Hello everyone, I'm starting a discussion here on the realistic quality of firearms in Fallout. I am doing this because I'd love to capture the perfect balance between fun and function with firearm usage in Fallout. Also because it has been several months since I downloaded a Skyrim mod from the Nexus and I'm probably suffering from "immersive bullshit redux" withdraw or whatever they smoke over there...

So, as any player of Fallout knows, guns are a big part of the combat in the game, and there has been a huge amount of time and effort put into the gigantic amount of firearm mods out there, from Millenia's amazing weapons to the awesome RSA weapon pack to well, about half of the plugins in our load orders.
I'm not a modder of any sort, my capabilities extend only to playing with numbers in Fnvedit, so I'm thoroughly useless when it comes to creating content (though I do think I take a pretty screenshot)
What I am, however, is a recreational shooter, with a great interest in the practical and theoretical aspects of weapons. I've been making tweaks to different mods already, making weapons use the correct cartridge, and trying to make the weapons themselves behave like real weapons.
For example, I use both RSA's weapon pack and AKs&ARs. (http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/42970/?)
I've been tweaking RSA's weapons so that they use the ammos present in Aks and ARs, such as the 5.45x39. This allows many of the Russian weapons chambered in 5.56 to use their intended cartridge, which is much more realistic. Beyond that, I've been applying rates of fire of real weapons (though in some cases lessening them for balance reasons) and the trickiest bit, making weapons reflect the ammo they fire.

For real weapons, the cartridge, not the gun is what hurts the enemy. The gun is simply a convenient launching pad. While longer barrels impart greater velocity, they there's only so much damage a weapon can do given its cartridge. That being said, I've been changing the weapon damages to reflect this. For instance, I have the 5.56 doing between 20-27 in base damage, depending upon barrel length. This round has a greater range of damages, because the 5.56 round does its damage by tumbling through a person's body. It's essentially a long .22 round traveling at 3k fps. Being intended to fire out of the 20 inch M16 barrel, the round can be very damaging. But troops report that the 16 inch barrels of their M4s often don't impart the needed velocity to tumble correctly, causing it to quickly pass through the enemy, not doing much damage at all.
Compare that to the (added by AKs&ARs and RSA's pack) 7.62x39, a wider, heavier and slower bullet that ranges between 29-34 base DAM. The 7.62 round is more than twice as heavy (usually, loads vary in weight) as the 5.56, but it travels 600-1000 fps slower. It will hit harder, and do more base damage. I have done this for most of the cartridges.
In addition, accuracy is a bit cartridge factor. The 7.62x39 is simply balistically much more unstable than the 5.56, and thus I make the 7.62x39 weapons have a min spread of .4-.6, while 5.56 has a min spread of .4-.2

This can get pretty comprehensive, but I think it's a worthy project. I would like to see a better re balancing, of guns, so that our late-game characters don't have to be ignoring all the weapons that are plenty effective in real life simply because the all-powerful base DAM is too low. I'm not skilled at all, but I'm happy with what I've done. I imagine with some people who actually know what they're doing, something very, very cool could be done to weapons.
There's an entire field of science to be understood when it comes to what happens when something gets shot, but I've shot my share of guns, and more importantly, I have a decent amount of research on the topic (at least for mucking around with a video game).
I'm not planning on releasing a mod or anything (a lot of other people's work, no permissions to distribute), but if people think this is worth the time, I'd be more than happy to supply the real world info about guns/ammo/armor to someone more talented than I who could take my ideas beyond the reach of my technical abilities.
Also, I'd like to foster some discussion about how things work IRL vs Fallout, how to balance things, and instruct people in what I've done if they'd be interested in downloading and changing their files themselves.
So everyone, I hope I'm on to something here. Let's talk guns.

It was similar thought and desire that got me into modding in the first place when I met a modder named FluidFire who created the original Reload mod that the eventual Caliber and CaliberX resources spawned from.  FluidFire went through explaining the math of it, which was over my head, but seemed to sort of revolve around the 9mm projectiles being somewhat accurate to real life and scaling the rest of the game around that in an optional mod called Rebalance that was part of the Reload suite.

Long story short, same idea - damage by caliber and adjusted by barrel length.  I have since used that system in my own game and tweak pretty much every firearm to fall in line with it.  The eventual values were something like this:

damages by caliber:

One mod that I've been mulling over in my head is a script-based plugin that applies weapon damages based on which ammo list is being used. I'm pretty useless at scripting though so I don't know if I could do it on my own but basically I was thinking the script would take every weapon in your game, record its ammo list, then apply a new damage according to this list. Wouldn't be too hard to make a CaliberX patch if I'm thinking right. Is this even possible?

