You could tow the rig, a lot of them aren't stationary It doesn't have to drill in order to be a base Deep sea rigs actually float

A moment of silence for all the fallen enclave members that serving in the Enclave oil rig Sandwich bar when it explode o7

As someone who is military, a reasoning for not doing a straight path to the oil rig in the vertibids is: Making it harder to track and follow them. Thus helping keep the location of their base more secret

My dad is a retired oil rig worker. He says that it's not that there isn't oil in deeper waters, it's just not searched for because the costs of extracting are higher. You want to extract from a higher position because oil rises. In a world with less oil, it makes sense to search for oil in places that haven't been discovered yet. And in places which would be considered too costly to bother to survey now.

They're not random villagers, they specifically wanted the Arroyans, because they were descendants of the control group that was placed in vault 13. Which is why they abducted Vault 13's inhabitants as well.

Could be that the rig was fake - a Poseidon Energy coverup funded by the pre-war Enclave to create a fake oil platform to serve as a base after the imminent Great War. That would explain the odd location. Also, as for the documented location (i.e. where the computer thought it was) could be a security tactic. I remember something I read about a secret airfield in Northern Europe during WW2. Pilots were given coordinates for the location of the base before they were told to fly there for an operation, but once there, no base was anywhere nearby, but if you flew through the area you'd get a radio broadcast from someone on the ground that told you the true location. It was supposedly to keep possible spies in the unit from passing along information about the airfield's location by supplying misinformation to everyone who was told about it (until you actually went there)

One thing I wonder about the oil rig is if it has to be in a viable drilling location at all. People tend to think of oil rigs as immobile, but they aren't, and it's a lot easier to make them semi-mobile than to build them in place.

The oil rig wasn't over a natural deposit. The Enclave created an artificial oil reserve in a natural feature they found under the ocean in the decades before the Great War. They slowly accumulated as much crude oil as they could and stored it in an area that they controlled and the "oil rig" was a decoy for their pre war operation and the base they would use to retrieve it.

one mild correction, it was 3's FEV that was designed to just kill post-war mutants, FEV Curling-13 was design to kill literally everyone....who didn't have the inoculation.

Just far a quick cover of one of your points. The reason they would fly south along the coast to San Francisco then head West out to see it easy. Military Pilots do this ALL the time. Its simply so you can find a notable landmark, and head DUE west. Not North West, Not South West, not South South West. Due West. This leaves the smallest gap for error in case instrumentation fails, or if the homing signal cuts out.

What if its a deepsea drilling rig that was never intended to actually drill for oil? The Enclave just used the platform because it is a tested structure and provides a believable cover, don't really need to be over a oil field.

With the Vertibird going from Arroyo to San Francisco before going west, maybe they needed to refuel? Maybe they can’t go the distance from Arroyo over the ocean to the Oil rig without refueling. Edit: looked it up and the internet says they only have a distance of 150 miles before needing to refuel. So if the rig is 175-200 miles away from San Francisco the Vertibirds can barely make it there so it makes sense to stop and refuel along the way.

In fallout 4 there's a terminal entry in the boston bugle building with a few articles and one of them is about "Where is the president ?" In the article the writer speculates based on an unknown source where the president has gone. Raven rock is mentioned at first, but according to his "highly-ranked anonymous source" the president is on an poseidon energy oil rig just off the coast of San Francisco and the official designation is "Enclave Control Station". I don't think the oil rig was an actual oil rig and just a mock up to look like one and the GNN spread propaganda to make it look like one pre war, so it doesn't get targeted by the nukes. China maybe didn't nuke the rig in case they somehow survived and could capture it, cause they really thought the US managed to successfully drill into deep sea oil reservoirs and just get this technology for free. Instead the rig was an propaganda mock up and not really functional.

I believe the computer coordinates were correct! After all, who would go looking for a secret oil rig in a small inland pond? Nobody! It's the perfect hiding place.

The confusion regarding the oils rig makes sense if we consider that it isn’t an oil rig at all and maintains no processes commonly found within one. You could make the argument that the excuse of the oil rig was used to secure any funding that couldn’t be discretely gained (workers engineers etc.). It would be interesting to see if the show tackles this at all.

