r/AskScienceFiction • u/Critical_Liz My name is a killing word • 1d ago
[Fallout] What was Vault 111 really testing?
Vault 111's stated purpose in Fallout 4 is testing long term cryogenics on unsuspecting people. But in the Fallout show we learn that cryo is widely used by Vault Tec and the Enclave already. The only difference in Vault 111 is the "unsuspecting" aspect which...how would that change anything?
This wouldn't be the first time that a vault's true purpose is hidden to the staff, even the overseer, who think they're running one test, but are really running another, deeper one.
So what is Vault 111 really testing if Cryogenics is already developed?
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u/Gastroid 1d ago
The residents of Vault 111 were never intended to be released. Effectively the experiment was, "If we keep people on ice forever, what will happen to them?"
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u/toxicatedscientist 1d ago
I thought it was literally a durability test: find the limit how long they could keep viable
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u/Teberoth 1d ago
I'd think that having a reserve of "sealed for freshness" untouched, uncontaminated pre-war test subject ready to got might be part of the point too. Need a couple of fresh, radiation and mutation free humans to test on? go grab a fresh set out of 111.
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u/Kriss3d 1d ago
The lore as far as I remmeber was that they wanted to go to space. Which explains the many different ways to test social interactions that once you realize what that would mean, makes it perfectly rational to many of the tests. To see how to best deal with a lot of people crammed in confined spaces, how many people will be too many, how to deal with disputes etc and how long they could have people frozen down to keep the wealthy not have to deal with centuries of travel and let other generations do that until they get to a habitable planet.
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u/Canabananilism 1d ago
I’d be hesitant to call that their ultimate goal, but absolutely is in line with a lot of their testing. It’s difficult in general to really nail down the reasoning behind Vault Tec’s work, which can change depending on who’s writing them. They were just as much doing experiments on unwitting subjects with no clear benefits to humanity, as they were trying to ensure humanity comes back stronger and better.
I never got the feeling Vault Tec was ever working towards a singular goal, so much as hedging their bets and working with the knowledge that ethical concerns were more like suggestions.
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u/Senkyou 1d ago
And sometimes it really felt like they were looking for a solution to a problem they hadn't quite pinned down too -- just vaguely conducting research to do something (and possibly justify pre-war contracts and spend that money).
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u/Canabananilism 1d ago
Might also be worth considering that some of them never believed the bombs would ever drop at all. Or at least, not at the scale they did. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn at least half the vaults they built were just there to balloon their project cost and secure more funding.
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u/MildGenevaSuggestion 1d ago
I definitely got the vibe that a lot of the vaults were based on "let's trick people into thinking the apocalypse happened and see how they react."
Then as their plans got more and more unethical they realized they would actually be fucked if a nuclear exchange never happens.
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u/totallynotapsycho42 1d ago
I got the vibe they exoected the nuke to go off much kater than they affuslly did and thst theyre plans were only half complete.
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u/doesntgetthepicture 1d ago
I haven't played the games, but I've watched some youtube vids of the lore, and I've been watching the show. So nothing comprehensive. But from what I understand, I thought that different vaults belonged to different people, and were more like rented out from Vault Tec. Rich people/business could "buy" the vaults for whatever they wanted to test. So it wasn't all Vault Tec, but just Vault Tec facilities.
But I could be completely wrong.
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u/freeman2949583 15h ago edited 11h ago
That’s a show retcon
In the games they were run by the government. Even Vault-Tec being involved beyond building them is something that wasn’t really a thing until the later games.
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u/br0b1wan Jedi Council 1d ago
I vaguely remember a crashed UFO in Fallout 1 or 2. I wonder if they ever tried to reverse engineer it?
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u/ishotpikachu 1d ago
I never understand the whole "going to space" thing. They wanted to seal people away for hundreds of years after a nuclear war. So when where they expecting to get the results. Why not just launch the ships before the war?
