Fallout weapons discussion thread.

Shaodeus

Shaodeus

Still Mildly Glowing
Yeah lets talk some more about how effective Fallout weapons would be in real life.

First two things I'm curious about would be the fatman and plasma based weaponry
 
The Fatman weapon was always the weapon I thought Bethesda should have never invented... There is no point in it and I don't think it would even be used in any armed forces in the world... it is basically a shoulder mounted catapult or mortar tube that launches friking mini nuclear bombs... In a world where missile launchers and grenade launchers exist there is no point in this stupidity of a weapon to exist... It only does because "Ha ha, it's Fallout so we have to have a weapon that launches mini atom bombs, we are geniuses!" :facepalm: The worst thing is that the weapon is not an easteregg or a joke weapon (like for example the Holy Handgrenades are).

I always wanted to see a darn Plasma Shotgun! To me it makes no sense that Plasma weapons could be rifles for the same reason Mr Fish said before (slow projectile), but in a close combat situation, a plasma shootie could be devastating :mrgreen:.
 
So in which ways would you die horribly with a fatman? My first two guesses would be that you go blind and that the radiation shock wave is going to make a dick grow out of your nose.

But I don't know much, if anything about this
 
Shaodeus said:
So in which ways would you die horribly with a fatman? My first two guesses would be that you go blind and that the radiation shock wave is going to make a dick grow out of your nose.

But I don't know much, if anything about this
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The explosion and radius are just too much, shoot it inside any building and you could drop the entire building down (of course not in the game because even glass bottles are indestructible), I think they nerfed the Fatman in Fallout 4, but I never used one in that game so I can't say for sure.
In Fallout 3 if you are caught by the explosion, no matter how much HP you have, how high your level is or what kind of armor (DT and DR) you have (without cheating or something), you're dead.
Since it is a "lauching" weapon the range is not that big either, if used in real combat situations I can assume it would wipe out both friends and foes in a big radius, and would also facilitate accidents, like pointing it or dropping it on the ground and the projectile (Mini Nuke) drop face down on the floor and KABOOM! there goes half of your HQ or something :lmao:.
 
Mr Fish said:
Lasers, announce your location to the world.
Plasma, why shoot ballistic projectiles that travel 5 times as fast when you can shoot a neat green ball that can be side-stepped?
Fat-man, cause if you're going to kill yourself then you might as well go out with a BOOM!
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Lasers are usually not visible in air, unless you got mist or dust in the air.
Real world plasma bolts would actually travel very quickly (they have to, because such stable plasma rings still only live for a few milliseconds at best, so those things better travel at Mach 5 or so, which is easily achievable because they don't weigh much). And the cool thing would be that they'd severely fuck up electronics.
Interestingly enough, the Fatman is the only weapon of those that was actually made (the Davy Crockett), but it was decided that it would irradiate the operating crew too much.
The Davy Crockett's explosion was obviously a lot bigger than Fallout's Fatman, which is not that big an explosion.

Anyway, if you want to know more about laser and plasma weapons I could write a few pages :D
 
Shaodeus said:
Tell me about lazer weapons, could I power my appartement for a month with the amounts of energy that's involved with a single lazer rifle shot?
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No. The energy involved in a single laser shot (in another threat I used 3.5 kJ as an example, equivalent to a 7.62 mm NATO round) is not very big. The average power, however, can be really large, in my example it was 10 kW, while the instantaneous power consumption of an average house in the US is about 1 kW. Your laser shot has enough power for your home... For 350 ms. The total energy consumed by your home is more like 10,000 kWh or 36 GJ, more than ten million laser shots.
Keep in mind that 10 kW average power for a laser is quite high already (although increasingly common these days), and that 100 J pulses are very hard to achieve right now. Pulsed laser with multikilowatt average powers and extremely high pulse energies at high repetition rates? Utopian.
 
R.Graves said:
The red laser (or green depending on the gun) we see in the game certainly would. A red laser (if I'm Not mistaken) also wouldn't kill anything either. Because there are no deadly lasers in that spectrum. @Hassknecht would know more.
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In clean, dry air you wouldn't actually see the beam all that well as there'd be very little to scatter the light around. Not to mention that useful laser pulses would be very short, so I'm not entirely sure if you could even recognize the direction such a beam came from.
Green lasers are easier to see due to Rayleigh scattering in the atmosphere, even when it's clean and dry (green light has a shorter wavelength than red light, so it's scattered more as it goes with l^-4, with l being the wavelength). That's why green laser pointers are well visible at night when red laser pointers would require much more power to be that visible.
But yeah, there are no high power red lasers. The best we could do would be flash-bulb pumped ruby lasers, but those are very inefficient and won't really do much beyond popping balloons.
There was never a demand for high power red laser diodes, so they just don't exist. Laser pumping is usually done in the near infrared.
Nevertheless, with the ruby laser being the first laser, and science fiction picking up on that, red is THE laser colour in fiction and, at least a few years ago, the colour most commonly associated with lasers. Given that most laser pointers these days are green or blue that might change, though.
 
