Liberty Prime

Liberty Prime (later designated as Mark II) is a military combat robot commissioned by the United States Army before the war from General Atomics International and RobCo Industries. Left unfinished before the Great War, it was reactivated by Lyons' Brotherhood of Steel in 2277 for their war against the Enclave. After its destruction at the hands of the Enclave, Liberty Prime was repaired to working condition a decade later to aid the Eastern division of the Brotherhood to neutralize the threat of The Institute.

History
Prime is the result of military contract 38917, for which the United States Army contracted RobCo Industries and General Atomics International to collaborate on an unprecedented joint project: The creation of the most powerful combat robot in the history of warfare, to liberate Anchorage, Alaska from Chinese occupation. Development commenced in 2072, and was intended to serve both military and propaganda needs. The former dictated the capacity, the latter the design: In the words of General Constantine Chase, initiator of the project, Liberty Prime was to embody the American military: A walking, talking, nuke-tossing hero reminding enemies of the U.S. that they picked a fight with a global super power. Confident that the project would soon yield result, General Chase publicly confirmed in June 2072 that the U.S. Army was working with General Atomics and RobCo to create a superweapon meant to establish dominance of the United States on the Alaskan front.

However, reality proved to be a harsh mistress. While the chassis of the robot and its weapons were all completed by the projected date, including the voice module, the developers were unable to finish the project for one simple reson: As Stanley Bloomfeld, project lead, reported to General Chase, they were unable to develop a power source compact enough to power all of its systems. Vault-Tec Industries was unable to help, as the only person capable of solving this conundrum - Stanislaus Braun - went into seclusion shortly before the problems manifested. The robot could technically move and navigate terrain, but it would only do so with all weapons systems offline. The delay was unacceptable and the U.S. military was forced to press on without the aid of Liberty Prime. The Alaskan campaign was won, at a heavy cost in men and materiel, while Liberty Prime remained in his bay below the Pentagon, waiting for a solution to his power management problems.

A new lease on life
With the Great War beginning and ending, leaving nearly all destroyed, the robot was abandoned and soon forgotten. His new chance came in 2255, when the Brotherhood of Steel expedition under Owyn Lyons arrived in Washington and found him beneath the ruins of the Pentagon. This impressive find led them to claim the Pentagon as the D.C. Bunker, their Citadel, and resuming development of the failed pre-War project. However, the same problems would plague the program as before the War. Chief among these was energy consumption. The Brotherhood had no way of powering the behemoth robot, even with Reginald Rothchild heading the project.

For twenty years, the Brotherhood struggled to launch its robot. Every attempt to gain ground was compensated with failures, even as late as 2277. On May 8, 2277, the research team managed to restore 46% power to internal processors, 45% to weapons, and 37% to power management systems, and attempted to redistribute power to bring the robot online. The attempt proved fruitless, with problems coming from the least expected direction: Liberty Prime himself. Rothchild's team tried to bypass the aggressive combat subroutines by trying to fool the robot with a neural dampener that power was being redistributed from a source other than its weapons. However, the onboard AI routines detected the attempt and again refused to allow the researchers to draw power away from its weapon systems. The attempt fried some of the robots circuitry and set the project back three months, again.

Another attempt was made on July 13, 2277. However, a faulty power capacitor caused a power spike and degraded system performance,dropping internal processor, weapons, and power management power to 12%, 13% and, 1% respectively. Tired of struggling with rerouting power, Rothchild ended power management experiments and resumed work on Accelerated Vector Fusion module to simply meet the power demands. Inspired by the work of Dr. Madison Li at Rivet City, Rothchild hoped for a breakthrough. Unfortunately, this avenue of research proved.. Risky. In its first major experiment on August 1, 2277, the AVF device resulted in 2nd degree burns for Scribe Bowditch, while an accidental weapon discharge nearly killed Elder Lyons. These events led to stricter control imposed on the experimentation team.

Yet there was hope. Despite the accidents, Rothchild's team was able to restore much of the power and improve its distribution (bringing power to internal processors to 87% and weapons to 60%), but problems with power management (operating at 3% efficiency) made deployment impossible. Mobility and navigation translation, as always, stubbornly remained at 0%. Only the voice module worked at 100% at all times, mocking the researchers.

Help came unexpectedly. When the Enclave seized Project Purity, Dr. Madison Li arrived at the Citadel. With her experience in fusion research and applications, Rothchild and his team were able to resolve the power management problems.

