The Enclave Oil Rig's Lore is a Disaster

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.