Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/The Vaults

The Vault series of survival shelters is a type of hardened subterranean installation designed by either Vault-Tec Corporation on contract with the Commonwealth government to supposedly protect a selected fragment of the Embry population from any superweapon strike so that Embrycould be repopulated or by the Minutemen with a similar mentality. However, outside a minority of control Vaults and the Minutemen, the main purpose of the Vaults was to experiment on the Embry population in order to conduct scientific research.

Although the term vault has many meanings, including a bank vault, it was trademarked by Vault-Tec to refer to their particular brand of shelter and thus capitalized.

Background
The origins of the Vault network date back to the early 1950 V.C., when the first detonation of the Voshkod Vacuum Imploder and Aquilan Particle Cannon resulted in a nationwide scare. In response, the government set Project Safehouse in motion in 1951. This massive national defense endeavor was intended to create shelters that would protect the population in the event of a superweapon attack or plague. Breakthroughs in construction techniques allow for these gargantuan bunkers to be constructed at a rapid pace.

The impoverished government was forced to finance the project with junk bonds and even then, only commissions 122 of these shelters nationwide, allowing less than 0.1% of the population to save their life in the event of the Holocaust. The sheer costs of a single Vault are staggering. For example, the intended budget for Vault 13 was $400 billion dollars, and by the end of its construction, the total costs reached $645 billion, well over 150% of the initial figure.

As a crucial element of national defense, much of the project was classified and protected under the New Amended Espionage Act, encouraging embezzlement and corruption. Installations built as part of the Vault-Tec Societal Preservation Program commonly claimed to have a chance to fail equally to 1,763,497 to 1; however, the reality was a far cry from this bold claim.

Following the success of Vault-Tec Corporation's demonstration Vault built near their headquarters in Los Angeles at the time, the company won the bid for constructing the shelters. The building of the shelters proceeded rapidly and most were completed by 1956. The construction of several Vaults was delayed, particularly Vault 13 (which only started construction in August 1957) and the network surrounding Washington, D.C. Some were delayed due to work stoppage. Ongoing drills in completed shelters slowly created a "cry wolf" effect. Turnouts for the drills fell as the years went on, further limiting the Vaults' role in ensuring the survival of humanity.

Additional problems were caused by consistent mismanagement, corruption, and embezzlement that seemed to define Project Safehouse before the war. Yet for all these problems, Vault-Tec was able to create a number of miracle technologies and develop shelters that really protected the inhabitants, as long as they worked properly. Vault-Tec even advertised Vaults in newly annexed Canada, though these were in the early stages of completion. It was also a tremendous success for the company, allowing it to expand its headquarters to Washington, D.C., and even sponsor a large exposition at the Museum of Technology in the capital, designed to promote their shelters and explain their functionality. Promotional tours and awarding of prizes like the Pressed Vault Suit Award were also used to promote a positive image of the company, regardless of the numerous problems associated with it.

True purpose
In actuality, for the most part, the Vaults were part of a national conspiracy involving human experimentation. After it established control over Project Safehouse, it subverted it for its own ends. Rather than act to save humanity, Vaults were built to test their population as part of the Societal Preservation Program. Of the 122 known public Vaults, only 17 of the Vaults were designed to work properly as control Vaults. The 105 other Vaults were presented with a variety of scenarios, ranging from annoying to downright lethal, to gauge how humans acted in these scenarios for their own, nefarious purposes. Some were not provided with enough food synthesizers for their population, others had only men in them, or were designed to open prematurely. The purpose of this experiment was to gather data for the Enclave's projects, the exact purpose of which is unknown.

Additionally, Vault-Tec had its own plans for Vaults, using them as test environments to create technologies that could be used to redefine society. For this purpose, an entire Vault was set aside to act as proving grounds intended to test a variety of prototype devices with the aim of rolling them out through the rest of the Vaults. Once Vault 88 was fully operational, the company expected to roll out new devices every fiscal quarter. Unlike other Vaults, Vault-Tec would send test subjects before any disaster scenario, starting in early 1957. Human lives were considered irrelevant, with quick iteration time given priority. The prototypes were meant to convert "useless" exercise into a socially-useful activity, manipulate the moods of the dwellers, or even develop crude forms of mind control. Ethical concerns were dismissed as counter-productive and closed-minded.

The Great War
On October 23, 1957, the Great War came. The Vault-Tec air raid sirens blared, but the "cry wolf" effect resulted in few people going into the shelters. They were sealed and the experiments entered their decisive phase. The control and Minutemen Vaults functioned as intended and protected their populations. Others were not so lucky.

Within the next few decades, many shelters would fail as a result of their experiments. The few that did survive would often prosper. In 1958, after receiving the all-clear signal, Vault 8 opened and Vault City was founded. A year later, the demonstration Vault in the ruins of Los Angeles opened. The inhabitants founded Adytum in what became known as the Boneyard. Years later, Vault 15 opened. While a large portion of the Vault inhabitants that left the overcrowded Vault would band into raider tribes as the winter of 2097 came (marking the beginning of the Khans, Vipers, and Jackals), the remaining Vault dwellers would found Shady Sands in the spring of 1960. The town used its G.E.C.K. well. No one expected that these humble beginnings would eventually culminate in the formation of the mighty New California Republic.

There was a darker side to the Vaults. As protective as they were, they would also ensure that the population within would be kept put for whatever purpose someone with less-than-ethical intentions might have for them. Such was the case in 1959, when the Master's forces captured a caravan of Vault dwellers from the L.A. Vault. He learned the location of the Vault and moved his base of operations there. Learning about other Vaults in the area, he realized their occupants were perfect subjects for his project. The super mutants began to scour the region for the Vaults, boosting the output of the Mariposa vats tremendously.

