What Became Of Project Purity?

[danconnors]

One reason I have no problem with the Aqua boy/girl perk is that it shouldn't be needed anyway. This adventure takes place at about the same time as James is perfecting Project Purity in DC. The aim of Purity is to make ALL the water in the region nonradioactive.

You know it's the same time frame after talking to the acting head of Synth Retention in the Institute and finding out whose place he took. The Institute guy you killed in Fallout 3 to save the runaway courser (and get his weapon).

Project Purity suceeded in DC, apparently by way of the GECK (garden of eden creation kit (results may vary)). The GECK is apparently the size of a suitcase and able to be mass produced. All vaults were originally supposed to be equipped with one.

If it worked in DC it should work elsewhere. I know radioactive water was done away with in New Vegas (mostly), but in the Commonwealth, just a hop, skip, and a jump from DC, the water still sucks. Disregarding the fact that water is not still going to be radioactive 210 years after a nuclear war, it should still be potable and swimmable because a GECK should have cleaned it up by now.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by danconnors:

Admittedly the Institute is evil. Any son who would order his mother or father to murder his own friends, as Father does to you, would have to be considered a bad person.

If killing off people you know is evil, then the Institute is no more evil than anyone else, since all the other factions will happily tell you to murder your own son.

[GoreTiger]

Originally posted by danconnors:

Let's put it differenty. Dr. Li originally lived in the DC area. She was there when Project Purity went into full scale operation--after the main enclave force was destroyed. She knows everything there is to know about Project Purity.

As a responsible, and I think moral scientist, she would have seen to it when she arrived in the Commonwealth that Project Purity was implemented there also. Being intimately connected to the Institute she would have access to technology sufficient to do the job.

Knowing her as I remember from Fallout 3 she would have brow beaten "Father" constantly until he caved, and allowed the Commonwealth's water to be made safe. If the Institute obstinately refused to go along with her, it would just be one more indication of how truly evil the Institute is. It has the ability to clean up the water, and it refuses to do so. That's EVIL.

the biggest thing your forgetting is that Father doesnt give a damn about the commonwealth. He says so himself. So hes not going to waste resources on helping them build a purifier.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by KrayToast:

Originally posted by danconnors:

Let's put it differenty. Dr. Li originally lived in the DC area. She was there when Project Purity went into full scale operation--after the main enclave force was destroyed. She knows everything there is to know about Project Purity.

As a responsible, and I think moral scientist, she would have seen to it when she arrived in the Commonwealth that Project Purity was implemented there also. Being intimately connected to the Institute she would have access to technology sufficient to do the job.

Knowing her as I remember from Fallout 3 she would have brow beaten "Father" constantly until he caved, and allowed the Commonwealth's water to be made safe. If the Institute obstinately refused to go along with her, it would just be one more indication of how truly evil the Institute is. It has the ability to clean up the water, and it refuses to do so. That's EVIL.

the biggest thing your forgetting is that Father doesnt give a damn about the commonwealth. He says so himself. So hes not going to waste resources on helping them build a purifier.

He cares about the Commonwealth as a whole (it being part of humanity in general), but not the surface because he views it as already doomed and impossible to help.

The Institute's attitude towards humanity is focused on its survival and prosperity as a species, not any particular population of specific humans other than itself, and after past events they decided the surface of the Commonwealth was a lost cause.

[jackdaniels5091]

The Institutes evil is its "greater good" mentality, the ability to look past their humanity for the sake of scientific advancement. That's the motto "Mankind Redefined".

[danconnors]

A lost cause they do not hesitate to loot from, steal power from, snatch human guinea pigs from, and kidnap, murder, and replace leaders from.

Of the four main power groups in the Commonwealth I view the Institute as the most evil, closely followed by the neo nazi BOS, with the Railroad and the Minutemen not even being in the same ballpark. Resource wise the Institute probably has the most resources. It is well within their power to make the Commonwealth a much more pleasant world.

