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The Vault-Tec Corporation became popular during the Sino-American War, a conflict that threatened the lives of more than just the combatants in theFalloutuniverse. Vault-Tec capitalized on the fear of Americans, pitching themselves as saviors to those who could afford spots in their vaults, underground bunkers designed to survive the ever-present threat of nuclear war.
Vault-Tec was the only nuclear defense company and had a stranglehold on the market. This led to many other products and mascots using Vault-Tec’s purported credibility to sell their products, painting a yellow-and-blue world filled with smiling Vault Boys and Girls for people living in pre-war America.
What Is Vault-Tec?
Vault-Tec isa corporation specializing in producing Vaults en masse for the pre-war population, as their name might suggest. They sprang out of a college renamed ‘Vault-Tec University’ where a majority of their employees were trained to operate the technology they were building.
Their shelters were actually more or less legitimately constructed,advancing building techniques so they could put up lots of Vaults— and fast.
After winning a bid to continue to construct shelters in the event of nuclear fallout, Vault-Tec would befunded by the American governmentin their endeavors, building these alleged ‘safehouses’ across the U.S. and the recently annexed Canada.
To the public, these Vaults were built to sustain large populations of people and many Americans started buying places within them. This uptick in businessincentivized Vault-Tec to see a continuation of the war, as they had built their entire business model atop the fear of civilians.
Vault-Tec was designed to be as efficient as possible, which often led to internal violations, especially when treating employees who had to subsist on two-minute bathroom breaks.
Vaults
On the surface, Vault-Tec may have seemed like a business capitalizing on a wartime panic. Unethical, sure, but not necessarily beyond the pale for a pre-war corporation.
However,the reasons for Vault-Tec’s Vaults' existence went beyond simple profit. Vault-Tec wanted torun various experiments on their Vault populace, out of scientific curiosity.
These experiments weremostly social, designed to see how humanity reacted to a series of stressors placed upon them,though some deviated from this formula.
At least one Vault-Tec employee would be within the Vault, analyzing the experiment, if the entire staff wasn’t made up of them.
It could perhaps be speculated that they wanted to ensure humanity would survive, or even thrive, in a post-nuclear world.
Experiments
Some of the Vaults were fairly tame, such as Vault 8, which had instructions to open after ten years, or Vault 77, which had one man and a bunch of puppets.
Others, like Vault 11, were built around the lie thata single person had to be sacrificed annuallyor everyone would die.
Some Vaults were designed with faulty mechanismsor resources, to see how their bodies would be affected by radiation or toobserve how people turn on one anotherin the face of scarcity.
All the data Vault-Tec gatheredwould be sent to the Enclave, a post-war organization developed out of the pre-war government. Vault-Tec itself would not survive the war.
Overall, these Vaults were typically horrifying, with the people living within them being unaware they were simply statistics for a larger company.
As said in the promotional comic for Fallout 3, One Man, and a Crate of Puppets:“The Vaults were never meant to save anyone.”
Vault-Tec built around 122 Vaults, with around 17 being set aside as a control group. They would employ hundreds to ensure their Vaults ran just the way they wanted to, which is to say,not exactly smoothly…
