This has to be the most mysterious item in the entire series, this troper isn't even sure if he's using it right, it isn't consumable and it has no information on the internet, anywhere! The whole thing just bugs me, it sits there in my inventory mocking me ugh!
 * According to the Fallout wiki, the Doggie Treat is a miscellaneous item that makes it so any dogs in the wasteland won't attack unless provoked. It may be a semi-useless item, since there are only a few wild dog encounters that even a level one courier can handle no problem, and would be rendered redundant by the Animal Friend perk. It doesn't work on coyotes or Nightstalkers, though. And now you know.

Counterfeit Caps

 * How exactly do counterfeit caps damage the economy? The caps themselves aren’t backed by anything like gold or a cohesive economy; indeed they were only accepted as a means to facilitate trade and not as an actual currency. Granted, the dangers of counterfeit caps are expounded on by Alice Mc Lafferty, who may just be referring to the NCR economy. This is a little more glaring, though, because the NCR have their own paper money that is (was) backed by gold.
 * Through other conversations, you will come to find out that the NCR's gold reserves had been destroyed by the Brotherhood of Steel during their war. NCR funds are now backed by 'water reserves' which is why the caps to NCR dollar exchange is low (one hundred dollars in NCR equates to 40 caps, or a 2.5 dollar to 1 cap ratio), which is similar to using Pre-war money. With the value of the dollar becoming practically worthless, caps return to being the currency of choice, at least in the Mojave, since non-NCR merchants will trade for caps as well (such as the Legion or non-affiliated groups).
 * It was also stated that just as in the first Fallout, the caps are backed by the merchant companies at the Hub (a major trading city and founding member of the NCR). They made a guarantee that they will back the caps as a currency and will trade supplies for them.
 * As of Fallout New Vegas, that was a promise made over 120 years ago, and the economy has changed quite a bit since. By Fallout 2, all the money in the NCR (which by 2181 had annexed the Hub) had been switched to Dollars, backed by a gold standard (caps were made worthless). By Fallout New Vegas, because the gold reserve had been destroyed, the standard became water, which made dollars just as valuable as pre-war money, and made caps valuable again.
 * Point of notice: exchange value is not an indication of worth. The change of the rate would be. As long as the rate stays 1:2.5, both currencies have the same worth. It's like comparing the Cent to the Dollar: the individual Cent of course is worth less than the individual Dollar by roughly 99%, but hundred Cents are always going to be one Dollar, since the entity who issues Cents is just as stable as the one who issues Dollars. Just taking the exchange rate as a proof for stability (which is what money's worth is all about - some stuff which keeps its value while you wait for something worth exchanging it for) is a case of You Fail Economy Forever.
 * Caps have value because of their irreplaceability. Since the technology to manufacture and paint them is more or less lost, caps represent a lightweight unit that can be exchanged to equate to units of labor or value, much in the same way that normal fiat money works. Fiat money is valuable because the backing authority says so, not because it's backed by gold or any other valuable substance. If you think about it, if I offered to pay you $500 for a high five, you wouldn't be motivated by the gold you would exchange the bank notes in for; rather you would think of the goods and services you would secure with the $500. The money I pay you with is valuable because it is difficult to obtain and has a limited supply. Increasing the supply, say by an unauthorized entity printing their own money, devalues the currency. Sure, the occasional cap turns up when someone finds an intact unopened soda bottle or in day to day scavenging, but not enough to have an impact. The bottle cap press, on the other hand...

The Courier Naked in the Doc's Office
I may be missing something, but... where are the Courier's clothes when they start the game? In the opening cutscene, we clearly see the Courier (or at least I think it's the courier, it's the knocked out person next to Benny as the Khans dig a grave) wearing clothes, what appears to be a "field hand outfit" (the same clothes Doc Mitchell wears), and a cowboy hat. So why does s/he wake up naked? Did the doc remove the clothes for an operation? Why would he need to do that for a gunshot to the head? And why didn't he give them back?
 * Maybe he thought the Courier wouldn't want them back because it was covered in blood and dirt. Alternatively, he decided to check the rest of the Couriers body for injuries and had to cut through his/her clothes to see.
 * Standard medical procedure, given the circumstances, you were unconscious and the easiest way to remove you from your clothes is cut you out so the medical assistance can proceed properly. Also, you may have, uh... lost control of certain bodily functions, and you really don't want to be sitting in your old clothes for that. It's not like Doc Mitchell could have you set up with a catheter or another device, like a diaper, for that eventuality.
 * No diaper? Now that's a missed moment of awesome if I ever heard one!

Magazines and their effects
How can certain magazines like Milsurp and Future Weapons today make you better at using guns as well as True Crime stories which gives you +5% to critical hit chances?
 * Giving you information you didn't previously know?. Isn't that like the whole point of reading?
 * A Soldier of Fortune style Magazine will be more meaningful for the Guns one, but since Guns And Bullets already covered the skillbooks. It's a wonder why does a Milsurp reviews gives off more knowledge than a Gun Rag with biased reviews. Also the critical bonus for True Police Stories is boggling.
 * Think about it this way: Skill books are like real text book or works that are more serious in nature. The information in the takes much more effort to understand, but once you get it, the skills will stay with you forever. Magazines on the other hand are much more entertainment and casual in nature. The information in them are much easier to understand (more skill points) but they will not stick with you for long.
 * Still, the True Police Storie's critical bonus is the one that bugs me the most.
 * In this case, just look at back to the old Police Procedural shows like Dragnet, or their modern CSI type counterparts - they go over the accuracy of what happens in real-life crimes, such as the physical damage involved in, say, murder. While gun rags and books go over the safety and operation of weapons, medical journals would go over how to treat such wounds, but the True Police Stories would describe the damage done by those same weapons - basically what happens when you put a bullet into a body.

The logistics of New Vegas tourism
So, people from NCR-controlled California come to New Vegas as tourists in order to gamble away their money. Apparently, the only way to do this is to travel on foot with a caravan along the Nipton road - I-95 route, through territory that is not entirely free of dangerous animals and raiders and lately has been threatened by the Legion. Which seems analogous to 18th century town dwellers from the established colonies on the East coast travelling on foot for days or weeks through frontier territory threatened by hostile Indians in order to reach some frontier town in the Ohio valley or some such region where certain vices are legal. This would have been more believable if there actually had been a working railroad that could carry travellers and goods from NCR to Vegas, but that project was halted by the Powder gangers revolt.
 * Actually, that is pretty much what they do. Most people enter through the Mojave Outpost and head up I-15 to New Vegas. The route normally was rather safe, with only recent events making it less so. The Powder Ganger breakout happened only a few weeks ago, and led to nearly every problem along that stretch of highway. Primm would always be a stopping point for travelers along I-15, and Ranger Jackson sends people to clear the lower route of giant ants. The Deathclaws never moved in until the Gangers shut the Quarry down, and after passing the Quarry most people turn right to avoid entering Fiend territory. All in all, the route was safe enough, with only recent occurences that made it dangerous.
 * According to The Other Wiki, the real Las Vegas only developed as a town when it became a stop on the railroad in 1905. Still seems like it would be too inconvenient for the average person to make the trip on foot solely for the sake of gambling.
 * New Vegas doesn't want to attract the "average" person. The credit check is 2000 caps, most people in the world are no where near 100. The people it is trying to attract can afford transportation and bodyguards. Besides there is plenty of precedent for very wealthy people to look for imaginative ways to squander money. There is no reason to fly by private jet to "X" country for "Y" food, but it does happen.
 * The credit check is required only of people who don't have passports or some other identification. By the terms of the agreement he has with the NCR, Mr. House stipulated that the NCR do nothing to prevent its citizens or soldiers from entering the strip. The 2,000 credit check is for non-NCR individuals (such as Emily Ortal, the Follower of Apocalypse you encounter on the strip - she required 2,000 credits because she's not an NCR citizen). The way around this credit check is simply having a passport (or a counterfeit) - you do not need either if you take the NCR-controlled monorail into the Strip. Now, that said, the civilians most likely to have the resources, the caps, and the ability to get a passport, to travel safely to New Vegas are those in the upper echelon of society.
 * The only way to get a passport is to be connected with Mr. House or one of the major families (so not the average person). Counterfeit passports do not count as a legitimately intended method of entry. The NCR could have easily steam rolled Mr. House's forces when that deal was made, so, to some extent, NCR citizen entry could be considered to be a deal made under duress (thus an extra-ordinary circumstance). The monorail is completely controlled on both ends by the NCR military. Mr. House has absolutely no say on who can go on it (so it is an unintended port of entry he can't do anything about). So basically, the intended points of entry are 2000 credit check or a passport issued by a major figure in New Vegas (neither of which are accessible by the average person). The counterfeit passport and monorail are unintended points of entry that Mr. House has no way of controlling, so don't reflect the group of people he actually wants to let into New Vegas. NCR citizen entry involves a deal Mr. House essentially could not refuse without risking the NCR simply overthrowing him.
 * Do not forget, the treaty favors House rather than the NCR - House is using the treaty to buy himself time while he puts his greater plan into action (which involves the Courier, the Platinum Chip, and a certain army or robots). Call it Luck, fortune, providence, whatever, but House is in a much better position than your argument suggests. The NCR agreed to the treaty because they didn't want to expose a weakness caused by trying to fight both the New Vegas families and Securitrons and the Legion at the same time, so the NCR is not going to go back on the deal while the Legion is still breathing down their neck. Mr. House doesn't need any say on who goes on the monorail for the very reason stated - he wants the NCR to go in and out of the Strip on their own terms - be it soldiers on leave or NCR citizens willing to blow their hard-earned NCR dollars in his casinos. There's nothing preventing the NCR citizens and refugees in Freeside from going back to the Strip - the problem is simply that those people don't have the money to stay at the Casinos (it's pretty strongly implied that NCR troopers and Securitrons won't let people sleep on the street in the Strip). Vault 21 is the cheapest place on the Strip, but it still costs more to stay there than just squat in Freeside, end up at Old Mormon Fort, or wind up at the Aerotech Camp. It is not in Mr. House's interest to bar his target clientele from the Strip simply because they're a little short when they show up at the gate. He's taking the NCR for every cap they've got, including the ones that can barely afford it now. The credit check is there to keep out non-NCR riffraff while the passports - counterfeit or not - are to allow NCR citizens and certain others like the Strip families free entry. Simply put, the only way the Courier can get a passport is through Ralph - either as a favor from the King or with his own money, and it's pretty much stated that it's a forgery.
 * Also, a huge source of income for the Strip comes straight from the NCR - or more specifically, the hundreds to thousands of soldiers they have rotating through the Mojave on a regular basis to defend the region. The entertainment/service/support industry near any large military base is enormously profitable, because soldiers on deployment have nowhere else to really spend their money, and there are three such bases within spitting distance of the Strip (McCarran, Golf, and the Hoover Dam). The Strip sees a constant, regular influx of soldiers willing to spend their caps/NCR money/looted Legion money on booze, gambling, and whores, and makes a massive profit off of it. Colonel Hsu even comments that the NCR thought they had the advantage when they first moved in, but House has profited more thanks to all the NCR money he's getting from the troops and the NCR simply can't afford to pull out of the region. House's agreement with the NCR pretty much ensures a large, permanent troop presence around the Mojave, which in turn ensures he has plenty of money. I'm willing to bet House could get along fine purely on money garnered from NCR soldiers; the money from gamblers is just added income.

Lack of Ghouls and Super Mutants in the Legion and NCR

 * In Fallout 2, the random NCR Rangers could be humans, ghouls, or Super Mutants. Yet in New Vegas, pretty much every NCR soldier is human (I think I found a few Veteran Ranger ghouls), despite the fact that having Super Mutants in the army would give a large advantage on the battlefield. Also, why doesn't the Legion seem to have any ghouls or super mutants in their military? I remember reading somewhere that the Legion is racist against them, but that doesn't tie into Caesar's Darwinist philosophy. Ghouls and super mutants are as strong/stronger than normal humans and completely immune to radiation, making them physically better than normal humans, so shouldn't the Legion love them?
 * Well there is, you know, the whole sterility problem, which could make the Legion look down upon them as inferior. That and the fact that most of the Super Mutants (not all, but a majority of those shown) sound and act rock-stupid could lead to the Legion looking down upon them as simple dumb muscle and inferior to them.
 * There were really only a handful of actually dumb Super Mutants. The human level and above intelligence ones were more common, you just interacted with them less because they were harder to trick. Fallout 3 just Flanderized the majority of them to being big dumb brutes.
 * The Fallout 3 Super Mutants were stupid because they were the result of experimentation in Vault 87. They are not representative of average Master-creative Super Mutant intelligence.
 * There are a few reasons why it makes sense not to see them.
 * 1) There was only one named Super Mutant Ranger and no ghouls in Fallout 2. The non-randomly generated Rangers were exclusively human. Even assuming the random number generator wasn't putting too many ghouls and Super Mutants into the random Ranger encounters, they still are a very small percentage of that organization.
 * 2) Being stronger really does not make that any difference in a gunfight (which is the NCR strategy). Ghouls are only human strength anyways. Super Mutant sized armor is almost non-existent, so while Super Mutants are much more resilient than a human naturally and can survive more actual damage, a human in armor is far more resilient and a smaller target that can make better use of cover.
 * 3) If you take Fallout: Tactics as at least partially canon. Ghouls and Super Mutants, despite some rather significant bonuses early on, were overall pretty terrible in the long run. Both have significantly slower learning and training speeds compared to humans. On top of that, Ghouls, due to their long life span, tend to shy away from dangerous situations.
 * 4) The main advantage ghouls and Super Mutants have over humans is the nearly complete immunity to radiation. New Vegas is one of the least irradiated areas in the entire Mojave wasteland. Which kind of negates that benefit in almost every area, other than the outpost that was full of Ghoul Rangers due to the elevated radiation levels.
 * 5) Super Mutants are dying out due to being sterile, there just isn't many left at this point without going into Fallout 3 plot magic. This is a major plot point in Fallout 1. So far, the west coast games have been fairly good at showing this. Fallout 1, Super Mutants controlled about a third of the map. Fallout 2, they basically held one fairly large, powerful town. Fallout: New Vegas, they basically inhabit one very small town.
 * 6) NCR soldiers are from the NCR. Broken Hills no longer exists (the most likely place to recruit Super Mutants and Ghouls). I would guess Gecko is probably still around, but the Ghouls there just wanted to be left alone mostly.
 * 7) Ghouls eventually turn feral with no warning. That makes them a liability. There is absolutely no baseline for this either. Some ghouls start as feral, while other Ghouls have been around for hundreds of years.
 * The biomechanics around "ferocious post-necrotic dystrophy" are difficult to explain, but there's a very strong argument that it is not "without warning" and that many conditions need to be met for a ghoul to become feral (including isolation, mental deterioration, radiation levels). It's really Fallout 3 that introduced "crazed zombie ghouls" that are hostile to everything at the drop of a hat. Ghouls from previous games tended to be those who were in high-radiation areas, or victims of rather extreme circumstance. Afterall, living in a Post-Apocalypse is not for everyone, and isn't exactly conducive to proper mental health. Looking in the mirror and realizing you're effectively a walking, rotting corpse probably does not help the matter. Needless to say, it's more likely that Ghouls will have more psychological issues atop of physiological issues than humans.
 * 8) Super Mutants can become progressively crazier (and not exclusively the Nightkin Stealth Boy issue), so they also can be a liability.
 * I could go on, but I think that is enough reasoning to why the NCR isn't flooded with Super Mutant and Ghoul recruits.
 * This said, there are still plenty of supermutants wandering around, but neither in organized numbers nor settlements aside from bands like the group at REPCONN or Black Mountain. Marcus just hasn't been successful in getting them banded together like at Broken Hills or Jacobstown. For the most part, they have been shown really to be antisocial and otherwise unwilling to congregate after leaving the Master's Army, either out of fear (for good reason) or simply not getting along. The Master's Army had been bonded by Unity (a sort of psychic connection), and once that went away, the usual differences in ideology and thought cropped up again, added on top of being effectively being made "different" and all the psychological effects that entails. Marcus and others, like Neil or the NCR ranger, tend to be the rare exceptions.
 * The reason Super Mutants can't be found in the Legion is that it hasn't come up. The only Super Mutants who go that far east are mostly insane Nightkin who Caesar wouldn't even consider recruiting. In fact, the vast majority of the mutants in the Mojave are insane Nightkin, and the rest are mostly gathered in Jacobstown (and even there there's a whole lotta Nightkin). As for ghouls, they tend to be rather weak and unhealthy on the whole, not to mention sterile; I imagine Caesar wouldn't even find them to be good slave fodder.
 * On the NCR side of things, there still seems to be a lot of racism on their part against Super Mutants; they treat Jacobstown like the mutants are a bunch of tribals, complete with the debates in the Senate between "let's leave them alone" and "kill them and take their land!" There are ghouls in the NCR (such as the ranger), but they're pretty rare; they're pretty rare in the Mojave too (one community of sentient ghouls, a couple other ghouls here and there, ferals in several locations, and of course Camp Searchlight). The Mojave is basically human-dominated, which makes sense; West Coast super-mutants are a dying race, and the majority of ghouls are feral.
 * It's hard to really determine anything of Super mutants east of the Colorado because of a few factors. One is the general lack of information about Legion territory. We have a lot of clues as to what the place is like, but we've yet to see what is actually going on there. Plus there's the uncertainty of what is and what isn't canon from Fallout Tactics. Gammorin's Army did move through the Midwest at least 70 years before Caesar rose to power, so it would be possible for the tribes under Caesar's banner to have met some Super Mutants or some Super Mutants to be in Legion Territory, but as that raises a lot of other questions, it was probably easier to just ignore the question entirely. No one in the Legion ever mentions ghouls or Super Mutants in their conversations, as far as I know. Whether we see anything in Honest Hearts DLC is uncertain.
 * As I recall, ghouls tend to avoid danger because they don't age and will live forever so long as they play it safe. Super Mutants also don't age, and the intelligent ones would likely have a similar mentality. As of this game both the NCR and the Legion have large, secure inner regions that would give a lot of new opportunities to someone looking to avoid danger. Maybe ghouls and super mutants have been leaving the military en masse to become farmers, scientists, etc.
 * According to The Fallout Wiki there was a hostile NPC called a "Legion Creature" in the game files which acted like a Feral Ghoul (although it looked like just another legionnaire), perhaps this means the Legion were going to be more than just baseline humans before the idea was Dummied Out
 * Also, this troper just encountered a ghoul NCR ranger on the Play Station 3 version, so NCR employs them to some extent, evidently.
 * Same for this Xbox player, in fact he was the frist Vet Ranger I saw, so odds are by the time between Fallout 2 and New Vegas all Ghouls in the NRC are Rangers now.
 * This troper's seen at least one "normal" Ghoul ranger, as well as several Ghoul "Veteran Rangers." The fact that Ghouls are only Rangers, rather than normal NCR grunts, could be explained in several ways: 1)Ghouls, being virtually immortal, would naturally have a lot more time to hone their military skills than normal humans, and thus more likely (per person) to be Badass enough for the Rangers than an average human grunt, 2)since Ghouls don't seem to suffer (at least as badly) from radiation, they'd prove useful in investigating hazardous areas where normal humans would suffer and 3)while they might not face legal discrimination, Ghouls could still face societal prejudice in many of the societies the NCR has annexed, so a commander would think it better to put Ghoul soldiers on recon and/or the frontlines rather than in garrison, where their presence could cause unrest among the local populace. The out-of-game reason why there are not Super Mutant NCR troopers is because the game designers couldn't/wouldn't take the time creating separate uniforms and armor for NCR Super Mutants, and in-universe it would take a lot of trouble to adjust all the different NCR bases and outposts to accommodate troops of such size...
 * It's also implied that the NCR has changed a lot since fallout 2, they've become much more expansive and war loving, these changes include a more human-centric view where super mutants are unwelcome and ghouls are politely tolerated.
 * J.E. Sawyer actually has an answer to this. According to him, ghouls and super mutants aren't part of the Legion is because:
 * 1). There aren't enough Super Mutants in the Arizona area to really matter.
 * 2). Ghouls, being centuries old are too jaded/cynical to be swayed by Caesar's words.

