Vault-Tec Corporation

Vault-Tec Industries is the corporation that was contracted by the United States government before the Great War to design and produce the Vault system, an endeavor that was officially code-named Project Safehouse. Its corporate headquarters was located in downtown Washington, DC. The first demonstration Vault in the project was constructed beneath metropolitan Los Angeles, and soon many others were built all around the country. The Vaults are all very similar in their basic functions, but were sometimes constructed according to different designs, as the Vaults of the West Coast differ from those constructed in the vicinity of Washington, DC.

Societal Preservation Program
The Vaults, however, were never actually intended to save the citizens of the United States from the ravages of a nuclear war or a viral pandemic. With a population of almost 400 million by 2077, the U.S. would have needed over 400,000 Vaults to protect every man, woman and child, and Vault-Tec was commissioned by the American government to build only 112 such Vaults. The true reason for the construction of the Vaults was to allow the government to secretly study pre-selected segments of the American population to observe how they would react to the stresses of isolation and how successfully they would re-colonize the devastated Earth after the Vault opened. It was the Enclave, a secret shadow organization of federal officials and corporate executives within the federal government that used the Vault-Tec company to set up this sinister experiment. Ultimately, the Vaults were created not to save American citizens, but to carry out often immoral experiments on live human subjects. The purposes and experiments carried out in each Vault varied, including the development of super soldiers (Vault 92), the creation of an entire population of human clones (Vault 108), the use of the FEV Virus on an unwitting test population (Vault 87),the use of psychoactive drug(Vault 106) (psychoactive drugs), the use of a virtual reality simulator on a population (Vault 112), and so on. In Fallout 3, Vault 101  was subject to "Never Be Opened" so the inhabitants were not allowed to leave and were intended to be made subject to the disctatorial whims of an all-powerful Vault Overseer.

Other divisions
The nuclear war shelters weren't its only area of work, as Vault-Tec released several other handbooks (such as "Coping with Mr. Virus" or "How to Cook a Rat") concerning survival during and after other disasters, with the Vault Dweller's Survival Guide being only one of many. Future-Tec, a division of Vault-Tec, developed the G.E.C.K., the Garden of Eden Creation Kit for use by vault residents.

History
Like many major military contractors, as Vault-Tec grew in finances and responsibility, it began to develop highly experimental and secure technologies. In time, Vault-Tec was so thoroughly integrated with top-secret military research, it was practically a division of the U.S. government. The company still retained some elements of privatization. So the principals of Vault-Tec - executives, scientists, and so on - had to be aware of the true function of the Vaults, and they had access to the technology. They were the developers. Regardless of the U.S. government's directives, Vault-Tec was not going to submit to a lottery and live underground with a bunch of human cattle in facilities that were intentionally defective. Thus Vault-Tec created their own facility, removed from the larger Vault network - and kept secret from the U.S. government. This facility is now known as the Secret Vault.

Vault-Tec didn't stop there. This secret, private installation was used to research the latest technologies that would benefit mankind in a post-nuclear environment. This included some extensive research with a "forced evolution virus" (FEV) which, unlike the government-controlled research at Vault 87, was kept secret from the government. It is known that the FEV in Secret Vault was highly modified to achieve its original goals and avoid sterility, however, unsuccesful.

Other Vault-Tec projects that they intended to use for themselves were their own robotic systems, special biological weapons program (the results are probably a unique race of radroaches and a variation of Deathclaw), medical researches on cell regeneration, and an attempt to create their own Power Armor model.

Inconsistencies

 * The company is sometimes referenced as Vault-Tek or even Vaultex.

Known Products

 * Vaults
 * Equipment and supplies for Vaults
 * G.E.C.K.
 * Vault-Tec Vending Machine

Appearances in games
Vault-Tec Vaults and other technology appear in all Fallout games.