Fallout 4: Singular Lore Problem - Red Workbench

Fallout 4 has a number of lore based problems, which I've covered in summary form elsewhere.  As the title says there is one with the red workbench used to scrap and create materials inside a 'settlement' area.  If you try to write fiction in the Fallout universe it is necessary to explain discrepancies and lore problems to ensure the setting conforms to the game world, and that is particularly difficult for Fallout 4.  As the red workbench is recognized by in game Non-Player Characters (NPC) at a couple of sites, it is necessary to then explain the background of them as they are something that exists in the game world.  The problem is that they didn't exist before the Great War.

Consider that entry scene where you are running out of your house to go to Vault 111, and take a quick look across the street at the house there, particularly its carport, and notice that not only is the red workbench not there, but the other workbenches for power armor, weapons and armor are also absent.  They are present when you arrive over two centuries later, but they aren't there on the day the bombs fell.  This brings up an important question: just when, exactly, were these put in place?

Codsworth, for all the dings and oxidation going on with his outer shell, would surely have noticed a delivery van pulling up right after everyone left.  Now it can be posited that he had some negative effects to the localized EMP of the bomb or bombs dropped south of Boston, and that a restart cycle took some time for him to get up and operational again.  Still his memories of just before the war seem to be relatively intact and the presence of objects that patently weren't there in those last moments would be something he should recognize.  So that is a problem, though a minor one.  Yet that means that the delivery or construction of those workbenches happened in that short period of time: the day that the cars generally became inoperable and the shockwave of the blast(s) were felt even in Sanctuary Hills.  The infrastructure went down, the roads were clogged with wrecks, and the survivors were starting to fight over scraps for survival.  Plus the ghoulification of many people now put an additional threat into the mix, and that would also hamper any attempts to deliver those workbenches.

With regards to lore, there are no indicators as to which company made the workbenches, particularly the magical red workbench.  As a game mechanic the player can just slap down anything that is available to be made from it and it instantly appears.   Even including magic this requires a very high level of material manipulation in the finest of details, particularly for making things like the machinegun turrets.  Machineguns require tempered steel, properly made and tuned barrels, and a set of small springs, mechanical catches, pieces to eject cartridges and, in general, a raft of parts that require forging and machining to fit into place.  This is not to speak of the ammunition that they use, which is also made with them and never needs to be replenished.  This is before the automatic sensing mechanisms and Identify Friend or Foe system for circuitry is put in place, and that is something we can't do today.  Fallout 4 is a strange place in its alternate reality, but it still relies on some basic physical mechanics and principles that don't change just because the time line has.

What this means is that the red workbench comes pre-loaded with diagrams, schematics and internal workings to forge parts, reprogram circuitry, and then assemble a working piece near instantly right before your very eyes.  This isn't an IKEA kit that requires you to unbox it and put it together yourself, but something taken care of by the red workbench.  By doing so and having a system of matter storage that isn't internal (or anywhere come to that) the red workbench becomes the single most sophisticated piece of equipment in the Fallout universe, even including the Zetan ships.  Those aliens can do some dematerialization and rematerialization, but only like the transporter from Star Trek, and it reassembles stuff just as it was.  The red workbench works through some other means as there is no beam coming from it to the materialization site for a finished piece, but it just instantly appears.  Instantaneous appearance at a distance requires quantum mechanics to operate and that is where the red workbench fits, even with magic included in the mix.

This then begs the question: who made it?

Did the Zetans decide to drop a number of these in the Commonwealth for reasons of their own?  Well, if they had that sort of technology they wouldn't need large ships to galavant around the universe but just use quantum mechanics to get where they want to go.  Plus they wouldn't be so backward in other areas of the sciences to keep needing new biiomaterial to study.  If they had this technology there is a good possibility they wouldn't even bother to physically go to other star systems, and thus they are ruled out of the mix.  They don't employ, deploy or use anything like this and if they did it would have all sorts of fun things they require that we don't as their basic construction system.  Plus it obviously has some interactivity with the Pip-Boy, allowing for materials you are carrying as a Player Character (PC) to be instantly moved into the workshop system, and that wouldn't be something the Zetans would ever bother with.  Positing a 'we stole it from them and repurposed it' forgets that the Zetans don't have this technology in the first place, so it is ruled out by that.  So the Zetans get scratched off the list.