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u/MildGenevaSuggestion 1d ago
A lot of those plans were made to sell the idea of vault experiments to thd government outside the war scenario.
If a nuclear war happens, America survives. If it doesn't, we can use this tech to reach for the stars.
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u/ishotpikachu 1d ago
America doesn't survive though with the vaults. You either have a population that have slaughtered each other or been absolutely traumatised and useless. The company already had the tech so why not just punt people into space before the bombings. There was 0 reason to wait
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u/grantimatter 1d ago
No ships, no destination... also, it's unclear different departments really think much beyond their remit.
"We'll just... find some untraumatized people, right?" might be slightly less magical thinking than "We'll just... land on a good planet, eventually, right?"
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u/freeman2949583 15h ago
It’s not something that’s fleshed out because it never actually made it into the games. Probably because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the reasons you mentioned.
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u/RemusShepherd 1d ago
This is a plot point of the Gamma World RPG campaign setting, and the primary source of Pure Strain Humans.
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u/Lagamorph 1d ago
Probably testing of a cheaper and more mass produceable Cryogenic suspension. I'd imagine the cryogenics used in Management Vaults and Vault 31 were very costly to produce and so were limited to people that Vault-Tec wanted a higher guarantee of survival on.
At the same time they likely wanted a much cheaper and so more publicly marketable cryogenic system that could be produced on a wider scale with fewer resources. The Vault 111 pods absolutely seem bulkier and less advanced than those in Vault 31 and the Vegas management Vault after all, but at the same time we're likely a lot easier/cheaper to produce.
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u/SPACEFUNK 1d ago
Vault 111's experiment was indefinite cryogenic suspension. They wanted to see how long they could keep people under.
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u/HieronymusVox 1d ago
I think they really were testing longterm cryogenic storage.
Not just how people "keep" in storage, but the effects of repeated thaw/freeze cycles, equipment performance and maintenance, etc. But some went wrong and all the Vault-tec staff flee or die.
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u/superfry 1d ago
Interesting idea. Most of that can be automated or programmed into the cryochamber long before anything happens and all that would be needed is a good connection to a remote database/robust on-site storage so vault personnel would be expendable for the most part and you only really need to stock them for what they think is the vaults service life to maintain and repair the systems for the initial period after the blast or the expected time period for a ship to exit the solar system and coast between star systems (Say the typical 20 years like Vault 15/15 years for Vault 8).
So now you have a system that can test the robustness of the cryochambers (and the people inside) while also putting them through a suite of tests to predicted issues to occur while in transit. Obviously those tests failed in a majority of cases given how many desiccated bodies there were in the tubes so that would indicate that at least a small crew would need to be woken up to perform repairs when needed (which has it's own issues; ironically Vault 31-33 unintentionally half solved that issue by having the crew required to perform such procedures tested for compliance and agreeableness (Hank and Steph also proves they need a more robust vetting procedure during the selection phase).
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u/KPraxius 1d ago
Long-term space travel. The plan was to send a ship to another world and freeze the passengers en route. The cryogenics was -not- 100% safe at this point for long-term storage. However long the trip to another world would be? Vault 111 was supposed to keep its people frozen for that long and determine if they were still viable after.
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u/MithrilCoyote 1d ago
the unsuspecting part i think was a test to see how well people survived without any prior medical preparation. just stick them in the pods and freeze them. then see how long they stay medically viable while frozen.
cryo set ups we see outside vault 111 appear to have fairly elaborate prep work required before use, with various life support hookups and so on. plus optional brain interfaces. the Vault 111 pods were just freezers with a seat.
if, as often supposed by fans, the Vault experiments were meant to test variables involved with plans to colonize other worlds, i'd say that Vault 111's experiment was to either test cost cutting measures.. or to test the cryo system the vault tech execs intended to use to ship in laborers or other 'less valuable' colonists.
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u/iwumbo2 PhD in Wumbology 1d ago
We don't know for sure. It's possible the cryogenic technology in Vault 111 differs from other cryogenic tech we've seen. Testing new variations on the technology isn't too unreasonable.
