For automatics in F:NV, your choices are kind of limited. They either offer pathetic damage (9mm SMG), or are horrendously inaccurate (12.7mm SMG: spread = 4? lol?) or both. So I was very interested to hear about the Automatic Rifle. Not the GPMG that I wanted, but still, shoots the respectable .308 and should leave a lasting impression on my enemy.

That...turned out not to be the case.

While it is true that the A.R. delivers up reasonable damage per bullet to bypass the DT problem that other automatics have without being limited to only using armor piercing rounds... and true that it has less spread than most other automatics... I'm finding it not very great. Mainly it boils down to two problems. The accuracy simply is not sufficient for a weapon this heavy, shooting ammo this expensive and heavy. Its lethality at point blank range where its rounds actually connect is not appreciably better than other options (my favorite, hunting shotgun with slugs) due to its low rate of fire and imprecision, and it has absolutely no ability to project firepower at a distance. Combine this with the laughably low durability (it's a heavy duty military weapon designed for automatic fire and trench warfare, that is 33% less durable than a civilian-issue hunting rifle firing the same cartridge?) that punishes you for actually using the thing on automatic.

Ideally it should be a decently accurate (0.5) semi-auto rifle when free aiming (the 1918 and 1918A1 BAR were select fire), and bump the burst in VATS to 3 rounds. And for the love of gods, increase the durability. The BAR was not known to be a maintenance hog.

:(

^this.

Momaw, unfortunatly, I can't feel your pain. When I redid my weapons, I also did the figures for the Dead Money weapons in anticipation of getting the DLC. I made the DLC mod with the new numbers for both new firearms and only played the DLC with them modded. If you're on PC, I think I included the modded stats I used in the thread I had up about it. I can find them for you if you're interested in changing them.

-Gunny out.

Weren't you mainly tinkering with damage? :unsure2:

I'm in agreement. I considered lugging around the AutoRifle, but after seeing how quickly it wore itself out and how big its dynamic reticule is all the time with Project Nevada, I dumped it.

Obsidian really needs to think about balance. First energy weapons and explosives, now the AutoRifle.

With a barrel as long as it has, it should be a freakin' sharpshooter weapon compared to the other automatics. Especially considering the cost per round of its ammo.

They did "balance" it....they offset it's devastating firepower by nerfing it's accuracy. Before the .308 nerf they would have had to give it a effective range of six feet.....now it gets the range of a shotgun.

The only problem I have with the weapon is it's pistol grip. Doesn't look right. :sadvaultboy:

Firing point blank range with a .308 rifle still does make things go along faster though.

I sorted out the damage, spread, ROF and some of the reload times, as well as modifications to the ammo types. At least to my liking.

Edit: Also weight and I might look at health some day. Not sure. Messing with health effects value and that could really screw up the game's economy. Like it's not screwed up already, right?

-Gunny out.

Exactly. Spread is just a very VERY bad system. I know they're just circumventing the engine limitations, but in the case of guns like the Assault Carbine, the Auto Rifle, and the Light Machine Gun, it just makes them useless.

I wish they would bring back the assult/chinese assult rifles back from f03. We went from only having the option of full auto rifles in fo3, to having a crap selection in nv. Isnt there a happy median? :shrug:

Yeah....since the apparent vision is guns user should circle-strafe at point blank range that's what I do with the AR now that the sniper rifle is only marginally useful.

I thlnk that most military main battle rifle s have smaller bullets now, becauce they r more accurate at range (at least this is what the military channel shows about bullets say)

So the bar not being as accurate as a semi auto m-16 or an m4 is right. The problem may be that nothing (besides lever action, bolt action or sniper rifles) is accurate enough. This is because of spread. If you take spread out then we will really be playing cod, because every bullet will hit where you r aiming from every gun.

Then it will be really really really really really really easy. So I have no problem with spread or accuracy of fo weapons.

Go to break.com search Iraq. Find some combat footage and watch how many bullets get shot when people r really trying to kill other people with small arms. Its not one shot one kill for those guys. There is some footage where u can even see them shoot people, and there is alot more than 1 shot going off from guys with m 16s when they are shooting people.

So if you want to shoot the bar at range, ads and shoot 1 bullet at a time. This way it is fine...... In real life it probably is more accurate at range, but so r all the other guns.

Your guy in not a navy seal, or a airborne ranger, or even a grunt soilder. He s a courier......... Fo3 he just came out of a vault, and his training was shooting stationary targets (that were not shooting back) from 10 feet away.

If the guns are 100% realistic then it will make the game even easier than it already is. I ve never fired a bar, but I have fired some weapons and the less time you take to aim in between rounds the less accurate they are.