@ 11:30 The vertibird could have been sticking to the land so they could spend as little time as possible flying over open ocean. Makes sense if you had to operate a century old flying vehicle.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Enclave Oil rig was abandoned Pre-war and then co-opted by the enclave. I assumed it was no longed used for drilling oil, and just used for research and such.

Real quick IRL lore about gas. Some experts think it could be generated by a bacterial process. Just as we have bacteria that eats oil there is probably bacteria that produces it.

If I had to guess, the oil rig is in the same region as the same island that you see in the movie Commando, where someone can fly two hours off the coast of Santa Barbara in a twin engine propeller plane and land on an island populated by fully armed South American commandos armed with US military equipment. A 1980s action movie would never take liberties with geography, right? I think we may need to take a closer look into what people are really doing on Catalina Island. /s

The oil Rig in the news report could be a location that China and the US fought over while the Enclave one was a different rig entirely, it makes little sense that China could build an oil rig so close to the mainland US and get anywhere close to making it a fight for the US to take, so maybe the Enclave oil rig is one only the US knew about and built in secret

I would personally wonder if the "Oil Rig" is in fact actually a military base and was always intended to be a such. Given unreliable nature of the people behind it...

I like this lore inaccuracy and speculation video and wouldn't mind more. I wonder if the coast line changed dramatically in the last 165 years since the Great War? If the characters map is a pip boy map or a pre war map it wouldn't be necessary accurate to the actual California coat line in 2241.

the coordinates being wrong at first could be a trap to fool people who are trying to find them

Ocean oil rigs are mobile platforms so the location is not a set location. More so when not actively drilling. So I would assume one of the first orders on the rig was to move away from any documented/known locations for the sake of security. After the great war.

The issue with the idea the rig doesnt have oil is fallout set up the Vertabirds as being run by conventional fuel hence the limited range and need for Navaro. meaning the enclave had acess to an oil reserve likely the one the rigs built on

they could fly west at san francisco to avoid alerting the NCR. Which would explain why all the soldiers say it's west, once over the ocean, without navigation tools, you wouldn't know which way you was heading.

well maintained oil rigs also last like 40 years. idk how the enclave increased the lifespan by 4x

With how ingrained Chinese spy’s where the chance of them finding out about the oil rig is a really funny possibility also all the submarines surely one of them would of noticed something

I think the Oil Rig is a defunct oil rig repurposed by Poseidon into an isolated base of operations, and possibly a forward outpost for Poseidon to chase after the deep sea oil deposit. It’s completely possible that purely from the length of time, accurate information about the oil rig could’ve been lost and retold with inaccuracies

Thoughts on a fallout game set in the deep south like Louisiana? I feel the heavy use of off shore oil rigs would be awesome along with seeing a fallout esc mardi gras would be sick

This is a fantasy alternate reality. It's possible there is oil there. It's also possible the vertibirds they saw flew over sanfran on a mission south of sanfran, did said mission, and then flower to the oil rig. Also, I thought in fo1-2 it wasn't stated what the vertibirds use as fuel, but in later games it was either stater or implied they used the same nuclear tech the cars and power armor do in game. Really well out together video either way.

The way I see it, the rig has 3 possible options of its existence. 1) It really was an oil-rig, but was just repurposed and towed to a different location. As @resevesh said, they are really just floating, non-stationary bases. 2) It was only officially an oil-rig for public purposes, but secretly a research base for Poseidon Energy. As such, it could've been placed there on purpose for whatever research they were doing. This would be supported by the layout we see, with lots of databanks and areas I'd call labs. 3) Extending from #2, it was only originally from Poseidon Energy, but secretly bought by the government or some other high-ranking official for the Enclave. This would be supported by the fact that there were suites for a president and military personell. Granted such things could have been retrofitted at any point post-apoc, but they look far too pristine and pre-war made.