Value of Power Armor

 * Why the heck does Power Armor sell less for than the Mk. Versions of the Combat Armor? Are the merchants just trying to rip you off?
 * Supply versus demand. For most everyone in the Mojave, the reinforced Combat Armor is the best armor in the wasteland and thus, merchants are willing to pay much more for it and sell it for much more than a comparable suit of power armor. Even though Power Armor is undeniably more effective, power armor usage is limited as the vast majority of the Wasteland are simply incapable of using power armor - they don't have the training and can't equip it. Only two factions in the Fallout universe know how to use power armor - the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave - and neither are willing to share the knowledge with "wasters" - the Courier and his companions are a clear exception. While the NCR has access to power armor, they don't know how to use it (they strip out the servos that would make it Power armor and make it "heavy" armor instead).
 * Standard Brotherhood of Steel policy is to take any power armor they see a non-Brotherhood member carrying with no compensation. If that person is lucky and doesn't resist, he probably won't die in the process. That gives a very plausible reason for merchants not being as willing to purchase it at a premium.
 * Combat Armor is medium armour. It weighs about half as much to lug around with you. The grunt-tier T-45d series compensates with heavy duty servos, but still slows you down. The top-tier T51b is better balanced to not slow you down, but doesn't compensate as well for the extra lifting. (I guess it's a traction thing.) On the other hand, most Power Armor is built to last. Worth noting that T51b- and Remnants-helmets are indeed worth more than CA reinforced Mk 2 helmets.

Mr. House's behavior after his victory at Hoover Dam

 * I am honestly really surprised and disappointed at Mr. House's behavior if you help him win at the end. After all his talk about helping humanity rebuilt to their pre-war glory, what is the first thing that he does? Rebuild the area around New Vegas into a technologically advance capitalist Utopia? Expend the Strip with more casinos and hotels? Open new trade routes and develop a thriving business sector? No. But what did he do instead? He sends his robot army on a killing sprees against the Kings for not attacking innocent NCR citizens (The same NCR that New Vegas is dependent on economically), takes control of surrounding towns and tax them like crazy (As a businessman, Mr. House should know that this is not an economically good idea), and totally ignore the technologically advance and by now friendly tribe right next door to him (Who will really be helpful for him in rebuilding and ruling New Vegas). It is like he suffered a serious case of Motive Decay after he is finally put into a position to do those great things that he has planned for 200 years. The final ending feels like that he turned from the 'Noble and intelligent scientist and businessman that wants Ne Vegas to achieve economic prosperity' into an 'Insane dictatorial warmongering Statist that wants to control and oppress everyone'. It just feels like a Character Derailment moment for me.
 * Maybe Mr.House was a greedy tyrannical douchebag and he just played you- simple as that. Either that or he views this as necessary for future plans. Last time I checked, he had the kings killed because they wanted to remain independent.
 * It's more your misunderstanding of who Robert House is as a person. Keep in mind that House never ever cared for the people. There's a difference between building a utopia and caring for what happens to people in his actions to reach that ideal. He himself tells you he wants New Vegas to run the way he wants to, calling himself an 'autocrat' rather than a dictator. He just doesn't want people to interfere with his plans. He doesn't care for any of the tribes he has employed on the Strip, they are there to protect his investments - as long as they do as he says, they're well-treated. Once someone he has dealings with no longer has use (see: Benny), he no longer cares what happens to them, as long as they are no longer in the way. The NCR's allies are a liability once Mr. House is in charge, and if he's to keep a stable grip on "his" New Vegas, he has to get rid of factions who would be used by the NCR to gain a new foothold in the region. If someone in the area allied with the NCR, House believes he has to neutralize them so no one can challenge his new rule. Taxing Primm is his way of cutting off their support for the NCR (they'd be taxed heavily anyway), and the Kings are very independent, but fighting off the NCR is the only way for House to be convinced they're loyal to New Vegas. For him, punishing people for siding with a foreign power is just good business.
 * (The OP) Perhaps you two have a good point about Mr. House being an uncaring elitist. However, the thing that unlike the NCR or the Legion, Robert House does not identify himself with a set of political ideology beyond the idea of a new Viva Las Vegas and like any business person, cares about profit. After all, his background is that of a CEO, not a military leader or politician. But his actions in the end game are not economically logical. For example, killing off the only resemblance of organized government in an area that is the only access point to your business venture (or not killing them when they have declared open hostility against your best customers) is not good business; Going out of your way to antagonize the most powerful faction in the West Coast (who are also your best customers) is not good business; And as anyone that has studied macro-economics can tell you, taxing your citizens like crazy is no good business (not to mention that it is extremely bad PR and you will eventually risk a popular uprising). I guess I have expected Mr. House's actions to be more Pragmatic Villainy if anything else.
 * Actually, running the government and taxing people excessively is economically the best strategy in his position. Normal rules of economics do not apply in a post-apocalyptic world. Outside the casinos, which are really the only major way for New Vegas to bring in money, there is very little other options. He has no trading partners, no unique resources, no significant manufacturing capabilities, and his one source of revenue is the casinos, a niche business (especially in a post apocalyptic world) with high amounts of competition. Yes, the NCR was interested in the area for water and power, but keep in mind they are not starved for either of these resources. Bad PR and popular uprisings don't really pose a major threat. Anyone capable of posing a real threat to the securitrons already hates Mr. House or is completely apathetic. The casino based economy is not dependent on the average person.
 * It should be noted that the only town Mr. House taxes heavily is Primm, and only because they had accepted the NCR.
 * Uhhhh... no. Talk to the NPC "Street Vendor" on the Strip. She'll say that Mr.House charges a 50 % income tax. Much greater than the NCR's.
 * It couldn't possibly be because the Strip's income tax also pays for security services for a freelance merchant, could it? The Strip is where Mister House is making his profit. Do you know the difference between a whole town like Primm and individual merchants like that Street Vendor? The Vendor on the Strip can move to Freeside, and voila! He stops paying taxes to Mister House. The Vendors choose to be on the strip because it's safer to peddle their wares there than anywhere else. For accepting NCR protection (which is the Courier's decision), on the other hand, Primm gets hammered with a double whammy of being under Securitron "protection" and heavy taxes for no real good reason except House is a little bit vengeful.
 * Paranoia was essentially the main defining trait of Mr. House. In hindsight, yes, the level of planning he had does come off as justified. However, keep in mind he didn't know Benny was betraying him, he didn't know his network had been hacked, he didn't know a Securitron was reprogrammed, he didn't know any other faction was actually planning to move against him (granted, if he knew anything about how the Legion operated, then, yes, he has good reason to suspect them, on the other hand the NCR does have a track record of leaving people in his position alone if they cooperate), he didn't know anyone knew what the platinum chip did or why it was important, and he didn't know anyone had the slightest inkling to what his plans actually were. On top of that, he's been betrayed numerous times over his life, so he isn't exactly a trusting person. Just because people ended up being out to get him does not mean he wasn't already extremely paranoid. The way he managed his casino should be a huge clue for that.
 * Also, about the NCR point. He broke a treaty with them in the process of taking over New Vegas. They weren't going to like him no matter what.
 * Think of it as a literal "Hostile Takeover". House was always dedicated to controlling New Vegas, and he wasn't willing to share power. For House, the whole point of the treaty was a stalling tactic so he could put his real plans into play (this is where the Courier and the Platinum chip come in). His plan ultimately requires the end of the threat of the Legion, while simultaneously removing the NCR as a power in the Mojave. He relies on timing and positioning of his pieces, before he sucker punches the NCR. While a little violence is necessary to achieve his aims, he'd rather not have more important figures like President Kimball or General Oliver die - he needs scapegoats back in the NCR to take all the blame. This will allow him to keep relations with the NCR as a whole in an unfriendly, but not openly hostile, terms. It will keep him in business, since some people will still go to New Vegas anyway - knowing that New Vegas Security is seen as being practically better than NCR military. Should either Oliver or Kimball die, House figures it would just delay the economic boost of his city by a few years. He has plenty of time, he can wait.
 * Was my understanding that the Kings started the fighting in Freeside, due to their whole philosophy being based on freedom and independence. House is working on expanding Vegas and the Strip; to do that he needs to control the surrounding area, and since Freeside's the place that his gates open out to, that's where he starts. The Kings, being the Kings, resist and do so violently. Also, Primm getting heavily taxed might have another motivation; Primm advertises itself as "the other New Vegas"; they're his competition. NCR might start sending their tourists there to gamble instead of Vegas out of spite(at first). He kills, or controls the town, he still gets the NCR money flowing into his plans to rebuild.
 * Only the NCR-controlled Primm gets taxed to death when House wins. The other endings WHERE HOUSE WINS all have House leaving the town alone under the control of a slow robot or a trigger-happy human sheriff. Neither would be a match for a few upgraded Securitrons. Third Edit: Apparently no one reads the edit history/folder title. It's twice been edited in that House taxes the shit out of Primm for accepting NCR control WHEN HE WINS HOOVER DAM. WHEN HOUSE WINS HOOVER DAM, HE TAXES PRIMM TO DEATH FOR ACCEPTING NCR RULE/PROTECTION. Not the NCR, House is doing the taxing. He's taxing Primm for accepting NCR protection and control after he gets rid of the NCR and the Legion.
 * To the OP: Mr. House is an asshole. He's actually interested in making an ideal paradise for theoretical people in the future, because if his calculations are correct, he can turn the Mojave into a Pre-War Space Age civilization in 50-100 years. Actual, living individuals are more of an annoyance.
 * Hell, this is no better demonstrated than the Jane securitron; House could have slept with a real live celebrity, but instead he uploaded a scan of her brain into a robot. He could have all the 'companionship' he wanted without having to interact with one of those meddlesome 'real people'. Think of him as a crazy cat person, but with robots instead of cats.

How is Mr. House's future plans for New Vegas going to work?

 * When you ask Mr. House about what he intends to do after he takes control of the entire Mojave wasteland, he will go on to a Motive Rant about how he will use the wealth and resources generated from Hoover Dam and the casinos at the Strip to rebuild the high-tec industry in ten years, put a man in space in fifty, and colonized a new planet within a century. Lets ignore for a moment that his plans depends on the NCR continuing to do trading with him and for their government to not declare an economic embargo or military action against New Vegas (The same NCR that he just totally antagonized or possibly committed an act of war against). How exactly is he going to do all those things? During your travels around the Mojave, you will find that its lacks any kind of functioning factories or heavy industry. The only resemblance of small-scale manufacturing is the Gun Runner factory, but even it will likely close down after the NCR retreated from the region. And if he is going to to create an entire economic infrastructure from top to bottom, he is going to need a lot more than just caps, and even if he is Robert House, it is going to take him more then just ten years to do so.
 * (Continuing on) For starters, there is a lack of an educated workforce needed for a advance economy that Mr. House is aiming at. Every educated or trained specialist that you met are from either the Brotherhood or the NCR, and both groups are now out of the equation. There isn't even a single school or any teachers around that at all! Is Mr . House going to so all the staff training via his robots himself? And finally, Mr. House seems to be overestimating the importance of New Vegas. Other then Hoover Dam and lots of Silicon, the Mojave doesn't really have any rare or critical resources to trade with at all. Hell, they can hardly even feed themselves despite the area being relatively free of radiation. Colonel Moore even noted that when it comes to to it, New Vegas is just an Awesome but Impractical tourist trap. If New Vegas is more like Vault City or San Francisco in Fallout 2, I can see Mr. House's plans actually working. But right now, it feels like Mr. House is just outright delusional or tricking the Courier into doing his bidding, knowing very well that his plans not going to work.
 * That is kind of the point he will never succeed in his plans, he is an egomaniacal prick blowing smoke and fell into the objectivist trap and failed to recognize that he needs other people for anything he does to have a chance of success.
 * Just remember who Robert House is based on, right down to the mental flaws. House has big dreams, and he has a plan to accomplish them, but the reality is that his plans don't always work out. Afterall, for all of House's posturing, he twice fails to consider that his proteges could -both- betray him.
 * He's going to "borrow" those functional rockets from the REPCONN ghouls when they come back from their little trip to help Novac. Send Victor up in one to scout around for inhabitable planets and give him a GECK to make sure it's nice once the rest of humanity follows. ;) Seriously, whatever else he is, House is certainly an egomaniac. Given all that he achieved in his long life, possibly a justified one. He almost saved an entire city from a nuclear holocaust and survived in a Pringles can for 200 years; obviously he thinks he can do anything, because he's usually right. Putting people on another planet is a goal entirely in keeping with his personality--a big, impractical dream that has less to do with actually helping people and more with inflating his sense of importance and superiority.
 * Use the money to open more mines and build foundries and factories to use the material from the mines to make a whole new infrastructure. All while opening up new education systems so he'll have the manpower to make space flight work again in a within a hundred years. It isn't that unbelievable; the knowledge is there, he just needs the time and the resources to rebuild the infrastructure to make it a reality. That being said he may either be exaggerating to sway the Currier to his side or underestimating how long it will take, but the goal itself(rebuilding, getting into space) isn't a completely unrealistic one. And considering he has the knowledge and experience of a man who's lived since before the war, combined with his intellect, he's the best suited person to do it.
 * Construction doesn't work that way. You can't just build an infrastructure because you have money. Though not very obvious, it actually took hundreds and hundreds years of trade, scientific breakthroughs, global investment, production, and mass education to create our current infrastructure. Even if you know every single detail of what you need to make it, that doesn't mean you can actually make it. Most manufacturing processes use lots of different raw materials and chemicals. The amount of work to produce these are ludicrous for one company producing one thing to maintain.
 * House has two advantages we didn't when setting up our infrastructure; first, he's not in the dark. Someone did it before and he knows how. Second, he's not working from scratch; the pieces are there. He just has to build on what's still usable(like the dam) and reverse engineer what doesn't work anymore, and he has a massive amount of old world tech just in his immediate area to work with, with the potential for much more depending on the actions of the Courier. Its also doubtful he's planning on doing all of this with tourist money; that's seed money. He has Hoover Dam and Helios One, he can sell power from them to the NCR for a nice profit. Someone up the page suggested he could buy out and monopolize the caravan industry. Both of those would be a boon towards finances which could be funneled into projects in the rebuilding efforts such as food production and education, and that's just to start. Again, I'm not saying House is going to make the deadline he gave the Courier, not by a long shot. But it is possible; House has had over two hundred years to plan this out. He's going to hit snags, he's going to hit setbacks. But he can get it done.
 * (The OP) Perhaps it is possible for Mr. House to eventually do all those great things that he is planning to achieve. But I just don't see how he is going to be able to do so within the time frame of putting a man in orbit in just 50 years and colonized a planet within a century especially given the current condition that the Mojave Wasteland is in. It is possible for Mr. House to build schools and universities for educating the people so that they can work for him (I am still a bit skeptical about whether or not the tourist economy and Hoover Dam can really generate the amount of money needed, but lets ignore that for a moment). However, it will take at lease a few generations until the general population can achieve a literacy rate and education level high enough for them to support a high-tec industry. Also, it takes a lot of time for a post-apocalyptic civilization to achieve any industrial capacity at all, even if they have all the pre-war knowledge on how to do so. To put it into perspective, in Fallout 2, the NCR still needed to rely on savaging Vault when they want to get computer parts more then 60 years after they were established and nether the Brotherhood or the Enclave have any large scale production. Mr. House's plans might work eventually, but I just don't think the Courier will ever live to even witness a fraction of the plan's implementation. He/she will be lucky to even be able to be there when the first high-tec factory is opened.
 * Why is it necessary the Courier live to see House's plans fulfilled? Can't the Courier simply believe House is the best bet for the future, and work to help him plant the seeds, even though it won't bear fruit till long after he/she is dead?
 * Simply put, we just don't know what other resources that House may have had tucked away as part of his scheme. We only really know about his stash of robots under the Fort, and even then, we don't know if that's all he had, or if he has another stash tucked away for a rainy day somewhere else in the Mojave. The Courier visits the basement of the Lucky 38 exactly once, and we don't know if it's the only basement (House's personal security room is off the radar, afterall). House had resources all over Vegas before the war, so it's possible (and very in-character) for House to have more resources hidden until after he had Vegas fully in his control. There's plenty of stuff left over from the War for him to procure and use, too. H&H Tools to build new machines, REPCONN for chemicals and rockets to get his dreams of space flight off the ground - these two most prominently as Rob Co worked with both companies.
 * (The OP) Anyone that has studied basic macro-economics knows that for there to be any economic growth or development, there will need to be four factors of production: Land (natural resources), Labor (human resources, workers), Capital (machinery, tools, money, etc), and Entrepreneurship (someone that combines all the factors together to create things). Lets give Mr. House the benefit of the doubt and say that he is the best source of Entrepreneurship available. However, he lacks all the other factors necessary for him to have a functional economy, let alone an advance one that he his aiming at. For example, as seen in game, the Mojave offers very little resources, natural or man-made. Even though the area is free of radiation, it can hardly even produce enough food to feed itself. The only real resources that he has are Hoover Dam and Vegas' strategic location on the I-15 highway, both of these resources are only useful if you are trading with someone else (mainly the NCR).
 * Depending on the actions of the Courier, House could potentially have access to the technology of the Sierra Madre as well as a good relationship with the people of the resource rich Zion national park, as per the Dead Money and Honest Hearts dlcs. Both could go a long way towards making his plans reality.
 * Even with the technology available in the core game alone, Labor and Capital can be handled by robotic technology. The DLC provides plenty of Land, as the above poster pointed out. The resources of Zion, the nanotechnology of the Sierra Madre, and the biotech available in the Big MT, just to name three examples. It's clear that Mr. House's utopia is possible, though he may have miscalculated the timescale or the amount of resources he'll need.
 * And at lease for this troper, the reason why it is necessary the Courier live to see House's plans fulfilled is because one of the biggest reason to support House is that he promised that he is the fastest path towards re-building the world. But as pointed out in a number of post here, it is highly unlikely that he will be able to do so within his own time frame. Perhaps he will be able to do all those things if given enough time, but then he is falling into the same trap as many Socialist dictatorships did in that he only think in the future tense and become totally detached from the present. Which is not a sing of good leadership.
 * If you have a decent science skill you can call House out on his lifespan being impossible for anything but ghouls and mutants. He explains that he knows quite a bit about "the science of longevity" and that he hopes to one day commercialize the technology & perhaps share it with the Courier...which, granted, knowing what we know about how he lived as long as he did, may not be that great of an idea, but maybe there are some kinks that can be worked out. Still, I think its fully reasonable for the Courier to decide that House is the best bet even if they aren't going to live to see it happen.