Liberty Prime was awoken and brought online for the first time in its life and more than two centuries overdue. Deployed against the Enclave in the Battle of Project Purity, Liberty Prime making its way towards Project Purity over the Arlington Memorial bridge. The massive robot acted as a spearhead, destroying Vertibirds and entrenched Enclave positions with ease. The Enclave was entirely unprepared for such an offensive and could not counter such brute force, even with Vertibird strafing runs and artillery bombardment.

Lyons's Pride and the Lone Wanderer followed the robot's path of destruction, mopping up any Enclave personnel that survived the initial assault. Liberty Prime continued its assault up to the Purifier, destroying photonic resonance barriers set up around the island to deny land access. Upon arrival at the Memorial, Liberty Prime and the Pride set up a security perimeter, while Sarah Lyons and the Lone Wanderer headed inside the facility.

Death
The victory at the Purifier set the pattern for attacks using Liberty Prime. For two weeks, the Brotherhood mopped up Enclave forces throughout the Capital Wasteland, until the Battle of Rockland. The attack followed a standard pattern. Liberty Prime was deployed as spearhead, destroying the bulk of the enemy forces and bypassing their fortifications, while ground troops under Tristan's command followed the robot, mopping up any stragglers. The initial attack went well and the combat group penetrated enemy defenses right up into the facility. Liberty Prime proceeded to create an access point into the facility, by punching through the concrete walls.

However, this was a ruse by the Enclave. Liberty Prime was lured into the cul-de-sac in front of the Rockland facility in order to be destroyed. Just as he opened the facility to the Brotherhood's assault, the Enclave initiated a tactical missile bombardment from the Bradley-Hercules orbital weapons platform, turning the area into a kill zone. Liberty Prime was destroyed, with Tristan's forces just barely able to reach minimum safe distance.

The destruction of Liberty Prime put the Brotherhood in a very difficult position, as it removed the only significant military advantage it had over the Enclave. Lyons had little in the way of men and resources at the beginning of the conflict with the Enclave, and after the loss of Prime all of these problems surfaced, exacerbated by the ongoing water delivery program. With the resources pooled into defense against the Enclave, the Brotherhood had to rely on the Lone Wanderer as their trump card.

Meanwhile, Rothchild immediately began work on rebuilding Prime, hoping to restore him to working condition. Eventually, the project was shelved due to a lack of success until Proctor Ingram was ordered to resume operations. Despite the terrible state of salvage, she labored for several years to reconstruct the robot. When Elder Arthur Maxson realized that the Institute can be tracked down and confronted in the Commonwealth, Prime's components were loaded onto the Prydwen and brought along for the campaign. A special gantry was constructed in the ruins of the Boston Airport, to assemble the war machine under Proctor Ingram's orders - as long as the Brotherhood would be able to salvage the components that would allow for it to be deployed.

Rebirth
There were several problems that had to be rectified. For starters, the fragile CPU blew itself out whenever the scribes tried feeding power to it, due to the complexity of the robot's power system. The missile strike that destroyed Prime also wrecked the power system, necessitating the development of a new system, enlisting the aid of either Doctor Madison Li or Professor Scara. They helped restore the total corruption of the memory core, caused by improper salvaging of Prime and flaws in its original design (lack of inertial dampeners and titanium shock casing to protect it).

The next step in the reconstruction was rebuilding its limbs. Electromagnetic actuators were used for this purpose, constructed on site using high powered magnets. The restored memory core posed a constant problem, as explaining to a combat robot why it can't move was a drain on the scribes' patience. Following the successful assembly of the limbs, the penultimate component of the combat robot was a supply of modified Mark 28 nuclear bombs, necessary if it was ever to operate at more than half capacity. The nukes salvaged from the Commonwealth at Sentinel site Prescott had to be adapted to remain stable in the unconventional launcher.

The final step in bringing Liberty Prime back to life was reactivating its fusion reactor, which lay dormant ever since its destruction. Kept online by power leeched from the Prydwen, Prime's reactor required the experimental beryllium agitator to cold start the reactor. The agitator - located at the Mass Fusion Building - would provide the power surge necessary to start the reaction.

Overview
Liberty Prime was built to be the very embodiment of American military might - a walking, talking, nuke-tossing hero to remind the world what it means to be a super power. As such, it is patterned after the human silhouette and outfitted with the most powerful weapons available to the United States military. Liberty Prime had two primary weapons: Its head-mounted Liberty laser and a back-mounted supply of Mark 28 nuclear bombs, modified from standard aircraft weapons. The sheer power output of the chassis allowed it to destroy fortifications simply by crushing or punching through them.