Yikes, I almost missed this one. Been scrolling past it because the thumbnail being split like it is looked like advertisements/shorts/community posts as I was scrolling past. Glad I noticed it was a video of hours this time scrolling. Thanks for the great content, loving it as always 💚

You mention you like geology, I'm sure we'd all love a Fallout video mapping real-world geology into the Fallout games with commentary about any major overlapping features. The devs put a lot of work into matching up buildings with reality, I'm sure there's some interesting stuff going on with landscapes too.

For the flight path of the vertibirds, it could be that they were minimising the time they spent over the water. We know vertibirds aren't perfect, with multiple wrecks across the series, and crashing down on the land would be much more survivable than crashing into the water. So while the flight path is longer and goes across occupied areas it also spends significantly less time over the water. Plus in Fallout 2 it's not like the Enclave are trying to be stealthy, they control the area north of San Francisco, both with active patrols and attacks on targets across the wasteland. While I doubt they would rush into a war with the NCR they probably also don't care that the NCR see them flying overhead. At the time of Fallout 2 the Enclave are the only air capable faction.

It's 100% the faults of devs. But since the devs weren't Bethesda at the time that would be blasphemy so I better say it was intentionally wrong by the computer even though it was clearly the devs fault who most likely figured the fan base wouldn't care nor look further into it.

Consider this: Nautical Mile to Mile: for an approximate result, multiply the length value by 1.151 175 nautical miles = 201.386 miles

Maybe it was never an oil rig. Maybe it was a "research rig", aka secret spy rig. As a child reading Popular Science I remember reading articles about the Glomar Explorer when it was looking for "Manganese Nodules" wink wink. That sounds like a totally Enclave thing to have done. Thanks for the great vids.

Regarding the computer's coordinates, I imagine it could be like a cypher code. You had to do a 3-step process to determine the Oil Rig's actual location, something I doubt all that many wastelanders or pre-war civilians would know how to do. But military personnel would probably know the process and could determine where the real location is. A military pilot or navigator, for example, would know what to do. Though that raises the question of how the Chosen One or allies figured it out, but maybe they made a lucky guess and switched the coordinates around after the first attempt. If the Enclave wanted to keep the rig secret from normal wastelanders, intentionally fudging the coordinates and only informing the pilots and navigators would probably work. The scientists at Navarro only know the direction, so they aren't in the know about the fudging. I'm not sure about the other stuff, though. It's possible that the Oil Rig goes to drill for oil in the South every few years or so and then returns to the location given in the deciphered coordinates, making it a mobile platform.

It is probably of the coast of san fran because the vertibirds would use major landmarks (like san fran) to fly around. This is why they would go to san fran and then go west being that any GPS would be destroyed but compass systems would still work. I also think that it was disguised as an oil rig so location was not that important

Could be disinfo. And/or, the rig could move. They don't have to stay in one place, I don't think.

I believe it's reasonable that the people and computer were either intentionally misleading or intentionally misled as to the actual location of the rig.

I think your location pick is really good. I was also thinking through this whole video that maybe the Enclave tells their troops to give a vague location to throw off espionage attempts, and the computer told to give false coords because either A] nobody in the wasteland will know how to read coords or B] it would, again, throw off people trying to find them. Like maybe Enclave members are all told the actual location, so if anyone asks it means they aren't with the Enclave, so they should give them the false location.

Talk about every plot hole, all of them! Please

For all the praise fo2 gets it is written in such a way you don't know what to take seriously and what to laugh off

I live in Northern California about an hour North of Navarro. It’s only got like 200 people there max. I always think about F2 when we drive through on our way south

Dude, I love how you do a lot of research for things like this, that's why I'm subscribed ❤

Hey Rad King! Love your content! I hope id be able to run into you one day at Northwest Seed and Pet off of Sprague! It would be so awesome to run into you since we live in the same area supposedly.

Yeeeeah gimme some more videos on the messy parts of the lore!