How about RobCo, the company that Robert House formed?  Now this brings up possibilities as the Pip-Boy is made by them and must be included in the mix.  Unless a highly sophisticated scanning and sorting routine is applied by the red workbench to the PC to figure out what they are carrying, the only other way to do that is through the system that is already doing that in the way of the Pip-Boy.  It is easier to use that system to hook it into the red workbench rather than posit a scanning system and the general non-use of the workbench by NPCs.  There is no animation for an NPC to use the red workbench and no NPC is ever seen materializing something out of thin air that could only be made by the red workbench.  No one would live on heaps of garbage if there was a means to convert it to useful materials and spare parts as that stuff is just too valuable to leave as litter.  This would make any place that has one tend to be litter and scavenger free since it only takes a few hours to do the clean-up work.  So many settlement sites live with useful materials in the way of garbage just sitting around that it makes no sense that they wouldn't use the workbench if they knew how to use it.  And when the PC is granted license to use one by an NPC for a settlement, it is more in the way of 'good luck if you can get it to work' than anything like a real and sincere grant of power.  The only difference between the PC and NPCs?  The Pip-Boy.

So RobCo gets put into the running as they were the pre-war masters of robotics, engineering and were even getting into space flight.  Plus they provided much in the way of equipment to Vault-Tec that it cannot be ruled out of the equation.  But for all of their prowess, this sort of design really isn't in their ballpark.  A company that begins to fit this bill is General Atomics as they also designed robots and concentrated on long-term power systems for government, commercial and private use.  General Atomics supplied generators to Vaults for Vault-Tec and even had a few Mr. Handy style of robots put in a few of them.  While the original programming basis for the Mr. Handy was designed before RobCo got in the picture, the fact is that the programming interface if not the code itself was moved over to RobCo Termlink Code as Mr. Handy robots can be hacked using the same tools made for RobCo robots.  The Gutsy line of Mr. Handy robots was a first instance of cooperation between the two companies and the Robobrain robot would continue that cooperation.  This joint venture style of production would promote both companies and be profitable to them, which meant a more fluid working environment in Vaults since General Atomics equipment would use RobCo based interfaces.  The power production end of General Atomics would be well suited to making the red workbench seen in FO4 and even provide it with an easy to access interface for anyone with a Pip-Boy.  What is lacking is the matter storage and re-arrangement concept for construction, and that starts to become the singular point in which neither company is demonstrated as having a footing.

After these two powerhouses there are some outliers like Wattz Consumer Electronics, though they tended to be more in the home delivery of goods and construction of plasma weapons as small arms.  Dunwich LLC may have an eldritch link, though that isn't very amenable to being regularized, systematized and put into the form of the red workbench.  House & House tools didn't have this as a specialty and once brought into the RobCo fold there was no massive change to the way RobCo operated.  What other links are there for the red workbench, then?

In the Vault-Tec DLC for FO4 we do get to see that an industrial form of workbench system was delivered to the construction crew at Vault 88.  As Vault 88 didn't get past initial construction phases due to bureaucratic problems, the PC is allowed to find and reactivate the integrated workbench system though they are much larger devices than the ones seen on the surface of FO4.  Here is a direct link with Vault-Tec actually able to get such equipment which was supposed to be used to speed up Vault construction.  If the war hadn't happened then the creation of Vault 88, at least the construction end of it, should go very quickly and it doesn't take long for the player to construct a basic vault in more than a few game days.  Yet nowhere is it hinted that Vault-Tec actually made these devices, and if they had been common pre-war then there is a very good chance that the entire industrial basis for the US economy would have radically altered in just a few years.  Gone would be the large factories as smaller production facilities and even home workbench units would begin to supplant the old industrial sector in the US economy.  That didn't happen, thus what is seen in FO4 in the Vault-Tec DLC is a large scale prototype system, not ready for wider use outside of the Vault.  Still it has all the plans that the exterior workbenches have without having a ready system to transmit nor receive them that means they are stored in a portable system that then gives an interface and structure to the workbenches.  That is the Pip-Boy, and the first time a workbench is used it's local plans synch up with it so that later plans can then be loaded into it.  Each of the DLCs have different post-war construction plans and there are even expanded plans available from the smaller workshop style DLCs.  The workbench is a tool, then, and its guidance system is governed externally outside of hand use of tools that can be seen on the workbench.

