I noticed that reloaded ammo is always worse than factory loads, with 10% higher dispersion and 10% lower damage. Curious as to the rationale behind this. I only shoot with friends, but according to them handloaded ammo is generally superior to factory loads.
I think that depends on how it’s done. In game I imagine the process used leads to a less precise bullet being made along with inferior sealing or something. But yeah I don’t get why there are very few custom handloads.
Edit:note I have zero experience of actual handloading with the most knowledge being educated guessing and skimming a Wikipedia article.
As there’s no solid numbers one way or the other, it’s set to make the (limited, scavengeable) factory loads better than the (unlimited, craftable) hand loads.
It also leaves the door open for better or specialized hand loads to be added in the future, perhaps with higher tool and/or skill requirements.
1 Like
Aside from getting an assortment of parts are the factory machines from vaults going to be useful?
No, that kind of thing tends to be pretty specialized, so repurposing them is difficult to impossible, plus you somehow need to supply power for them.
There’s an intermediate set of tools you’d find in a “machine shop” like lathes, drills, metal breaks, etc that are intended for general-purpose machining, but to support something like that we need greatly expanded crafting qualities.
As in more tool qualities, higher tool qualities or something else? With that said then what are the factory machines at vaults supposed to be producing? As for powering them well the main issue with any kind of machining tool would be more of figuring out how to get it to where you may be able to install it on a heavily modified big rig or something than figuring out how to power it unless said power requirements are somehow outside the realm of being powered by a miniature nuclear reactor(or whatever they are supposed to be as fuel rods in a traditional reactor usually last years). (Only semi related quest does the code for the plasma engine still exist or is it entirely out of the game?)
Sounds like an interesting and logical expansion to crafting.
Is there some problem preventing those from being added in, or is it just a matter of someone writing in item definitions and crafting recipes?
The only in-code feature they need that they don’t have is support for powered furninture that acts like a specialized tool. Most of the pieces are present, but it needs to be stitched together.
1 Like
A handload and a reload are two entirely diffrrent things unless its a shotgun shell.
is already 9mm +P and +P+. guessing eventually we can get things like that for other ammos.
Well the difference is if you have ever actually made your own bullets. Your hands and that press are not as precise as the machines and people that make them in a shop. You can be pretty damn close though. But I am of mind to agree with hand loaded bullets in that exists in the discrepancy we have already in game. It also makes sense as Kevin pointed out for more options.
Well, I would think with the real world model focus you would default that reloads are similar enough in quality.
Yeah, I can accept that this is a lower skill reload recipe that isn’t the same quality.
Maybe an automated press that takes a higher level of skill to build or configure? I might work on this myself actually if I get time. What’s the preferred implementation for something like that? A furniture piece like the fermenting vat/kiln?
Not really. Technically a reload is a subset of a handload, specifically referring to reusing spent casings. But in practice the terms are used interchangeably, since the only difference is where the cases came from. Designing a new load is a different thing, I suppose.
Overpressure ammo is commercially available, and there are both reloaded and non-reloaded overpressure rounds in the game.
As far as I know, we currently don’t have the code for power-consuming furniture.
Simplest way I know of would be a really heavy tool and a bunch of new ammo crafting recipes (maybe they’d produce normal ammo instead of “reloaded” ammo). The recipes would require and consume battery charges from that tool.
Could be vehicle-installed as well, in which case it’d consume energy from the vehicle.
You could even expand this beyond making high quality ammo - since you’re using a machine, you could have the ammo produced in batches, to represent sped up production as compared to doing it by hand.
It would also be possible to abstract out automated ammo making - say, a short crafting recipe (to represent configuring and filling the machine) that consumes the tool, battery charges, and materials, and creates a “working ammo press”, which would function sorta like a charcoal kiln - you wait a while, and then disassemble it to get the tool back, along with ammo.
This wouldn’t be compatible with the vehicle-mounted ammo press idea, though, since it would consume the tool during the process.
Oh right, I had forgotten about this, but it was part of the rationale. the recipe doesn’t (and based on the current code, can’t) distinguish between used and new casings or more generally casing condition, so it pessimistically assumes the casings are reused and in poor condition. In practice, this can lead to all manner of problems, but the only part we can reasonably represent in the game is performance degradation, so that effect is exaggerated.
Ideally, we would track casing condition, and ammo crafted using damaged casings would suffer the performance problems we have now (but possibly to a lesser degree) as well as reliability problems.
In order to make that a reasonable thing to add though, we’d need to handle grading the casings, so that the player can simply avoid using casings once they have become damaged. That ends up being quite a bit of work for a fairly minimal benefit, so it’s still in the initial state of player-crafted ammunition being substandard compared to factory loads.
If we do add hand loads on par with factory loads a part of that would be differentiating new casings from used casings. The simplest way to handle this would be for casings spawned in the world in shops to be a slightly different item that counts as “new”, and the casings produced when a gun is fired to be the current “non-new” item type. Then crafting recipes for “standard” ammunition could be added that use the “new” casings and perhaps some slightly elevated tool and skill requirements could be added.
The main thing to be careful of IMO is making sure the descriptions of the items and recipes make this distinction clear, because if they don’t there will be a lot of people confused about being unable to make crafts based on which casing type they have on hand.
I have no idea what you’re talking about…
Dont casings already degrade in game anyway? Plus, using degraded casings can lead to very dangerous failures more than simply lower performance. There should be a difference in casing quality depending on the type of gun (e.g. G3s are very well known for completely wrecking casings) and ammo catcher should greatly inrease the chance of recovering good casings.
And yeah Kevin, ball bearings are relatively common in reloaded shotgun shells because, well, they’re very small smooth metal parts that fit in most shotgun shells anyway.
Personally, I think its a pain that there’s a distinction between reloaded/hand-loaded ammo and factory made ammo at all. Yes, I know it fits with the setting and makes sense from a realism standpoint, but by the time you have a good supply of HQ ammo, the reloaded stuff basically becomes trash. It’d be a nice quality of life mod if you could just craft the normal stuff.
That’s my two cents. Since its almost Christmas, I’m giving you guys Wheat Pennies. 
I mean, a hand press and die set is the same tool used in both cases. Ideally with the reload you’d add a new tool “electric lead smelter”, and new bullets would require both new casings and factory pressed bullets.
Also somebody above said ball bearings should be used in reloads. Depending on your size concept I can’t see why the bullet matching that size couldn’t use a bearing in lue of lead/silver/gold as the metal componant. Maybe standaardize the bearing to 9.01mm. Or bring back mïnne balls!
Not all presses are going to be the same, tolerances around alignment and pressure come to mind as the most likely factors to impact round reliability. Alignment is pretty obvious, but a more advanced tool could have a pressure indicator so that every bullet is seated with the same amount of pressure, which seems very likely to impact reliability.
@steelmaniac covered the issues inherent in using a ball bearing as a projectile in a rifled barrel. Yes steel bearings make perfect sense for shotgun loads, thanks for clarifying that. That either leads to allowing bearings in the shotgun rounds, or making new shotgun rounds that use them. I’d expect steel shot to have rather different characteristics compared to lead, but I don’t know what they would be offhand.