Someone already pointed out that not flying straight for the oil rig from Navarro was to keep the exact location of the base obscured, but I want to offer an alternative/supplemental explanation. I think they along the coast is simply for safety. After all, the Veritbirds are a century old, so one crashing isn't out of the question, no matter how well maintained. And given the Enclave likely has limited/no ablitity to produce new build vertibirds, each one is one is a precious resource that must preserved, so even a relatively minor malfunction can force a complete loss if over open water. Whereas overland, another team can be dispatched to recover the aircraft, repairing or completely destroying it as deemed necessary. The same goes for personnel, the Enclave simply does not have many people, so losing them to simple accidents is unacceptable. My guess is that whatever general manages the vertibirds decided that the risk of losing a vertibird with all hands over open water due to technical failure is not worth the slightly increased risk of attack by flying down the coast.

Any plans to cover the new lore bits and other stuff mentioned in the Fallout Tabletop book "Winter Of Atom"?

There is also the possibility of the oil right being a moveable rig (the ones in deep sea are such types of rigs) and by watching some of the tech of fallout maybe it has some kind of space kraut technology to drill to such depths. Also I have to say that keeping in mind its one of the most important bastions of the pre war goverment it has sense to be some kind of moveable base to re take América and eventually Canada and México and maybe even move it to alaska or hawaii to work as a kind of aircraft carrier till they fix enough navy assets to continue the reconquest according to their plans.

I think the Enclave base is in that cow pond. They are just using the cows as a cover.

Super late, but I actually have a very different hypothesis. This isn't well-known, but the San Francisco area is actually one of the biggest oil refinery areas in the US, largely in the Martinez/Antioch area. Interestingly, other major refinery areas are Bakersfield and Los Angeles - and these are the only real-life areas covered by a Fallout game with large amounts of oil refining, I believe. Maybe they were abandoned due to lack of supply or destroyed by bombs, but it's interesting that none of these areas have the old refinery buildings or infrastructure mentioned, especially since we get a pretty good look at Bakersfield as Necropolis. I think the Enclave's oil rig wasn't for extraction - it was an off-shore refinery, possibly because the pre-war government feared sabotage or enemy action if fixed-site, on-shore oil refineries were used instead of a mobile refinery at a secret location. Tankers bring crude oil to the rig from anywhere they can find it, and refined oil is either used on-site or transferred by tanker to shore - which would also provide a reliable fuel supply for gas-powered military vehicles and equipment if it were cut off from the rest of the US. Say, by the Great War. We have something similar in real life in FPSO units - most are converted oil tankers which now act as mobile, floating processing units. We use oil tankers for convenience, but if an oil production platform were no longer usable, perhaps the pre-war government would convert it instead.

Y'know? The best way to learn something is if you are doing it with something you enjoy, i just had my morning coffee, and knowing that Frank Horrigan fought the choosen quite close to Baja California is enough to make a man smile. Quite interesting knowing more about oil rigs. They did put a lot of effort on the post-nuclear role playing game.

Camp Navarro is more likely the City of Fort Bragg since the actual Navarro is a tiny town of 100 people in a densely forested valley. My guess is Navarro is a cooler name. There is also a BSA Camp Navarro north of the village of Navarro along Flynn Creek Road.

Love your content are you planning on playing and doing lore on starfield.

another idea: SInce it is not said (or at least I don't remember it, if I am wrong the whole theory can be ignored ^^) that the oil rig is still active there is another option: Nowadays all oil rigs are more or less floating on the ocean and are anchored and drilling holes in the ocean floor. (thats why the mexican sea oil spill occured, since they did not calculate the water correctly and the "ship" caused the breaking of the tubes) So they just took one oil rig and floated it as more or less mobile base to the location it can be found in the game since it far away from the coast not to be targeted and seen and near enough to reach the shores.

Radking, I greatly enjoy watching your Fallout Lore videos, especially ones concerning locations, geology, spatial distributions of factions. I do want to say, with modern day flight patterns on civilian airlines, most aircraft try to hug the coast or stay over land as long as possible so that, in case of emergency, pilots can land the aircraft on land and not in the ocean to increase chances of survival. The Enclave might have done similarly, especially if flying such a long distance (for example, to Arroyo) l just thought I’d mention it since it increases the likelihood of the oil rig being off the coast of San Francisco.