The combination of a directed energy weapon capable of destroying targets at hundreds of yards with pin-point accuracy and high-yield specialized explosives produced a weapon system theoretically capable of engaging any target in any terrain. The only drawback was Prime's slow speed, as it could only move at a walking pace due to the amount of weapons it carried. Foreseeing this issue, Liberty Prime was outfitted with the toughest armor available, allowing it to withstand extended combat with no performance loss. In fact, Prime was so well equipped that the only weapon that could reliably damage or destroy it was a nuclear warhead detonating point blank (or an orbital missile salvo, as witnessed by the Brotherhood of Steel).

However, as mentioned above, Prime was a miracle on paper, but less so in practice. No fusion power source available in 2072 produced enough energy to allow Liberty Prime to operate even at a minimum combat capacity, and as the war with China dragged on, the project was eventually mothballed. The self-sustaining fusion reactor remained active, powering the robot, until finally Madison Li resolved the power distribution and management problems, allowing it to be deployed into combat. Moreover the machine's slow speed and large size made it supremely vulnerable to high-yield artillery and orbital missile strikes capable of overwhelming its armor, potentially limiting its practical effectiveness in combat against an enemy on similar military footing to the United States.

While undeniably effective in an asymmetrical post-apocalyptic context, Liberty Prime in reality embodied very different aspects of the American military-industrial complex as of the 2070s than were originally intended - over-funded, bereft of oversight, and seemingly obsessed with super-weapons and displays of power.

Quests

 * When Liberty Prime is fully operational once more, it is used by Elder Maxson's Brotherhood of Steel against the Institute. Or if you side with the Institute then Liberty Prime is used against the Brotherhood and the Prydwen comes crashing down down in a blaze of glory.

Gameplay attributes
Liberty Prime is just as Chase described him: A walking, nuke-tossing hero. The giant robot has two head-mounted Liberty lasers that can take out multiple Enclave soldiers or synths with each shot and an endless supply of nuclear bombs it can chuck at enemies to devastating effect.

His armored shell and powerful strength are also an asset, as it can simply step on targets to ruin them and destroy anything with its hands, even photonic resonance barriers that are seemingly impregnable. Artillery, rockets, and energy weapons hardly register as damage either.

Liberty Prime also plays back inspiring shouts, originally intended to boost the morale of U.S. soldiers fighting the Chinese occupants at Anchorage. It considers all enemy targets to be Chinese soldiers.

Quests

 * Take it Back!: The player follows Liberty Prime to the Jefferson Memorial and Project Purity as it carves a swath through Enclave forces. The player's role is essentially that of a janitor, as they simply have to mop up whomever survived Prime's onslaught.
 * Death From Above: Prime is deployed to the Rockland facility. Again, this is effectively a cutscene, as the player follows the robot's path of destruction. Prime is destroyed once the facility is reached, initiating a self-destruct sequence to prevent salvaging.
 * Getting Ready for Prime Time: The player can donate sensor modules and cameras to Scribe Rothchild to aid in the rebuilding of Liberty Prime (the extent of destruction notwithstanding).

Other interactions

 * Prime is stuck in its bay for most of the game, although the player can activate a test of its voice module.
 * The player can accidentally turn Prime hostile during the final quest of Fallout 3, with predictable effects.

Notable quotes
Prime draws his repertoire from common 1950s and '60s anti-communist slogans, slightly modified to target China rather than the Soviet Union.

Behind the scenes

 * Emil Pagliarulo denied any intentional relation between Liberty Prime and Optimus Prime, though he mentioned it could have been subconscious.
 * The GECK has an entry for "Infiltration", a quest between The American Dream and Take it Back!. It was apparently the infiltration of Rivet City to gain access to a power source for the robot.
 * Liberty Prime's final moments are very similar to those of Frank Horrigan.

Bugs

 * Prime will clip into Citadel walls when he is deployed.
 * Liberty Prime often gets stuck due to his size and the nature of the engine.
 * Liberty Prime's severed head will not be properly disabled at the relay station, resulting in two of them: One in the Citadel, one at the station.

Appearances
Liberty Prime appears in Fallout 3, its add-on Broken Steel, and Fallout 4''.