Better Red Glare and SMMG.

[Anguti222]

The Red Glare and Shoulder-Mounted Machine Gun aren't as good as they should be, the Red Glare has a great fire rate and can be used for sniping with the impressive scope, but it's raw power is very lacking. The SMMG is very powerful for an automatic weapon and looks awesome, but it's fire rate and clip size just doesn't cut it, especially when the ammo it uses doesn't have an armor piercing option.

 

Red Glare needs to have stronger impact damage, to better ignore the DT of a lot of enemies and common sense, a direct hit with a fast moving rocket should hurt more than being shot with a 10mm pistol. The explosion damage is okay, but it should be a little better than rougly half the damage of a stick of dynamite.

 

The SMMG is a Gatling cannon, the ammo capacity should be more like CZ57 Avenger or modded LMG or somewhere inbetween, and the fire rate is just too low, it should shoot faster than 7 times per second, the All-American shoots almost as quickly and it's a semi-automatic! Somewhere between 13-18 shots per second would be a good start, it would make the DPS enormous, but hey, no armor piercing.

 

Two more reasons why they should be made better. One, Red Glare when fully modded and at full repair is worth nearly 50,000 caps and SMMG is worth nearly 40,000 caps in the same condition, two, they just aren't very effective at dealing with LR enemies.

[Hectasword]

I'll give a basic walkthrough for the sake of clarity. Open the Geck and load Lonesome Road. Find the entries for the Red Glare, SMMG, the Red Glare ammo types (all of them), and the Red Glare missile projectile explosions (also all of them). This will seem to overpower both weapons, but I'm playing with my own custom damage table overhaul, so here's my personal preference: Set the explosion damage values of all the rockets to 80, 100, and 150 for the incendiary, standard, and HE explosions, respectively, and remove the HE ammo effect on the ammunition to avoid overpowering the HE rockets too much (For comparison, a frag grenade does 125 damage, I believe, and I set mine to 200). Next, open the ammunition entries. Find the ammo effect and set it to subtract DT with a value of 15 or so; that will defeat most armors coupled with the explosion damage. Granted, the Red Glare is primarily an area-of-effect weapon, but rockets would punch through body armor rather easily. This covers the blast part of the weapon. For direct hits, go to the weapon itself and increase its damage value to 40 or 50. That's an arbitrary value which, for my game, is on par with the damage of a 40x46mm grenade impact (the ammo for the M79 Grenade Rifle and China Lake Grenade Launcher; by the way, for a realistic velocity for those grenades, find the 40mm grenade projectile data and change its speed to 5250 and its gravity to 1). Finally, go to the SMMG weapon entry and increase its damage by about 10-15% to account for the improved barrel rifling and length of the weapon compared to a N99 pistol or submachine gun. A 10mm Auto round isn't designed for long range shooting, so there is only so much a longer barrel can do, sort of like with a .357 or .44 Magnum round, but the SMMG's longer barrels would increase accuracy and muzzle velocity, and thus kinetic energy retained through the bullet's flight. Cut the SMMG's spread by about 30% and multiply its rate of fire by 4 (28 rounds/s=1,680rpm), the change the attack animation multiplier from 1 to 4 to accomodate the increased rate of fire. As I said for the rockets, this value is arbitrary and probably isn't entirely realistic, but I feel it is fitting for a gatling weapon. Keep in mind that the firing sound won't reflect your rate of fire accurately, so watch your ammo counter carefully. An rof of 28 will eat through your supply of 10mm rounds insanely fast. As far as ammunition is concerned, I think a box capacity of 120 works fine.

 

Change whatever you want to your tastes, of course, but save the file and you're done.

Edited April 6, 2013 by Hectasword

[mechatech]

Using Hectaswords specs, I threw this together. Red Glare SMMG Tweaks Enjoy.

[Anguti222]

• The Red Glare tweak works great, much stronger, but not overpowered. It takes 4-5 shots to take out a deathclaw, which is good for an automatic rocket launcher, it is kinda prone to becoming ineffectual against an enemy though, several enemies become immune to rockets after being hit once for some reason, I fought a group of NightStalkers, one of them became immune to rockets, two groups of Bark Scorpions, one became immune in each group and finally two groups of deathclaw, one in each group became immune as well. It might just be a bug with explosives in general though.

The SMMG tweak, the fire rate is far too much for my taste, the DPS is over 10,000. Can you make a version with only 16 shots per second fire rate? Perhaps also remove the damage tweak, 30 base damage is plenty enough for me. That would make it stronger than CZ57 Avenger, but still give the Avenger some use due to armor piercing properties. Can you also tweak the SMMG Extended Magazine mod to add 80 extra capacity? Gatlings are build for prolonged fire and the SMMG would be great for that purpose.

Edited April 7, 2013 by Anguti222

[mechatech]

Red Glare - I have no idea what's going on there. I've never experienced enemies becoming immune.

 

SMMG - Done.

[Anguti222]

Endorsed, thanks for the work.

[mechatech]

Uploaded corrected versions. There are two variables, fire rate and attack shots/sec. I think one is for actual damage and the other is for animations. I only had the first changed, fixed now.

[Anguti222]

Increase the requirements of the SMMG to 100 Gun skill and 8 Strength, it makes the requirements equal to the LMG. It's weight and it's classification as a heavy weapon makes it cumbersome but it would be easier to wield than a minigun.

 

Add a crit multiplier, 0.06 is the same as the LMG and it seems fitting. Set the fire rate to 15, that gives it a max DPS of 630 with 20% fire rate boost from Fast Shot and 18% dmg boost from damage boosting perks. Significantly higher compared to CZ57 Avenger's 540 DPS with the same bonuses.

 

My calculations tell me that the SMMG and CZ57 Avenger have the exact same DPS against 15 DT enemies using standard rounds with this configuration, 360 DPS. CZ57 Avenger has much higher DPS with AP rounds, 504 DPS.

 

Note: It may be using 10mm Magnum(it's a real cartridge) instead of 10mm auto, much like how Survivalist's Rifle probably uses .50 beowulf instead of .50 AE or .50 GI like 12.7mm pistol and 12.7mm SMG uses.

 

Set the explosion damage of the Red Glare to 60, it will reach 100 with Demolition Expert, Bloody Mess and Lord Death. The default rocket ammo multipliers should be used. No need for the DT reduction with 50 impact damage.

 

The spread should be set to 0.2, less than unmodified missile launcher, but more a than modified missile launcher.

 

The damage may seem low for an explosive weapon, but the fire rate and long range would make the Red Glare superior to Mercy if it was any stronger. Gaining HE rockets is also very easy, you just need to buy a large amount of standard rockets, convert them to HE rockets and sell the leftover conductors to regain caps.

Edited October 21, 2013 by Anguti222