Explosives can get location and sneak attack damage - but only on the impact damage and only if done in VATS. The explosive dmg itself will not get locational/sneak dmg. Easy to too see if you head shot someone with a missile launcher in VATS.

I played around with giving explosives crit damage and it does wierd things - like applying that damage to every one in the blast. Regardless of distance from the blast.

Look like New Vegas has the opposite effect from Fallout 3, in fallout 3 the critical damage from shotguns was very typically half the full damage say 80 in base damage, and 40 in critical, for the terrible shotgun.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/The_Terrible_Shotgun
as seen in the bottom, this rivaled fatmans damage against single targets.
Sneak attack did 2*(80+9*40)=880 outside of VAT, headshots single kills overlords and reavers,
My favorite in Fallout 3 was actual the laser shotgun from the pit, less damage but so low spread I could do headshots at medium ranges.

In New Vegas shotgun critical damage is closer to the damage of each shot, say 10, with 7 shots doing 10 damage, sneak hit will do 2*(70+7*10)=240, still decent but in VAT its only 2*(70+1*7)=154 who is not impressing, bad if you factor in the huge spread they have in VAT.

That's the thing. I'm not sure why I got lower damage in VATS than out for the same sneak attack crit. I was close enought to pick pocket and my VATS % was 95. The only explainations are either I didn't get crits on all the pellets that hit, or not all the pellets hit, even with 95% chance from 3 feet away. The non-VATS shots seemed like all the pellets hit, but I didn't do the math, I ran out of time. Real busy with the move today, and I'll be offline from wed-fri, so maybe I'll just play around with this stuff for something to do. Time to move the sleeper sofa, anybody wanna help?

-Gunny out.

In VATS you can only get a single crit pellet, as I understand. In a non-VATS sneak attack, every single pellet sneak attacks.

For example, Big Boomer has base 8.6 damage with 100 Guns, and 9 crit damage.

Assuming all pellets hit, a VATS sneak attack will do 2 x [(14 pellets x 8.6 base) + 9 crit bonus] = 258.8 damage

Out of VATS, you're looking at 2 x [(14 pellets x 8.6 base) + (14 pellets x 9 crit bonus)] = 492.8 damage

That's also what I believe to be the case. I will do some in game testing to see if we're right. Not sure when I'll have a chance to, but I'll do it.

-gunny out.

I wonder how better crticals and Elijah's Ramblings stack.

No need unless you want precise numbers. With a free-aim sneak attack every pellet that hits gets it's own critical damage bonus. A single shotgun in this case will rack up 98pts critical damage with normal buckshot and only 14 with slugs. Helpful to know at the start of a new character.

i don't think explosive can do sneak attack damage and get headshot bonus，i stay far back away Veronica and use a steath boy，when i use holorifle headshot her，it shows sneak attack critical.But when i use annabelle,nothing is showed on the screen.And i use annabelle with steady and HV missile to shoot Veronica every bodyparts in vats,i find that the DMG is the same.Yes,the DMG in Vats is higher than free aim,but i can't see the headshot bonus.

I am pretty sure it gets locational dmg - if done in VATS, I know for sure you get no dmg free fire. Best way to test is to mod the explosion to do 1 pt of dmg. Then you can see the results much better.

what i want to confirm is whether explosive can get headshot bonus,in my opinion ,when i use annabelle in vats,the DMG i hit the head should be much higher then hit the torso,for it's base DMG is 150,but i can't see the difference,i play on xbox360 with latest patch.