Regarding the "Sniper perk"...Anyone play Mass Effect 2 as in Infiltrator? What if they added a time dilation bonus everytime you scoped in with your sniper rifle or AMR with the perk?

What I mean is, if you take the (totally fake and made up by me) Sniper perk, everytime you bring up the scope time will slow down (as if you've taken turbo) for one or two seconds to make headshots easier to hit when snipers scope.

Err...not, that is what VATS is, really.

Again, the problem is just some how all the 'morden' military gun is inferior in every way compare to military gun of last century.

That is not what VATS is - VATS is totally automatic. The only thing the player controls is target selection (down to body part).

Furthermore, time dilation while scoping is useful at all ranges, unlike VATS. Just wondering, have you played Mass Effect 2?

The discussion seemed to have progressed past the "military gun is inferior" aspect for a while now. We were talking about perks - specifically, what perks that would be useful in a sniper customization - that would balance out the Cowboy perk.

I am so gald you mentioned that. That's the real problem I have with the way Josh laid out the weapons for us. It makes some sense, especially if you understand the intent to favor cowboy weapons (for whatever reason. I know Josh has a 1892 lever, but he also has a Mauser K98 :confused: ). I hate to use the words "suspension" and "disbelief" in the same sentence (mainly because they're hard to spell :hubbahubba: ), but I have a terrible disconnect when I use a high velocity rifle and it does less damage than a pistol round shooting lever-action at great distance. Hell, IRL, it would be incredibly hard to even hit your target at some of the distances I shoot at in game. If the max draw distance really is 1500m like someone posted, then you'd have to be a world class shooter just to be able to hit anything with any weapon.

To sum it up, high performance rifle rounds should beat pistol rounds any day. I need no more proof than this: In the latter half of the 19th century, when very effective lever-action weapons were finally put into widespread manufacture, very few, and I mean almost no, national militaries used them. Power, range and inherent design negatives made them very unattractive for military use. The US Army continued to use a single shot rifle rather than the much more advanced, more rapidly firing lever-actions until they changed to a real modern magazine fed bolt-action rifle. Once James Paris Lee perfected the integral box magazine for the bolt-action repeater, there was no looking back and almost no militaries used the lever-action again (the notable exception being Tsarist Russia using the Winchester 1895).

History has shown us that lever-action rifles were never a match for the single shot rifles they followed or the bolt-actions that followed them. Just look at the ballistics of these two rounds to get an idea of why: .308 inches of drop at 500 yards = 47.2; .44 mag inches of drop at 500 yards = 227.8. Yes that's correct. You have to adjust sights, or hold off almost 20 feet above the target to hit it at 500 yards. That's a pretty long shot, but for those of you who have less knowledge, in the Marines, you shoot qualification at 200, 300 and 500 yards. Every bullet I ever fired from an M16 at the 500 yards line hit the bull. I'm a pretty good shot, but this tells you that 500 yards, as a target range, while long, is not that difficult a shot. I doubt I could even get the .44 on paper at 500 yards. The other thing is wind drift. Each bullet design lets it cut through the air with greater or worse effeciency. Wind drift @ 500 yds for the .308 is 30.4" while the .44 is 98.1". There is simply no comparison in the performance of these two bullets at any kind of range.

Close up, inside the effective range of a lever-action fired .44, the comparison is closer, but then you get into that old saw about what makes a round "more powerful"? I've posted these numbers before but here they are again: .308 energy at 200 yards = 1895 ft-lb. .44 energy at 200 yards = 1305 ft-lb. Only when you take into account the diameter of the bullet do the number start to even out between the two: .308 TKO @200y = 15.8, .44 TKO @ 200y = 16.4. The .44 never has more energy than a .308 and only has a better TKO inside of 200 y. And that only matters if you're in the camp that believes that the bigger the bullet the better, rather than the faster the bullet the batter. Any blend of the two I can make never has the .44 greater than the .308. And that doesn't even take into account bullet penetration. the spitzer point, FMJ high velocity .308 has an incredible penetration advantage over any flat nosed, slower .44, excepting maybe AP, which is not in the game.

I've gotten to the point where I have preliminary working numbers for adjusting the damage of all rifles/pistols/SMGs. I think I'll post my current numbers and where I'm going with them either here or in the damage thread I started.

Edit: I think I'll post it over in the other thread, since we've moved on to perk fixing as so noted above.

-Gunny out.

I am sure it is more like 1600' instead of meters.

And thanks in advance for working at SMG caliber.