So I can imagine spraying 20 rounds from a bar 1/8th of a mile away is not real accurate. They shoot big bullets which means recoil, and I bet you d have to fight to keep it under control. It was a cover fire weapon. Sure it would kill people, but IMO the guy that had the bar in a squad was shooting to make people not shoot back.

[Sigh] This is not true. Full sized rifle rounds carry a considerable amount of energy advantage over the smaller caliber munitions. Rounds like the .308 are far more accurate at range than 5.56mm. I could quote you some numbers from one of my ballistics books, but they're all the way in the garage and, frankly, I'm just too damn lazy to go get one.

-Gunny out.

I belive u , but what go to smaller rounds then????? and WHY WOULD THE MILITARY CHANNEL LIE TO ME???? I thought they were suposed to be right. Pretty soon they ll start having a bunch of reality shows like TLC and history channel.

I find the BAR highly effective. It does what it was designed to do, be an area-of-effect weapon filling the role of a light machine gun. No automatic support weapon has amazing accuracy, and the Browning Automatic Rifle definitely wasn't very accurate but it didn't need to be because you are relying more on the spray of bullets than just one bullet. Basically the way it goes when shooting any firearm fully automatic, three rounds minimum count as just one shot. That's the reality of the case.

Probably the most accurate machine gun to date without the aid of bipod, tripod, or vehicle mount would be the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_Minimi (or commonly known as the M249 LMG or C9 LMG). And that's only because it fires highly accurate .20 caliber cartridge, 5.56x45mm NATO. But even still the accuracy is much to be desired when compared to it's rifle siblings like M16s and C7s.

If you could use the Automatic Rifle in Fallout: New Vegas with the bipod deployed in a prone or supported position, I could see the accuracy being much better but already it's pretty damn good for such a high caliber weapon being fired fully automatic without any support whatsoever. Fantastic would be the best word to describe it...

The British Bren gun was often complained about for being too accurate by the men useing it. My GrandFather was instructor for it & the Lewis Gun towards the end of WW2. I wish he was still alive to swap waries with. He joined the British Army under aged at 14 in WW1, demobbed after his hitch. Joined his mothers & sisters out here in Australia (he being the only surviving male out of 5 boys) then joined the Australian army for WW2 & the Korea. Sadly he died when i was 10 in '78 of lung cancer. He set the standard his two sons(my father being one) joined the Army, my brother joined the Navy & i joined the Army.

On this I can agree. One of the things Fallout 3 did right, in my opinion, was having proof the Chinese managed to infiltrate the US. Clothes, weapons, books, Pre-War spies. But Fallout 3 is strongly lacking, I mean, I don't even think it mentions the chinese as the cause of the War. All in all, I miss the C.A.R. :sadvaultboy:

Because they're stooopeeed. I remember the Future Weapons guy telling me that the .308 was the standard round for the AK. sigh

Coming soon: 50mm Rounds can be fired by a 9mm pistol.

they are stupid....but they are only somewhat wrong there. 7.62x39 is nominally a .30 caliber round, though the actual bullet diameter is .323 not .308.

I think its a great weapon, make sure you meat the high skill and strength stuff, and if you have a high luck or the finesse perk you will critical most of the time so everything will hit.

Yeah, they're both 7.62mm so i can see why they could get it wrong, but the .308 is a full fledged rifle round with a cartridge length of 51mm. And people who make basic mistakes like this end up being shown on TV worldwide...

The major driving force to go to a smaller rifle round was the desire for higher outputs of firepower (moar bullitz). The Army learned how to read (at least a little bit, comprehension was not to come yet, though) and found out that there was a study that had concluded that the more bullets that were fired in combat, the more of the other guys got boo-boos. So they wanted automatic weapons in the hands of the individual soldier. The main problem with this is that full sized rifle rounds, ie: .30-06, 7.92x57 Mauser, 7.62x54R, .303, .308, 7.7x58 Arisaka, etc.. are almost completely uncontrollable on full-auto in a shoulder fired rifle. Too much recoil, too much muzzle rise, not enough weapon mass, not enough weapon stability. The solution was a smaller round. The Brits liked .280, the American brass liked .308, the Secretary of Defense liked 5.56 and the French liked, well, I'm not really sure what the French liked. Do the even shoot their rifles? Just kidding. Guess who won: Secretary of Defense signs the General's paychecks. In the end we forced NATO to go with 5.56mm, just like we forced them to go with .308. One side effect that was a great benefit was the much lighter weight of the ammo. Since the doggies were gonna shoot that stuff by the pallet-full in full-auto, at least they could carry more of it. 5.56mm weighs considerably less than 7.62 NATO. It worked out to great benefit to us Jarheads, since they never stopped teaching us how to shoot single aimed rounds. Marksmanship FTW.

-Gunny out.