Sierra Madre Technology

 * Jesus christ, Dead Money potholed so many weird bits of technology into the Fallout universe, and none of it makes any sense. First and foremost, the vending machines. They are explicitly described as being matter replicators, able to produce food, medicine, and other useful items out of worthless little metal chips. Apparently these were widespread at the time of the Great War. The Great War that was started over lack of resources. Why didn't the Chinese or Americans simply create a giant Matter Replicator and dump a whole bunch of granite or ocean water into it to produce tons of oil and food? Boom, resource problem solved. Secondly, the holograms. These things have powerful beams, are immune to gunfire on anything other than their projectors, and are still running after 200 years. WHY has the Enclave never used these? It would solve a lot of probelms of the Fallout uninverse if the Americans just used what a private businessman was using.
 * The technology at least gets explanations in that they -are- supposed to be overlooked, experimental technologies that were being developed in the Big Empty, but not yet adopted by anyone else. The holograms supposedly need enormous amounts of power (which is a plot point - since you need to overload the generator's capacity so you can break into the casino - bypassing the holographic security). Elijah seems to have wanted to take the holographic emitters and plug them into Hoover Dam - how's that for more power? As for the vending machines, the explanations are from the in-game files where Elijah believes that all the stuff you get from the vending machines are actually made by breaking down the chips themselves and reconstituting them into whatever produce you're buying. Combine this with Christine's lessons on how to make more chips which work with the machines? Think about that. You're basically breaking down scrap metal and fission batteries and turning it into edible food, clothing, weapons, and medicine. Wrap your noodle around that - how advanced and bizarre that sort of technology is in The Verse, and tell me it doesn't bug you that no one else in the world is using that stuff. And remember, the Courier is getting a delivery of more chips every week...
 * This is confirmed in Old World Blues. The Sierra Madre was both Sinclair pet project, mostly build in the name of Vera, and another experimental town for the crazy bastards of Big Mountain. Elijah thought the matter replicator technology was widespread before the war, except that if has been, there would have been no ressources war at all, so he is essentially wrong. The irony is that technology could have prevented the war, but it was too little, too late.
 * The vending machines aren't magical; they require specifically manufactured bits of matter to make things (so somewhere, someone has to expend energy and resources to make the chips) and they operate by, presumably, running on electricity like anything else. Even assuming that the technology can scale up, the amount of work it takes to actually use beyond the concept (manpower, fuel to build the machines to obtain the giant block of granite or portion or ocean, fuel to run those machines, fuel to transport it to the replicator) is always going to be more than you actually get out of it. You're also assuming you even have a 1:1 ratio of what goes in versus what comes out; maybe you need a hundred barrels of ocean water to get one barrel of oil.
 * Furthermore, it needs to be a "fissionable" material in order to break it down into what ever you wish to create. The machine doesn't work both ways. When you "return" an item for chips, it only accepts it in exchange for the chips-it would most likely give that item to the next person who "buys" it instead of making a new one.
 * Screw all of that. Why on earth did Elijah need to get inside the Vault to get ahold of all three of these technologies? The Cloud is everywhere, and Elijah had even figured out how to reproduce it (on a small scale, but it still worked). The vending machines were on every corner, even in the villa. And the holograms were found in the medical district. He could access all three things he wanted without having to stop foot inside the casino, let alone the vault. And what purpose would getting in the vault get him?
 * The running theme throughout Dead Money is how the Sierra Madrea consumes everyone in their sins. It does a lot with the Seven Deadly Sins - Dean's Pride, Christine's Wrath, Dog's Gluttony, God's Envy, Vera's Sloth (Acedia to be exact), Sinclair's Lust, and finally, Elijah's Greed. Elijah doesn't want the gold, right, but he considers the treasure of the Sierra Madre to be all the technology contained within the resort and casino, down to the Vault. Elijah's ultimate plan, then, is to use the Sierra Madre Vault as his personal base of operations, and he wants all the technology held within. Consider all the speech options you have when talking to him prior to the final encounter - the thought of denying Elijah what he wants most (control and possession of the Sierra Madre's tech) enrages him. He can be talked into sharing the tech, but that leads to a Bad End. On a more practical note, he really does want the Vault to himself because it's a safe base from the Cloud and the outside world, where he can work in peace. And possibly, it houses some tech not found elsewhere in the Sierra Madre.

Elijah not just killing you

 * If Elijah truly thought You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, why did he activate a bunch of turrets than charge at you with a Gauss rifle rather than just waiting inside the forcefield, activating your collar, letting you blow up, then taking whatever's inside the vault? On a similar note, why does your collar just stop beeping when you get back up the elevator and why does it take so much longer to blow up than it usually does?
 * A good bit of it is the Vault's apparent ability to block transmission of the radio signal to blow you up. Similar to Christine's Companion Perk, the interference slows down your collar's activation, with enough time for you to make your dramatic escape. As for why the beeping stops once you leave - like what happens if you kill any of your former companions in the Hotel, you're simply out of range of the interrupted signal.
 * Insane person acting illogically is not exactly a stretch.
 * He actually tells you, after you've turned on the power, that he would have set off your collars except that the signal doesn't work between floors.