They could clean up the water, use their gen 1's and 2's to drive off or destroy the various raider and gunner bands, re-establish commerce, and generally vastly improve the living standards of honest people who now wallow in their own filth.

Instead they write off all of humanity outside their little fiefdom as being beyond help. Instead of helping them they make their lives even more miserable. That's why, in my last playthrough, when I tried to talk "Father" out of his order to assasinate the leadership of the Railroad, and he refused to talk about it, I killed the cold hearted bastard myself.

[jackdaniels5091]

Also just to add in, but Dr. Li didnt know half as much as James or Catherine about the purifier. She says so herself, when explaining to the lone wanderer her attempts to get a smaller version working. She couldnt so she began work on a fusion generator to power rivet city.

Dr. Li is a nuclear physicist specialising in fusion power, which is why she was able to fix Liberty Prime in Fallout 3 and F4. It also explains her position as head of advanced systems and the "Phase 3" power project.

[danconnors]

As I understand it she was forced to close the laboratory after James abandoned it because the local BOS withdrew their protection from it. It was then overrun by super mutants. Dr. Li and her associates were forced to flee to Rivet City, and ended up being involved in its own growing pains.

I may be wrong, but I seem to recall Dr. Zimmer (from the Insitute) making some snide comment about the science group as "not being able to clean up their own water"....or words to that effect. Evidently meaning he saw no great difficulty in doing just that.

[GoreTiger]

The BOS are pretty much the Hero's of the Commonwealth. Without The Lone survivors help, They were the only ones who stood a chance of taking on the Institute on Equal(ish) footing. Not to mention the Fact that Maxson traveled so far to put down what he saw was the Ultimate threat to Mankind. I give the Brotherhood alot of Props for what they did.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by danconnors:

A lost cause they do not hesitate to loot from, steal power from, snatch human guinea pigs from, and kidnap, murder, and replace leaders from.

Their activities are surprisingly modest, considering that they've had the power to exterminate anyone they liked for decades.

Sure, they scavenge for materials and need to supplement their power supply (most likely from the numerous functional and readily accessible pre-war sources, which isn't stealing from anyone) until they complete development of their reactor, but they're the same as the other Commonwealth settlements in that. General kidnapping and murder aren't notably high (compare activities in Goodneighbour or Diamond City), and there's a grand total of one leader who gets replaced (and he kicked out the ghouls before the Institute replaced him; he was of no use to them for replacement until after he became mayor).

Originally posted by danconnors:

Of the four main power groups in the Commonwealth I view the Institute as the most evil, closely followed by the neo nazi BOS, with the Railroad and the Minutemen not even being in the same ballpark. Resource wise the Institute probably has the most resources. It is well within their power to make the Commonwealth a much more pleasant world.

They could clean up the water, use their gen 1's and 2's to drive off or destroy the various raider and gunner bands, re-establish commerce, and generally vastly improve the living standards of honest people who now wallow in their own filth.

Instead they write off all of humanity outside their little fiefdom as being beyond help. Instead of helping them they make their lives even more miserable. That's why, in my last playthrough, when I tried to talk "Father" out of his order to assasinate the leadership of the Railroad, and he refused to talk about it, I killed the cold hearted bastard myself.

They tried to help previously. Their current position of separation is due to how they got blamed for the CPG massacre, despite almost certainly not being responsible for the outbreak of hostilities (their synth just happened to be the winner). There was a proposal by someone within the Institute to deploy androids (now known as synths) to the surface to maintain order, but it was understandably rejected.

Compare the activities of the Institute as a Commonwealth settlement to the other settlements. Diamond City actively deported a large group of its own citizens and hasn't done squat to help anyone other than itself. Goodneighbour houses hostile triggermen, shares a penchant for drug-dealing with Diamond City, and generally doesn't care who gets hurt inside or outside its walls. Bunker Hill is a little better, possibly due to not having much local activity beyond basic trading, but it still isn't helping anyone beyond its own self-interest.