In a game like Fallout you really want to have that realism and I was always pissed off by the fact that how little effort it seems to went making gun play work. And it's not just Obsidian Bethesda did the same thing in fallout 3 too.

Aside from Fallout Battlefield is one of my favorite game and so many times I dreamed of having that gun play in Fallout universe. But I'm really looking forward to Fallout 4 as it really looks more like a modern shooter from the footages I have seen.

Personally I dont know jack about modding so I really appriciate people who spend time over this stuff and then share it with others for free. I really like that mod you mentioned too the AKs&ARs mod. Are you using Hitman's first person animations ? Because for me they dont really mesh nicely together. I wish Hitman would look into this issue because AKs&ARs is a good freaking mod






He is like heyooo I dont even know what I'm doing

@XxAKINCIxX what armor mod is that? Looks cool and it seems like hands have decent textures.

@meowjar looks like one of the MW3 SAS outfits from Drags old VGU armor packs

EDIT: Also @XxACKINIxX to solve your animation issues try installing Hitmans pack again over the animations included with Heffys Ak and Ar pack. Or use the non-anim replacer version of the Ak and Ar pack included in the fomod

meowjar wrote:

@XxAKINCIxX what armor mod is that? Looks cool and it seems like hands have decent textures.

It's this mod
http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/52044/?

I found it while looking for a mp5 mod because I really like that weapon and I was lucky enough a modder named Raclopride made this and it's hell of a lot better that other mp5s out there

jtucker40 wrote:

@meowjar looks like one of the MW3 SAS outfits from Drags old VGU armor packs

EDIT: Also @XxACKINIxX to solve your animation issues try installing Hitmans pack again over the animations included with Heffys Ak and Ar pack. Or use the non-anim replacer version of the Ak and Ar pack included in the fomod

That fixed the weird looking stances in first person so thanks. Actually I should have tried this in the first place because mod author mentions this in his page but I was kind of blinded by the fact that I must have those custom animation that comes with the mod

Quote :

jtucker40 wrote:

@meowjar looks like one of the MW3 SAS outfits from Drags old VGU armor packs

EDIT: Also @XxACKINIxX to solve your animation issues try installing Hitmans pack again over the animations included with Heffys Ak and Ar pack. Or use the non-anim replacer version of the Ak and Ar pack included in the fomod

That fixed the weird looking stances in first person so thanks. Actually I should have tried this in the first place because mod author mentions this in his page but I was kind of blinded by the fact that I must have those custom animation that comes with the mod

Awesome! Glad I could help

I use Weapon Animation Replacer 3rs person animations in first person with Enhanced Camera's configure features, I haven't had any issues with Aks&Ars.
Brigand, I see that you're on the same page as I, though most of my calibers generally do half as much damage as yours.
I think the trickiest part of this is making both armor penetration and damage work. For instance, take the 7.62x39 and the 7.62x51 NATO (.308). They both in FMJ will do roughly a similar amount of damage to a dude in a T-shirt (probably passing right through), though the .308 will blow through most body armour due to its velocity while the 7.62x39 will get hung up on most military-grade body armor. The .308 is of course, more damaging due to its weight and speed, but they aren't so different in wounding capabilities as Fallout would lead you to believe.
I think the pistol calibers are way underpowered in Fallout as well. I think a good general way to translate this is to alter the damages to meet at a realistic medium, but to make an armour multiplier for less powerful cartridges and higher velocity rounds should have a natural DT reduction. Thoughts?

Yeah, the real trick is figuring out the balance between damage and penetration and translating that into numerical values.

...then, once you have those lovely numbers, you're left scratching your head trying to figure out how to make it work alongside melee and energy weapons.

@XxAKINCIxX Just as a quick answer to your animation issues, make sure you install Hitman's animations over the AK and ARs ones, or if you use MO, make sure Hitman's animations overwrite Heffy's. And if doing just that doesn't fix it, you can go into the Geck (after following the above steps) and change the handgrip (click on the weapon, click the Art and Sound tab) of all the weapons to Default. You might lose the handgrip, but it should solve that arm problem you get when firing. Hope this helps.

-Hax

Edit: To add to the thread, personally I have Reload (on the Nexus) and I just add any new weapons to that base ammo enhancement. Then, I went through and changed almost all the calibers to have at least 2 or 3 DT reduction, while changing stuff like .308 and 50 cal (especially ammo piercing) to have like 20 DT reduction because that stuff tears through anything and combined it all into a plugin. Makes sure Raiders can't take 10 rounds from an AKM to the chest, you know? But that's just my solution.