R.Graves said:
How loud would a laser rifle be, @Hassknecht?
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The laser itself wouldn't be all that loud, probably just a bit of electrical noise and some hum from the cooling, depending on how the laser is switched. The impact of the laser would be quite loud, though, probably on par with a ballistic rifle. I recently fired 80 J pulses at rock targets, it gives a really nice, loud POP from the expanding hot air and plasma at the target spot. At 10 Hz repitition rate it sounded a bit like a jackhammer. A weapons laser would fire a lot of pulses with a very high repitition rate, so it would just be a loud bang at the target.
 
Risewild said:
The explosion and radius are just too much, shoot it inside any building and you could drop the entire building down (of course not in the game because even glass bottles are indestructible), I think they nerfed the Fatman in Fallout 4, but I never used one in that game so I can't say for sure.
In Fallout 3 if you are caught by the explosion, no matter how much HP you have, how high your level is or what kind of armor (DT and DR) you have (without cheating or something), you're dead.
Since it is a "lauching" weapon the range is not that big either, if used in real combat situations I can assume it would wipe out both friends and foes in a big radius, and would also facilitate accidents, like pointing it or dropping it on the ground and the projectile (Mini Nuke) drop face down on the floor and KABOOM! there goes half of your HQ or something :lmao:.
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No, the Fat Man was not nerfed as far as I believe. It's actually MUCH more suicidal and overpowered, especially with modifications. You can attach a MIRV Launcher to fire 6 or 8 or so Nukes at once, most likely killing anything you point it at and yourself in the process. I'm not too sure, as the times I used it I picked it up, fired it, and dropped it right after if I was in a firefight.
 
Knight In Leather Armor said:
No, the Fat Man was not nerfed as far as I believe. It's actually MUCH more suicidal and overpowered, especially with modifications. You can attach a MIRV Launcher to fire 6 or 8 or so Nukes at once, most likely killing anything you point it at and yourself in the process. I'm not too sure, as the times I used it I picked it up, fired it, and dropped it right after if I was in a firefight.
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So they also have the MIRV in FO4.... So not only did they included the Fatman but also made a MIRV mod for it :facepalm:. Fallout 3 had the MIRV Fatman which launched 8 mini nukes too.
This is just how over-the-top Bethesda is about weapons in Fallout.
Maybe they will expand this trend to other games and the TES VI game will have "Ultra Killing Multiple Explosive Crossbow Bolts Launcher" that will shoot 10 crossbow bolts that explode into mushroom clouds >_>.
Hassknecht said:
I recently fired 80 J pulses at rock targets, it gives a really nice, loud POP from the expanding hot air and plasma at the target spot. At 10 Hz repitition rate it sounded a bit like a jackhammer.
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I want your job!

EDIT: I just found out that apparently in Fallout 4 you can use mines and a rubbish basket to make an improvised close combat cannon :clap: Gamebryo Creation Engine physics :roll:.
GtFJ2fv.gif
 
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I laughed so hard at work watching that gif. Everyone got curious and came over so I had to close out before commenting.

Wow, just... wow, that is both awesome, and game breaking to an extreme degree.
 
After even the 90 years to Fallout 1, a lot of those guns wouldn't work. A damn Revolver or a AK might work, but otherwise....

By 210 years after the war, the only thing left of those guns should be their mark in the forges as they're recycled and remade. It's part of why I love the Gun Runners so much, they add a little solid detail to the world and its economy and internal logic.

As for the Laser and Plasma weaponry, well, we know they can exist; we just can't pack enough power into a small enough package yet. They're unobtainable for now, but not unrealistic in concept (though I've heard a lot against Plasma weaponry due to the problem of keeping it together beyond a few feet, Lasers get a lot more leeway). This also means a Laser 'Rifle' (there's no damn rifling in that damn thing, well, maybe 'focus optics' can count) is akin to strapping dynamite to you and hoping nothing hits it and you don't blow up the building.
 
Danuis said:
After even the 90 years to Fallout 1, a lot of those guns wouldn't work. A damn Revolver or a AK might work, but otherwise....

By 210 years after the war, the only thing left of those guns should be their mark in the forges as they're recycled and remade. It's part of why I love the Gun Runners so much, they add a little solid detail to the world and its economy and internal logic.
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Dunno, a properly stored or maintained weapon can last quite long I think. I mean, if it's kept properly lubricated nothing unfixable should happen to them. Especially not in the dry world of Fallout.
If people can play fragile wooden instruments that are hundreds of years old I'd think that a gun could survive, too. Especially modern guns that contain a lot of plastics and stainless steel. The springs might be an issue, but those are also somewhat easy to fabricate.
 
Hassknecht said:
Dunno, a properly stored or maintained weapon can last quite long I think. I mean, if it's kept properly lubricated nothing unfixable should happen to them. Especially not in the dry world of Fallout.
If people can play fragile wooden instruments that are hundreds of years old I'd think that a gun could survive, too. Especially modern guns that contain a lot of plastics and stainless steel. The springs might be an issue, but those are also somewhat easy to fabricate.
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I would religiously clean out the chamber and barrel, just to be safe. Hell, I do it now with guns made (not literally) in front of me!
 
One of my favorite death animations comea from fallout 1 when you score a critical hit against a centaur with a plasma rifle-SPLOOSH!!!

But im curious to know if such a weapon could even exsist. A weapon that could twist your very matter so that it changes its form from solid to liquid. Pretty sure a plasma gun would only be able to do so much as to have its projectile go through you and not liquify your flesh.
 
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