How difficult would it be to make mods that modify ED-E's base zapper weapon to act like different weapons for different player builds and roleplay? Since ED-E has no default Melee weapon I have long thought that it would fit a more brutal player for their ED-E to be equipped with a Buzzsaw with it getting right up in the enemy's face and slicing them up (think Phantasm). We already have a base template in the form of Mr. Handy's buzzsaw weapon.
Or a pyro player having their ED-E equipped with a flamethrower instead of a laser. I tried going through the records for ED-E's default zapper and changing everything like sound, impact data, projectile etc over to a flamethrower like the Mr. Gutsy flamethrower weapon but, weirdly, in game ED-E's weapon makes the sound of a flamer but there is no visible flame and it did not seem to do any damage to enemies.
I also thought of a less "sciencey" feel for certain kinds of characters where ED-E is equipped with a machine-gun of some sort and I did the same thing I did with the flamer to change sound, impact data, projectile records over to a machine gun based off the various robot examples like Securitrons and Sentrybots, and in game this ED-E would shoot and kill enemies but I could not for the life of me get this gunfire to be automatic (despite having the IsAutomatic flag checked and making sure that the fire-rate and attack shots/sec records were were multiplied accordingly).
Is this just more complicated to do than I first assumed or am I missing something obvious? I am pretty good with FNVEdit but don't have any knowledge of animation or writing new scripts so that's why I was trying to keep the implementation as simple as possible. Everything I tried there I did using FNVEdit rather than going into the GECK. Is that my problem? Do these kinds of changes require using the GECK in order to take effect properly?
Thank you for any help you can provide since, as of right now, I'm not sure what else to try in order to make it work.