"we'll use Poseidon to refuel our Vertibirds." Yeah ok, fly 340 miles round trip over the ocean just to fill the machine that probably burns through fuel.

The vertibirds supposedly coming from the north to fly over San Francisco could be them using it as a point of reference. Enclave pilots might just be using these as flight path markers to reduce the chances of pilots getting lost.

I would say a big reason to fly to San-Fransisco then turn west to the rig could be a matter of navigation, by following the coast down to San Fran then bolting straight west you could simply the navigation process since all you need to do is turn west eventually your pilots will become very familiar with this and have an easier time of it leading to less strain for long flights. I commonly play Flight sims and it's very common for me to follow Rivers, Major Roads and Coastlines, all significant landmarks that are often very easy to identify from any altitude and most ranges, I also find that flying from a fixed point along a straight bearing, cities ar a MAJOR component to my Navigation since they are almost impossible to miss and will have an abundance of roads and often rivers I can then follow, as a more specific example, IL-2 my personal favourite flight sim recently released the English Channel as a map and I have found using Caen as a reference city to be very useful even on return trips to Britain as it's a known route I have a lot of familiarity with flying. this is not to say you cannot fly straight from point A to point B via instrument or the use of GPS, this is just my theory on why it they had the Enclave do this.. outside of making it at all possible for the player to have this interaction.

I know I probably won’t get a response but I would like to know what the speech from the intro of your videos comes from

Still never understood how you could run out of oil when you had advanced electric charges, mass fusion, and advanced fission anything...

Brazil has the tecnology to explore oil 300Km far from the coast. I can imagine fallout tecnology can do that

Thabk you for dropping a new vid i was so bored but now im about to learn

Maybe an ex oil rig that wasn't used to drill oil anymore? And maybe they don't really know where it is themselves, just more or less the direction and they get the details to ther verties. It's on a need to know basis.

Flying over land instead of the direct route might be a saftey thing

Enjoy your time off with family you definitely deserve it. Can’t wait to see the amazing video you’ll come back with after being nice and refreshed

There was a proposal a few years back to drill oil in the Central california zone which is west of san francisco and the only reason it never went through was protests about the area being a marine sanctuary

>Security robot was critically hit for 4575 hit points ☠☠☠

the Enclave went full Legion of Doom having their oil rig in an in-land lake.

Didn’t think I’d spend my morning researching real life oil rigs and whether they can be moved, but there we are.

It's possible the personel are running off the computer's info and have been gaslit.

A simple explination for the vertibirds flight path is navigation. After the great war we can assume things like the GPS network are unavailable, thus resulting the pilots being forced back to compass and map navigation. Its pretty easy to plot a course if you use known landmarks, and San Francisco would be a visible landmark from the air. It also works at nighttime as there would be some lights that the pilots could use to determine their location.

11:45 Taking a path like that isn't necessarily weird, for one they might be also carrying out a patrol, but also it's generally preferable to fly over land in case of an emergency. It's not so much a thing irl anymore because aircraft have gotten so reliable but both comercial and military flights used to be planned like that and the FAA still does have rules demanding that all comercial flights never get more than 225 minutes away from an airfield, which is why flights across the atlantic route close to Greenland. Another factor might be navigation, GPS presumably isn't available in the post apocalypse and without it navigating across open ocean is pretty difficult, so you'd want to avoid long trips across the ocean. The Enclave base would probably have something like a radar beacon to assist with navigation but that'd have limited range so pilots might follow the coast until they pick up its signal. Though that being said the fact that this guy had some clue of who was on the Vertibirds indicates that they just had some other task in SF and had to land.

Would be cool to see the whole video in the style as the intro

Hm, given that it's a pre-war retreat/backup it could also simply be a conversion of an Oil Rig instead of a fully operational one, so Oil doesn't need to be present. As it has production and storage capacity it's likely a FPSO (floating production, storage, and offloading system), just less shiplike in appearance. Also given that Oil and Uranium are the go-to resources for the cause of the resource wars (which became the Great War), having a stationary Oil Platform might make an easy target hence quite bad as escape plan for global nuclear war lending further credence to the theory it was a mobile platform. The flightpath could be explained by something west of Navarro (or southwest) which limits or cancels Vertibird flight so to fly to and From Navarro via San Francisco might make sense?

