Rapid-firing a high calibre rifle

“Near” being the keyword, there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXEK7rcqO-Y

I’d characterize that as “practically” impossible. It takes a world’s best shooter to even fire like, that, and even then it was all over the place.

Isn’t level 10 in a skill generally considered world class? Plus, it’s possible for a normal human, it should be quite doable for a bionic mutant.

World class and world’s best are two different things.
Skill 10 is “qualified to participate” in national level competition or maybe somehing like the olympics, but it doesn’t apply that you can do can automatically do something that a person already at that level has trained a great deal to do.

The guy in the video is “riding” the recoil, not absorbing it. Nothing in the game would give you the strength necessary to hold a 50 cal rifle steady whie shooting it, which is what you’d need to do to fire rapidly and accurately.

You said it would take “A world’s best shooter” to fire like that, in other words a world class shooter. It doesn’t make sense to make something impossible just because it’s impractical.

Would we have to add another skill for recoil control?

There are mutations to give you grizzly bear level strength and bionics to more than double it on top of that. 35 strength (or whatever a reasonable endgame strength build would have) should be more than enough to handle the recoil on a bigass gun.

A quick wiki check says a 5.56 NATO round has a muzzle energy of 1,758J, while .50 BMG has 18,050. So about 10 times the energy. 5.56 is pretty common for automatic weapons, so we can safely assume it can be easily fired in automatic by an average (8-10 strength) human. If strength is linear (which it seems to be, based on how it works ingame), then 35 strength should be 3.5 times stronger, so .50 cal would still be the equivalent of about 3 times the recoil of 5.56. A character of that strength probably has the large or huge mutation, in which case they’re also going to have substantially greater mass than an average human which would help a lot with controlling recoil. They also probably have the hydraulic muscles bionic, so I’m fairly sure hydraulics would be able to resist recoil far better than mere muscle.

7.62 NATO rounds which are also used in automatic (or at least burst) fire have about twice the energy of 5.56, to which the .50 cal would be only about 1.5 times stronger relative to a mutant cyborg.

In short, assuming the strength stat is linear, then burst/auto firing .50 BMG would probably be quite possible for a character with 35-40 strength. Even if it would be pretty uncomfortable and strenuous.

Who said anything about making it impossible? If we add double or triple tap for rifles (which we probably wont…), I wouldn’t specifically disallow it for high calibre rifles, but the recoil would certainly make it impractical all on its own.

There’s already a skill for recoil control, but you can’t get it (or your strength) high enough to completely negate the recoil from very large guns. That’s intentional, you can’t be superman.

I’ll point out that while that’s close range and the world’s best shooter, all shots did hit center mass on a target a few meters away, and it was 6 shots in under 1 second.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable for someone who is merely “Extremely Good” instead of “World’s Best” to keep such a weapon on target for 3-5 shots in six seconds, which is the smallest time increment cataclysm uses.

The more I think about it the more than 6 second time chunk is a serious problem. It really would never take more than 6 seconds for a half-way decent shooter to aim a rifle precisely. The “practical” shooting I’ve seen unusually involves a 3 round short burst with maybe a second or two to reaquire a target between bursts.

Isn’t barrett’s muzzle breaker taking away 70% of recoil? And recoilling barrel reduce it even more.
Also, it weights a lot. All this makes it more easy to controll than your average .375 Magnum rifle.

I’ve always imagined that some kind of Bionic Solider would use Hydraulic Muscles to get their STR high enough to fire a heavier machine gun.

I actually don’t think that it should be high enough to properly fire a Browning HMG; you should need at least 48-50 STR for that at minimum. And the only people who get that high are dedicated super-mutants (who probably have an Artifact or two backing them up).

So, instead of firing HMGs, how about we talk smaller: The realm of Miniguns and MMGs, perhaps?

Oh I see. In that case, no problem then.

No, you can just be The Flash, Batman, Iron Man, Wolverine… You can get pretty close. We’ll just have to see how it works out ingame once everything is set up to make it possible.

That is very true. I could see it taking a few seconds for very long range shots or low velocity weapons like grenade launchers or bows, but 20 seconds to aim a gun is pretty ridiculous.

I was going to quote Newton, but this video suggests that you might be right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzUAQoyvrOw

The problem with miniguns is not the recoil of individual bullets, it’s the number of bullets being fired. You need time to compensate for recoil, and with that kind of fire rate it would be impossible.

However, we do need to talk about the effects of power armor (and possibly overall body mass) on recoil.

That is not the case, “turns” are 6 seconds long (though I plan to shrink that to 1 second at some point), but a standard player has 100 moves per turn, and an action can take as little as a single move (or approximately 1/16th of a second). In other words, we could easily tweak firing times to be that fast, though in general that wouldn’t be 6 individual firing actions, instead it would be a single action to fire until the magazine was empty.

