Willy Wonka reference?

Too many different sizes, shapes, and metals. Easier to just say something is worth X amount of Virtually Identical Objects.
Also, most people wouldn't be able to read, rendering the value printed on the coins moot.

That is the problem, democracy eventually leads to beucracy. I've seen enough beucracy to last a lifetime. The only factions that seem to work are house, enclave, and bos the other factions seem to fail although ceaser has the right idea, the thing is he needs to make plans for and adequate replacement when he dies (I.e vulpes).

Why did they encourage Nuclear War exactly???

That does not seem to make sense.

lol democracy is FAR FAR FAR from a utopian governing type. Communism is a good idea in paper but like most governing types fail because of one universal truth ppl are corruptable lol.The fall out usa and the real world usa have alot in common only diff is that the fall out government was more obvious with their actions ampng some other things.

I thought Caps were just used in the game to make it fun no offense, I love trying to make sense of all the references to things in Fallout, but I just think it was put in the game because it makes it funny. Bottle Caps are what kids used as toy money 50 years ago while kids actually did normal stuff like they should instead of listening to Slipknot and wear chaps and all sorts of stuff I shouldn't even know about :shrug: . I just like the aspect and I like to keep it that way. Seeing so much discussion on one subject just gives me a headache :wacko:

I've found myself saving the caps off of my beer or root beer bottles...seriously.

As for why it's the currency...it's just something that has no real intrinsic value, but I suppose was rare enough to be usable as a monetary unit. It's also a unit of value that you can use while bartering, though you are really only just trading one item for another.

Inflation due to energy crisis wiping out pennies is reasonable.

Speaking of Fallout 3, could the reason that bottle caps were used for currency be the proximity to a Nuka Cola Factory, and the fact that Nuka Cola machines are all over the place? Besides, there are only two or three real open societies in the game, so that could contribute to a contained form of currency, rather than using Pre-War Money, for example.

The reason for that is because the West was the primary trading source and they used Caps primarily, So the east caught on and started doing so too, And the west changed to real money later on but the east did'nt have any resources to create hard money.

Least thats what I remember.

It matters not "who shot first" in a war, both sides are guilty for letting things escalate to that point.

Bottle caps were the currency in FO1 because they were everywhere and the Water Merchants used them as money. Who ever contols the water makes the rules. By FO2 NCR became the most powerful in the region and everyone switched to their gold coins. FO3 has bottle caps because the Devs did not pay attention to fallout history :shrug: Not saying they had to use gold but bottle caps? why not something else like ring pulls like in Tactics due to DC being so far from bottle cap users in the west which stopped using caps? Still maybe I am being to hard on them. By the time of New Vegas, NCRs gold lost value because the BoS would hit the gold caravans and merchants were not getting paid so they went back to Caps. NCR switched to paper money which I bet is the main currency back West.

Technically, the Enclave was a democracy. They had a president, vice president, a senate and so forth. It was pretty much the pre war government.

The originals always held the view that nobody knows and will never know who shot first.

Ehhh, my memory on it is sketchy at best but IIRC it was something like so that the best of the best of America could survive and thwart Red China and communism from the world. I honestly dont know to clearly, I think this, like the 'No one knows who shot first' debate of the series, are gaps in the plot because the Pre-War world and it's politics, though known within the series, to us the player, we may likely never know the day to day politics from January 2077 when the USAF liberated Anchorage up to October 2077 when the Great War started.

Oh okay. Thanks.

But you still have to be insane to want to start a nuclear war.

Well, we don't quite know what The Enclaves motives were. (up to the Great War, they were a shadow government that only high up officials and conspiracy theorists knew)

I'm sure rob-co and vault-tec had a lot to do with the increased tension as they would profit the most from the increased tension.

You know, I was quite surprised Obsidian never wrote in dialogue choices for us to ask Mr. House (who founded Robco and ran it up until the war for roughly 30-35 years) about the companies cotnracts with Vault Tec and Project Safehouse.

Both NCR and Legion money aren't affected by your barter, and are always worth the same thing. 5NCR$ = 2 caps, always.

To be fair, though, they wouldn't have done so without anyone they felt was worth destroying, so I'd say both countries are at fault, but we're not here to debate over the prewar politics of the Fallout universe. Really, whose fault it was doesn't matter much, because that wouldn't change the outcome of the war.

But back on topic, the decision to use botlle caps as the main currency was probably a throwback to Fallout 1 on the designer's part, I doubt it was was just because it was easier to use what Fallout 3 used since I cant see changing the model and texture and icon and name of bottle caps being that hard. Though I'd guess that the in-universe justification is because the NCR is reletively new in the Mojave and has not fully dominated the area, and most people still use the original currency of the area, and back in fully NCR controlled territory, NCR dollars are presumable still the standard currency. So why does the Mojave use bottle caps in particular and not something else? The same reason the Capital Wasteland uses them, I'd guess, because the designers thought it would be a good idea. Admitably, when you get down to it, most design choices in any game are probably made for that reason, but some choices may have in in-universe explanation as well, but I haven't heard one for the continued use of caps in the Mojave wasteland.

