Fallout: The Sino-American War 

Odd fact I just realized: the Chimera in operation anchorage is the only non-US originating based vehicle actually seen in Fallouts universe.

The Annexation of Canada must have been demoralizing. I definitely wish Fallout 4 explored that.

A mysterious disease? Gas prices spiking due to war? Conflict with China? I thought this was a game, not real life! /s

I really like how the writers depicted the war, a decade long one with massive casualties accompanied by economic meltdown. Nukes were only employed after the existence of the chinese state and country was pretty much at risk of not existing, that's the policy most nuclear powers have in our timeline.

the sheer amount of Americans in China at the time would lead to a large American remnant which would make a cool dlc ! it probably wouldn’t happen due to it not being inside the united states but it would be a cool mod idea especially when you have access to a submarine with a captain who wants to return to China..

would be really interesting to have a fallout game set in anchorage, where the surviving us and chinese soldiers are still fighting, but already lost their reasons of why.

It would suck to be one of the U.S. soldiers trapped in mainland China after the Great War with no way to return home and surrounded by a hostile enemy force.

I love that in FO4 we come across the poor sub captain. Hes had 200 years to sit and look at what he did. You can tell through dialogue how much it eats at him. If he could, he would go back in time and stop himself from giving the order. I think China suffered as much as rhe US in the FOU. They likely had survivors and their own version of a vault. It would be neat to go explore that possibility one day

The "Vault-Tec launched the first nukes" theory is pretty strong. I've seen a few theory videos, but what makes me believe it is the fact that the Vault-Tec logo is on the unexploded nuke in Megaton.

Minor inaccuracy in your statement about the Enclave no longer existing: It is believed that the Enclave control the entire city of Chicago, and thus it would be likely that the city is their main headquarters now.

I don’t remember the exact quote but my favorite quote about war from Fallout (and one I think applies perfectly with the pre war days) is what the Enclave deserter/ship captain guy from Fallout 2 says“I realized it wasn’t America I was fighting for, but the rich old bastards who didn’t want to give up their power”

“Who drop the bombs first?” M A R S THANK YOU MARS FOR WIPING THE SLATE CLEAN AVE, TRUE TO CAESAR!

Given how little we see of the rest of the world its entirely possible that China or the European commonwealth survived to some extent. It's also possible they rebuilt or didn't get hit as hard as the U.S. did

There needs to be a spin off title where we can play through the war.

Imagine the Frontline of the War right before the bombs, power armor troops and sentry bots providing cover while Mister Gutsys and Soldiers charge forward with Vertibirds overhead, and also they might have a few Deathclaws in the mix

Funny thing, as a huge Fallout fan from childhood, I never knew real reasons for war. I completed Fallout 1-2 about 7 times and poured about 500 hours into Fallout 3 thinking about the chinese as just baddies, lmao

3:40 California gas prices be like.

I was just about to leave a suggestion to cover this on an older video.

the whole uranium shortage thing doesn't seem particularly realistic given the time frames were working with leading up to the great war but if you dropped that aspect from the resource wars the whole thing gets a tad unrealistic anyway, because its proven in universe that they can use nuclear for literally any purpose from powering cars to children's toys so why would the oil shortages have even been that big of a deal certainly there are still food shortages but its impractical for superpowers to go to war for food access rather than solve such issues domestically, though as i understand it the great strides in nuclear energy were kind of American centric

This is one of my favorite parts of the lore since it shows how humanity progressed expect we see the word didn’t progress because instead of finding solutions to disagreements nope humanity did what always does fight and kill and lie and use each other. Also it brings up big who startled the Great War as many people say China but who knows there were so many lies and propaganda in the Great War that we’ll never know the truth but to the wasteland it doesn’t matter because as you said in this video war never changes but this war change everything

I thing gobi desert campagn was more a spec ops campagn rather than a full on invasion

Thanks for this chilling video! Great writing, narration style and art direction!

Fucking loved the dad joke at the end.

The way that the fallout cutscenes and commercials usually give the feeling that things in the US were just like 1950's, a golden Era, at least for me. I never knew that on the brink of collapse was the best that everyone had.

Do we know if the other nuclear powers fired their arsenals aswell? I’d imagine the Soviet Union, India, Pakistan would still have their weapons.

I also enjoy the fact that the Enclave’s calculations on the surviability of the United States, and because of EMP interference they weren’t able to coordinate with other cells. Ultimately, the few vital hours following the nuclear exchange is what cemented the Wasteland as what it is and could’ve been drastically different if the Enclave spurred into action way sooner

It's almost scary to think that some time in the future this could happen. Maybe not in the near future, but somewhere down the line something like this may be a reality.