Well that's even better. 1600 feet is damn close to 500 yrds, a range I am well familiar with the performance of most of these weapons. Do you recall that console command to get actor distance? I fear I've forgotten it.

-Gunny out.

getav range? getav vats?

I don't remember about either, but actor fade seems like per 100' to me.

IIRC if you go in console in VATS it would display the distance

Thank you .46 ACP.
I completely agree with the above statement(s).

Just for grins and tickles the .50 BMG has approx. 3,000 fps and 14,000 ft lbs of energy. Boom.

Go back a few page and look at the .50BMG's TKO

If I used the same formula for the .50 as I did for all the other weapons in the game when I came up with my new damage stats, the .50 would have had a DAM of 338.

-Gunny awed.

I do hope that obsidian *repairs the 50.bmg and makes criticals automaticly convert enemies into giblets ;p.Ive looked at a 308-50bmg and i dont see how its 7 times stronger then the 308.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Rifle_cartridge_comparison_w_scale.png

-Gunny out.

You mean a 40 Terawatt range.

Also, I would love if energy weapons worked like that. It doesn't need to be perfect, but It's better when things follow some resemblance of reality. A stylized reality, if you will, instead of just acting like the player is stupid.

In the movie he says watt, not terawatt. A watt is a measure of energy over time (1 joule for 1 second). In the movies, the plasma rifles that the terminators use have a bolt duration of 1/24th of a second or less (step-framing through the movie). If each bolt is 40 watts, over 1/24th of a second, then each bolt delivers about 960 joules. Which is a respectable amount of energy, roughly comparable to a .357 Magnum slug. Coupling this kind of delivered energy with automatic fire (~500 rounds per minute), extreme muzzle velocity, no appreciable recoil, and apparently near-bottomless magazine capacity, it's not hard to see why this would be an ideal weapon for a Terminator hunting humans.

Or about the power output of a small home micrwave oven in the US @ 110v, right?

Uh, what? <_<

960 joules over 1 sec = 960 watts, or about the output of a small microwave ~1000 watts.

Ah, I see where you're going. However seeing as the plasma rifle delivers all that energy in one short burst, it's more like standing in front of 48 small microwaves (microwave ovens are only about 50% efficient at turning electricity into microwaves) all focused to one small part of you while somebody rapidly flips the switch on and off. The experience would be unpleasant I think.

You mean watts?

Take this modern-day real life example:
A big explosive charge is used to blow a hole in a wall,
then somebody got the bright idea to use a shaped charge - focus the power in one small location -
thus decreasing the amount of power necessary to blow a hole in a wall.

If you focused the energy in a toaster oven enough (laser beam anyone), I am sure it would do much more damage than opening the door,
peeking inside, and saying -not much going on here...but my pot pie looks tasty.

Personally all I use is the completely mod up cowboy repeater for actual combat the sniper rifle mod out for long stealth shots and amr every thing else especially since theirs the glitch when you use the incinerator rounds if you vats on something then close out without shooting it'll do the same damage without bringing them after you and without losing Rep.

Real sniping should be outside of VATS range.

It is just a sad paradox that you are suppose to use leveler to snipe.......

The small/medium bore high velocity cartridges won't show their main advantage over large bore slow/medium velocity cartridges due to the fact that there's no exterior ballistics modeled. The former allow for less chance of a first round miss due to range estimation errors as they shoot much flatter.

Out to 100 yards, a .44 Magnum rifle can take game much larger than a .308 Winchester rifle with a typical kill zone shot (heart/lung area). You can hunt buffalo with the former at that range and under, but the latter is deemed inadequate for such at any range due to the lack of penetration of the standard hunting bullets and a lack of damage with the standard high penetrating ones.

Conversely, you can hunt deer sized game out to 200 yards with a .308 Winchester rifle, whereas it's pretty much impossible with a .44 Magnum rifle due to the bullet drop (even though a .44 Magnum rifle will have enough penetration to shoot through a deer at that range).

.357 Magnum and 5.56mm NATO can be compared similarly (albeit, the .357 Magnum is a deer sized cartridge at short range, and the 5.56mm NATO is a small game one at longer range/small deer sized at short range).

.50 BMG is in a whole other class compared to all the others (it can exceed the elastic threshold of parts of the human body, i.e., blowing off limbs with a solid hit, even with ball ammunition); .45-70 Govt. is closer to .44 Magnum/.308 Winchester.

Energy figures don't give an accurate picture--a hunting broadhead arrow has less than 100 pounds of energy, and the tissue damage it will do is as great as most high powered hunting rifles (which have thousands).