Illogical reputation and karma systems

 * There's so many things here that bug me. First of all, killing Mr. House results in negative karma. Let us remember that in the Mr. House quest-line, you are forced to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel (hundreds of noncombatants, presumably including children) for no reason other than because House hates them; and every other quest-line forces you to kill Mr. House. Also, in his ending, he forcefully wipes out all of the Kings, who are demonstrated to be a rather positive influence on Freeside. Why is killing Mr. House negative karma? Whether he's some an enlightened dictator of a megalomaniacal tyrant is ambiguous and arguable, but the game just slaps you with an Anvilicious negative karma and a ridiculously white-washy obituary.
 * It's implied that House uses his influence to lower your karma (even though it's not reputation), and the obituary was written by him (read until the end: "Let's hope the ingrates never have cause to read it. Who knows how many of them are even literate!"). Either that, or, as Colonel Moore suggests, killing House will plunge the Strip into temporary anarchy until the NCR comes to secure it. Though you don't see it, so maybe it was intention more than results. Also, he doesn't murder the Brotherhood for no reason, he murders them because they hate him and want to take his robot army. Not defending the guy, just saying he didn't do it for no reason.
 * The Mojave Brotherhood doesn't leave the Hidden Valley bunker, save for grocers and scouts. The only one who actually did anything to Mr. House's securitrons was Benny, who was able to reprogram one of them. There's no indication that the Brotherhood is a threat at all; House just hates them.
 * The only reason they only send out grocery shoppers and scouts is because the NCR shoots them on sight (i.e. keeps them from stealing from traders). If you drive out the NCR in the Wild Card ending but leave the Brotherhood alive, without the NCR to oppose them they just start straight up murdering people for every little bit of technology they are carrying (unless you get them to make peace with the NCR first, in which case they "merely" go back on the deal by mugging traders). Not only that, they capture HELIOS One. Generally, murdering traders and capturing one of New Vegas' only sources if income is bad for business and publicity, it lessens his profits and makes him look weak, and House knows this. He's perfectly justified in wanting them killed.
 * One, that happens in the Wild Card ending. So what you're saying to me is that Mr. House is right to see the Brotherhood as a threat, in the scenario that he's already killed by the Courier. Two, given that the independent Vegas ending causes a power vacuum, the Brotherhood -- being probably the most responsible faction in the whole franchise, save for arguably the Followers -- is justified in taking Helios ONE and trying to hoard weaponized technology (lest Fiends or Khans get a hold of it, which would be catastrophic). Three, this ending does not in any way signify that the Brotherhood "just start straight up murdering people;" only that they take technology from travelers.
 * Except your forgetting the Wild Card ending is basically just the House ending, except New Vegas is controlled by the Courier instead of House. Nothing suggests that the Brotherhood would in anyway tolerate a Vegas policed by robots, whereas everything (including the Wild Card ending and comments by Yes Man and House) indicates that they would try to take away those things. That's the entire reason they started a war with the NCR (and got slaughtered), because they thought the NCR didn't deserve to have even a little bit of high tech equipment (and the NCR are relatively low tech compared to House's securitron army). When you say "The Brotherhood is justified in taking Helios ONE and trying to hoard weaponized technology (lest Fiends or Khans get a hold of it, which would be catastrophic)", that's just making an excuse for an act of agression for no real reason other than greed, dogmatism, and spite on the Brotherhood's part. They don't care about anyone but themselves, if they were really hoping humanity made progress like they said, they wouldn't have attacked the NCR.
 * You're completely wrong; the Brotherhood was the original faction to discover Helios ONE, and the NCR started the war by trying to reclaim Helios for themselves (look up Operation: Sunburst on the Fallout wiki). If "they don't care about anyone but themselves", then explain the Fallout 1 ending where the Brotherhood - now in a secure position in the Wasteland - begins using their resources to bring medicine and education to non-members. By the way, how is the hoarding argument "just making an excuse for ... greed, dogmatism, and spite"? Would you want the Fiends or the Vipers to get their hands energy weapons and power plants? Didn't think so.
 * Yes, the Brotherhood occupied HELIOS first. But guess what? They started the damn war. I fail to see how attacking an enemy base in your territory after they've already declared war on you and massacred civilians is wrong. They've suffered huge Motive Decay since Fallout 1. The Brotherhood, after introducing all that new advanced technology to the wasteland, decided that now they wanted it back (mainly from the NCR). So they attacked the NCR, who were really the only chance the West Coast had at salvation. They got slaughtered (both sides, but the Brotherhood's casualties were more severe due to their smaller numbers). In all my endings, I killed off all the Fiends, evacuated the Khans, destroyed the Powder Gangers, and slaughtered the Black Mountain mutants, so there's no threat of all that technology becoming theirs. Worst case scenario, and assuming the caravan owners are incredibly incompetent, a gang of Vipers takes a few laser pistols and energy cells from some caravans. Then they sight a caravan full of loot they like, without the NCR to stop them, and use the laser weapons to kill the caravan and take their stuff. You know, the exact same thing the Brotherhood is doing. The Brotherhood doesn't even do anything with the stuff they take. They just store it away. The only time they did something with it was at the end of Fallout 1, and as said above, they just tried to take it back.
 * There's no indication who started the Brotherhood-NCR war except in non-canon sources, which is still foggy. That being said, the first contact between the NCR and the Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood was at Helios ONE, which was a case of NCR aggression. That was for no good reason, by the way, since the NCR had no idea how to repower the facility -- and even if they did, their intent was to power their military bases instead of giving it to their citizens. Talk about pointless bloodshed. Furthermore, the Brotherhood hasn't suffered from motive decay; the Mojave chapter simply doesn't have the resources to both subsist and help common folk in the state they're in, under lockdown in the Hidden Valley. But, they do help patrol the I-95 in the NCR ending where the Courier engineers a truce, which is evidence that the Brotherhood is doubtlessly a "good" faction. And, finally, to the question of if the Brotherhood is right to confiscate high-tech from other people: consider who is in the Wasteland. Common folk (traders, travelers) have no need of energy weapons. The ones that would actually use it are primarily transnationals like Fiends, Great Khans, slavers and raiders. The Followers aren't a military faction and wouldn't use energy weapons for much. Mr. House and the Vegas families don't need them either. The NCR has a legitimate usage (against the Legion), but they're also at war with the Brotherhood (and, in the case of the truce, the Brotherhood helps the NCR against the Legion using said weapons). So, simply hoarding the weapons is a good plan, since it keeps them away from bad people.
 * If you're talking about how Veronica was complaining they don't help common folk, she's not complaining that they don't keep raiders away at all times, she's complaining that they don't help anyone at all, even though the ending shows that they are capable of doing that if they put their rivalry against the NCR aside (and the NCR ambaassador is fully willing to negotiate, something the Brotherhood would know if they didn't kill anyone who came near their bunker. And the ending where they "help" people? They only do that when they get paid with the salvaged power armor!. About the weapons: You're missing the point. The Brotherhood aren't keeping those weapons away from bad people, they are the bad people. If I'm a caravan owner, I'm not going to get worried by a gang of 3 or so vipers with laser pistols (thats what guards are for), I'm worried about those power armored killing machines who are taking my best merchandise and possibly kill me in the process.
 * The NCR wasn't willing to negotiate; the Courier was explicitly ordered to destroy the bunker, and he is scolded for disobeying orders and negotiating the truce. Considering the bunker is surrounded by radscorpions and mutants, it's a fair assumption that anybody who comes nearby probably has the specific intent of attacking the Brotherhood. Also, agreeing to patrol the I-95 was not IN EXCHANGE for the NCR turning over their salvaged power armor; that was part of the truce. The Brotherhood began the patrols simply because they ended their lockdown. And, how are the Brotherhood the bad people? They only attack NCR caravans because they're at war, which the NCR started in the Mojave region. As shown by the Fallout 1 ending, the Brotherhood is fundamentally a good organization. You keep trying to escape that, but it's pretty clear.
 * They're not good. Why do you keep ignoring that they steal and kill because they think they own everything? How is that any different than a well armed raider group? Oh, and yes, they did only help patrol the I-15 because the NCR gave them power armor, the exact words in the ending slide were: "As per their agreement, the NCR handed over all suits of salvaged power armor and in return the Brotherhood helped patrol I-15 and Highway 95." That clearly says the Brotherhood patrolled the highways because the NCR handed them the armor. The Brotherhood, once again, started the war!. The developers have alluded to this, even if its not explicitly stated to be canon. The Brotherhood's leader in the Mojave was Elijah, do you really think it's a good idea to leave a base in your territory with that guy as their leader? Also, regardless of who started the war, the Brotherhood moved into the Mojave and started attacking NCR caravans, before the NCR attacked them, plus they were already in an official state of war with the Brotherhood, so of course they're going to attack the nearby stronghold of well armed raiders commanded by an Ax Crazy madman that's already started attacking caravans. Only Moore is mad at you if you make peace with the Brotherhood. She even says flat out "This is terrible, now Crocker is gonna want to establish diplomatic ties with them!". Not to mention the Brotherhood is a really big backstabber. They were friendly with the NCR in Fallout 2, and then they just attack because they think the NCR don't deserve any technology, then they attack caravans, then they got driven back, and depending on your actions, you could drive the NCR away and they will just start attacking caravans again. A truce with them is ideal, but unless you're taking the NCR ending the best thing to do is to bury these murderous, greedy, self-rhiteous jerks under the rubble of their own bunker.
 * I'm supposing you're including all of the children and noncombatants in the category of "murderous, greedy, Self-righteous jerks"? Regardless of what your opinions on killing children are: (1) They are different from a "well-armed raider group" because they don't kill people for supplies, all they do is confiscate high-tech objects (mostly weaponry), which ordinary folk shouldn't have in the first place. It makes the wasteland even more dangerous. It's the equivalent of the U.S. government confiscating rocket launchers from civilians. (2) The key word for the ending is the Brotherhood "HELPED patrol..." That doesn't exclude the given fact that they were already patrolling the area, which is the case since the lockdown ends before the truce with the NCR is established. (3) Yes, Father Elijah is not a good person, but plenty of NCR leaders aren't either; as shown by the Bitter Springs massacre. Judging the whole faction by one person is ridiculous. Elder McNamara is the leader during the events of New Vegas. (4) Regardless of how evil Elijah is, the fact of the matter is that it's unclear -- no matter how much you cry otherwise -- who started the Brotherhood-NCR war, but in the Mojave, the Brotherhood first claimed HELIOS One before the NCR attacked them there. They are the aggressors in this instance. (5) "Only Moore is mad at you if you make peace with the Brotherhood." Yes, but she is the legitimate officer at that point, and there is no reason to think Oliver, Hsu, or Hanlon would've objected to utterly annihilating the Brotherhood. (6) "They were friendly with the NCR in Fallout 2, and then they just attack because they think the NCR don't deserve any technology..." Different chapters. Again, the NCR attacked the Mojave Brotherhood first in order to claim HELIOS One. (7) "you could drive the NCR away and they will just start attacking caravans again." That's a good idea. There's only a handful of responsible factions in the Mojave: the Brotherhood and NCR being the only ones with legitimate usage for energy weapons, so with no NCR, that's fair game to claim all of them.
 * Nothing at all suggests there were children in that bunker. There are a few of what appear to be teenagers, but that's it, and even those are armed. That's just making assumptions without evidence. They're are no non-combatants in the Brotherhood. Everyone has a weapon and is trained to use it, and is trained to fight to the death over even the most useless bit of technology. What I'm trying to say about the NCR attacking the Brotherhood in the Mojave is that the NCR was justified in doing that: They're not the aggressors, since they were already at war. The Brotherhood is one organization: It doesn't matter who's in charge of what chapter, they are all the same group. They didn't even make any effort to differentiate themselves from the people the NCR was at war with by sending a diplomat or something, they just occupied the nearest power plant and started confiscating things from NCR caravans. Even when the Brotherhood takes technology, they don't do anything with it. At the end of Fallout 1, they introduced new technology to the wasteland, but they just decided they wanted it back later. They're obviously not helping anything, since the NCR has a relatively loose grip on the region and I don't see any Jackals running around with Gatling Lasers. Some fiends have laser rifles and plasma rifles, but those are likely provided by Ceasar's Legion who bought them from the Van Graffs. Those caravan owners might have just lost their livelihood, but oh well, at least some violent cult has more shiny things to store in a hole! And yes, they are a violent cult. They kill anyone who comes near their bunker (they themselves say this), attack people to take their things with their better weapons (just like raiders), and generally kill anyone who dares question them. Let's remember this is an organization where Elijah was snubbed at times not for his cruelty, but because he wanted to actually do something with the technology he found. Plus, the vast majority of members will literally kill you if you don't follow their codex to the letter. Even McNamara won't go against the codex. This sounds like an awfully dangerous organization when left unchecked. And that's because it is. You're also ignoring that the Brotherhood are not the U.S. government. They have no legitimate authority to do anything. It's less like the U.S. government confiscating rocket launchers from civilians and more like thieves threatening merchants at gun point and taking their best merchandise. In fact, that's exactly what it is.
 * (1) The Brotherhood only gets new members through offspring of current members, so clearly there are children in the Hidden Valley bunker; they're in sections of the bunker that the Courier can't or has no desire to access. (2) "The Brotherhood is one organization: It doesn't matter who's in charge of what chapter..." False. There's no central Brotherhood master that everybody else takes orders from; every chapter is the same in purpose but makes its own foreign policy. The only reason the NCR is at war with the Mojave chapter is because they attacked first at HELIOS One. (3) "At the end of Fallout 1, they introduced new technology to the Wasteland, but they just decided they wanted it back later." Canon source for this please? (4) "Some fiends have laser rifles and plasma rifles, but those are likely provided by Ceasar's Legion who bought them from the Van Graffs." Thus justifying the Brotherhood's purpose! (5) "Those caravan owners might have just lost their livelihood, but oh well, at least some violent cult has more shiny things to store in a hole!" Again, it's like if the U.S. were to confiscate rocket launchers or C-4 from civilians. Oh no, the government is violating my rights! They couldn't possibly have a good reason for doing this! (6) "They kill anyone who comes near their bunker" Right, because the only people around their bunker are Black Mountain supermutants, Powder Gangers or NCR patrols (who they're at war with). I don't see how you could possibly argue against this. (7) "and generally kill anyone who dares question them." The paladins that get upset at Veronica are a fringe; as far as I know, there's no indication they're taking orders from McNamara or Hardin. (8) "You're also ignoring that the Brotherhood are not the U.S. government. They have no legitimate authority to do anything." There's no such thing as 'legitimate authority' in this realm. If you want to run with that, then Caesar has more political legitimacy than the NCR in the Mojave, despite being one of the most despicable human beings in post-war America.
 * I think 'killing' them is a bit much I prefer the method that Veronica had wanted to do which was point them in the direction of doing some good. To the guy who was arguing the Brotherhood was in the right, They may have been a force for good in the past but they are going through incredibly severe Motive Decay the old Brotherhood provided technology to the weak settlements in the California wasteland but they abandoned that cause a long time ago. As time went by they steadily became more dogmatic about the codex and how they where the only ones who could have advanced technology, (no it did not say just weapons but just advanced technology that includes farming and industrial technology). So as time went by and the Dogmatic kill and take stuff faction grew in power those who wanted to be benevolent either left or joined Elder Lyons and set up shop in DC until eventually all that was left where the ones who would slaughter a Followers Outpost because one member was sick of all the bullshit and decided to join a different group. They stopped being a group of former US military men and women who where protecting human technology from being entirely lost a long time ago and have since become The Tech Priesthood of Mars desperately trying to keep everything Pre-War to themselves.
 * (1) I actually agree with you on that one. (2) Actually the brotherhood does have loose central structure in canon, its basically just a council of the most important Elders but it is clear connection and shows that they are the same organization. Veronica mentions that they exiled Elijah for HELIOS ONE.(3) He is thinking of the Fallout Bible which is considered canon by many fans because it was written by a Black Isle staff member. (4) What gives them any right to take these things when they are not the government in the region that would be the NCR who don't like their merchants being mugged for their technology along with the fact that they don't just take weapons just that they take advanced technology that which includes technology for more efficient farming to machines to make medicine and help people. (5) If thats the case why are they so stubborn against the idea of actually rebuilding the world, they very clearly suppress people like Veronica and Elder Lyons. The East Coast BOS where refused supplies and had contact cut when they decided to become the government in DC and Veronica was kept far away from the rest of the brotherhood.(6) That is actually kind of justified if only because of the fact that they have made an enemy out of every single major group in the Mojave (7) The extremely dogmatic group is not just a fringe but the majority look at how they all but exiled Veronica for daring to say that they should try to help people and use what we have for good and cut off the DC group. (8) They have no legitimate because the actual group in charge the NCR wants them to stop and is capable of forcing them to stop.
 * (2) Where is this stated? Elijah disappeared during Operation: Sunburst, and since then, the Brotherhood dispatched assassins after him; but I never heard anything of a formal exile issued by all of the elders. (3) Specific citation please? (4) The Mojave isn't the NCR's region. They were never elected; they entered the area with force and annexed several towns. The Brotherhood has the exact same amount of legitimacy. (5) They do rebuild the world, as per the ending to Fallout 1. The Mojave chapter isn't, however, because they're under lockdown. (6) Who did they "make an enemy" out of? The NCR attacked first at Helios ONE, Fiends and other bandits are just psychotic, Mr. House wants to eliminate the Brotherhood either due to an irrational hatred or simple desire to annihilate any potential threats, there's no known contact with the Families, Boomers or Great Khans, and Caesar's Legion wants to eliminate any technological society. That just leaves the Followers, which are non-military. (7) What do you mean "all but exiled?" How are they the majority when they weren't acting under orders? (8) The NCR has no legitimacy in the region except military force. Prove to me why the NCR gets to police the citizens of New Vegas but not the Brotherhood.
 * (2) The Brotherhood does have a central command structure. Read the backstory. Though I can't remember this being exactly stated in New Vegas, in Fallout 1 Maxson explains it. (4) The Mojave is the NCR's region. Regardless of whether or not they took by it force, they are the closest thing to a ruling faction in the Mojave, and they drove the Khans and Brotherhood out of the area. (5) The Mojave Chapter doesn't even try to rebuild the world after they get out of the lockdown. At best, they get paid to help the NCR patrol a highway. At worst, they actively attack people, keeping technology out of there hands and setting the world back for everyone but themselves. (6) They made enemies out of the NCR because they attacked in the west. Veronica herself outright states that they have tons of enemies, and not just those in the Mojave. (7) "All but exiled" means they kicked her out of the bunker and sent her to some obscure trading post where she couldn't spread any of her ideas. Several extremists are in high ranks. In addition to Elijah formerly being the elder, Hardin is the Head Paladin, and is utterly unwilling to negotiate with the NCR, in addition to supporting taking everything valuable from "inferior" peoples. (8) The NCR has more legitimacy then the Brotherhood because they actually do shit other than hide in a hole. When the NCR comes to your town and asks if you want to be a part of them, they'll protect you from raiders, charge a few taxes, bring food and medical supplies to your town, and likely set up crops around it (look at Vault 15 in Fallout 2, for example). The Brotherhood won't do any of that. Instead, they'll hide like until their enemies go away, come out, hold defenseless people at gunpoint, and take whatever they feel like taking because apparently it's rightfully theirs. And once again, comparing them to the U.S. Government taking missile launchers away from civilians is idiotic for many reasons. One, laser pistols and rifles aren't missile launchers. They actually do less damage than their kinetic counterparts, and aren't anymore dangerous than the guns the Brotherhood sees no purpose in confiscating. Two, how exactly is things like farming technology and fission batteries dangerous? The Brotherhood didn't just confiscate weapons, they confiscated "anything they saw as inappropriate". Three, the U.S. Government is able to take away your missile launchers because they protect you. The Brotherhood doesn't. So it would be less like if the U.S. Government confiscated missile launchers from civilians and more like if some violent cult sprung up in the middle of the U.S. and started taking guns, phones, batteries, and pretty much anything they want.
 * You know what just recruit Veronica and talk to her about the Brotherhood she explains exactly why the Brotherhood is in the wrong she was all but exiled means she was given a job where she would not be able to explain her views to anyone in the brotherhood and spends most of her time outside the bunker.
 * Anyway, that's not the point here, we got off topic. You're question was why does killing House give negative karma when apparently he was unjustified in killing the Brotherhood. The answer, I don't know why it drops your karma, but I do know that he's right abut having the Brotherhood eliminated. This isn't a matter of whether they're good guys or bad guys, it's a matter of if they will attack innocent people, damaging the economy and making House look weak, or if they won't. And they clearly will. Mr.House was Properly Paranoid.
 * Furthermore, you get negative karma from stealing, but good karma from killing bad people. What. Annihilating Fiend or Legion encampments makes me a good person (understandable), but if I take any of their stuff in order to continue my crusade of justice, I'm morally grey.
 * It doesn't just apply to evil characters. If you slaughter an entire town, your karma doesn't drop a point, but pick up a tin can, and boom -5 points. Not to mention it was a little hilarious when I attacked the Powder Ganger base at the NCRCF, iced everybody with a laser rifle, then got in trouble for grabbing a plasma pistol on someone's desk (that THEY stole from the NCR).
 * You get a reputation hit in the NCR for engineering a truce between them and the Brotherhood. I understand ultra-militarist officers that don't care about casualties being sore about that, but your reputation is considered by every level of society (e.g., civilians, soldiers and officers alike); are you telling me that the frontline troops are unhappy that they don't have to be incinerated by plasma rifles?
 * I think they'd also be happy that they have Elite Mooks to absorb bullets for them on the I-15 and Hoover Dam, for that matter. And they are. The amount of reputation hit you take is extremely miniscule, basically saying only the jingos (they exist in civilian ranks as well) are mad at you. Of course this would require everyone else to be neutral, not grateful, so...
 * The average NCR citizen hates the brotherhood because they have acted as terrorists murdering civilians and destroying the NCR's gold reserves thus destroying their economy. They probably see the Brotherhood as an incredibly well armed Raider group and going off what they have done and what they do if you let them run rampant they are kind of right. It stands to reason that the person who went against orders to get the NCR to not only let them stay around but essentially become a part of NCR's military would be hated.
 * The Karma system is a hold over from Fallout 3, which only worked because of how ridiculously over the top branching paths were. When your options are consistently along the lines of "blow up an inhabited town with a nuclear bomb" or "don't blow up an inhabited town with a nuclear bomb," then it is pretty obvious what is the more morally correct decision. Fallout New Vegas, on the other hand, has much more gray and gray morality, so a black and white karma system is never going to make that much sense. Considering karma intentionally has almost no impact on the game, it can almost completely be ignored.
 * I agree, I always got the impression that the development team did not want and did not care about the karma system, but wasn't bothered enough to remove it.
 * Wait, what's the problem with the obituary being a whitewash? Didn't House WRITE the obituary himself? Granted, I don't really agree with getting negative karma for killing him (since you take karma points for offing smaller scale bad guys) but considering there's a way to disable him without having to pop a round into the middle of his forehead (or shooting him with Annabelle I assume they'd give that a cursory evil tag.

Companion Help with Doors/Computers

 * Why can't companions hack computers, pick locks or disarm traps for me? That's one of the biggest reasons to have henchman in role playing games: having someone who has skills that you do not have. This applies to other skills too. Why doesn't Arcade help me heal the wounded Boomers or NCR troops? He is a doctor after all. Raul or Veronica could repair things, like the Helios One computer. It just bugs me that the game requires my characters to develop lock picking and hacking to complete quests when other people could do it for me, especially when I want to role play a character that's stupid or has no training in those fields.
 * Because that would completely ruin the point of having medicine, repair, or science skills in the first place. They have practical application, but for the most part are for checking skill checks. If you could use companions for those skills, then no one would ever need to put points into them.
 * Not really. The companion wouldn't be able to help you with skill or speech checks, just hacking or lock picking. That doesn't ruin anything in other RPG's. Neverwinter Nights let you hire a halfling thief who could disarm traps and open doors. It could be balanced just fine, maybe picking a character who can open things means forfeiting a strong fighter character; when I picked the hafling I had less muscle in my party to work with so it was a trade off. Does it really make sense to have a master mechanic just stand there while the player tries to fix something by reading out of a magazine? The problem is that the game expects you to become a mary sue that can do anything and that's not fun for role playing IMO.
 * The only companions whose background would realistically allow them to hack computers would be Veronica or Arcade, and no one has the background to pick locks or disable security. Veronica does have the capacity to unlock specific computers, like the one in the unmarked Gibson shack outside of the scrapyard.
 * I didn't know about the computer in the scrap yard, that's pretty cool. I think Raul could realistically have lock pick skills, being a handy man with a criminal background. He definitely has the repair to disarm traps. I also had EDE in mind for that, kind of like R 2 D 2 or something.
 * The series has done this earlier installments. It was almost definitely taken out due to how easy it was to abuse the system. It also diminishes character roleplay because you would end up with every character type being able to more or less do the same thing. What's the point of playing a stupid, unskilled character if you do not have to deal with being stupid and unskilled because you can use companions for skill crutches?
 * Eh, I disagree on it hurting roleplay but YMMV. My main point was that it's unrealistic to have these highly skilled experts unable to help you when they are talked up as being highly skilled experts. The informed ability JBM.
 * Veronica, Arcade, and Raul are the only ones who you could count as highly skilled experts and the abilities they say they have are generally backed up. Raul keeps your weapons in good condition for longer than they normally would be it never said he was a good lock picker and it is not a tagged skill for him. Veronica says she is good at tinkering and punching people low and behold she makes it so you dont need a workbench meaning she can make things stuff without tools and she IS amazing at punching people. Arcade is supposed to be an incredibly skilled doctor and that is supported by the fact that having him with you means your wounds heal much faster than they normally would. Most of the things you say they should be able to do they are never even hinted at being able to, It is never stated that any of these people had these skills.
 * Raul is a former criminal with repair skills, some lock picking would make sense in universe. Just because the skill isn't tagged doesn't mean that he wouldn't be able to open a Easy lock. The character is expected to learn all these skills, why can't a talented handy man have some novice skill at lock picking? Veronica is a BOS Scribe, meaning she has a science background, enough surely to use computers and according to the troper above, she does at one point. The game is so generic about what "science" is that hacking would fall under the purview of her skills logically. Arcade is a doctor who is doing "scientific" research when you meet him. Surely he would/could also have good science skills. I don't think any of them should be experts, that WOULD defeat the purpose of the players learning the skills themselves. However, they could open Easy to Average level things realistically.
 * Well, during restoring hope, you can have Arcade teach the doctor there instead of having to run to Crimson Caravan buy two books.

Damnit, Hsu!

 * Alright, long story short I went too far in The House Always Wins and passed Don't Tread on the Bear before I got my NCR rep up past soft hearted devil(was low because I killed a merc at Jacob's town for his star bottle cap). Now, I could rant about why my rep went down so low for killing mercenaries with a checkered past who were trying to incite violence and murder the inhabitants of a peaceful village when I have evidence of that...wait, just did rant about that, sorry. But my point is; I still have the No, Not Much quest where you get troops sent to Bitter Springs. Having already done Restoring Hope, I got those troops sent. Having helped out the Misfits, I got the troops from Camp Golf sent. However, Hsu won't send troops from Mc Carren...even though I single handedly wiped out the leaders of the Fiends, caught the spy in camp, and solved the murder of one of his corporals, along with uncovering the theft of water from the sharecropping farms. Despite all that, Hsu won't send help to Bitter Springs and I seem to have run out of ways to raise my NCR rep any higher, which means I'll fail the quest to save Kimbal. Now, my own frustrations aside, I just don't understand why Hsu is refusing; all of his problems have been solved and he has men to spare. Forlorn Hope is on the front lines and they had troops to spare.
 * NCR rep is simply too low for him to willingly spare troops.
 * You are a random guy that he does not like very much asking him to redeploy his troops. You are doing roughly the equivalent of walking up to someone, intentionally kicking him in the shin, then asked for $5. He might not specifically need that $5, but you didn't exactly ingratiate yourself into him wanting to help you.
 * It is my understanding that as long as you spook Kimball into fleeing (by letting the rangers shoot you on sight, for example), he'll survive even if the quest doesn't reward you for it. Think there was some line from House to that effect.