Is there anywhere that has similar technology to this?  Matter teleportation is seen being used by The Institute, Zetans and Big MT.  If the first two are ruled out that leaves the last one, the Big Brains at Big MT.  While it is a private concern, it is also one that worked with the government, military and other businesses and there is even a bit of envy towards what Vault-Tec was doing.  That and the spore creatures seen at Big MT show some link with the ones seen in one of the Vaults in Fallout: New Vegas.  So would they create such devices?  Here is an attitude taken by Borous, part of the Think Tank at Big MT: "Whether it was holograms, NEW Auto-Docs, toxins, vending machines... we wound them up, let them go into TINY ISOLATED TOWNS. Then... we OBSERVED!"

Now the Commonwealth is no tiny isolated town, to be sure, but there is the post-war delivery problem to be added into the mix.  As we do not know exactly when they were delivered and have a window of time from the Great War to the Sole Survivor getting out of Vault 111, there is a lot to play with in the way of possibilities.  Big MT was more or less off-line for a time after the Great War and then suffered some internal problems as the outside world started to try and creep into their holdfast crater.  With exposure to the outside world Dr. Mobius then performed a memory wipe on his colleagues, installed some inhibitions and fears, then went to the Forbidden Zone to keep their paranoia up so they would become obsessed with him.  That was before the start of FNV by a year or two, and would overlap the Fallout 3 period.  As the Think Tank didn't realize the outside world survived until after the Courier arrived there and settled matters, that then puts in a time-frame of post-Courier and Sole Survivor leaving the Vault.  FNV starts in 2281 and FO4 starts in 2287, and after putting in a good year to finish FNV for the Courier, that then closes the window to between 2282 and 2287.

Is it possible that Big MT made the workbench system for Vault-Tec?  Yes, it is as part of their outreach to that company.  It would make a lovely opportunity to do some social experiments, so that is a prime consideration.  Offering faster Vault construction technology would be just the ticket to those sorts of experiments.

Did Big MT like to create new things to send out into the world and see what they would do?  Yes, they did.

Does Big MT have a demonstrated system of matter teleportation?  In the way of the transportalponder, yes they do.

Could the Courier get between the Mojave and the Commonwealth in less than 5 years to then have these workbenches delivered to various sites?  That is not impossible.

This then eliminates the Who, What, Where, When and How portions of the problem, and that leaves only the 'Why?' portion.  This is, perhaps, the easiest of the questions having the ability to teleport people and equipment would also mean having the sensory apparatus to see if any similar system is being used.  Such systems utilize a large amount of energy and that use can be tracked down, just like the Brotherhood of Steel was doing in FO4.  Anyone using this sort of technology would be of great interest to Big MT, and finding out if that source were friendly or hostile would be a prime concern.  The Courier could be delivered close to the off-loading zone for Vault 88, which would have been above the surface, and then need to survive some raider attacks to then look around for appropriate spots to place down workbenches.  By the end of Old World Blues the Courier has the technology to shut down and restart robots at close range and should have enough general persuasive ability to get agreement to put down a workbench in some small settlements.  Also for those places that seem deserted it would be very easy to put a workbench down, which would explain why so many of them are in places that aren't inhabited.

The Courier would have left no real, lasting impression on much of anyone as the Commonwealth is far away from the Mojave and the main thing that the Think Tank would desire would be observation of what happened next.  Additionally the red workbenches may have other technology built into them to track where the teleportation signals are coming from to then try and figure out who is using this technology. When the Sole Survivor arrives and starts to utilize the main functional systems of the workbenches, then that would also be tracked as well as what the goodies that were programmed into were used for.  By putting a Pip-Boy interface as a hurdle was a means to limit the use of such technology to those who had some technical background from a Vault, plus would allow the Courier to utilize them on an as-needed basis for creating other goods.  With a final set of known points the Courier could then travel to each workbench site to take stock of its placement and gain an understanding of what was happening there, although that might be very rare as there are a lot of loose ends to tie up in the Mojave.

As there is no lore behind the Red Workbench and its powers, it is left up to the players to figure it out on their lonesome.  Good luck with that, I tellya!