Which, as I understand it, must turn the armor difectly in front of it into a superplastic paricle stream, not terribly unlike my punching a hole through plate steel with a cutting torch or plasma cutter, which I just love to do, and thereby taking with it the mass of armor that it removed from the outside of the tank to the inside. If you have ever cut steel, as I'm sure many here have, you know you don't cut it with the torch flame itself, you use plasma created by the torch to melt the steel around it. Now, you can quote the wiki, which I'm sure has some fine information, but I've had the pleasure of going through training and shooting HEAT warheads and one thing always mentioned is the inclusion of the armor in the particle stream adding to the material mucking about on the wrong side of the tank (for the occupants, at least) Now, if you don't believe me, you probably won't believe my brother either, who shot at tanks (from another tank. Silliness if you ask an old grunt) for a living for 20 years and he, I reckon, from his not small font of information might just know a thing or two.

Anyways, this is a bit of a digression from sniper rifles and cowboy guns and I would much rather hear your comments on the edit I made to that post of mine showing the accuracy figures on the weapons in question.

win a change in the sniper rifle in next patch thats what.

and spraynpray again by itself is the cowboy repeater overpowewred? By itself is the trail carbine overpowered? By itself is the sniper rifle not doing its job?

It's not that I don't believe, it's just that I don't recall that the ability of a HEAT warhead to penetrate armor has anything to do with heat or by being "plasma-fied." Sure, once penetration has been achieved, the spall from the penetration would have nasty effects, but that's not how HEAT *defeats* armor, from my understanding. It's just something I picked up on the Tanknet forums, which is probably the number one source of information on this stuff.

Your brother also probably shot an APFSDS round at other tanks, not HEAT. I assume the targets were Iraqi T-55/72s? Not that it invalidates anything of what you or your brother said, but tanks typically don't shoot 120mm HEAT rounds at each other when they have a capable APFSDS round, like the M829 series in the U.S. or the DM53/63 if you're driving Leopards. Both types of rounds rely on a penetrator to defeat armor - it's just that HEAT rounds use a "plasmified jet" formed by an explosive shaped charge as its penetrator.

I may be remembering wrong, and if I am, I apologize to Tanknet, but I don't think so. For our purposes, a HEAT round can be treated as a solid projectile.

Here's a thread on the subject: http://208.84.116.223/forums/index.php?showtopic=18117

Refer to Post #3.



I'm not huge on chipping in my 2 cents on accuracy/spread figures. Mostly because I feel I need to actually shoot the gun in New Vegas before I can comment. Not because your figures are unrealistic, or whatever, but because it's a game and balancing is delicate - I prefer to "feel" how the guns shoot at range.

If you want an answer, yes, with no Cowboy perk, the Cowboy Repeater still compares very favorably to the Sniper Rifle. The basic DAM is 35 vs. 42, and the DPS of both weapons are effectively equal.

For a weapon that people can pick up before the Service Rifle (at worst, on the road to Nipton before you meet Vulpe), yes, the Cowboy Repeater is overpowered relative to the sniper rifle.

Factor in Handloader, and then the sniper rifle does more damage against unarmored targets (with its better 1.5X DAM modifier), with convergence of both weapons as target DT increases (.357 handload has a -3 DT bypass).

With regards to the TC vs. SR debate, the TC already does more DAM/shot than the SR, without perks. That is, even without Cowboy, the TC is shot-per-shot more damaging than the SR (45 vs. 42). With the handloads, this lead increases against armored targets, because the .44 SWC has a -6DT bypass, although JSP ammo gives the SR an edge on unarmored targets (1.5x DAM vs. 1.2x).

I don't get why you make such a big deal out of the Cowboy perk. It's an excellent perk to get - the requirements are easy and low level, so it's not hard to get either. IMO, everyone who specializes in guns and/or explosives should get it, even if they don't use lever-action weapons.

The comparison was less about *how* it makes parts of the target turn into flying goo, just that it does. And from what I do know, you're right, there's no thermal action from HEAT. As for Bro shooting HEAT, he shot plenty at old rusty M48 hulls during gunnery practice. I only got to shoot dragons, LAWs and AT4s. Nowhere near as much bang, but grunts are cool and tankers drool. :hubbahubba: You could say there's always quite a bit of competition between us when we get together for our annual "shoot every gun we own for 2 days, then spend another 2 cleaning them" fest.
Edit: Disclaimer: Beer was only consumed during the cleaning portion of above said activity. German. Dark. Warm.

Try out This Machine if you have it and see how you feel about the spread. I'm thinking that might be near the spread that the lever-guns should have (the brush gun should be slightly better).

That's awesome. I'm actually considering enlisting myself. I know soldiers don't actually shoot an AT4 and fill their manly activity quota everyday, and almost all of it can be considered boring, but it's actually the only available career choice right now that appeals to me, haha.



I don't have the This Machine, but I'll try to pick it up sometime tonight or tomorrow and find some Fiends to kill.