Colonel Moore: Worst. Leader. Ever.
1. It is a show of force to the Kings. 2. To occupy Freeside after you kill the Kings.
 * 'What? A street gang in an urban backwater is causing minor unrest with passing citizens? MOVE IT! MOVE IT! MOVE IT! I want six brigades to scorch the entire region, wipe it off the face of the Earth, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!?! Whew, well now that we got the serious stuff out the way, lets get on to the trivialities. Say, Ms Courier, could you be a dear and single handily wipe out that gang of drug peddling, leather clad badasses that already beat you to a pulp, left you for dead and who we haven't been able to get rid of in the entire history of our country? Wait, what's this about the Brotherhood? DAMN IT COURIER! When I tell you to completely annihilate the most technologically superior faction in the Wasteland without any backup or support I bloody well expect you to annihilate them! We could have had a decisive victory on our hands, now all we've got is the same Power armoured killing machines who brought our entire nation to its knees holding the line between us and that army of kiddie fiddling slavers that we've been totally unable to defeat up until this point and... eh... SCREW YOU!'
 * ....yeah? In case you didn't notice, Moore is a bit of an irrational psychopath. I fail to see the problem here; that's just her characterization.
 * Well...er...Moore is a firm believer that might makes right and openly states this. By making peace with the Brotherhood, you've basically undermined all the death and loss that occurred on Helios One. And, let's face it, she's just a bitch.
 * I think what the OP is complaining about is that she sends a whole platoon of soldiers to wipe out the Kings, yet just expects you to be able to wipe out a gang of raiders (not very hard) and the most technologically advanced people in the wasteland (hard) on your own.
 * Sorry about that, I got kind of carried away with the last bit. Though you do have to wonder why even if Moore was daft enough to expect a single combatant to take out both the Khans (whose roach like persistence gives the Enclave a run for its money) and the Brotherhood, then why would she deem them worth bothering about at all (Obviously they would be a major tactical threat from the point of view of a sane individual, but apparently not from the 'Elvis impersonators are harbingers of Belezebub' perspective of Moore.
 * I always wondered about stuff like that. How many soldiers is a lot in this universe? How are military tactics effected by certain individuals being able to take 100's of rounds of gunfire without dying, or kill dozens of enemies with their fists?
 * Base form the Fallout wiki the Battle of Helios One had the NRC sending over 2000 soldier vs the brotherhood's 200 (with 30 robots) this is a major battle that's a major battle between two super powers.
 * Operation Sunburst was a major battle, but not one between two superpowers. It was a last desperate holdout against a massive assault NCR force by a surviving chapter of the BOS. The Brotherhood itself was never a 'superpower' in the Western regions, even with all the chapters surviving. By comparison, the NCR is a huge force, with a home population numbering 700,000 that could simply overwhelm the Brotherhood with numbers. That said, comparing the two largest battles in the Mojave prior to the events of New Vegas, the memorial to the casualties of the First Battle of Hoover Dam lists 107 casualties and is considered one of the largest single battles in NCR history (though they are losing 1,000+ soldiers per year in the stalemate with the Legion), while the casualties suffered at Helios One against the BOS alone number around 700 or 800.
 * Moore never says you have to do it alone. Besides given everything you've done up until that point being ridiculously unrealistic for one person to accomplish. Should could just be genre saavy. If this one person that single handedly done all thing, then what's the harm of asking him to do this. Worst case scenario, the Courier ignores the request and she is in the exact same place she started at.
 * Moore isn't sending the NCR Troopers into Freeside with you to help you kill the Kings, she's sending them in because:

The troopers are there for the aftermath, you're there for the fight. Also, I saw Moore and Hsu as the only NCR commanders who are true soldiers: Oliver is willing to sacrifice hundreds of soldiers for a place in the history books, Kimball is in it for the same reason, even Hanlon is wasting troopers lives to discredit Oliver and Kimball. Moore is just as jingoistic as Oliver, but for very different reasons: she, and Hsu are in it because they believe in the NCR, and want them to succeed.

Scary Armed Stripper

 * Why does the stripper/crier for the Atomic Wrangler carry a knife? For one thing, it would scare off customers. Half naked woman with giant butcher knife is not sexy (YMMV I guess). Secondly, if she has it for self defense, would that even work? What's she gonna do against all those roaming freeside thugs? If security is even an issue, the Garret twins could have one of their many armed guards stand near her outside for protection.
 * The Kings are across the street, so presumably they would protect her from mostly everything. The knife, then, could be added assurance.
 * Oh yeah, the Kings ARE right there, good point! The added assurance is scaring away the horny customers though!
 * I guess that just leaves the hungry and the thirsty customers, then...
 * Well, would YOU want to go out into what is essentially an extremely violent ghetto full of rapists and murderers half-naked without a weapon? In a dystopian post-apocalyptic future, no less?
 * If I was being paid, didn't have better options for work, and there was a ton of security a few feet away (the kings and a casino guard). The other strippers in the same dystopia are unarmed. Its just needlessly jarring for the player, bugs me every time I see it.
 * Just because security is present, it doesn't mean you're safe. If some drugged-out psycho comes at her and tries to stab her with a knife all of a sudden, she needs a weapon to defend herself in the couple of seconds it would take security to respond. I know that, were I in her position, I would want to carry a weapon on me regardless of the presence of security.

Just shoot out the hinges!

 * Why on earth cant you just shoot the hinges off of doors? I had a shotgun from the very start of the game from the caravan pack that came with the game yet I never bothered to just shoot the lock or the hinges.
 * Cuz this ain't Red Faction.
 * So? What does Red Faction have to do with this.
 * Because Red Faction is pretty much the only game that could let you do that, and that was because of its unique engine. Fallout 3's engine doesn't let you do that.
 * 1.) It would make the lockpicking skill, and also the science skill (for dual pick/hack doors) useless. 2.) Shooting out the lock/hinges without specialized ammo is action movie horseshit.
 * Suspension of disbelief is required so they do not have to make every single locked door obviously capable of withstanding repeated mini-nuke hits.
 * Besides, if the hinges are on your side of the door anyways, then why are you shooting them? You could dismantle them.
 * Shooting the hinges is one thing, but by the time you have a rocket launcher, doors should be a non-issue. As in most cases, it's Gameplay and Story Segregation.
 * It would make an interesting perk. A Courier that is stupid, too stupid to learn lockpicking/hacking and is very strong could have a perk that allows them to smash doors. A Courier with a very high guns skill could have a shoot the lock perk.
 * Not really, most CRP Gs used to let you do this. All it did was negate the negative aspects of playing stupid, me smash type characters.
 * The fact that the old school Fallout games allowed you to blow doors open with dynamite makes this even more jarring.
 * J.E. Sawyer has commented on this, with his justification that letting characters smash down/blow up doors would make the Lockpick skill useless.

Doctors' Monopoly on Addiction Treatment
Addiction is bad, we get that, and part of the trade-off of using buffs is the debuffs you might get. Now, an addiction is something that can be cured with a visit to the doctor and 100 caps. But how come the Courier, who could already be a better physician than most of the wasteland, can't remove his addictions himself? Could he just synthesize some kind of Super-Fixer, which was used in the "High Times" quest with 50 science? Seems like a severe case of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Couldn't it be remedied with a high-end perk, similar to jury rigging in how it requires an almost maxed-out stat?
 * Skill doesn't necessarily mean you have all the tools needed to do the job. The best surgeon in the world is not going to have a high patient survival rate if he only has a rusty knife and a mostly dry patch of mud to operate on. The fact you can instantly lose addiction status is already a huge case of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Even chemical approaches to removing addiction take weeks to months.
 * I know, but we could have both the skills and the tools. To treat Bill Ronte's addiction, all you need is one dose of Fixer, Psycho, and Buffout, somehow combined with a science skill of 50. My question is how come a Courier can't make a chem like that for himself, if he supposedly could do it in a slum like freeside. And arguing for it not to be realistic is pretty strange considering you can de-toxify yourself in under an hour by talking to a doctor.
 * Am I missing something here? You're asking why the Courier can't make detox drugs out of detox drugs? That doesn't make sense. Fixer is already effective against all chemical addictions; Hoff and Ronte required the additional materials because they'd developed a psychological addiction and wanted to come down from that slowly.
 * Hoff and Ronte's addictions aren't completely fixed by the Courier. It's the only instance in the game where it is implied there is a psychological component to fixing addiction. The Courier's help puts them in much better shape for that part of curing addiction.
 * Fixer does not permanently remove addiction. It removes it from the status menu, but if you use the drug you were addicted to again, your addiction returns rather than using the normal percentage to determine if you get addicted.

NO CORNBREAD?!

 * Okay, this is really minor, but it bugged the crap out of me. Why can't you make cornbread out of maize and yeast? With a high enough survival skill the courier can make coffee out of a freakin' tobacco leaf or a sludge martini with seemingly random crap and some cloud residue. So way can't they make some cornbread? Is that really too much of a stretch?
 * Obsidian didnt think of it, they cant put a recipe for everything ever in the world so some things just dont get made.
 * They thought of making bloatfly sliders and gecko kabobs, but not a western favorite like cornbread (or beans and cornbread, which should also be avalible thanks to all those cans of pork n' beans floating around) even though the courier can find (most) of the logical ingrediants? Thats like having horses without saddles, it just isn't done.
 * Cornbread isn't really all that major a dish in the few areas the Courier has been confirmed to be in (Las Vegas, possibly California, possibly Montana).
 * Lots of cultures rode horses without saddles.
 * And were promptly wiped out by those cultures that did.
 * Not actually the case. Most of the saddleless cultures either adopted the saddle after wiping out a different culture or were wiped out by infantry tactics or superior technology. In the few cases of saddled cavalry versus saddleless cavalry combat, the saddleless cavalry tended to come out the victors. This was usually more to do with saddleless cultures being more adept riders to the point the advantage of a saddle did not actually factor in.
 * Cornmeal doesn't form gluten, so you can't make yeast bread with it. You would need a chemical leavener like baking soda or baking powder.

No ending without murder

 * This just bugs me: Despite the Grey and Gray Morality in Fallout: New Vegas, and the multitude of options available for solving almost every quest, you cannot get any of the four endings without solving at least one of your problems by murdering someone who's in the way. (I'm defining "murder" as killing someone to solve a problem, rather than in self-defense.) In three of the endings, you have to crack Mr. House's coffin, either at someone else's orders or to gain control of the Securitrons for yourself and Yes Man. In Mr. House's ending, you have to destroy the Brotherhood. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in the idea that murder should always be a solution for any conflict in an RPG, but in a game as open-ended as New Vegas, it shouldn't be the only solution. One of the NCR, Mr. House or Wild Card endings should allow you to solve the main quest diplomatically from start to finish.
 * It is possible to spare House. You can leave him alive in his tube with no way to access the outside world using the terminal. You still have to kill several legionarries if you want to survive, but as you said before, that's self defense, not murder.
 * That isn't sparing him. He still dies within a year due to contamination, so the moment you crack his coffin, you're killing him through biological warfare. (And technically, you can sneak through the legionnaires using Stealth Boys if you so choose, but that's an irrelevant tangent.)
 * It's not 'murder' by your definition, either, but I do believe it's involuntary manslaughter by gross negligence. It's not intentionally killing someone, for self-defense or not. What you do to House is disarm him because his neural interface makes him a threat. The byproduct of him being removed from being a danger to others is that he cannot defend himself against contaminants. Death happens in every Fallout game, through your actions, directly or indirectly. Even the Pacifist Run in previous games has results in death, by way of the player's actions or inactions.
 * The game ends in a battle between two of the largest factions seen in the Fallout universe. The fact you can potentially get through the game only killing one extremely elderly, paranoid, violent, self-centered man who is already at death's door that has made himself a major threat to both of these factions while also allowing two of his three main underlings (Benny and Omertas) to conspire against him is extremely significant. In addition, the fact Mr. House designed the chamber so anyone can walk up to the terminal and open the chamber is Too Dumb to Live territory. That terminal did not need to exist at all. He knew going into the chamber he was never coming out, so why make it open in the first place?
 * That annoyed me too. It's WAY too easy to kill Mr. House.
 * The chamber may be openable to allow access to it for repairs. Still, the terminal did not need to exist: Mr. House could have designed the chamber so that once closed it could only be opened by someone hardwired into the computer network of the Lucky 38 (IE, Mr. House once had had hooked himself up, and Yes Man once you've already killed Mr. House and taken the robot there).
 * The chamber is referring to the pod Mr. House is actually in, not the room the pod is located. There is no way to open it without Mr. House being infected and eventually dying, so any maintenance that would require opening it is unproductive anyways.
 * It definitely is way too easy to take the guy out. But you know, the fact that you can get through the game (in theory) by only killing one guy is why it's irritating that you can't get zero murders. Take Mass Effect and Dragon Age; in the former, you're a soldier fighting off an alien invasion, in the latter, you're fighting against darkspawn, blood mages and abominations, and pacifist options in either are never really there. In Fallout: New Vegas, you can talk down General Oliver. You can talk down the Great Khans. You can talk down Legate fucking Lanius. The only people you can't talk down are the Exclusively Evil raiders like the Fiends...and honest, reasonable businessman Mr. House. At least in the NCR ending, you should be able to get Mr. House to cooperate without killing him (there's even Dummied Out content for that), if only because it'd royally piss off Moore. It'd be even better if McNamara could be convinced to make peace with House (he'll accept peace with Yes Man, after all).
 * You missed a lot of characterization if you think Mr. House is "honest" and "reasonable."
 * Honest is right out. He never intended to keep his word with the NCR and his entire plot line revolves around breaking his treaty with them. He even says he only made the deal so he could build up power to take them down.
 * A big point that most people seem to miss is that the NCR was in the area before New Vegas was established. He established an entire city solely to give himself some vague justification for eventually attempting to kick the NCR out.
 * If you actually do dig into his backstory, he is extremely self-centered and paranoid. This is why he built an entire army of Securitrons.
 * The fact he wants control of New Vegas at all costs eliminated being "reasonable." There is absolutely zero chance his army could hold off an attack from the NCR or Legion in force. His plan requires you piss off the NCR and Legion and hoping both get too distracted to actually attack him. Stopping the assassination on the President actually makes this a kind of reasonable assumption for the NCR. However, if Caesar or Lanius survive, they are going after him. If both die, he still has to hope that there is not a single, even vaguely charismatic leader left.
 * If he was reasonable, his main plan would have been "maintain treaty with NCR." Past precedent indicates the NCR would leave him alone unless he was a slaver (which he is not) or directly attempted to undermine or attack the NCR (which is literally what Mr. House's entire life has revolved around since he woke up).
 * Mmkay. Saying it's unreasonable to want power if you think you can win it is a rather extreme values statement...and he can defeat the NCR's forces in the Mojave if the Legion has battered them first (he has to stack the deck properly, but it's established that he can do just that if the Courier doesn't go rogue). I never said he wasn't self-centered or paranoid, but being selfish (or even evil) doesn't make you impossible to deal with, and if he's paranoid, he's Properly Paranoid since Moore really is out to get him (because she's Properly Paranoid that he's up to something, yes; vicious cycle). So yeah, the seizure of New Vegas was a blatant power grab on his part, but I don't see how relevant that is to whether he can be reasoned with. Cut content suggests that he could have made a deal to join the NCR if he realized that he was out of cards and wasn't getting the Chip.
 * Part of why it was cut is probably that it just isn't the sort of thing that House would do. Given his general distrust of the NCR and Democracy (see all the arguments above), it might be a bit of Character Derailment to convince such a massive egotist like House that he is wrong and that he should trust the NCR to keep their word (even though he mentions that without the Legion, the NCR would just make up a reason to remove House from power in the Mojave). It would be nice for a guy like House to see reason, but this Fallout, and Grey and Grey Morality is the norm.
 * You are still ignoring that the NCR and began settling in the Mojave before New Vegas was founded. It is even said that Mr. House didn't even become active yet, let alone formed an entire town until after the NCR showed up. You are also neglecting the NCR force in the Mojave is a very small fraction of their military. The NCR is far and away more powerful than the Legion or Mr. House and this does get mentioned. The problem is the NCR is protecting the largest territory, so their forces are spread out very thinly. The diplomatic approach to getting rid of the Legion is pointing out they would have the exact same problems if they defeated the NCR. The only reason the Legion is a credible threat was because they could concentrate their forces more highly than the NCR. The NCR is the single largest, most populous, wealthiest faction in the entire "Fallout" universe. They also have a large chunk of Enclave and Brotherhood technology. What you saw defending the Mojave was a few hundred poorly equipped grunts with some minor support from elite forces, not the whole of the NCR military.
 * There's a good reason for that, remember, something that House goes over once or twice. As Chief Hanlon also mentions, the NCR's best troops were diverted by rich cattle barons in the home territory to protect them from lowly raiders (instead of rebuffing the major threat of the Legion). The elite troops who wear heavy armor (stripped out Power Armor), and make a brief appearance near the end of the main storyline. It's something that House was counting on as part of his scheme.

