To cut it up short I had just cleared Wilson's Atomatoys Factory and needed to make multiple trips to transport the scrap. Upon coming by for the second round I was greeted with gunners operating a vertibird.. thats already confusing. There was brotherhood corpses but no knights, weird. Upon killing them I decided to walk this load of scrap to a nearby settlement instead of fast traveling and upon returning for the final round I was greeted with a military APC surrounded by brotherhood members. It is basically implying that the APC vehicles are in working order.

Has anyone else ran into something similar to this? It seems like this is either unfinished content or just a random inconsistency. As far as I recall the brotherhood in the commonwealth have only blabbed on about vertibirds and not land vehicles. As well as nothing of the sort present during the BoS questline.

Gunners can come at you in Vertibirds, it's rare but it happens. I was up in the northern commonwealth and had it happen to me too.

Did you complete the Brotherhood questline? Because when I did, I found that some of their checkpoints were based around old military APCs. I reckon they just saw them as good locations for checkpoint, given that they are on roads, provide cover, and allow room for storage. Basically saves them the trouble of building fortifications themselves.

Never heard of there being any operational APC's in Fallout... I've never experienced it or heard of it until... now.

on this character I have not completed the main story and have just gotten to the institute. There isnt any military checkpoints close to wilsons atomatoys factory that i am aware of. The APC was just there all of a sudden on my third round back.

In tactics the brotherhood of steel has HMMWVs, APCs and tanks operational.

The only time I ever saw a vertibird actually land without crashing, it was operated by a Gunner.

Now I can imagine the raiders and gunners acting like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f69ZVXn4-w

I never played Tactics, didn't know it existed until recently. The closest thing i've seen as a land nav. vehicle was

And we all know how that thing works...

I saw four Gunners guarding a Tank (yes, a Tank and not a APC) once. They showed as Red but didn't attack as long as I kept my distance.

Tanks and apc's are used behind the scenes, they teleport in when the units spawn, but are just set pieces, and disappear and appear instantly when the cell updates, not actually being functional, just visual flavor.

I have had brotherhood knights appear outside big john salvage using a pair of apc's as cover against the super mutants, it was an epic fight, once I cleared the area and emptied the bunker I exited back into the commonwealth and the apc's had vanished along with the brotherhood units.