A post war China DLC would be incredible

After so many integration of fallout games taking place in the US, I would like one that goes to the Chinese mainland.

Feels like a warning to the real world 💀

I still think that the truth about the resource wars is that it actually happened because of overproduction, since most of the world markets already collapse before the war neither US or China got anyone to export their goods other than themselves, since they didn't want to do it between themselves the solution was the war as a way to maintain their industries.

A DLC set in China for a future installment would be neat. I doubt we'll ever get a fallout completely set outside of America unfortunately.

I always loved the simplicity of the explanation for why Fallout happened. It didn't matter which side was worse because they both were guilty of monstrous crimes. Operation Anchorage was a good DLC but I feel like it failed to capture the conflict in its scale, I guess it's due to it being a simulation tailored for American interests. Fallout 4 had a chance to delve deeper into the war but again, Bethesda just struggles with writing that's beyond surface deep. It's preferable to consider to the Fallout west coast story where the actual story is naught but a string of loose theories and circumstance evidence from Ghoul perspectives. The truth being that it might have just been the culmination of Capitalism and Communist governments finally prove the worst out of each other.

What a well thought-out lore and video.

My bank just got hacked and emptied but it's a good day when yaboiii posts a new video!

My soul died a little with the realisation that these days disclaimers like that are actually required for some of the smooth brain people who might believe it or for protection of monitization from a company overstepping the mark. Smfh.

The fact that this could VERY WELL happen in our universe terrifies me

This seems like a video I would watch in class about history love it dude

It would be interesting to see how the fallout universe came to be through aspects like the censorship of cultural movements in the 1970s, the transistor never being invented and their goal to their idealized version of the future still stuck in the 1950s.

Better version of the end joke: "Did you hear about the two nuclear superpowers that got into an argu-"

Isn’t that weird how in this game it’s describing our reality we’re like in the beginning stages of this game right before the Great War. Oil shortages food shortages war is just around the corner damn the similarities are almost Word for Word.

Hoped you cover this Kinda sad that this is all close to being forgotten by the people of the Wasteland Shows how Stupid War is

it seems that every day fallout becomes more realistic

very well done thumbnail and video!

The more and more I explored Fallout lore, the more and more frightful I have become for our future. It may be a game, but it has a lot of concepts folk could take away as a reflection of our real world politics. History doesn’t often repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Oh this is feelin to be a banger.

Another banger as usual.

5:04 this can be atributted to inflation in the Fallout USD but yeah. 8k for a gallon of gas. In a car that was most likely designed to look good 1st and put safety or economy 53rd. This is comparable to the 1973 oil embargo, but that just made Asian imported cars popular since they sipped fuel. You really think in a 50’s style society Americans are gonna buy an Asian consumer product?

This was a great video I had often wondered about the prewar conflict since aside from the anchorage dlc in fo3 and the Yangtze in fo4 I never really had much more context about it. Just a suggestion maybe you should do a video about the father in fallout new vegas' honest hearts dlc (I think his name was Randal Clarke)

Been binging your vids, subbed!

Apart from maybe Cyberpunk, Fallout without a doubt has the most ominously relatable lore out of any game franchise I’ve played so far. At the very least, both definitely have me curious to see if something will actually go down in 2077…

You could argue that the Chimera was a fiction from the U.S general that helped with the simulation (operation: anchorage), and that could be absolutely true, since the general had lost his marbles by the time of this simulation (based on the text files you find in the game). But an equally compelling argument could be made for the Chinese retrofitting them as tanks for the conflict. Think about it, the Chinese (based on Op: Anchorage) retrofitted Canadian mining machines to counter U.S power armor as a stop-gap measure in case the U.S tried to storm their pulse field with regular infantry. While it is implied that the general giving advice to the simulation crew was PTSD'D and unreliable, there are shards of truth in that brain that leaked into the simulation you played in Op: Anchorage.