I think some people have lost sight that this is a game and not real life. You can't have too much realism in a game or it ruins balance. Unless of course you want my straight razor to kill everyone in one hit? If you want realism then I guess no more perks or traits. Unless of course there is some super gene out there that makes my Brush Gun do more damage than your Brush Gun? I can see accuracy maybe but not changing the base power of a weapon. You can shoot a gun a billion times and you will not cause more damage than what the gun is capable of.

If I understand it correctly, the projectile from a hyper-velocity solid-projectile weapon is designed to plasmafy (I just made that word up. Nice, huh?) on contact with the target. Much like a HEAT round, the plasma wave created turns the target into the damaging projectile, just like a HEAT round jets the tank's armor inside to do the damage. So when you get hit with the gauss rifle, your skin and bones turn to plasma and explode through your body from the leftover energy. At least that''s my understanding. So, yeah, they vaporize. They vaporize bits of you.

After doind some very tedious research looking a them, I would say the cowboy repeater overperforms a little (or maybe the 5.56 weapons underperform dramatically), while the Trail Carbine and Sniper/Hunter perform close enough, without cowboy perk. My gripe, as laid out in thread #1 is that the pistol rounds lose power at any range quickly, are much, much less accurate, and have a very hard time penetrating armor, while the rifle rounds don't realize the advantage of their greater accuracy and penetration capabilities. I personally think the way to fix this is not to treat the guns that shoot pistol rounds like they shoot rifle rounds and give them spread numbers accordingly, and add some DT bypass in any high velocity, non-expanding round. Here are the spread numbers of the guns in question, next to some ballistic figures from the research I've cobbled together (these figures are at 500y, with all rifles zeroed @200y):

Weapon_____________Spread#______Drop (in)_____Drift (in)
Cowboy Repeater________.04_________220.7________66.2
Trail Carbine____________.035________227.8________98.1
Hunting Rifle____________.03__________47.2________23.4
Sniper Rifle_____________.02__________47.2________23.4
This Machine____________.50_________47.2________23.4

I threw in This Machine as a standard to compare the relative accuracy of the cowboy guns to the other .308 guns. This Machine is over 10 times less accurate than the cowboy guns, while they are only a fracion less accurate than the high velociy, high performance bullet .308 guns. Changing lever action rifle spread to around .5 (most pistols are above .5) would make it so that you could hit targets close with good terminal effect, while not being able to use them as frickin sniper rifles out to long ranges.
-Gunny out.

Is the CE Guide ALWAYS wrong?!

Oh I should note 2 things.. one I dont concider the repeater overpowered overall simply because I always dump it for other guns mid game. I DO find it oddly powerful for early game where it pops up.

You're missing out on the second stage of its OPness then. You're dumping the gun right when many people pick up the Cowboy perk at level 8. The next upgrade is at level 14 with Handloader.

Hand Loader is a level 6 perk. To be honest with you though I always thought the Cowboy perk was a little too much. I mean 25% more damage can be a lot of damage and then add in the 20% (?) for the Hand Loader and that does make the gun pretty powerful. When you get up to the Brush Gun and Ranger Sequoia that 25% makes those guns even more powerful and they are strong enough to not even need the perk.

Hand Loader is a level 6 perk. To be honest with you though I always thought the Cowboy perk was a little too much. I mean 25% more damage can be a lot of damage and then add in the 20% (?) for the Hand Loader and that does make the gun pretty powerful. When you get up to the Brush Gun and Ranger Sequoia that 25% makes those guns even more powerful and they are strong enough to not even need the perk.

The perk by itself is actually not that excessive, but the combination of it with the current incarnation of cowboy weapons is. Sawyer mentioned in a couple of threads that the cowboy guns were buffed shortly before release to be faster-firing than they originally were, and then admitted he'd overdone it somewhat. He said "I originally envisioned these weapons to be hard-hitting but slow-firing, and realize now that increasing their rate of fire made them a bit too powerful". The quote is paraphrased somewhat, but the point still holds.

Since I don't have the original ROF values I have no way of knowing what an appropriate adjustment is; testing at various settings would be required, and that's a lot of work.

Anyway, point is, Cowboy Repeater is pretty damn amazing until players can find a Trail Carbine to play with, whose stats essentially pick up from the Cowboy Repeater's.

I find them overpowered even when talking about single shots. Take a look at this thread - we've been almost exclusively considering base DAM, and the Cowboy rifles handily bests any of their military counterparts.

Rank them from most powerful to least, or, if you had to get shot by one, what order would you least like to get shot by?" Does the list vary from my personal rankings? A little, but if I did a statisticaly regression, most individual's lists correlated pretty close to the end result. The funny this is, I can find NO way to rank these rounds, by any of the various metrics available to me, be it velocity, energy, size, terminal ballistics, etc., that makes them come out in this rank. So perception is a funny thing, but this is how a few folks perceive things, for what that's worth.