As far as im concerned, the G36 is just another Assault Rifle-type weapon using 5.56mm bullets.
Im pretty good at making up fake names for weapons not invented yet - like the SE-6 combination grenade launching assault rifle system.
And bullets too - though I tend to be more plain than most when it comes to ammo; stuff like 7mm rifle bullets, 20mm rockets, and 30mm shotgun shells.
Who ever thought of making a rifle bullet that not only had a calibre of .223 inches and 5.56mm... neither of those numbers are very standardized. It's like making the freezing point on the farenheight scale to be 32degrees instead of 0.
Why didn't they simply make a 5mm or 6mm rifle bullet. Then of course there's always the minor differences in much of the 7.6mm bullets (.3006, .308, .303, the list goes on). Should have simply made all of them 7.5mm or maybe even upgraded them to 8mm.
on that note, i think you should find gauss rifles only from high tech places, not like in FO2 where you could buy one from Red88 or that other guy in SanFran. how the hell did they manage to get a gauss rifle? kill and enclave guy? ...right...
As I recall some of the people in the tanker had high-tech guns. Someone there has a XL enfield and someone has a G11. Someone there actually *has* an M-72 gauss rifle too (guy at the bar), I think someone else has a pancor jackhammer too. They're awful rich to get those weapons for being poor tanker vagrants eh?
I think that the tanker had a whole buncha stuff left on it from when the enclave got done with it and installed the FOB system (before it rolled into harbor), but I would think that the enclave would have been a little more complete in retrieving items as valuable as gauss rifles and other high-tech guns (they did leave the wanamingo monsters there as guard dogs).
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The G11 sucks. It's a great armor penetrator, but doesnt do all that much damage... and it automatically fires in 3 shot bursts from what i've heard (which means that you lose ammo much faster). And yes - being caseless exposes the propellant directly to the elements, severly limiting it's shelf-life. Cased bullets are much more reliable (but I wouldn't put money down that they'd last more than 80 years).
I think that there shouldn't be as much of a money bottleneck as there was in fallout2... it was rediculous. But they did it so that you'd have to eventually screw yourself out of a whole buncha money by selling items directly for items and not simply cashing in. That doesn't mean that I had to like it though.
Yes, shops should sell much more ammunition... or sometimes even use ammo as a form of currency (oooh, think of the possibilities - the more ammo you shoot, the poorer you get, but it's really an exchange of money for power and possible loot).
Ammunition should also be as expensive as the difficulty required in making it (since i'd assume that all ammo you'd use would have been produced by someone locally, not scavenged). But it should definatly be cheap as well - enough pistol and rifle bullets to kill a few people should be attainable with chump change.
Weapons which are abnormally unbalanced (sort of like the .223 autoloader, and IMO how the FN FAL should have been in Fo2) should probably have a limited supply of ammunition. That way you can't rely on using a tried-and-true super weapon to quickly dispatch characters which should be really tough to beat.
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Shortening weapons doesn't do much but make them a little quicker to handle, reduces range, and reduces damage (slightly). It doesn't reduce AP cost - but makes it easier to unsling off your shoulder (-1AP to retrieve from inventory).
Maybe could do something like how the scoped hunting rifle couldn't hit targets up close very well. Like, a shortened version of a weapon hasn't got a problem up close but one with a long barrel gets negatives at close range (not too much, but enough to get it out of the 95% range). Also could make weapons with longer barrels vulnerable to being sundered - knocked out of your hands by a melee attack.
Also, could have two different types of single attacks - snap and aimed. Aimed takes 1 AP more to shoot, but you get subtantially increased range as well as increased
critical rating. Snap attacks would have less range but would cost 3 or 4 AP (3AP for a really small weapon like a pistol, 4AP for a rifle). Maybe a weapon with a long barrel could be remanded to having no snap attack and only doing aimed. I think that burst attacks should probably also remain at 6ap - even for SMGs... since it takes time to recover from them and they make your guns turn into super weapons (game balance issue). And what about reloading? Reloading takes *time*.
recap:
snap attack - 4ap (3ap handgun)
aimed attack - 5ap (4ap handgun)
burst attack - 6ap
aimed+targeted attack - 6ap (5ap handgun)
reload - 3ap (5ap+ for bigger guns)
Of course you can still make bigger guns use up more AP - an especially tantalizing concept for energy weapons which take time to charge up (like a big-arse laser or plasma gun, has a whining power up phase or a cool-off or something). I dont want to see much in the way of clip-fed explosive weapons unless the ammo is
rare.
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Clip sizes for handguns should be 6 bullets for revolvers, 7-12 bullets for a compact handgun, 12-15 bullets for a normal handgun, and up to 30 bullets for a non-standard handgun (like the gauss pistol or DE expanded mag).
Rifles should have a minimum clip of 10 - even the sniper rifles (either that or single shot). Standard magazine for an assault rifle should be 20, a better one (you have to buy) being 30, and drums of 50. Maybe you could obtain a special dual-drum of 100 by going on a quest.
Belt fed weapons should probably only have ammo in belts of 200, that way you dont get screwed outta ammo, and you cant go happy shooting with a minigun for too long. Could just make that the standard... limits the power of a minigun and gives heavy machineguns more power. Miniguns eat through ammo quick and take forever to reload, heavy machineguns dont do much more damage than assault rifles but with a belt of ammo they practically never run out (they also take forever to load, but you also take a long time to run out too). A belt of 50 or 100 runs the risk of making the weapon too underpowered for game balance (why use an m-249 when you can use an m-16 with a drum of 50... which is also slightly more powerful too and has much longer range?).