I'd really like to see a mod on Fallout 4's engine with a full campaign set in China. Here's my recommendation; Fallout: Yangtze Set the world around the Yangtze river If you know Chinese geography even slightly well you know this is one of the biggest and most important waterways in the world In terms of gameplay you could have a very large map with mixtures of jungle, swamp, and rolling asian hills. China has a long history of warlords, I think the most logical step in canon is to have the Yangtze province be sort of like the Chinese equivalent to the Commonwealth or even New Vegas, with indicators and wounds of the war everpresent, but new factions and settlements bringing some small humanity to the wasteland. You could have a faction based on the pseudo-fascist pre-revolution Republic of China, a royalist faction based on the old dynasties(similar to the legion, but chinese warriors), and of course Communist PLA remnants. But here's my twist. Have a significant(but small) area controlled by an _American_ settlement, but here's the thing, you could go one of two ways(or, if you really wanna get fancy, BOTH) First: Make them a direct US Army/Marine Corps descendant faction, obsessed with maintaining their fleet of power armor and advanced weaponry, a combination of Brotherhood of Steel and Enclave tendencies, with their own unique ideology based on hundreds of years of guerilla warfare behind enemy lines. Second option: Have an NCR style mixed democratic community descended from both American occupying forces and local Chinese tribes, where they speak a mixture of English and Chinese and both is taught in their schools, and they have an impressive but underpowered military held back by the usual red tape of a democracy in the wasteland. Here's one pitch for how this could work: The Yangtze river acts as the great barrier. On one side you have the "American remnants" with two factions fighting among themselves. The Yangtze Republic, a democratic union of settlements with a mostly defensive army, with numbers but limited technology. And the Extremists, a radical group of mostly ex-military officers who hoard technology and simultaneously fight an ethnic war against the Chinese population itself.(Including their Yangtze Republic brothers, as they are seen as "unpure") The Extremists will be a small faction with an extreme technology advantage and simultaneously extreme tactics and skill/experience. They'll be experts of technology and use vertibirds and unique variants of upgraded power armor, modified from hundreds of years of damage and shoddy field repair to dominate on the battlefield, however they fight in small teams and usually use hit and run tactics and stealth technology reverse engineered from the Chinese to hide themselves in plain sight. On the other side you have a vast dangerous swamp and jungle divided by cliffs In the swamps you have the fascists and the communists. They battle over the waterways and fertile lands in an endless ideological war. Further inland you climb the great cliffs and enter a comparative paradise, of endless rolling hills and fertile farmland. But as you go farther inland you begin to feel as though you're being watched. That's when the Emperor's Dynasty makes themselves known. Similar to the Legion of the Mojave these men base their customs and armour on ancient culture - in this case specifically the Ming dynasty. Similar to the Extremists of the opposite side of the Yangtze, the Dynasty fight an ethnic war, of Chinese purity, and are made up of former Royalist rebels as well as defected PLA remnants, perhaps they could be less evil than the Legion, dispensing of outright slavery but rather relying on a still highly unethical feudal warlord style of rule, with misogyny still everpresent in their society and the population divided into a peasant and a ruling class. Of course with their warlord style of leadership, there is endless possibility for backstabbing, sabotaging and infiltration missions, and outright infighting and civil war between lords. The various lords could all be based on different dynasties in their architecture, customs, and equipment/armour, but there could be a constant obsession with honour and loyalty to the Emperor shared between the tribes. I think this would be an excellent way to portray the extremely diverse and long history of China without being overwhelming in exposition and complication - with each settlement and their respective "tribe" representing a different era, all with a sci-fi and apocalyptic twist obviously. I'm by no means an expert, but, I'm just saying, if I _was_ This would be the mod I would make.

So until about a week ago I had no idea what Fallout was. Now I still haven't played a single minute of any of the games but the mythology seems very interesting and the scenarios discussed in this video very compelling and possible.

Thanks for the upload

Sounds like were right on track 😪

7,000 dollars a gallon? Either Fallout had some wicked inflation or the writers don't understand basic consumer economics.

Very good video!!

"Some even speculate vault tec started the war" The meaning of this in 2024 lmao if ykyk

Great video as always, may I suggest a future video of either what would happen if House made a contact with the brotherhood and what those effects would be at around the point of his awaking and the NCR coming to New Vegas or how a wasteland wide faction would work with all the lore and tech in the games in a post F04 world.

See now if only this was a tv series. I love the a whole Cold War vibe it’s going for

amazing video thank you

Facinating how much history this game has before the time you start playing, Fallout 3 & 4 is my timeline. Playing since 2008 and just learned this info.

Scary how close this is

Never realized that the amount of dollar stacks we find in fallout is due to hyperinflation!