Broken Down Wasteland

 * It’s two hundred-odd years since the nuclear war, yet everything is still broken down. People are still living inside the husks of burnt out buildings and making walls out of scrap. Fences are still decaying and ruined and everything has a sort of half-assed recycled look to it. Why in two hundred years have people not built entirely new structures or improved upon what they have beyond gathering up more scrap?
 * It is just one more of those things that either does not make sense at all or would only make sense if it had only been a few years since the Great War. Note that in Fallout 2 Vault City and Shady Sands had post-war, well-maintained buildings in the form of white adobe single-story structures.
 * It does make sense when you put together the Big Picture, there have been several attempts to start rebuilding, it has just been a slow, painful process. There's a heirarchy of needs that prevented more ambitious projects. No one has an organized way of creating an infrastructure to rebuild - all the machines and plans that were used to build before are not readily available. Vault City is the prime example of a first foothold back in the Wasteland after the Big One, though they had limited resources and needed to ally themselves with the NCR in order to expand. The NCR itself has had a long, painful history, dealing with raiders and slowly building up over time, but is only a few breakthroughs away from having mass construction projects. One of the places that doesn't seem important at first there in the Mojave is Quarry Junction, where they bring up limestone for cement used to pave roads and buildings. It's a slow process. They don't have big giant cement trucks readily available to haul the stuff around, but that will probably come in time.
 * There are probably more attractive places in the world but those would be boring. You are a character in a wild and dangerous area because that's where the action is. Since the area is a savage frontier, civilization is basic at best, hence the crappy buildings.
 * But Beyond even the crappy buildings, why are places that have people living in relative comfort so... dirty? Why is the hotel at Novac still a dilapidated mess? Why does Primm still have rubble and skeletons in its buildings? Why does Camp Mc Carren still have broken slot machines cluttering the floor (and for that matter, why are there slot machines at what was once an airport)? And why do many of the casinos have broken and useless machines or areas of refuse?
 * McCarran International Airport actually does have slot machines right there in the terminals for people to keep playing as they're waiting for their flights. Today, there's over 1,000 machines in the airport. As for everything else, part of it is that some of the place actually has been cleaned up, but again, with nowhere to really to put debris except throw it out the window or our back. You and I might take curbside trash pickup as a luxury, but the folks in Post-Apocalyptia don't have that option. Novac is as good as Jeannie May Crawford was able to get it with a limited population and supplies. The fact that Carla didn't approve of how ramshackle Novac was is a plot point for Boone. As for Primm, well, the first floor is relatively clean, actually, with only one collapsed hallway in the back. The second floor is really where all the damage is, and some of the skeletons there were behind locked doors, so it's possible no one had bothered to actually explore/check the upper level.
 * There is a goddamn bloodied corpse of a Courier named Daniel propped up against a wall in front of Primm's Mojave Express when you first arrive and unless it bothers you enough to move it yourself, it won't go anywhere, no matter how many times the citizens of Primm walk by it in plain sight. Yeah, it's nitpicking but compared to the absurdly senseless world that was DC Wasteland, Mojave is incredibly well thought out and the fact that there isn't an extra set of textures/props for semi-renovated places where everything isn't such a ruin and you don't have all the random shit just laying around is a bit jarring.
 * It may have been an oversight, something for the Courier to deal with, really, or a case where the Developers got lazy. While Daniel just sits there, there's two other incidents where the Courier himself can dispose of bodies properly. Both involve simply dumping the body into a nearby dumpster.
 * Daniel isn't related to any quest, but does contain some information relevant to the plot on his body. If the body dissappeared at random or based on quest progression, then people would lose access to that information.
 * The NCR military is just sort of squatting in the airport and there is a lot of wasted space. The terminal is almost unused except for a few offices, so the trashed slot machines in the dark uninhabited corners were just left alone. The Novac motel is run by a elderly woman working alone, and she says that it's off season in dialogue. She might clean up a bit more when its tourist season.
 * It's distinctly possible that dirt and disrepair simply don't bother the locals as much as they might someone from our time and our universe. We're used to relatively sterile, clean environments. For them? This is normal.
 * The amount of resources to build anything better than the old buildings are far beyond the capabilities of the people in the Fallout world. There are groups that make new strutctures, which is more prominant in Fallout 2, but those structures are fairly primitive and would be no where near as effective a shelter. Very mundane seeming tasks in construction are actually virtually impossible without massive amounts of infrastructure providing raw materials and tools.
 * There is a historical precident for this. When Rome fell, many of their structures were used without repair for centuries. A well made building is still useful, even if it looks aesthetically run down and for dark age type societies, functionallity always matters more than aesthetics.
 * Also House only got Vegas up and running a few years ago, before that it was mostly just tribes running around who wouldn't have the means to fix up anything.

The Courier's Ignorance of Christianity

 * In Honest Hearts most conversation options indicate that the Courier is not a Christian. At best, his response to Joshua and Daniel's conviction is a "Yeah, whatever". At worst, you can have him mock them about their beliefs. This is repeated when Joshua talks about the need to protect Zion on religious grounds, and one of the responses is "You know I don't share your beliefs, right?". A conversation option mentions him visiting Utah in the past and the head of the Crimson Caravan mentions Mormons. In addition, people still exclaim "God" and "Jesus". So, there is no way he never heard of Christian figures. Even if the Mormons are the only "real" Christian community left, one expects the Courier to still have a basic understanding of Christianity, which he blatantly seems to lack. I have no problem with him not being a Christian. But I did find it jarring that the Courier shows no familiarity to Christianity and Christian figures.
 * Hearing the names of religious figures doesn't mean you're going to have knowledge of the passages and quotations the likes of Joshua use, similarly people using exclamations like 'Jesus christ!' and so forth doesn't make them religious. People still use Latin phrases today after all, and the language is dead.
 * "God" is a generic word, so it doesn't by any means apply to only Christianity. "Jesus" being used as an exclamation does not put it in context. A lot of words used in the same manner are used incorrectly or without people even understanding what they even mean.
 * Christianity is not a large religion in the "Fallout" universe. Considering how few Christians even understand their own religion now, there is very little expectation that a non-Christian in a post-apocolyptic world would have any significant understanding.
 * One could note that Fallout 1 has an example of religion becoming rather muddled while names were carried over - not with Christianity, but with Dharmic religions - amongst the people of Shady Sands (IE, the founders of the NCR), some people say that they are followers of Dharma, with one person specifying that Dharma was a great man. Of course, Dharma could have been a post-war founder of a religion, but that still means no-one of his followers catched on to the 'coincidence'. There is probably a great deal of variance in just how much the local Christianity-descended religion is Christianity. Still, it is somewhat odd that someone as explicitly far-traveled as the Courier doesn't have a basic grasp of what it could mean.
 * There is a big difference between well traveled and religious understanding. For example, if a person visits India, it is very unrealistic to assume that person suddenly has obtained a through understanding of Hinduism as a result. It is still unrealistic to expect a non-Christian in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to understand Christianity when most actual Christians don't even understand their religion.
 * Not understand it, recognise the terminology (IE, God, Jesus Christ, etc).
 * The problem is that the Courier seems to be unable to make the connection that the "Jesus" and "God" people shout happen to have the same name as the "Jesus" and "God" and that Joshua and Daniel seem to worship. I mean, he is smart enough to make the connection that the Sorrows came to see "The father in the Caves" as "God". Second - The Courier has likely encountered people of Christian upbringings. Religion may not have been big but it still existed. America was still a Christian-majority country and, practiced or not, it would have survived one form or the other. One of the Misfits mentions a Christian upbringing and Searchlight, which was inhab,ted until recently, has two churches. They may not have been used but I find it very unlikely how clueless the Courier seems to be about it. Again, I am not complaining about the Courier not being Christian. Just finding his unfamiliarity very odd.
 * I would simply put it down as Obsidian trying to avoid a serious religious argument at that point in the story. A little railroading to avoid derailing the story into one of conversing about God and Jesus. It gets mentioned, but it avoids a more serious discussion at length. The Courier probably knows more about it, but the script just ushers the more direct story along. Afterall, it's possible for the Courier to talk to Arcade and have no idea what Latin as a language is, and then five minutes later, be using Latin fluently to trick a Legion Officer into giving up Caesar's plans.
 * It's a roleplaying game, the Courier is your character. If you select statements suggesting the Courier know nothing about God or Jesus then it's you actively deciding that the Courier isn't well aware of Christianity or possibly just saying he doesn't know anything because he wants to find out more about Joshua or Daniel's beliefs. As for not having many options to talk about Christianity with the characters, I'd also say it's probably Obsidian avoiding religious arguments in the story.
 * That is my point though: Pretty much all responses in that conversation implies he is ignorant. The one that doesn't is more of a "Yeah, whatever" response that can be interpreted in different ways. I think I will take the Latin example above and mix it with the religious argument issue. Still finding it a bit odd though.
 * No, only a couple imply ignorance. You're forcing your interpretation into the other responses and assuming motive based on that. It's clearly not the intent.
 * There's also the issue that Joshua Graham isn't some christian you're likely to stumble upon in your local church. They're New Canaanites. Gun training is a religious rite of passage. The only scripture he seems to have is one I hear is rare for current mormons to use.
 * Personally, I'm wondering why the game spefically makes a point of not allowing the player to choose the Courier's beliefs, or lack thereof. It makes sense that the main game wouldn't broach the subject, so there was no need for it to be decided, but specifically mentioned it in an expansion and didn't allow a decision. Little things like that tend to make the Courier feel less like your character and it's somewhat jarring, considering the freedom you have over him/her throughout the rest of the game.
 * Obsidian are just being pragmatic. There is an insane variety of religious beliefs out there, and having to choose a handful of them to go into the game would elicit just as many complaints as not having any - no matter the choice there's always going to be something they forget, or something which needs to get pushed aside. The 'I don't share your beliefs' line covers all the bases without getting bogged down in extraneous detail.

Origins of the Brotherhood/NCR war

 * Why among the thousands of questions you can ask to hundred of NPCs, why don't you ever have the possibility of asking HOW the war started? I had to check the Vault Wiki, and what they have to reveal is only based on Van Buren, and thus of doubtful canonicity.
 * Long story short: the latest descendant of Maxson is kind of an asshole. Presumably, he wants to build an old world technologies bin and fill it up with every remaining kinds of old world tech, swimming in it Scrooge McDuck-style, all the while giving a giant middle to all of those who'd like to use that tech for productive purposes. Sound incredible, but the NCR doesn't share this opinion.
 * We know it isn't Maxson's latest descendant that is responsible, because we met him in 2277 (a scant four years before New Vegas), at which point he was ten, so that bit of Van Buren seems to have been left behind, but the general implication is that the Brotherhood have flanderized themselves into forgetting that the original purpose of gathering old technology and keeping to themselves was to preserve that technology, not "to keep technology they must never have" or to "not take them in or help them". Remember how quickly the Brotherhood decides on confiscating advanced technology in almost all the endings where they survive? Now add to that the fact that after Fallout 2, the NCR captured Navarro. Given the Brotherhood presented, but stronger and being capable of thinking that it might win a war against the NCR, and combined with the NCR suddenly having access to technologies from the most advanced faction in the Wasteland... but of course, that is all implication and extrapolation, and it is still somewhat odd that no-one can be asked exactly why it started.
 * The main BOS flanderizing itself is rather likely (both FO3 and before FO tactics had whole chapters deserting an order that was becoming stupidly isolationist), but it still as a bit odd when you consider FO 1 BOS ending, which explain they'll gradually integrate into the new society as a research, and FO 2 where their presence is minimalist. Essentialy, in the rather mysterious time period between FO 2 and New Vegas, the BOS did a 180° and start working backward toward an extreme version of their original doctrine.
 * The process seems to have started at the time of Tactics - it takes place between Fallout 1 and 2 and features the 'isolationists' winning the internal debate and effectively exiling their opponents, after all - and led to the Brotherhood that is more isolationist by 2241 than the FO1 ending implied they would be (they should have slowly reintroduced their advanced technologies to New California, but eighty years on there is no indication that they've even begun to do that. Granted, their presence is, as you say, rather minimalist, so it is hard to judge). One presumes it was not so much a 180° as stagnating into a shape that was meant for another time - the compulsive technology-hoarders - and gradually making dogma of the old reasoning (everything they do makes perfect sense... for an organization bunkering down in a wild wasteland where most travelers are raiders and settlements are few and small - but by 2281 even the Mojave Wasteland is more of a Wild West Reborn than a wasteland, despite the name). It contradicts the Fallout 1 ending, sure, but it wouldn't be the first time endings haven't been followed exactly. The headscratcher still remains, though - Wild Mass Guessing based on what we have been told about the Brotherhood aside, it is still quite odd that no-one, neither in the NCR, the Brotherhood, or anyone else, ever bothers to mention anything of the triggering cause of the war beyond the vaguest of details ("disagreements on how technology should be regulated in the wasteland", to quote the Fallout Wikia).
 * Bear in mind, the Mojave Wasteland isn't NCR territory (until the NCR ending, at least). Most of the people you meet probably have no idea how the war happened anyways, and the ones who do have bigger fish to fry at the moment (that Caesar guy, for one).
 * Agreed, but you get to meet quite a lot of NCR and BOS military personnel...and you can't even ask a single soul when the whole mess begin. I think the implication are that the war started a few years after F02, when Navarro finally fall, apparently from a combined assault of the BOS and the NCR (shades of WW 2). Presumably, the bounty of tech they got from Navarro must have been very important. Then, the NCR goes all "make a vertibird the new Air Force One and try and improve the life of our citizens", while the BOS goes all "let's compuslvely hoard the tech and do nothing of it, because... well..." Cue war for fairly stupid reasons, on the BOS side at least.
 * IIRC, the BOS aren't prominently featured in the battle against the Enclave (They don't even rate an ending in Fallout 2). If the NCR managed to take Navarro with minimal help (not counting the Chosen One, who really just wants his village back), it's possible they may have refused to turn over whatever tech they grabbed from Navarro. Cue shooting war.
 * The chapters of the Brotherhood are capable of operating fairly independently. Odds are a few of the more isolationist chapters got into a minor firefight with the Republic and it exploded. Wars aren't really the nice straight forward things people learn about in history class. Two sides can be fighting each other for years before a war officially "starts" and it can go for years after it "ends." Besides, anyone that actually knows probably falls under "too important to explain what should be minor historical details."

Ok just how do you juggle the factions till the last minute?

 * So this game's trope page states that you can go all Magnificent Bastard on everybody in the endgame until the very end if you side with Yes Man. And one of my friends confirm that I can indeed to this until the quest "Finishing Touches". Ok, ok, just how the frak are you able to manipulate both the NCR and the Legion in the Wild Card route until the very end? The moment you do one of the quests for one faction, the other one warns you that you're going too far. So just how does this work?
 * One: play the game. Two: You can't manipulate both factions per say. At one point, after manipulating both factions, you have to decide relatively early which is going to be the one you stick to until the final quest. If you chose, say, the NCR, then you can help them, do their quests, lead them on attacks against the Legion (two quests specifically let you do that), stop raiders that attack them, and overall make them think your an ally to them. This means that at the final battle at Hoover Dam, they'll have an Enemy Mine moment and help your securitrons against the Legion until your last second backstab. Or you can just not help anyone or choose to help the Legion until the backstab, but that gives you bad endings, makes several people hate you, and means you don't get any support in the final battle (they still attack you). In fact, they meant most of it in lore terms rather than in gameplay terms.
 * I don't see why this doesn't make sense to you. Yes Man is the only faction leader that plausibly could keep it a secret that the Courier is working for him. All of the mandatory quests for Wild Card can be completed through stealth. It is very plausible that the Legion and NCR are monitoring each other's communications to some extent, so one of them mentioning the Courier is aiding them significantly could tip the other one to becoming hostile. Mr. House's communication networks are compromised before the game even starts, and it can only get worse depending on your actions.
 * Juggling factions requires meta gaming. Check and see what actions you'll need to take for a particular ending, and then complete those quests before actually going up to whichever faction you're working for and accepting their quest. It's fairly Sequence Break-y, but it's a completely viable way to play the game.
 * Is it possible to work with the Legion long enough to kill Caesar in surgery, and then turn your allegiance back to the NCR?
 * No, but Caesar dies without your intervention anyways, so there is no actual net gain for killing him during surgery and then defecting back to the NCR anyways.
 * Well, apart from the delicious schadenfreudeness of killing Caesar right under the Legion's noses and getting scott-free away with it.

NCR Trooper MP

 * This one kinda puzzles me. I haven't even done any wrong towards the NCR, yet when I was in the embassy, this one guy tells me that I have a "due to pay" and "Don't fuck with the NCR", just before attacking me and immediately prompting others to shoot me on sight. I wounder what the reason for this is...
 * You'll have to provide a bit more detail. You could be wearing Legion/Powder Ganger/Great Khan outfits and getting attacked. That whole faction thing does have an in-game effect, yanno.
 * I wasn't even wearing them. Must be a bug...
 * One documented bug is that wearing faction armour while your faction status changes will lock your status as it is with the armour on - it happened to me when I was doing errands for the Great Khans; I got a little fame delivering for them while wearing their armour, and the next I knew, I was being shot at by the NCR even though my reputation with them was completely friendly and I'd taken the armour off. I think the only way to fix it is to reload a previous save.
 * I've had a similar bug occur during "I Put A Spell On You" during a Legion playthrough. Going to Camp McCarran in NCR disguise and my Caesar's Legion rep actually vanished (as in, completely reset) even after changing out of the outfit.
 * The Fallout Wikia has an entry about it: there is a bug, or possibly badly explained WAD, with the NCR military police that can cause them to attack you randomly. It appears to be related to how you entered New Vegas for the first time, with one of the theories being that it occurs if you entered via the Monorail. The military police then drags all the other NCR soldiers in the area into hostility, thus explaining the shooting.

