Okay, so last night when I should have been trying to sleep to get ready for a new job today (it went well, if very, very long), I was thinking about a lore issue of the Fallout TV show, namely the apparent retconning of Shady Sands' location from Falllout 1 and 2.

But, here's the thing: Shady Sands's original location is terrible: East of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, near the ominiously named Valley of Death. Now, what's out there? Not a lot of water. And when you get a big town like that, relying on basic subsistance agriculture, you are going to need water to survive.

So, here's my head canon: sometime between the end of Fallout 2 (2141) and it's destruction in the ruins of LA a good 2-300 miles away, the city basically ran out of arable land and water. So, a major project to relocate the city began to somewhere with a reliable source of water, which just so happened to be in the Boneyard (did anyone call it that in the show? I honestly don't remember). However, that water source that was detected was in fact the water resevoir for Vaults 31, 32, and 33. So as the new town was built, the old one was abandoned by 2277 (the "Fall" of Shady Sands). A new capital was selected, possibly The Hub or Junktown, hence why Shady Sands was the "first" capital of the republic, and not the "current" capital of the rebublic.

This effort, while sucessful, also drew the attention of the Vault 31 super managers and Rose McClaine, and realizing that civilization existed that would threaten the Vaults purpose to make a Vault-Tec dominated world, Hank then proceeded to blow up the new Shady Sands, fracturing the Republic and sending it into freefall.