First: If you answer then please stay spoiler free. I'm still trying to enjoy the game. I'm just not sure if I'm doing it right or not and need a little help.

Hey there. So I was streaming fallout 1 on justin.tv and one of my viewers asked me how I got into the military base so early in the game (level 4). I was in there for 4 hours trying to get past guards and get through forcefields and whatnot. The reason I was over there is because of that stupid water chip quest. An NPC somewhere in the game suggested to me that the necropolis had a water chip. I wandered over there and found out that they do in fact have one but I had to repair their water pump before I could have their water chip. So I went down into the sewers and found the part I needed to repair the pump. Then I went to the water shed and wandered into super mutant land. I knew that the water pump I needed to repair was in there (I could even see it in the building) but there were super mutant guards everywhere who had captured me and taken me into their military base. So like I said, I was in there for 4 long hours trying to figure out what to do. I couldn't kill anything and those forcefields I had to walk through annihilated me. So I guess my question is was I supposed to be in the super mutant base at level 4? Is getting the water chip from necropolis the right thing to do or is there one somewhere else? The only reason I was in there so long was because the robots were able to kill some mutants and I figured there was a control panel somewhere that would let me control them eventually and take out all of the base.

It would be better to reload your game to a point where you didn't talk to the mutant, because you shouldn't be in the military base at your characters level. What I did to get the water chip is I killed all of the super mutants fixed the pump, freed the ghoul prisoner and went down into the vault (deepest level) and nabbed it. I also had help from Tycho (Junktown), Ian (Shady Sands) and Dogmeat (Junktown). IF you can't reload it'd probably be better to remake your character. =/

i posted about this a while back, apparently its very hard to get out of that base at low level and its basically game over if you do

I've seen a speedrun where the player got captured and left successfully at even lower level, but he used a lot of cheese and exploits.
It's definitely better to reload a save from before getting captured.
In Necropolis you can use your dialogue skills to convince the supermutants that you aren't what they're looking for (extremely funny if you play a stupid character).

Also, there's little need to go to Necropolis so early. Seriously, you have 100 days, you can do most of the side quests in that time and happily get the chip to the vault.