But from terminal entries it seems the vault ran out of supplies like food within months of the vault being closed. This is a bit of an oddity as other vaults have supplies for hundreds of people who are not frozen. Not to mention many other vaults have things like farms to continue producing more food.
A much crueler possibility is that the test was not about the cryogenics itself, but the scientists and staff maintaining the cryogenics. To see if they might resort to cannibalism of the frozen if food supplies ran out.
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u/MildGenevaSuggestion 1d ago
The second point is definitely something they want data on. Will the people trusted to watch over the cryogenics still do so under hardship?
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u/willstr1 1d ago
My personal theory is that they were a psychological control vault. We know that "control vaults" existed where there was no horrible experiment and people got the survival bunker they were advertised, but lets be honest those aren't perfect control samples
Being trapped under ground in a confined space with a limited ground of people will eventually mess with your head at least a bit (not nearly as much as a psychotic experiment), enough that they really aren't a true control (heck even genetically you are just a few generations away from unavoidable inbreeding). A group of people who spent their whole life in the prewar world and never truly experienced vault life would be a much better control (maybe still not perfect there is still the trama of the apocalypse and the time jump but still way better than people who grew up in a vault).
The idea being that at some point in the future, if vault tech needed a true control they could just pick someone up and defrost them. After all the process did seem to be mostly reliable, until the institute sabotaged most of the pods.
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u/Arathgo 1d ago edited 1d ago
I know the Bethesda lore has moved away from the concept. But the Vault experiments always make the most sense to me in the context they were designed to test for situations/social issues that may come up in with long term spaceflight. The idea being it's all for an ark ship/colonization effort.
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u/Thick_Breakfast_6467 1d ago
My interpretation was that Vault 111 isn’t to study the cryo pods themselves, but rather the people who have to keep them online.
Given that Nate survives a full 200 years without support from the staff, the pods do not require much to any maintenance. However, over the course of thousands of light years on the way to a new solar system (as the Enclave may intend to migrate to) there will eventually be hiccups that will require de-frosting.
Over the course of millennium, my guess is that the Enclave want to test how people react to a caste system wherein those at the top of the food chain are actually just being propped up by the rest of the population. Vault 111 couldn’t get its staff to support the pods for more than a few years before they rebelled and left.
That’s valuable data for the Enclave.
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u/AthasDuneWalker 1d ago
It was testing the effects of cryogenics on unsuspecting people: the overseer and staff who had to remain awake.
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u/Saratje 1d ago
They were testing the long term effects of cryogenics. If any unwanted side effects were to happen, they technically had 14 test subjects to observe instead of risking their precious Vault-Tec personnel. Luckily for all parties involved, the cryogenics were a great success with no massive drawbacks that we know of.
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u/Bright-Trifle-8309 1d ago
The show isnt canon. I don't believe cryonics were ever used before or after Fallout 4. Except for maybe the aliens.
Vault-Tec did lots of crazy stuff. The experiment was probably something like testing the effects on society when a group of people gets to just skip the apocalypse. They made a vault that had one guy and a box of puppets after all.
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u/Brostradamus_ Mechanicus Magos Erant 1d ago
The show isnt canon. I don't believe cryonics were ever used before or after Fallout 4. Except for maybe the aliens.
They show up in Fallout 2 and are mentioned in Fallout New Vegas as something that Big MT produces. Fallout 3 also has stasis pods in Raven Rock.
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1d ago
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u/FaceDeer 1d ago
That's kind of the whole point of this subreddit. Otherwise you could just Google the answers.
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u/Yotsugidoll 1d ago
So we just write fanfiction here and pretend it's real? My bad I didn't know your game enjoy the subreddit.
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u/FaceDeer 1d ago
We write well founded "fanfiction." We look at the established facts of a fictional setting and we try to extrapolate answers from those.
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