It could be possible that the vertibirds flew south until San Francisco and then turned west to the oil rig to minimize the amount of travel over the ocean, since it's easier to survive a crash on land than on the ocean, as well as recover any gear or personnel.

I never knew the oil rig had such conflicting information on it.

I have 2 ideas about the location. 1: the enclave lied about where the base is. It put the wrong coordinates in the computer and told the people the wrong location in order to keep anyone from finding it and possibly to keep it safe. Or 2: due to the desperate search for oil, new technology was developed for extracting oil in areas previously considered impossible. And that it is 175 mile west of San Francisco. Fallout technology and its timeline doesn’t completely match our real life timeline and technology.

If you can't find it in game then the only reason for npcs to say 'west from sanfran' is to protect the Enclave.

as a geologist, this video has been sort of a redemption because i've been struggling alone with these inconsistencies for so many years xD thank you!

i'd love more messy lore videos :)

Why first fly to san and then to the rig in stead of straight from navarro? We can assume there's more then one place they fly to, it's not just navarro. You depart, follow the coast to san, then head straight east on the compas. Easy, clean, functional. It's much easyer tofollow a landmark like the coast up to another landmark like a city and then in a straight line from there to the east for x amount of miles. As an added benefit if all craft fly over the same place then help is much faster to arrive considering it's closer and on a well known path, flying straight from navarro to the rig is nothing but ocean, you'd want to know where to look if a bird doesn't return,wich is a lot harder if they could be anywhere.

I've just gotten into fallong and your view have really helped me get into it

Hey, where'd you get that power armor...

12:53 Where could I get a poncho like that for my mca?

I checked, those coordinates are definitely valid, but the distance offshore is not. The format you're using is incorrect. It should look like: 37°18'00.0"N 128°07'00.0"W. That point is 265 miles offshore. Either that or the point represents the center of the oil rig and the edge of the oil rig is actually 175 miles offshore... meaning the oil rig would be about (assuming its a square) 32,400 square miles in size. Which would make it just a bit larger than the state of Maine and just a bit smaller than the state of Indiana.

An idea I had while watching (which other commenters mentioned) is that the base personnel and computer were lying in order to obscure the true location of the base.

I always thought that the Enclave chose that flight path to avoid the jet stream.

Yes! Let's do a messy lore series!

4:44 I loved the Real Life Lore collab!

what if in the fallout world the coords are in the ocean from continental drift? are there any other coords to compare them to?

Fallout 1&2 had cursed developments and as stated in the video the devs themselves have said that the lore is spotty which was why the Fallout Bible was made so that the developers and fans together could hash out the lore and fix contradictions in preparation for Fallout 3 [ Van Buren ] until the franchise was sold to Bethesda in a bid.

I just wanna take a moment to appreciate the Science Rad King researches or maybe straight up knows and applies to these videos. I don't know you bro but you're one of my favorite people lol 🍻

A nautical mile is slightly longer than a mile on land

its possible the vertibirds took that weird path because their pilots weren't skilled at navigating in the post-apoc environment.. plotting a least time path would require some pretty accurate positioning of both the aircraft and the destination, to figure out the correct course. but by using landmarks like the ruins of SanFran, they could simplify navigation, since they'd know that if they took a course due west of the ruined city, they'd reach the platform and could be guided in by the platform's radar and flight control. presumably they would have navigated from Arroyo to nevarro to san fran using similar landmark references. using such navigation, you don't need positionign systems, just reference maps with notable landmarks and a compass. the maps could easily have been compiled by the Nevarro staff and pilots.

Disaster...? 🤔💭 ,,I should've left my at home 'Cause this is a DIS-AS-TUH, Calling like a collector Sorry, I cannot answer!" 🎶

Just a wild guess, but I wonder if the technicians and even the computer were given false data in order to further hide the bases location. The problem with this theory though, is how does the Chosen One manage to find the oil rig if they're following false leads?