This is why it's a dumb idea. It's the Underpants Gnome profit chart, only the ???? is build a ship that's never been built before after a nuclear war. Which is dumb. You're basically screwing up at least half of your survival pool hedged on the bet that you can accomplish something that's never been accomplished in the history of the planet. If you lose that bet, you lose everything.The original idea was:
1. Enclave ducks out, survives nuclear war
2. Vaults start their experiments
3. Enclave re-emerges, evaluates what happened with the Vaults, and using that data, leave Earth ready for anything which might happen with their generation ship.
However, the plan never borne fruit. The ship was never finished, was destroyed or is otherwise made inaccessible. Thus, we step to their backup plan, which is retaking the Continental United States.
They're even worse than that. They're TWISTED and WACKY. They have absolutely no goal present despite claiming the original goal of a generation ship. And this doesn't even start with Bethesda. The OG Fallout Bible started it. Bethesda is just really good at taking a shit idea and shit examples of an idea and making them so much shittier. In fact, it's nearly impossible to run across a control vault in anything following Fallout 2.The Fallout show's conception of the Vault Experiments is also weird as hell but for other reasons. Bethesda vaults are pretty much torture/death vaults, while the show's vaults seem to be more like a bunch of rich people throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_known_Vaults?
They just can't help themselves.