The End of Honest Hearts

 * There is no unambiguously good end of Honest Hearts DLC - either the Sorrows are displaced or are taught in the art of war and begin to vaguely worship Graham as their war chief, with Daniel in either scenario mourning the loss of their innocence or Zion itself. Having a level 20+ Courier at the time and Joshua Graham with a DT of -50- there is absolutely no reason that both the Courier and Graham couldn't take on the White Legs by themselves (as you've been doing up to that point), as even the intervention of the Sorrows & Dead Horses took perhaps six White Legs out of the fight in the leadup to the end of the canyon. Win-win - the Sorrows maintain their "innocence" (for a while at least), and remain in Zion with the Dead Horse tribe taking care of internal & external threats. Why aren't the Courier or Graham allowed to take this route ?
 * The longer Joshua Graham and the Dead Horses stick around to defend the Sorrows, the more the militaristic/warlike influence Graham has over them, which is what Daniel does not want. Daniel wants to get the Sorrows to a place where they do not have to witness war, and he can't do that if the Dead Horses are around all the time to defend the Sorrows. If the Sorrows stay, they will continue to see more and more of Graham defending them from the White Legs, and eventually, they're going to change their ways because of the stories they're going to tell (remember, the Sorrows have a fairly strong storytelling tradition). He already thinks Graham is already changing the tribe by the time the Courier appears. Unfortunately for Daniel, Graham does not protect the Sorrows from afar, as the Father in the Caves had done. He's someone who walks among them, and brought about another tribe to help. As Daniel says, he's seen it from other tribes he's tried to help - the more people attack the tribes he ministers to, the more they change from a peaceful culture to a more militant one. His only option is fleeing to Grand Staircase, which apparently is remote enough where the White Legs cannot follow.
 * Plus game mechanics are not meant to be taken as a strict interpretation of the lore. Graham has a DT of 50 to minimise the risk of his death, which brings the entire DLC crashing down to its worst possible ending - instantly cutting off the rest of the content.
 * Well, Graham's insane DT is more like Gameplay and Story Integration; Graham was tough enough to survive being tossed off a cliff while covered in pitch, naturally, he should seem tough in gameplay.
 * You consider the Sorrows maintaining their "innocence" a good thing? Like it or not, violence exists in the Fallout world, and people do need to learn how to defend themselves, which is why Graham and the Dead Horses are needed to protect them from the White Legs in the first place. Otherwise, they'll always be at the mercy of others who want to take what's theirs. If you want to consider Graham to be tough enough to protect them singlehandedly, he's still just one man; he can't always be there for them. And you can't ever trust the Dead Horses to want to be their defenders forever either. That "innocence" was going to be lost, one way or another.
 * To be fair, Daniel just doesn't want the Sorrows to lose their innocence because of himself and the New Canaanites. The White Legs are attacking the Sorrows and their land because of the presence of Daniel and Graham, as Caesar has ordered the destruction of the New Canaanites and their allies. The Dead Horses were warlike before Graham showed them how to maintain their weapons (which is why they agreed to help Graham out), but it's the Sorrows who were a relatively "innocent" hunting tribe being helped out by New Canaanites before the White Legs started stormdrumming their way into Zion Valley. To Daniel, he's feeling guilt over putting the Sorrows in the position of having to flee their home or defend themselves violently.

Lack Of Noticable Effects Strip Quests Have.

 * Now, I know that it wouldn't be feasible to fit every single quest into the ending narrations, but the quests for the Ultra-Luxe and Gomorrah seem like they'd be pretty major, and the fact that the Strip is a key location in the game also makes it seem like it should have had more details covering it at the end. Granted, the White Glove Society had several different outcomes, which would have made things more complicated when it came to the ending, but even then, all of those outcomes revolve around whether or not they return to cannibalism, which is pretty major. Even more important than that however, is the matter of the Omertas' possible chlorine bomb threat and planned massacre, which is either assisted or thwarted by the Courier. That sounds like something critical enough to deserve an ending slide, especially if you sided with the Legion. But instead, the only possible mention of it is in the Independent endings detailing the Strip mentioning that either "anarchy ruled the streets" or "any chaos on the streets was ended, quickly," and even then, completing the quest by stopping the plot still yields the same messages, indicating that they are not talking about the scheme, but just disorder in general.
 * It's not just the Strip quests. There are several sidequests that should have more effect on the endings but don't. "Restoring Hope," "An Eye For An Eye", "White Wash", "Hard Luck Blues", "I Put A Spell On You", etc.
 * The Strip itself isn't all that important in the overall plot line beyond "Mr. House and Benny live there." The White Gloves and Omartas are very minor factions that are only of marginal importance.
 * Well, Primm is hardly an important place, but that got its own slide. It is weird that Primm got one and not one of the most important areas of the whole Mojave.
 * The lack of an ending slide is probably because, in a sense, the main endings provides one - the Indep endings has it either in chaos or quickly brought to order, House's ending is all about New Vegas (and the Strip is the central, most important part of New Vegas), the Legion endings starts off with recounting the fate of the Strip when the Legion comes, the NCR ending specifies that the NCR annexes the place... as for several of those sidequests that should have more effect on the endings, the game actually provides some measure of explanation for that: the main impact happens during the Battle of Hoover Dam.

The White Legs

 * Okay, several things about the White Legs bug me. Most importantly, why do the Legion reject their request for membership in one of the endings? I can understand the Legion wanting to just let these loyal followers deal with the tribes around New Canaan to make them more vulnerable for when the Legion arrives, and for sacking New Canaan itself to kill Joshua Graham. But what I don't understand is why they'd turn away such a good source of potential soldiers.
 * The Legion doesn't reward fuckups. See also Graham, Joshua. If you reach that ending, the White Legs have failed to finish off Graham, and have also failed to exterminate the New Canaanites, despite the Legion and Ulysses' assistance.
 * Still, rejecting so many well armed and trained soldiers just because they failed at killing one man is just stupid when your forces in the Mojave are trapped in a brutal stalemate.
 * When Lanius is executing and decimating those Mojave soldiers for far smaller errors in performance, admitting a tribe that's screwed up a simple job as badly as the White Legs have is going to introduce all kinds of morale problems.
 * First, they're naked and have no military training of any kind, so "well armed and trained" is out right from the start. Second, if you find Ulysses's tapes he says, in a convoluted way, that there never was an offer to admit them into the legion. Ulysses just told them there was so he could throw them against New Canaan's walls.
 * Right, naked and have no military training. That's why they carry sniper rifles, power fists, and .45 submachine guns and have almost NCR Ranger level health whereas Veteran Legionnarries carry hunting rifles and 10mm submachine guns(which is given justification in universe). Then again, I guess I can believe that Lanius refused to admit them as part of his whole Honor Before Reason shtick.
 * Did you pay attention to Honest Hearts, like...at all? The White Legs don't have any military training but they uncovered an enormous cache of munitions during their travels (and before anyone speaks up people are still capable of learning how to use weaponry without being part of an army), and the sort of environment they're raised in has given them high levels of endurance and strength compared to most normal people (soaking up bullets and the like is a given for game balance). All the complaints here are addressed, you just need to actually listen.
 * Nitpick on that point; Lonesome Road shows they were in fact trained by Ulysses. Not that I disagree with the overall why the White Legs were denied entry, but they were trained.
 * But not to a military standard, which is the distinction. The White Legs took after Ulysses, not the Legion or any other armed forces.
 * Caesar does not care how well-armed they are, how well-trained they are or how numerous they are (especially given that half the White Leg warriors are female and thus irrelevant as a fighting force to Caesar). He has men by the thousands. He rarely arms them with more than pistols. He lost Hoover Dam through bad tactics, not lack of forces. The White Legs had one task and plenty of help, and not only did they fail despite them, their war-chief was kicked out on his ass, left a hangdog ruin of himself and/or killed. Why would he admit such a bunch of pathetic weaklings into his glorious Legion? There are other, worthier tribes all over the place to be conquered or assimilated.

Ulysses' Motivation
"Step 1: Gather a metric shitload of poorly equipped yet completely fanatical soldiers.
 * Okay Ulysses, let me get straight. A few years back, you were following me for some unknown reason. You found a town I used to resupply and fell in love with it, leaving the Legion. Then one day I brought a package deep from the NCR, left it there, as ordered and having completed my assignment, went on to my next job. The package contained some electronic equipment (Well, a copy of ED-E) that...somehow detonated a bunch of the nuclear warheads. A lot of the nuclear warheads. Hopeville was destroyed. Everybody got that? So Ulysses, having survived you decided to blame: A) The people who built thier town around a goddamn cash of nuclear warheads (Who DOES that?!) B) Someone in the NCR who carelessly sent the package, killing thousands. C) The Pre-War people who designed this Death Trap. D) The Enclave for building a robot that accidentally sets of Nuclear Missiles when replaying Pre-War TV shows. E) Me, who didn't actually do anything wrong, whose responsibilites of the job is to respect the privacy of the package (the same job you do, by the way) and doesn't remember a goddamn thing because, oh yeah, you've got me sent on a suicide mission that left me completely brain-scrambled and on the edge of death!
 * Minor point, but J.E. Sawyer has stated that the dev team went out of their way through dialogue options to show that the Courier does not have any memory issues. As for the rest, you can point out your limited involvement to Ulysses in-game; he will cop to it and then state it doesn't matter.
 * If the Courier has no memory issues, why does s/he so clueless about the NCR? Or the Fallout Surrounding in general. Yes, Gameplay and Story Segregation, and in some cases you can the excuse that I am simply playing ignorant because I am surrounded by armed people who may be violently opposed to the politics of my homeland, whether I myself am loyal to that homeland or not. In other situations claiming memory issues is the best way to avoid Fridge Logic. Like being unable to tell Dad that Jonas was killed in Fallout 3, being able to point out that there are people FAR more responsible for Hopeville's destruction is something that Just Bugs Me.
 * You do remember the questions about NCR are phrased in a "what do you think about..." manner, and you have the option to speak about areas without being forced to sound clueless, right? You're either misremembering or were picking the worst options available in those conversation.
 * Furthermore you seem to have missed the whole point of the New Vegas DLC by a huge amount. Learning to let go in Dead Money, being true to your self in Honest Hearts, clinging to the old world in Old World Blues? Guess what Ulysess embodies? The whole point of his character is to show you just how fucked up and deranged it can make someone - regardless of how otherwise level headed they might seem - when they focus themselves on one goal with such zeal. The others you speak about? Dead, or gone in other ways. The Courier survived, the Courier 'destroyed' Hopeville without so much as a backwards glance. The Courier completely destroyed Ulysses hopes and dreams for a new world, completely broke him...and depending on your dialogue choices can even not even remember or care about doing so. You have both grossly simplified the circumstances and failed to understand the thematics of the DLC.
 * Accepting what you say about NCR questions, I still reject the 'thematics' of the DLC. Ulysses' whole deal seems be a grand theatric of the saying "Shoot The Messenger." And he CAN find someone more to blame for Hopeville's destruction - whoever sent that package to Hopeville in the first place. (Heck, I'd help.) Instead he zooms in on the one face and name he knows and suddenly It's Personal. The fact that he himself acts as a courier makes him more hypocritical in the first place. Ulysses lost the most important thing in the world to him -his self-. I get that, and for that he would normally have my sympathy. But he is not a great Chessmaster or Magnificent Bastard. And somehow he mind is too intact to write off as "simply insane." He is petty.
 * Your rejection of the thematics doesn't mean they're irrelevant, it simply means you don't understand the character. Ulysses is petty? No shit. That's the whole point.
 * There's plenty of petty characters in FNV. Elijah's genocidal plan essentially boiled down to eliminating all traces of his failures. Dean Domino stuck around for 200 years because he wanted to ruin a dead man's life. Jeannie May Crawford destroyed Boone's life because of wounded pride. General Oliver cares more about getting into the history books than beating Caesar. The thing is, however, pettiness can be a hard thing to write; all of the above characters work brilliantly because of how well their pettiness is written and their reasons for it. Ulysses? His pettiness just comes off to some (like myself and the OP) as nonsensical and bizarre, instead of the raging wounded man he was intended to be. And considering that this entire confrontation was hyped up so much throughout the game, Ulysses came off more as a joke rather than the badass he was supposed to be.
 * Secondly, how did I 'fuck up'? I delievered a simple package, having no clue as to what it was or what it could do, and then went about my business. I'm just as much to blame for that as I was for getting shot in the head carrying the Platnium Chip. And the dialogue choices of not knowing or caring what he's talking about just make it worse; you'd think the courier would hear about the Divide getting destroyed and wondered what happened, or at least remember something about a package delivered to a place before nukes went off under it. But the fact that you can only cock your head in total confusion - and have that be utterly plausible - just makes Ulysses anger seem petty. And not petty in the way that many other villians are, but in the way that his anger seems to have no solid ground.
 * Ulysses has a big case of Insane Troll Logic with the theme of shooting the messenger and that the Courier is responsible for the message the way Ulysses himself was responsible for bringing Caesar's message to the White Legs and others. Ulysses is a wounded character, hurt because history has not availed him the faith that he desperately wants to give. What's not in those holotapes or your conversations with Ulysses is what he hoped to find in Hopeville, just that he found what he was hoping for there. He is lashing out at the only other survivor, and pinning the blame on the Courier, who is in fact, blameless. The structure of Lonesome Road with the Courier following a path prescribed by Ulysses makes a lot more sense when you note that Ulysses himself set the path the Courier takes, having him deliver ED-E and use the Laser Detonator (Ulysses tells you that you have to get it) to make his way to his Temple. He's trying to justify his blame by putting the Courier in a situation where everything he says about the Courier becomes true, that Destruction and Death is the message that the Courier delivers.
 * His plan to let the Legion take New Vegas is completely insane. The fact that he's willing to let them have free run of the place and possibly splinter into warring factions afterwards (which would get even more people killed) makes him an out-and-out monster. Any tragic elements he may have had are just outweighed.
 * His plan really isn't all that insane. He isn't too optomistic about the Legion's future, but he also still seems to legitimately consider them the best option, which isn't a completely unique viewpoint. If anything, it's much more intelligent than the Legion's actual plan.
 * Legion's plan:

Step 2: Charge less numerous and demoralized yet heavily fortified, better armed enemy.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: All hail, Caesar."

"Step 1: Blow up NCR supply lines before Legion charges Dam. Step 2: NCR soldiers start running low on food and ammunition (even the private merchants get their shipments from the West). Step 3: Legion charges hungry NCR soldiers with limited ammo. Step 4: Ulysses stops caring anymore. Step 5: Legion unifies region or falls apart, reverting back to the tribal cultures Ulysses seems more comfortable with."
 * What is the conversion rate between an imperial shitload and a metric shitload?
 * It's 3.272 Imperial to one metric.
 * Ulysses' plan:

