I've resigned myself to using .50 cal and 5.56mm ammo as an income source. I know I may regret this when mods or a decent DLC weapon that uses them shows up...

+111111

.50 cal ammo makes for getting a very pretty penny.

I found a pipe rifle that was .50 only thing is the damage was not that much more than the .308 version.

I made a business using water purification. I have 4 large purifiers and 1 small one in the river in Sanctuary. Every so often, I come back and there is like 117 purified waters in my workshop. Sell to my Lvl 3 vendors for 10 caps each. Tidy income! Easily buys any ammo I am short on. Usually .50 and the Gauss ammo.

Yeah, purified waters are a steady source of income.

I've got 35,000 caps so far so part of me wonders why the hell I keep hoarding more and more instead of just buying everything in sight.

I found a Pipe Rifle with that also, but technically it's just a basic Pipe Pistol with a modded stock and .50 mod added. Hell every 'Pipe-anything' is basically a Pipe Pistol modded. I turned a Pipe Pistol into a sniper rifle, a full auto machine gun, etc.

Yeah, since there is no rifle that can fire the .50 round by default, you can't get any bonus reciever damage... which pretty much makes .50 ammo equally powerful to .308 ammo (slight edge to .50 but not enough to justify the cost and rarity of the .50 ammo)

I find it incredibly lame that they have ammo in the game and no gun that can shoot it by default...

It is true that the 50 caliber does not do enough damage,

but what really bothers me is that Bethesda don't bother,

to model a weapon for caliber 50, personally I would love a gun that look like the Great Britain AS50 with fallout look

These people that keep popping up looking for absolute accuracy in the game's ballistics and engineering are going to really freak out when they notice the super mutants, deathclaws, ghouls and plasma weapons that are all over the map.

It's not Call of Duty. It's freaking Fallout.

Call of Duty isn't that realistic either, besides people dying very fast to bullets. A bit of effort at realism and sticking to the guns in the lore would be nice though. What even is that Assault Rifle? It's not something in previous fallout games and based on the looks, it's not something I'd miss if I never saw it in another Fallout game.

Not entirely true, though I get where you're coming from. There is three separate "Pipe-" frames that have their separate starting ammo type and separate mods (ie mods that don't fit into the other type)

Pipe gun - usual versions pipe pistol or pipe rifle. Uses .38 ammo
Pipe Revolver - uses .45 natively if I don't recall wrong
Pipe Bolt action - uses .308 without ammo mod

All pipe weapons are mods of those three, be it pistol or rifle, auto or not and with some ammo type mods.

In the same vein, Hunting rifle and sniper rifle are the same frame. So you find legendary hunting rifle, you have your legendary sniper rifle as soon as you stuck a scope to it. (And maybe the fancy stock)

Edit: fixed the name to bolt-action. That's what I get from making posts out of memory at work.

It has nothing to do with reality, it is a game related fault. The .50 is the glorious end mod of the hunting rifle class, a caliber with limited ammo for which you need a tier 3 perk. It should increase the damage considerably. The hint to the real ammo performance was mostly for informational purpose. But if Beth uses names borrowed from real cartridges, the ingame performance should be at least not extremely counterintuitive. I would never demand that the .50 should deal 4 times more damage than the .308. But it should increase damage more than for 1/10.

Then why bother naming after real-world caliber sizes?

Also that's beside the point. It's less about realism and more about upping the damage to a more reasonable level since .50 caliber ammo is rarer. That's all the folks are asking. Otherwise .308 is inherently superior and makes .50 pointless.

Anyways once the GECK comes out, I'm pretty sure modders will take care of this balance problem as well.

Not every .50 cal cartridge uses .50 BMG cases or projectiles.

Yeah that's right, except in my game (N/A) what you are calling Pipe Pump Action is actually Bolt-Action.

I think any rifle you put a scope on suddenly becomes a Sniper rifle, be it a hunting rifle or a pipe gun with a stock and scope.

Thanks, you're right. I remembered the name wrong since I'm not at my computer, fixed it in the original post.

For the sniper thing, I seem to recall the pipe weapon, even when adding scope to it, retains the "pipe" part in the name, becoming "pipe sniper rifle" (or something more convoluted, debending of the other mods) while specially with hunting rifle it removes the part "hunting" when scoping it becoming just "sniper rifle". That is, as long as you don't give a custom name at which point the name stops changing by the mods you add to it.

Regarding the subject of the thread, it seems to me that the standard .308 receiver damage is about half of the .50 receiver damage. If you compare just the change of ammo type, it does in fact nearly double what .308 does, as someone wanted. But there is no further tweaks to get it higher, as there was tweaks to get more juice from 308 bullets.

The damage increase compared to .308 doesn't seem worth it. Better to use Gauss or Plasma Sniper for heavy duty, and .308 combat sniper for lighter sniping.

Hmm. Maybe it's my level, maybe it's my 2 ranks of Scrounger, or maybe it's that I carry weapons of several calibers, but I'm swimming in .50 ammo. I use the .50 sniper a lot, and have been using it for quite awhile now, and I've never had to buy any ammo.

Hmm. Haven't found a gauss yet. And only seen like 3-4 plasma guns (so I also don't have much ammo, since I'm not looting it off corpses). The .50 sniper is still my strongest gun at the moment.

Seems rather obvious that they are keeping the 50 Cal anti material rifle for DLC.

KLEO usually sells one at higher levels.

As for damage with the weapon i have available:
Poisoner's (poison for 10 seconds) Combat Sniper: 91 Ballistic + 3 poison
Mighty (1.25 times damage) .50 Sniper: 116 Ballistic
Plasma Sniper: 80 ballistic + 80 energy
Gauss Rifle: 176 Ballistic

So 22 point damage increase for a lot rarer and more expensive ammo? And considering the .308 has DoT effect? Just not worth it. I rather sell the .50 to keep the Gauss fed

Edit: and both the Gauss and Plasma weight less

It would be fine if they made the actual .50 cartridge stronger.

I dont think its really NECESSARY to have a dedicated .50 sniper (unless its a unique?). All I want is for the damage added by the .50 mod to be multiplied by at least 1.5

I'm currently with 50 rounds of .50 and 250 of plasma and 450 of fusion cells at lvl 28. I bought a plasma sniper rifle once but I was not impressed by it. It seemed to me as if the plasma moves towards the bad guy with the speed of a snail. I also tried the Gauss (there is one buyable legendary Gauss but I have just 27 cartridges) and failed with it because I didn't like the charge function and often shot right beneath the foe (a badass supermutant with a minigun who killed me with ease). I would really prefer a .50 if it had a bit more punch than now.

I think a modded Gauss deals a lot more damage than a Fatman? But a laser musket with 5 or 6 cells loaded can do a lot with some ninja perks and is much cheaper and there is more ammo. Nevertheless I should give the Gauss another try perhaps when so many are in favour of it. At least Gauss guns were my favorite MechWarrior arms.

Hence the modding system is pretty weak sauce lol....I'd rather have quality uniques again...

amen!

If you are comparing the Standard .308 receiver to the .50 receiver mod. Comparing to the Powerful .308 receiver and the damage difference isn't worth the rarity (or price) of the .50 ammo. I had a fully modded out .308 sniper rifle and adding the .50 only raised the damage a few points. Just wasn't worth it.