I agree, I’ve been planning to adjust the definition of a turn to be one second instead of six for roughly two years now, but it’s never bubbled up to the top of my priorities.

Wow, that video is REALLY compelling. I don’t know how much is the muzzle brake and how much is the reciprocation, but that makes it pretty clear that for a gun with those features it’s simply a matter of being strong enough to hold it up while shoulder-firing. I knew reciprocation helped a lot, but I didn’t realize it was that much.
Keep in mind though, it needs to be a gun with this kind of feature set to keep recoil down like this.
It looks like the Barret isn’t the only Antimaterial rifle to do this: GM6 Lynx 50BMG Reciprocating Bullpup -The Firearm Blog so it’s not unique by any means, but it is also not what you’d call a “standard feature”.

Re: conservation of force, there’s nothing surprising happening here, the thing that makes simple guns (revolvers, automatic pistols, bolt-action rifles, shotguns) really hard to handle is Impulse, i.e. you get all the force of the shot delivered in a very short amount of time. With a reciprocating bolt and/or barrel, that sudden impulse is spread out over a much longer period of time (in the case of the Barret, it’s fairly clear it’s somewhere close to 1/6th of a second, which for impulse is a really long time). For comparison, that 6/second turns into a cyclic firing rate of 360 rounds per minute, or a little higher than half the speed of a typical SMG. This is the same reason that a .45 pistol is extremely harsh to fire, but a Thompson .45 firing in full auto is manageable (not necessarally in a “holding it on target” way, but in a, “not having huge bruises” kind of way).

I am completely open to power-armor mounted weapons not following the limits we’re talking about here. Between greatly increased mass, much higher rigidity of the arm holding the weapon, and potentially features like further shock absorption being built into the PA arms, it would be totally reasonable to treat it as a mounted weapon platform.
I’m not particularly open to treating simple increase of mass the same way. At some point as you scale strength and the impulse of force from the gun, you’re going to reach a point where the firer is going to get injured when firing the gun. It doesn’t matter how big your muscles are if the cells they are made of get crushed when you fire the gun.

I agree, that video surprised the hell out of me.

Well currently the only two guns in game that fire .50 cal are the Browning and the Barret. I don’t know about anything less than a dedicated strength build burst/auto firing a Browning, but it looks like the Barret should be more than doable for most characters. Honestly, it sounds like we need to buff the muzzle break a bit, and possibly add a reciprocating barrel mod (at a VERY high mechanics/marksmanship skill, obviously).

Indeed. That sure seems to make one hell of a big difference compared to the recoil you see on a Browning. Long sustained fire is still going to get unpleasant fast, but short bursts look pretty doable. Makes me wonder why more large caliber guns don’t have reciprocating barrels (or maybe they do and I haven’t noticed).

Also, on muzzle brakes: I’m not a muzzle break engineer, but the couple of places I saw people talk about them they said that they could only reduce recoil by maybe 40% at most. Having said that, there are probably some interesting things you could do with a Tesla valve or some sort of door that automatically shuts to block the gasses. Sounds like it wouldn’t be very durable though.

I’m pretty happy about power armor helping with recoil, in fact we could even include some shoulder mounted or integrated weapon systems. There are all kinds of fun things you could attach to power armor.
I still think large/huge characters should have a bonus to recoil with already usable guns, not necessarily let them fire artillery pieces by hand. Even if it doesn’t let you hand fire a minigun, it should still reduce the recoil of a normal rifle.

There was also a discussion at one point about a mobile stabilized firing platform, like the thing they stabilize cameras on. My idea was to have some form of automated robot that follows you and automatically stabilizes the gun you’re holding, but I’m not exactly sure how that could be handled. It does occur to me that it would be pretty impractical and not worth the effort, but it still strikes me as a pretty fun idea. If you armored it you could even use it as a little mini-tank.

Oh wait. That’s power-armor.

It’s not something that you can just move to a different gun, the whole gun is designed around it. It’s much better to just add a bonus to the underlying gun to offset recoil.

If I had to guess, added weight and added cost. Rifles firing single shots don’t need it unless they’re really massive, and assault rifles don’t need it because they limit their recoil via keeping cartridge size under control. Also assult rifles already have reciprocating bolts, which has a lot of the same benefits.

You mean like a belt feeding mechanism? Perhaps not the same, but if we’re at the level where we can basically make equivalent guns, it should be doable.

Fair call.

10 posts were split to a new topic: Removal of impossible gun mods

I belive muzzle brake effectivnes depends on mass raitio of gass leaving the barell / mass of bullet leaving the barell.
So its more effective when working with long rifle rounds, and much less with pistol rounds.

That makes sense. Of course, a muzzle break depends on redirecting the gas and it can’t redirect all of it or redirect it straight backwards, so you’ll never be able to remove recoil entirely. Newton always gets his due.