Here? Oh, well, according to Ulysses long lectures, apparently there was a settlement here (there was?), that you built (I did?), and it was an awesome place that held Old War ideals (it did?), but then you delivered something (I did?) and it killed everyone (it did?) and now all of that is your fault (it is?). All of that is meaningless empty air unless you really feel the consequences, and how can you do that when the Divide is nothing more than generic rubble with little story to be found and no emotional ties to the people who died there? If the story has Ulysses tell you, rather than the game showing you, what happened, then his anger has no real depth and thus his pettiness is just stupidly shooting the wrong messenger. Christ, Bethesda, you made me weep at the hologram of a woman who died 200 years ago, but then spend the most anticipated DLC having Ulysses wave his finger at me? Come on.
 * When I said "completely insane", I was referring to the part where the people in the Mojave get enslaved or slaughtered en-masse by the Legion. As a plan, it's actually pretty well thought out. It just so happens it happens to be incredibly evil. Also, I was under the impression that Ulysses didn't actually care about the results, as he just wanted to prove that 'one man can make or break a nation'. Finally, I remember him saying that Hoover Dam would kill Caesar, whether he won it or not. The Legion's incredibly overstretched (as you can point out to Lanius in the final battle) even without having control over the Mojave. It seems more likely to splinter than hold together. And once that happens, the tribes would war against each other and get more people killed.
 * Jesus christ, I was seriously thinking of coming here and saying this exact same thing. After having Ulysses and this DLC hyped so much throughout the entire game, after fighting my way through the Lonesome Road, after finally confronting this man who got me shot ... I was seriously disappointed. Thing is, the entire game is filled with petty characters who hurt themselves and others; Elijah, General Oliver, Jeannie May Crawford, Benny, Dean Domino, Manny, and so forth. But the reason their pettiness works so well is that we see first-hand the effects it has on you and other people - you suffered through the Sierra Madre, you see how Boone's life was destroyed, you got shot in the head, you help fix the NCR's problems - their pettiness had actual weight because of you personally saw the effects.
 * So basically the whole issue you two are having with the DLC is believing Ulysses is meant to be justified, deep and emotionally engaging. He is the thematic summary of all DLC so far, not something to make you as a player feel bad. Stop assuming your own pet theories are what the writer meant.
 * Yes, I generally assume that an antagonistic character of a story driven RPG will have a decent motivation, depth to his character, and make the player get emotionally involved. I thought that was the baseline of basically any villian; every other DLC accomplished this easily. So this isn't my 'pet theory', this is kinda what I expect of decent writing in a game that is otherwise full of decent writing. (Also, how is Ulysses not supposed to make me feel bad, when he tried to get my character shot in revenge and spends the whole DLC condemning me for what I did to him?) Seriously, both the OP and I have outlined why we disliked LR; you can disagree with those reasons, but there's no need to be rude. Remember, rudeness is not cool.
 * No, it's still your pet theory. The whole point of Ulysses - THE WHOLE POINT OF THE DLC THEY DRUM INTO YOUR HEAD OVER SEVERAL PORTIONS OF IT - is that he's a pathetic, miserable little man too wrapped up in his own ideals, his own past and symbols of the old world to move on with life. He's fixated, obsessed and does not function as a normal person. That you cannot understand this means you have failed to understand the blatant, recurring message that Obsidian keeps throwing at the player. It's a 'baseline' you haven't paid attention to beyond the surface level. An NPC condemning you doesn't mean you're meant to feel aghast. If that was the case every antagonist, ever, would have you blubbering like a baby apparently.
 * Dude, this wiki doesn't have a lot of rules, but one of the big ones is to not be rude. You can disagree with me all you like, but nothing I've said has been an attack on you, the DLC or FNV. "It's just a wiki, I should really just relax." Anyway, to your point; yes, of course Ulysses is an obsessed petty wretch of a man. I've never said anything otherwise. Rather, I've pointed out other wretched petty people in FNV and how I considered their characterizations to be better than Ulysses. Here, I pointed out that the climactic battle couriers suffered from too much Show, Don't Tell to the point that Ulysses's character suffered, and thusly sucked all the weight out of his anger towards you. Seriously, that's it. I didn't like how his character was written. That's not worth bickering over.
 * I think the point is that the whole thing really wasn't personal. The whole story basically comes down Ulysses stalking the courier, who then delivers one of a billion packages throughout the Mojave. With no actual relating. It just feels really weak to me and what does the whole "you can go home courier" mean, I've only been there a handful of times. Seriously, folks there can't have been one person playing who thought "yeah this is what I was expecting and it's epic" instead everyone is like "well that was anti-climatic" and it's true. Even if you enjoyed it as I did, it really wasn't the huge battle of the flags that changes the wasteland as it was meant to be. And it was demonstrated to be this as shown by Dog in Dead Money, "praying for the courier" and all that. Really weak ending to what was a good arc.
 * Outside of the finicky and pedantic troper pages, response to Lonesome Road's narrative arc has been extremely positive. There is absolutely nothing objective about your opinion.
 * Um, no opinion is objective. Secondly, the response to LR can't have been extremely positive if there's, well, people right here pointing out why they didn't like it.
 * Hence 'outside of the finicky and pedantic troper pages'. If you're not going to read things like this properly it's no surprise you guys are having trouble understanding the meaning of Ulysesse's story.
 * To be honest, I think that you're being a bit biased to yourself and what not with insulting people. The game explicitly and continuously said that it was hundred percent personal and that there was going to be major history between the Couriers. We didn't get that. Plus it wasn't as well received as your saying, a lot of people have said that it's good but not what it was built up to be and that's reviews. You didn't even answer directly instead saying that apparently I was claiming to know it all when I was saying my opinion. I'm the original poster but not the one who replied to your sarcastic and to be frank fanboy bashing. Now I love Fallout more than most, but we can criticize it, especially when we know they are capable of epicness.
 * Second poster here, I agree. Seriously dude, we disagree with you on Ulysses's character. This isn't us being 'pedentic', as if that could be the only reason why someone could dislike the DLC. And if it's down to us 'not reading' things properly ... well, I don't think we're the only ones 'guilty' of that. This isn't worth fighting over. If you keep being rude, well, have fun with that, but I'm only going to respond to actual discussion lest the mods get involved.
 * The whole problem stems half from the fact that 1 - There has been an insane amount of buildup leading to this DLC; 2 - The fact that the developers actively went out of their way to keep the Courier's backstory as open-ended as possible ended up hurting badly their ability to tie Ulysses and the Divide into his past; 3 - No trace of the Divide (city) exists at all. Point one is understandable. With the amount of foreshadowing and buildup that has been done to this final confrontation, there's no way the final product could have live up to the hype, no matter how awesome. Hell, this wiki's own WMG page for New Vegas has a couple theories that would have been absolutely fantastic if implemented. That's what Hype does, make people constantly think better and better ways it could have happened. No way the developers could keep up with all the Crazy Awesome stuff being done. Point Two, however, isn't. Without being willing to compromise and reveal SOMETHING about the Courier's ties to the Divide in the main game, it's no surprise that the whole setting feels like a rushed, poorly-written fanfiction. And when I say something, I don't mean some guy coming out of nowhere and asking "Hey Courier, what about that awesome town you built that got nuked to hell last month?". I mean, at the very least, SOMEBODY MENTIONING THAT THERE USED TO BE A THRIVING TOWN RIGHT OUTSIDE THE MOJAVE THAT SIMPLY DISAPPEARED OVERNIGHT. It wouldn't be a stretch to have some of the Rangers in the Mojave Outpost commenting on how "supplies are even more scarce after we lost The Divide", although I guess they take their duty of informing you of the Mojave's meteorological conditions' effects on their psyche quite seriously. Point 3 is the worse, though. Even if no one in the main game ever mentioned that The Divide existed at all, the DLC could still have done a very good job at making us players feel emotionally connected to the place... if they actually showed SOMETHING of it. Through the entire DLC, you wander through all of the Divide, but there isn't, anywhere, any signal that there used to until recently actually be a community there, not just a 200-years old abandoned military base. Hell, even the records you find there are all from pre-war citizens! If there were at least a couple more records from the post-war settlements, something along the lines of "Hey, that nice Courier came here again bringing supplies. With such a nice guy like him helping us, I'm sure we'll grow up to be a thriving and friendly community! Nothing can possibly go wrong!", there would be at least some EVIDENCE that the Courier have actually PASSED through there before. The way things went, though, till the very last second of the DLC, there wasn't ANYTHING stopping Ulysses from raising an eyebrow and saying "Oh, sorry... your name is Courier? I thought it was Courrier. Sorry, I got the wrong guy. You can go away. Don't tally now, I'm a busy madman, I've got other people to stalk". Which... actually would have been quite awesome. In summation, Lonesome Road has a quite impressive and sharp execution [the final confrontation is the best of all DLCs], but many and very, VERY rough edges story-wise that could use a lot of polishing.
 * Is launching/preventing the launch of a bunch of nukes not epic? Although I didn't think of it that way. I thought it was supposed to be, well, personal. You walk the road because you want to learn about your past. You do. End. And I liked the ruin of the Divide - all that vertical space, the gritty, dust-filled wind, the combined loneliness and feeling of being constantly watched. But I realise I may be in the minority.
 * It's not personal though is it? It is revealed that we once walked west while he walked east, oh and that overall we've never met the guy. Hardly the lifetime grudge it was built up to be. The Courier literally had no way of preventing the nukes going off and had no idea that he was even responsible yet somehow he's "going home". Nothing about our character was revealed, not his background or anything. That said, the atmosphere, the enemies and the overall build up was superb. The actual motivations weren't really as good as the gameplay.
 * Yeah, I agree. The launching of the nukes was epic (ha ha, eat it Legion!) with real-world consequences and the Divide was a fascinating place, but it didn't measure up to the epic building up over the course of the whole game. We heard things like the 'battle between couriers', 'you can go home now' and 'an ending to things'. That is a lot of expectation to raise, and unsurprisingly it didn't satisfy everyone; especially since it had a pretty sparse story.

Wait, what about the Tunnelers?

 * Okay, so Ulysses told us about the Tunnelers and how they're slowly making their way towards the Mojave, where everyone will be utterly screwed once they start popping out of the ground. The game then demonstrates just how fearsome they are by having them slaughter a deathclaw. Okay ... so now what? I assumed at the time that at the end of the DLC there would be an option to blow up some more nukes to kill them all, but then they're never mentioned again. Sooooo, certain death is tunnelling its way towards the Mojave, and apparently the courier can't do anything about it. Uh, Esoteric Happy Ending, anyone?
 * I did end up killing an enemy called the "Tunneller Queen" and I don't remember encountering any after that. Er, problem possibly solved? ...This strikes me as a dropped stitch in the plot, actually. Somebody forgot to cut the thread.
 * Ulysses might be a bit over dramatic about the threat they pose. They flee from bright lights and fire. They also don't seem to have any success taking out the Marked Men or Deathclaws as a whole in the Divide. A large pack might be able to kill a Deathclaw, but Deathclaws also come in packs and intelligent creatures would be able to scare them off very easily.
 * Well maybe it was just me, but those little bastards were hard. Sure you can scare them with a bright light, but you only have a short window of time to pour hot lead into them until they recover and rip your face off. And if they took the Mojave by surprise - which they will - then people won't know how to fight back in time before all hell breaks loose.
 * They aren't that difficult. Stat wise, the only real advantage they have over soldier ants, which are less than half their level, is that they tend to appear closer to you and can move faster. Unless you are trying to melee them in light armor, they can't pose much of a danger. The Tunneler Queen is the only Tunneler than does enough damage to be a threat. Even without much focus on it or chems, it is easy to get enough DT that even Hulking Tunnelers won't be able to break it.
 * Most of the major habitated parts of the Mojave are brightly lit anyways. If they did attack, it would be very obvious, very quickly that they wouldn't attack brightly lit settlements. They might kill a lot of people, but their avoidance of light is too detrimental for them to completely decimate the region.
 * Oh, okay. I guess it was just me sucking at close-quarters combat again. *shuffles feet sheepishly*
 * However, all of this assumes that they WANT to go to the Mojave. After all, they refuse to leave their caves, so why would they want to go to a strange place full of bright lights? Besides, they're afraid of the Courier by the end of Lonesome Road, so if (s)he hears about an attack, (s)he'll show up, and they will flee from his/her mere presence.
 * It seems like the tunnelers like to eat people and, well, the Mojave is the closest place full of people. Gotta go where the food is.
 * The Tunnelers, even gameplay wise, prioritize running from light over attempting to eat people.
 * Yikes, which would make night time in Vegas (especially without Hoover Dam's power) a bad time should the Tunnelers ever head that way.

No way to fix 8's voice

 * Why is there no option to fix Doctor 8's voice? He clearly doesn't like having his voice damaged, so why can't the Courier fix it? Surely there are unused think tanks somewhere in Big MT, and even if there aren't, he/she could surely find a substitute. Understanding him isn't an option for all couriers, so there should also be an option gameplay wise to fix his voice
 * 8 probably doesn't want anyone touching his voice module after what Elijah did; he could end up not being able to speak at all. Plus, any skill check to fix his module would probably fall into the same skill set as understanding him in the first place. Those things aside, Rule of Funny. Same reason there's no way to fix Klein's volume control. Pretty much every gag about 8 revolves either around his weird speech or his obsession with the number 8.
 * If 8 really wanted to fix his voice, he probably could. He specializes in sound technology, is over 200 years old, and has had access to pre-War tech over all that time. There is no plausible reason the Courier would be better able to fix his voice than him beyond adding some sort of "I need this to fix my voice, but it is in a dangerous place" quest.
 * Female couriers actually find out why. When talking to your brain they mention that there are almost no voice modules left, and even then they're all male. Sure Dr. 8 is male, but the implication is that they don't have any to spare. Given what a prick Klein is, he probably won't let 8 replace his since he's perfectly understandable to the Think Tank.

Where did the Tunnelers come from?

 * What exactly are the Tunnelers? Is it ever explained? At first I just assumed it was humans mutated by radiation, like everything else in the Fallout Universe, but radiation is explicitly described to make you sterile even in Fallout, and the Tunnelers are described as explosive breeders. Plus, how does radiation somehow make you stronger, faster, and make you look like a lizard?
 * There are two possibilities found within Lonesome Road: The insinuation made during the conversation with Ulysses is that they are mutated pre-war humans who hid underground during the great war, and mutated to the point of becoming lizards on their own. Other possibility is that they are experiments gone wrong again. Several notes in the "Nostalgia" challenge refer to a pre-war incident of Protesters in the vein of 60s hippies being "rounded up" by the Chief Liaison officer with Big MT with something "special" planned for them. It may very well be a combination of both, however.
 * All the wasteland humans are partially irradiated and still capable of breeding. The super mutant sterility comes from the FEV. Ghouls actually are irradiated to the point they should be sterile. Radiation caused the Jackson's chameleon to change into Deathclaws, so humans changing into tunnelers is not particularly less plausible than that.
 * Aren't the Deathclaws stated to be the result of FEV?
 * Deathclaws are a pre-war experiment, like the Cazadores and Nightstalkers, that escaped. The mutation from radiation exposure is that they have lost their color-changing ability. Joseph, an herbalist in Vault 13, theorizes that Deathclaws are just mutant chameleons. However, Fallout 2 Lead Designer Matt Norton, tells us specifically that Deathclaws are a pre-war experiment, later experimented with by Fallout 1's Master.
 * I thought with either survival or INT checks you can suggest to Ulysses that they are the mutated result of something that lived deep under ground being brought to the surface by bombs... removing the surface. Like No-Bark's mole people.

Why don't the Marked Men just commit suicide?
So, we all know that they are insane cannibals. they feel nothing but hate for the Divide and all that enter. Close to feral ghouls but not quite, they capable of making decisions. For instance, some of the former Legion members model their armor and weapons of Legate Lanius, as a symbol they can hold on to. They can jury-rig scrap metal, road signs and other armor pieces on to their own. Lastly during the epilogue, the Marked Men are among those who avoid the courier either out of respect or fear. They are in constant great pain, only kept alive by the constant radiation, plus their is now no point to their existence beyond killing all those who enter the Divide. So, why don't they just kill themselves?
 * Constant great pain can drive the human mind into insanity, where the rational thought leaves the mind, but the capacity for intelligence remains. It's very likely some of the survivors had killed themselves in order to avoid such a fate. We've seen similar incidences in other genres, such as zombie horror ("I'd rather die than become one of those things"). Reavers display similar characteristics as the Marked Men, driven on impulse by rage, in spite of still retaining some communication ability and tool-using capacity.
 * Suicide isn't as easy as you think it is, regardless of the circumstances.
 * The ones willing to commit suicide already have.

The Lucky 38 in a non-House route
Not that I don't appreciate it, but I just find it odd that, even if you don't side with House (which invariably means you ultimately kill him), you're still able to use the Lucky 38 as your unofficial "main base". You'd think Victor and the other securitrons would be a tad upset you "betrayed" and offed their boss.
 * Hm, doesn't the securitrons inside the Lucky 38 all become hostile after you neutralize House (the non-unique ones just re-spawn non-hostile)? Notice that Victor disappears from the Lucky 38. And at least for Yes Man, there is a good explanation for the securitrons being friendly - they are machines, controlled from the Lucky 38's grid, and even in the darkest interpretations of Yes Man, he'd still need you at that point.

Christine's Abilities
Christine Royce has a lot of disparate and seemingly contradictory traits. She mentions how experiments in the Big Empty cost her the ability to read letters, but she can still do math and equations. Um, okay, this is a universe where radiation makes your skin fall off and cause you to live forever, whatever. When she's then rendered mute, communication is a real bitch, but the confusing things come later.
 * With a stat check, you can deduce that her part in the Gala Event requires her and her alone because of her technical expertise. For that quest, you have to lead her to and subsequently activate a computer console. In the Fallout universe, GU Is don't exist--it's either DOS-style command lines or voice-activated controls. Christine doesn't have the ability to operate either, yet is considered essential.
 * Binary. Maybe she remembers how to force computers into a binary-only readout.
 * Doesn't even have to be binary. What Christine cannot do is read and write English syntax, but that does not mean she is incapable of still using computer programming language. Christine is still capable of equations and mathematics, so she might still be able to understand computer syntax and allow her to operate the computers she finds, regardless of the interface.
 * When you reunite with her, she has  Not necessarily hers, but it works. If you were nice to her, she details the circumstances of   death and the addiction that lead up to it, gleaned from the Auto-Doc in the room. The only way should could learn this would be to read it or have it played out loud--and speakers agitate the collars the two of you are wearing, making your head explode.
 * Once again, binary.
 * Or the Auto-Doc speakers haven't degraded from running constantly for two centuries like the others.
 * My bet is on that. The speakers on that particular Auto-Doc have been in a room isolated from the nearby Cloud, and yes, have also not been running constantly in two centuries.


 * made Christine mute in the first place, so that he could "tune her like an instrument," to . However, that turns out to be irrelevant, as piecing snippets of songs together to make the key is an unskippable part of the main questline, making it doubtful of why she's even necessary in the first place.
 * Dean's plan to break in must have been different from Elijah's plan to break in.
 * Indeed, his plan was thrown off by the War occuring before he could put his own plan into action. It never occurred to Dean that he could just use the snippets of recordings to unlock the Vault, particularly when he had the originator of the sound in his pocket.
 * Lastly, she states that she's good at fighting with guns, energy weapons, explosives, melee weapons, and unarmed. However, she sucks at everything that isn't an energy or melee weapon. Probably just Gameplay and Story Segregation, but still irritating, especially since the weapon of hers you recover in Old World Blues is a conventional ballistic weapon.
 * Maybe she was brain-damaged enough to believe it, even though it wasn't true.
 * Or it was just skills she had lost because of the lobotomy.
 * Probably a game engine limitation. All NPCs only get three "tagged" skills, but they seem to have 0's for anything that is not tagged. She should have all of the skills she mentioned, but the game doesn't allow it.
 * They can have four tag skills (there are a few non-companions that have it), but otherwise, yes.

BOS Quest Arc Segregation

 * Why is it that even after you go through such lengths to help the Brotherhood survive, and succeed, in which case McNamara will inform you that the lock-down has been lifted, yet this never comes up when Veronica berates him for his isolationist policy. Why?
 * The main explanation is probably that Veronica is talking about Brotherhood-wide isolationist policies in her quest, while the lock-down is a case of McNamara being excessively cautious. Basically, Veronica wants the Brotherhood to venture out and help people (her argument being that their current course is self-destructive, but if they could get friends and more recruits from the outside...), or failing that at least to take a closer look at the potential of non-military stuff. Lifting the lock-down does nothing about any of that, so...
 * Veronica is an extremist and she is angry at the Brotherhood of Steel. McNamara agrees with her on numerous points and he points out where she is being unrealistic or where certain things take time. McNamara is basically what Veronica would be if she was intelligent about changing the Brotherhood rather than simply alienating them with radical ideas. McNamara is much more practical, hence why he takes small steps towards ultimately the same goal.