User:Kastera1000/SNM game theories

Theory the First: Raiders with more firepower than the Brotherhood?
Anybody who has played Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas will notice that there are noticeably fewer raiders in the Mojave than the Capital Wasteland. The only major raider group in the Mojave is the Fiends which prey around New Vegas in the South Vegas Ruins and the far north. Compare this to the Capital Wasteland where there are more raiders than at which you can shake a stick. They are in every corner of the wasteland, from deep in the metro of the city, to up north where deathclaws roam freely, around settlements and in the boonies of the Potomac in the northwest. They may be everywhere, but they're generally easy to deal with; they have a hunting rifle, maybe an R91 assault rifle, maybe a flamer. But the Fiends of the Mojave are a different story: sure they've got pool cues and baseballs bats, but it is also not uncommon for them to also be in possession of laser RCWs and plasma rifles. Why is this? How did these chemmed up bandits get tech that could rival the technology of the Brotherhood of Steel? Well, it has something to do with the thorn in Head Paladin Edgar Hardin's side: the Van Graff family.

During the quest Birds of a Feather, the Courier acts as an errand boy and has to run into the desert to meet the strange man, a Legion agent, and supply him with a package of energy weapons; Gloria Van Graff even says, flat out, that they deal with the Legion: "The Legion paid us to deliver weapons, and the NCR paid us to deliver the Legion.". Furthermore, it's obvious that the Van Graffs will work with anyone, even the Legion, and their greed knows no bounds, so it's very possible that they have dealt with the Legion more than that one time.

Now, Caesar's Legion has entered into a formal alliance with the Great Khans. Regardless of the Legion's intentions for the tribe after the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, it's possible that the Legion provided the Great Khans with some of the energy weapons they purchased from the Van Graffs as a sign of good faith. Regardless of these fantastic gifts, the Great Khans simply have no need for energy weapons; those weapons are for the weak and the Khans care only for strength, battle and the lamentations of their enemy's women! That and business, which they regular conductly with the Fiends. So there's a real possibility that the Great Khans handed off their gifted energy weapons to the Fiends second-hand in addition to their regular shipment of Psycho and Jet.

Of course, this does not sit well with the Brotherhood of Steel; all this technology in the hands of the unworthy, especially if they're raider filth, is extremely dangerous. This is why Hardin is so adamant about slaughtering the Van Graffs during Tend to Your Business. He knew where the lowly raiders were getting their high tech weapons. If he can seize the Van Graffs stock and store, and take out the Fiends' source of weapons as well, he's killing two birds with one stone.