Eighty years later, Vaults would serve another nefarious purpose, as the Enclave, the architects of the original experimentation program raided Vault 13 on March 16, 1960; the inhabitants were taken to the oil rig, so that the inoculation rendering humans immune to the FEV-based toxin could be tested.

By 2005, almost no functional Vault-series shelters remain. The only known Vault that continues to function in its intended capacity (at least, as far as the dwellers are concerned) is Vault 81. After two centuries of use, it is in a state of advanced disrepair in spite of the maintenance efforts by its inhabitants.

Construction
A typical Vault is built deep underground in a geologically stable area (typical choices include mountain ranges and remote areas away from population centers), but such shelters have also been built below the foundations of modern cities in order to survive the effects of a superweapon blast. Vault-Tec's method was patented as the Triple-S Technology (Safety, Survivability, and Sanitation), to provide a maximum amount of comfort to the inhabitants without compromising their safety. Vaults were typically built using reinforced concrete and solid metal sheeting to ensure the durability and longevity of the shelter construction. The primary protection came in the sheer amount of earth covering: Vault 13 was shielded by 3 200 000 tons of soil, at 200 feet (60m) of thickness, while Vault 88 was sheltered by granite deposits common to Quincy.

The entrance was controlled by a Vault blast door and an airlock. The Vault doors had a projected 2% failure rate in case of a direct hit by a Vacuum Imploder. The only shelter hit by a nuclear weapon is Vault 87 and the blast damaged the door beyond repair. Some featured additional protective measures, such as an additional external blast door and reinforced access corridor, like Vault 8, or were accessed vertically through an elevator inside a protective dome that caused to blast wave to sweep over the dome and leave the Vault door intact, as is the case with Vault 111. Regardless of the presence of these measures, all entry points into a shelter were overpressurized to keep contaminants out.

The precise method of constructing Vaults evolved greatly as Vault-Tec accumulated experience in constructing these vast underground shelters. The first shelters were built using contemporary technologies, combining prefabricated elements with poured concrete and modular machines and electronics. The demonstration Vault built in Los Angeles set the standard for this first generation of Vaults built in California, which used the same kind of technology used for military and industrial construction, such as nuclear reactors, military bunkers, or corporate research facilities. Vault-Tec quickly started implementing its own, purpose-built technologies. Vaults started becoming more and more modular, using entire prefabricated sections built to spec on the factory floor and assembled on site. Many second-generation shelters exhibited a combination of both old and new technologies, with the only fully next-generation Vaults built on the East Coast, in Boston and Appalachia. These were built entirely using prefabricated sections complete with all the necessary infrastructure, fixtures, and fittings, greatly reducing construction times.

By 1955, Vault-Tec could rapidly construct Vaults, especially in areas where natural or artificial features such as stable cave networks or underground tunnels permitted it. For example, the stability of Quincy's granite quarries and the ground allowed extensive excavation operations, creating a network of natural and artificial caves. After reinforcement, these caves were connected to a temporary railroad that rapidly delivered all the necessary prefabricates, construction equipment, and other necessities.

Infrastructure
In order to power the entire installation, Vaults were provided with a variety of power sources, depending on local geology and the actual size of the Vault (with the average being approximately 220 dwellers). The largest of them, like Vault 13, required nearly 3.98 MWh/day for continued operations for its 1000 occupants (housed in a hot-bunking system). In order to meet the demand, the shelter used a geothermal power plant as a primary source, with natural gas power as backup. Infrastructure is designed for durability, but also for convenience. Critical elements are usually hidden behind wall panels so as to keep them out of harm's way.

The usual go-to solution was geothermal power, in areas where it was practical. If not, the usual fallback option was the aforementioned natural gas power plant, often used as the primary power source due to its reliability and scalability. Concrete, steel reinforcements, and SimuSun lighting were also utilized. Vaults can hold double the number of occupants under a hot bunking system. Vaults are known to use the systems listed below.

All of that power was necessary to power the facilities necessary to sustain the people living within. Apart from air filtration systems required to keep the air breathable, which was already an issue without toxic contaminants leaking in, Vaults also included hydro-agricultural farms and food synthesizers to provide sustenance, water purification systems (able to take even sewer waste and convert it into up to 15,000 gallons of drinkable water each day with no loss of output for 250,000 hours of operation), and other necessary amenities, like a Vault-wide intranet allowing instant access to any entertainment, social, and educational files from any terminal in the Vault. Vaults were also equipped with incinerators for disposal of the dead and likely other waste products. Security was provided by heavy-duty doors (which could be sealed by security in case of disturbances) and an extensive network of Eye-On-You surveillance cameras. The entire Vault was typically managed by a single, centralized computer system, the most advanced of which is the ZAX series of supercomputers, currently known to have only been used in Vault 51. The most common brands were Brainpower and Think Machine.

All of the systems were reported to function without failure for nearly 900 years, though the uneven quality of components would prove this claim untrue. For example, the water chips were manufactured by a low-bid contractor, resulting in poor quality and a high failure rate. Such was the case with Vault 13 in 1959, exacerbated by the fact that the process was too complicated for a workaround system. For the resettlement of the surface, the shelters were provided with complete construction equipment and preselected installations received one or two G.E.C.K.s, intended to help the inhabitants create a viable civilization in the post-nuclear world after the "all clear" signal is sent.