The "honest people who now wallow in their own filth" aren't the Institute's responsibility to protect, and those people would just be attacking any synths deployed to offer help, even if it were something the Institute chose to do.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by KrayToast:

The BOS are pretty much the Hero's of the Commonwealth. Without The Lone survivors help, They were the only ones who stood a chance of taking on the Institute on Equal(ish) footing. Not to mention the Fact that Maxson traveled so far to put down what he saw was the Ultimate threat to Mankind. I give the Brotherhood alot of Props for what they did.

I see it very differently. The Institute was less of a threat than ever (one of the Institute's own, Virgil, already having put an end to the harmful FEV project), and the Sole Survivor having disposed of the psychopathic Kellogg without any need for the Brotherhood. All the Brotherhood achieves if they succeed is to crush the one settlement in the Commonwealth that managed to drag itself up from the muck.

Look at what happens if the Institute wins: They become self-reliant for power, deploy a few peaceful, unarmed synths to Diamond City, and post synth units to guard the roads (just as everyone else does). They're marginally more in touch with the surface, and beside that, nothing terrible happens.

[danconnors]

The Institute is the only group with the power and technology to actually improve the Commonwealth. All the other settlements have all they can do just to maintain a minimum subsistence level. Instead they loot, pillage, and kidnap. View the bloated green bodies in the "secret" area of Biotech. Realize that that is NOT the total number the Institute experimented on. Listen to Virgil's parting tape in that "laboratory".

Your son, Father knows all about this. It was to him that Virgil appealed time after time for an end to the ghastly experimentation. It was he that refused to end it, time after time. Your son was stolen from you by evil people working for an evil group. Read Kellog's mind and see that, evil as he was, he still couldn't understand why his orders read to kill all the other vault occupants except you.

Your son was solen by evil people and brought up in an evil settlement. It's no wonder he, himself, became evil.

[Hobo Misanthropus]

Project Purity doesn't purify enough water for anything but the Capital Wasteland. And there aren't enough GECKs just laying around to build more. Plus there's just the one Jefferson Memorial, and we all know Jefferson's Colonial Magic is what REALLY makes Project Purity work.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by danconnors:

The Institute is the only group with the power and technology to actually improve the Commonwealth. All the other settlements have all they can do just to maintain a minimum subsistence level. Instead they loot, pillage, and kidnap. View the bloated green bodies in the "secret" area of Biotech. Realize that that is NOT the total number the Institute experimented on. Listen to Virgil's parting tape in that "laboratory".

Your son, Father knows all about this. It was to him that Virgil appealed time after time for an end to the ghastly experimentation. It was he that refused to end it, time after time. Your son was stolen from you by evil people working for an evil group. Read Kellog's mind and see that, evil as he was, he still couldn't understand why his orders read to kill all the other vault occupants except you.

Your son was solen by evil people and brought up in an evil settlement. It's no wonder he, himself, became evil.

Yes, Father knows about it, and I agree that the FEV project in particular is bad. The population of the Institute settlement as whole, however, doesn't know about it, and the settlement as a whole isn't evil (that's why it's a secret area). As far as we can tell, there're only a couple of people in the leadership who know about it.

No, the number we see is certainly not the total number; based on what little other evidence is available a few hundred people were taken over the approximately hundred years for which the FEV project was active. A bad number in total, but also a small number when you consider the impact any settlement can have. More people might easily die in Goodneighbour of drug overdoses or triggerman violence.

Yes, disposing of people at Vault 111 was also bad. It was, however, a single incident 60 years ago, and the people in question were already effectively doomed by the way Vault-Tec built the place; with no hope of any release signal, they would have been stuck there until the systems eventually failed after who knows how many centuries and they all die. The Institute of the time didn't help them, and made use of them for its own purposes, but ultimately didn't make their fate any worse. For both Shaun and the Sole Survivor, on the other hand, the outcome was better than if the Institute had done nothing, since they survived instead of dying.

