Firearm confusion

If you have zero firearms knowledge then educate yourself, google and youtube are both massively useful for this, my knowledge of firearms, which I still consider limited, was actually surprisingly helpful in saving me time in Cata while raiding gun stores and knowing what calibers I should bother using against certain enemies without having to spend an hour reading through what each firearm and ammo type does.

But also

Just read the stats. Read the descriptions.[/quote]
If you read the stats on firearms and ammo you’ll eventually begin to learn which ones are useful or not in your current situation

As someone with zero firearms knowledge, and zero real need to educate myself (urbanite NZer FTW!) I find that the stats gained by using the ‘I’ button are practically all you need. The most important stat is what ammo it uses … if you don’t have the right ammo, then it is useless to you.

Once you have removed the guns and ammo that you can’t use, with the two things you want to compare on your person, or on the ground that you are standing on, push ‘I’ (for Igloo), and then ‘.’ . Any stats that are white are the same, green stats are better, and red stats are worse. Pretty much all the stats are self explanatory (better/lower dispersion makes you more accurate, better/higher damage does more damage, etc. etc.). Some stats are for using the weapon as a melee bludgeoning tool (such as to-hit and attack speed), and for most cases, can be completely ignored.

I tend to run around with a high damage, high dispersion, high recoil, small volume gun for quickly taking out big guys (generally I wait until they are 4 or less tiles away, and then plug them full of lead), and if I ever got to survive long enough I plan to get a low dispersion, high volume, bad-stats-everywhere-else gun, with plentiful ammo, for sniping long distances. I don’t even need to know what type of gun that would be, but the numbers don’t lie :wink:

[quote=“TheWumpus, post:18, topic:7505”]A Cx4 Storm with a sniper conversion and recoil stock is a great weapon into late game if you can make it happen. 9mm ammo is plentiful, and with the conversion it jumps from teens to low 20s to 50+ damage a shot. The low recoil with the stock means you can stand your ground and minimize recoil growth, and suppressed it makes like 6 noise.

For .45 I prefer a USP if I can find one, that extra 5 rounds makes a huge difference.

For armor…anything .30-06 and up. Put a brass catcher and scope on that puppy and snipe turrets from 25 tiles away.[/quote]
I knew something was off when you said Storm+Sniper+9mm.

I’ve decided to upload a database with shitloads of guns(and lots of other stuff like load bearing equipment) with realistic stats from another game called Jagged Alliance 2.
The material was all sourced by fans as an unofficial expansion so it’s pretty accurate.

Here it is 2mb compressed, unpacked it’s 12mb.
http://a.pomf.se/cdivfv.7z
MD5(just in case) : 8DE882D8A9A8DDC45ED4B558E5A2EF23

Start with XML Editor.exe, it could take a while to load up.
Also needs .NET Framework 2 to work.

I learned lots from playing JA2.
Here’s how the program looks like

I hope any dev/contributor that uses this decides to add some stuff from it to cata, rebalanced for our game of course.

What confuses me about guns is howa .300 magnumrifle does more dmg then a railgun that fires steelbolts so fast they leave smoke trails.

Nerf that rifle or buff the railgun its not quite realistic >.<

[quote=“Valpo, post:24, topic:7505”]What confuses me about guns is howa .300 magnumrifle does more dmg then a railgun that fires steelbolts so fast they leave smoke trails.

Nerf that rifle or buff the railgun its not quite realistic >.<[/quote]

A high speed rod does a lot less damage than a bullet fragmenting in the target.

Not true if said rod goes that fast you wouldliterrary explodeafter beeing hit irl. Also consider the size differense of a bullet and a the steel rods you load into therailgun). Furthermore the bulletdoes NOT fragment its an ap round made to pierce armore not to fragment.

Yeah, if it’s going fast enough to leave a vapour trail (Which I presume is what the smoke represents), it’s going fast enough to literally drag most of your internal organs out with it on exit. I’d imagine that would be fatal to most targets.

It might, but ive done alot of hunting, often a through and through wound with a powerful gun and hard ammo can just be a hole in one side and right out the other, the bullet needs to mushroom or fragment inside the target for maximum damage. What is a clean (ish) hole with one bullet will often be a tiny hole in one side and a bloody fist sized mess in the other with a slower, softer bullet.

Slower bullets will also ‘ping pong’ around inside if they hit a bone, whereas a higher powered one may go clean through the bone and just keep going.

Y’all seem to be confusing “solid projectile going somewhat fast”, “solid projectile going extremely fast” and “a cloud of plasma and molten metal”.
First one’s going to leave small hole on entry and big on exit, second one is going to leave two small holes and a mushy, bloody pulp inside (hydrostatic shock - yes, it IS a thing), third is going to leave burnt gaping hole in whatever you were shooting.
Railguns doing less damage than a .300 round is only explainable if they’re the first, sub-sonic, type. If they leave smoke trails? All bets are off, they’re either second or third type and SHOULD do more damage than most puny rifle rounds (i.e. everything but Rivtech ammo, .700 NE and .50 BMG) due to their sheer energy.

P.S. And if you somehow manage to reach energies of the third stage with projectile remaining solid, you’re going to get hot plasma trail, charred insides, two small holes and a cone of blood and guts behind the exit point.

Alternatively, the metal rail could just be super heated and and violently oxidizing to leave that smoke trail. Would allow subsonic speeds (which is were a modern man-portable railgun fits in).

However, this would also imply horrifying pain as the target gets slowly roasted from the inside out.

[quote=“Daidalon, post:30, topic:7505”]Alternatively, the metal rail could just be super heated and and violently oxidizing to leave that smoke trail. Would allow subsonic speeds (which is were a modern man-portable railgun fits in).

However, this would also imply horrifying pain as the target gets slowly roasted from the inside out.[/quote]
Don’t think blob feels pain. Things that are alive in the regular sense of alive-ness (animals, mutated humans like dementia, NPCs) yes, should die in horrible pain and just as incapable of doing things as player.
Also, wouldn’t such a weapon be blocked by Geneva pact?

I think that no matter what the answer is, railgun needs a buff. Any one of these options is scary.

I think there are plans to make projectiles continue travelling if they have enough energy, which would greatly benefit railguns. Anyway, the ferro-magnetic rail rifle, the bolt driver/repeating crossbow, the pneumatic assault rifle, and the energy weapons are all relatively hastle free as far as ammo goes, provided you have enough infrastructure.