Yah but if the world ends 5 gagillion dollars is nto gonna stop a guy who needs food, shelter, ammo, or water from killing. I could see "well hey lets increase tension and make a billion bucks", but you would have to be careful about starting a nuclear war because it still likely would not end well for you.

And yes the Enclave is a shadow government but why would they want to start a nuclear war? It just does not make sense to me. Although it makes for a great game.

You have to remember people don't think if moneys in their face. I'm pretty sure they didn't think things would be as bad as they are now.

Think of it this way. Why were almost all of the vaults experimental where it wasn't even expected for them to succeed? If the vault-tec knew how bad the world would be, I really doubt that so many of the vaults would be experimental.

The Mojave does not have a unified government so the currency would be whatever people are willing to back. But here's a good reason. Bottlecaps are common their everywhere so they can be used as a currency. Now Mr. House controls new vegas through his secutirtons and the families do you think he'll make his dollar beholden to the NCR? not a chance. He'll just use something wastelanders are comfortable with using.



Not backed up by cannon material, no one knows who struck first. The one holodisk hat supported china striking first is filled with inconsistencies with other material and Chris Avellone said it was non-cannon.



Fallout Tactics isn't considered cannon, its developers didn't pay any attention to fallout history which is SAD because Chris Taylor was on the design team.[he did apologize for that though]. it lacked any of the retro-futuristic style of the previous games, They got the history of the brotherhood of steel wrong claiming they came from a military vault, the ghouls suffered radiation poisoning, the list goes on. The problem with ring pulls is they were invented the 60's while in fallout all the soda and beer are in bottles in keeping with the Retro-futuristic style of the games.

We also don't know when they started using bottlecaps as currency in the DC area, the Brotherhood traveled two and a half thousand miles west from California to capital wasteland, the concept of using bottlecaps as currency easily could have easily made the same trip.

Actually precious metals would be the currency of the realm..along with jewels and of course barter ( tech, meds, food etc )
Bottle caps are too easy to produce.
I brew and bottle my own beer and I can punch out bottle caps all day...I can even print on them anything I want.
I was even considering making a bunch of Nuka Cola caps and selling them on E-Bay....but was informed after asking I could not ( copyright infringement ) They even asked me to stop selling the 1/35 scale model dioramas I was selling since it was considered too Falloutish

Like others before stated, bottlecaps are the established and accepted currency because they are water-backed, durable, and well-known.

However, they are just as worthless themselves as paper money. Representative currency (like paper money or bottlecaps) derive their value from a commodity that the currency's creator owns. The commodity that the entity owns is what gives the currency it's value and it has to be widely accepted as valuable by those of whom the entity wishes to trade with. For example, if a government wishes to use paper money and backs their currency with gold (a mineral that is widely considered to be of value), the currency will be as valuable as the gold it represents. If the governing entity chooses to back it's currency with something worthless, like a stockpile of used tampons (which no sane government would do), their currency wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on (or in the case of the U.S. Quarter, not worth the steel it's made of) because nobody in their right mind would want used tampons.

In the case of Fallout's bottlecaps, the currency is backed with water, which is extremely valuable in post-apocalyptic America. It's possible that other entities (I'm calling them that because most groups outside the NCR aren't governments) have adopted bottlecaps as their representative currency because it's well-known, but not guaranteed that water is backing them. It's entirely possible that the bottlecap in the Mojave Wasteland is backed by a commodity other than water like steel or copper (both of which would be readily available in the form of scrap and extremely valuable to a developing country like the NCR).


Regarding government on the other hand (which seems to be the side-topic of this conversation), Anarchy is the ideal system. It is commonly misrepresented thanks to the masses of youth who parade the idea in their rebellious age as a way of saying "I want to do whatever I want with no consequences!" but the real system itself is allowing everyone their absolute freedom from governance. However, as you see in the world of Fallout and scores of nations in the world today that have no government, people as a whole cannot handle not being held accountable for their actions.

So the founding fathers (as they are so lovingly called here in the USA) devised a system based on the merits of the Roman Republic and Greek Democracy with ideas carried over from England's commonlaw legal system and capitalist economy (yes, America owes it's way of life to the country it wrestled it's freedom from). The government was set up with the idea that it would be intentionally inefficient (checks and balances) so citizens would rest easy knowing that the government would need to have a majority concensus in order to act on anything of importance.

I'm telling you all this because the idea of America's systems itself, which can be best described as a Constitutional Democratic Republic, isn't flawed. The design is ingenious (or at least it was) in that it puts the true authority of the nation in the hands of it's citizens. Taking that into consideration, you can see that the blame for the failure of the system in the Fallout universe doesn't end with the U.S. and Chinese governments, but with the citizens of those countries that chose to follow their leaders blindly into annihilation. The Enclave from what I understand believed that they could win the war of Democracy over other forms of government that President Woodrow Wilson started by wiping the slate clean with apocalyptic nuclear fire. They thought that in the vacuum of power left in the wake of the war, that they would emerge as the dominant force in the world thereby establishing that Democracy won the battle over Communism once and for all. They're the remnants of the corrupt, failed government that was elected into power by the sheepish U.S. citizens of their time.

On a side note, guess what my major is!



I typed this up on the Notepad because I had to wait out my mandatory hiatus and this topic was just too good to pass up.