The Sole Survivor's son was saved from death by people in a settlement who wanted to study his DNA, then raised by people in that settlement even when they had no reason to look after him. Had they been genuinely evil, they would have disposed of the infant after they had what they wanted. But the Institute is just another settlement, and while occasional people within it have committed evil acts, most of them are just scientists going about their work. Were it not so, Dr. Li would have found working there abominable long before we ever turned up.

[danconnors]

Your defense of the Institute's actions in Vault 111 misses a key point, intentionally or not. It would have been extremely easy for Kellog and his team mates to install a delayed release on all the inhabitants of the vault except his father/mother. The other vault dwellers would have woken up a day or so after they left. The sole survivor's pod could have been relayed into the Institute and kept safe until it was certain not to have been needed. It then would have been transported back to Vault 111, and the occupant awakened as he was, only not in a vault full of dead people.

This deed would have been the morally correct thing to do. The Institute chose not to do it, and instead murdered all the people they could have saved. That, the human experimentation, the abductions, slaughters, and looting leave the Institute moral brothers of the raiders and gunners. Most of the population of Germany during World War 2 were unaware of the genocide being carried out by the nazis. But there is no way they could not have known that by invading country after country their nation was responsible for World War 2. Hitler's generals could have assassinated him at any time, but they chose to follow him. The entire nation of Germany was responsible for World War 2. Hitler couldn't have done it without massive support. The same is true of the population of the Institute.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by danconnors:

Your defense of the Institute's actions in Vault 111 misses a key point, intentionally or not. It would have been extremely easy for Kellog and his team mates to install a delayed release on all the inhabitants of the vault except his father/mother. The other vault dwellers would have woken up a day or so after they left. The sole survivor's pod could have been relayed into the Institute and kept safe until it was certain not to have been needed. It then would have been transported back to Vault 111, and the occupant awakened as he was, only not in a vault full of dead people.

This deed would have been the morally correct thing to do. The Institute chose not to do it, and instead murdered all the people they could have saved. That, the human experimentation, the abductions, slaughters, and looting leave the Institute moral brothers of the raiders and gunners. Most of the population of Germany during World War 2 were unaware of the genocide being carried out by the nazis. But there is no way they could not have known that by invading country after country their nation was responsible for World War 2. Hitler's generals could have assassinated him at any time, but they chose to follow him. The entire nation of Germany was responsible for World War 2. Hitler couldn't have done it without massive support. The same is true of the population of the Institute.

The difference where is that the people in Vault 111 were effectively already dead, doomed by the actions of Vault-Tec. It would have been morally better to save all of them, but the Institute's overall actions towards the people in Vault 111 still improved the number of survivors from zero to two. On a pragmatic level, a delayed release to wake the other vault residents would have introduced risks like the chance of them freeing anyone else left frozen, or exposing the vault to the outside world by leaving it (and thereby risking outside interference).

You're also overlooking the fact that the Institute is a settlement of unique individuals, not a monolithic entity that acts with one will. As a settlement it doesn't even have a strict code of behaviour, unlike the Brotherhood of Steel or similar organizations, and we see people within the Institute with different methods and ideals (like Dr Li, Virgil, Liam Binet, Dr Higgs, and Dr Loken). One director ordered the extraneous people of Vault 111 to be terminated, and that director is no longer the leader of the Institute (and is presumably long dead by the time the Sole Survivor emerges from the vault).

The FEV project is responsible for the vast majority of abductions (with just three confirmable abductions outside it), but unknown to the Institute at large, and unlike your comparison, the general population has no idea that anything untoward is taking place; simple hostility between synth patrols and the surface is a mutual thing, and was largely started by the surface dwellers in the first place.

The only "slaughter" that isn't entirely unintentional (the BMI or CPG) or performed on the orders of a leader decades in the past (Vault 111), is conducted by a wasteland native using Institute forces to indulge his psychopathic tendencies (University Point). It's also something that Father (the current leader) recognizes as a problem, and it factors into why he sets Kellogg up for the Sole Survivor.

The idea of looting is just ridiculous; the Institute sends out scavenger teams. That's not something special; almost everyone in the wasteland scavenges in one way or another.