Ooooo-weee we're ahead of schedule

I would love to see a Fallout game that focused solely on the Sino-American War. Not an RPG like a normal Fallout game but something more like old fashioned Call Of Duty where it specifically shows significant events throughout the war. We got something like that in the Operation Anchorage DLC for Fallout 3 but that was primarily focused on the end of the war in Alaska. I wanna see a game that tells the whole story!

would love a pre-war fallout set in the sino-american war or the middle-east war

Plague, economic inequality and downturn, and an energy crisis.. A little similar isn't it? (obviously we haven't run out of oil yet, but they rise of green energy is not coming fast enough to replace it for several more years)

fun fact: the chryslus rocket 69 has been advertised to be so fast that it breaks the goddamn sound barrier could you imagine drag races or speeders on the highway with that thing

“The estimated cost per gallon being $7,450” and you think *your* gas prices are high

I find it a bit dumb all happened with Canada, it is not like if an invasion of Alaska happened, Canada would be like « Nah, you not passing through bro, I know we have all our defenses there, but Nah, not going thought me ». Also I don’t like how Canada is always annex and all, don’t you think having an allied who don’t want to die wouldn’t help you better than you taking over by force? It is such a trope I will never really understand. Nice video btw!

I feel like Fallout won’t be fiction anymore soon.

Would be really cool to see an expedition update to F76 like Operation Anchorage where you use a simulator pod to fight a prewar battle. They could also bring in the FN assault rifle from fallout 3 as a possible reward.

Would've been cool to see what Chinese combat armor would've looked like

the last time I was this early to a vid the platinum drip was on its way to las vegas

It was vault tec that dropped the bombs. I'd love for us to know details thou. Its super vague considering what lore we do have.

Fitting this is suggested in my feed now.

And yet the Sino American war is a closer reality all the time

Interplay, Obsidian, and Bethesda: "No one won the Sino-American War per se, since it was ultimately an inherently destructive and self-defeating endeavor, especially with the sheer cataclysmic power of nuclear weapons." Me: *feeling the breeze of the moral fly right over my head* "... so did we win?"

Prewar history seems very close to our own time line lmao

I may be a little hopeful but I feel like a FO5 set in "Ronto" with heavy enclave/brotherhood presence and an element of a "Freedom force" would narratively go hard asf

I can already tell that the quality of your videos will far exceed the quality of the fallout television series. Nice video mate, cheers!

Weren't the vehicles nuclear powered? And they actually sold coolant not fuel

Fallout 5 when

I infiltrated Bethesda Studios and I can confirm Switzerland is still around and canon in the fallout universe.

the fact that china and america were fighting a brutal war against eachother yet nate and zao act friendly towards eachother shows the disconnect between soldiers and their superiors

War never changes but it changes the world.

Something I realized is that if oil was so limited how were they able to fuel the war? How did they fuel the trucks planes and boats? I can see planes boats and submarines being powered by nuclear energy but if these things blow up it would cause nuclear explosions. Battlefields in Alaska would be irradiated but we don't hear or see it.

Im not sure if you said "fission" at 3:56, but I believe it was fusion and not fission from the lore.

I do hope we get to explore the other nations and lore in other medias

Fallout gameplay: hehe shoot ghouls and do quests Fallout lore:

Not sure if there are Chinese Communists in the Philippines within the Fallout Universe. But there are Communist Influenced rebels in the Philippines which are the HUKBALAHAP and/or the CPP-NPA. But I could be wrong😅

During the cold War in our time line it was believed if it went nuclear the northern hemisphere would obviously be destroyed and the southern hemisphere although would face hard ship would be generally intact due to a lack of important strategic targets however what became of the southern hemisphere in fallouts universe

Quick sidenote, great video, but the armor seen stored in a container, with the helmet being worn by the soldier at 8:51 is winterized t51 armor, i recall bc i own the anchorage dlc for fo3, and it was my main armor, having 9,992,000 hp (lol) and having a slightly inferior armor. I get why you used it though, the t45 isnt seen in the anchorage dlc.

I always loved this part of fallout because it's so realistic to our own world. I really think a war between the US & China will happen around Alaska over location & resources. This war would be a third world war & would definitely go nuclear. I see this happening by 2040 or 2060

With the way the real world is, the fictional American and Chinese conflict seems more like a prediction of things to come instead of just game lore.

Thanks for this. Tbh, I already made/watched this lore vid in my head because I’m also a self-proclaimed fallout dweeb lmao. Obv, yours is way more thorough…and real 😅

16:50 This should have been when the USA decided to push its advantage and try to negotiate a peace settlement rather than keeping up their advance and making the Chinese believe that all out nuclear warfare was the only option left (Then again, it's also possible that China rejected any sort of peace offers too...)

Damn when you realize fallout made the whole world look like Detroit