Wreckless1

I've always found it difficult to play 'evil' players in Fallout, even the early ones. But playing a 'good' path is meaningless if its the only path available to you, so I really like the option to be good or evil.

First, I'd like to apologize for how off-topic this post is within the context of this thread, but I really felt compelled to address these points: 1) There's no telling what the yield of the Megaton bomb was. Nor is there any telling the actual distance that is supposed to exist between the Tenpenny tower and Megaton. Most nuclear weapons in our current US arsenal are very, very small and would only be deployed well into the sub-megaton range if they were actually dropped on target. The Soviets built a few much larger nukes than we did, but the tendency for delivering many much smaller warheads is a strategic premise that has been reflected amongst all existing nuclear powers that possess any kind of trans-continental delivery system. Thus, the Megaton bomb was probably much smaller than a full megaton.. and assuming it was an implosion based fission weapon as its 'Fat Man' configuration suggests, it is likely that sitting 200+ years had deteriorated the detonation system a great deal and thus it was an imperfect and nonideal overall reaction when it was triggered, which would have significantly reduced its total yield. Anyone looking directly at the blast without significant eye protection would have likely had vision damage, however, and there would have been some fallout & radiation exposure depending on how completely the fissile material reacted and how much would have just been ejected into the ground thanks to the Megaton bomb's placement deep in a crater already. 2) You should do more research. There have been IV-based antiradiation medications for quite some time, usually used to counteract heavier-duty radiation therapies administered to cancer patients. I'm no doctor or pharmacologist but as I understand it, radioactive materials are attracted to the cocktail in your bloodstream and the active parts of the medication bind with the radioactive material, where it is filtered out of your blood and passed on through urine. There are also parts of the cocktail that help reverse/mitigate the damage done by radioactivity to your body on a cellular level. But obviously this means it has to be administered as soon as possible after the initial exposure. They can be hell on your system, especially with the more extreme versions that are used almost exclusively by the DOE, and subteams/organizations like NEST, etc (and similar agencies in friendly countries) and only indicated to for use after direct and extreme exposure. Which is to say, it'll give you a chance at survival but is far from a guarantee. Also, most of the long-term issues caused by mild exposure could have been prevented with a similar treatment if the victim knew they had been exposed and received appropriate treatment for it - note the lack of long-term radioactive exposure problems in cancer patients that have been directly irradiated, even in the early days when radiation therapy wasn't nearly as precise of an art as it is now. I'd also like to point out that the game takes place with tech development ending in 2077, considering that 60 years ago we'd barely figured out antibiotics I don't think its much of a stretch to expect more effective antiradiation medications that have few if any side effects to exist ~70 years from now. 3) Now you're just being ridiculous for the sake of sparking an argument. 4) Not everywhere got directly hit by nuclear weapons. Most of the damage from the terrible bombs dropped on Japan was caused by the fires that raged on afterwards through the periphery of ground zero. That aside, its not much of a stretch to expect to see the shells of structures, even wooden ones. There's the walls of a 300+ year old wooden cabin on a ranch where my Dad used to take me hunting, and I'm certain that there's plenty of newer wooden houses that enjoyed vastly superior construction quality than that rickety thing. 5) Human eyes are still human eyes. A couple weeks with proper goggles would allow their eyes to adjust in most cases. I even asked my optometrist this same question when Fallout 1 was released so many years ago, and that's what he told me - total wraparound darkly tinted glasses would allow someone in that circumstance to adjust. Without the goggles, it would be extremely unpleasant but not likely to be permanently blinding unless you accidentally looked directly at the sun. Now... who's going to texture this sweet sweet M82?!?!?! :)

Personally, I was a huge fan of the Colonel carrying an M1919 belt fed in his golf bag. LOL.

You are most welcome my good man :) Thanks for the thanks! I agree that a vehicle mounted M2 wouldn't be a bad idea - another idea might be to rig up an M2 onto a Behemoth as a creature-specific weapon - that'd make things interesting! Plus since it would be a rare enemy it'd add to the excitement of getting a small heap of .50 BMG ammo when you looted it! PS those look like subcaliber AP sabot rounds that are loaded into the Ma Deuce in your pic. Nasty stuff!

That sucks about being sick, man.. there's something going around my area too that's putting people down for the count. I hope you get better quick. I've fired several .50 BMG's including an M82 and M107 on several occasions at a variety of targets. I've fired literally tens of thousands of rounds of .308/7.62 NATO. I've done the math comparing the two as part of a project in my physics 260 course. Yes, .50 BMG *IS* that effing powerful compared to .308 and I'm speaking from direct experience with both. http://turboninjas.com/gallery/d/44080-1/Lineup.jpg I took this pic for another weapons mod thread to demonstrate a similar point. From the right is a dummy 20x102 electrically primed M61 Vulcan round. The one next to it is a .50 BMG dummy I made when I was 5 from a fired .50 BMG projectile and a casing - note the rifling marks. To the left of the .50 BMG dummy is a 7.62x51 NATO FMJ round and to the left of that is a 308 Winchester softpoint - note the exposed soft lead at the tip. In addition to the obviously massive size difference, just ponder for a moment the physics involved with a projectile weighing almost five times as much and going 200-400 feet per second faster. We could get into momentum and a lot of other fun things while we're at it but I'm pretty sure its obvious without the math. If you're so inclined and your stomach is up to it, there are plenty of images floating around the internet that show what's left when a human target takes a .50 BMG round. Its not pretty. I agree that the M82 should definitely require more AP to fire vs most semiautos, to account for its mass and the recoil, what about the M2? the M2 is would be a hell of a handful to hold steady and fire accurately especially since you're firing from the hip. I continue to insist that its impossible to hip fire an M2 effectively regardless of how strong you are or what power armor you're wearing. But what of the M2's AP penalty? Even if that were accounted for, the fundamental way that VATS works and the way it deals with full auto fire and being unable to target multiple enemies so there is ZERO gameplay benefit to adding the M2. In addition, .50 BMG is already overpowered for the game's purposes, and its basically impossible to implement an M2 in a way that makes it any better than the M82 at doing anything but using way more ammo to achieve the exact same result. Its mere presence insures that way more .50 BMG ammo will be found than should be found to keep the M82 balanced as the five foot package of pure whoop ass that it is, etc etc. Bottom line. Hip-fired M2's would do nothing but eff up Fallout 3.

1) Ammo weight - a mod out there already exists and includes support for mods. 2) Strength requirements for weapons - Coming soon? 3) .50 ammo in Fallout Tactics was pretty rare, but the thing was, you only needed to fire it once. Therefore keeping it rare should be acceptable, but if the Barrett usurps the role of the M2 in terms of firepower, there is no point. The M2 SHOULD be better than the Barrett. As for the debate about ammo and the like, I think Vash's idea of a master ammo file is the best, along with a secondary mod that supports it (ie: the ammo weight mod, which is an absolute MUST). In addition this will avoid conflicts down the road. What I would like to see some day when we have a CS is support for ammo TYPES. Now, Oblivion let you equip an 'arrow' to use with your bow, which is effectively the exact same thing - instead of shooting a flame arrow with my bow, I'm shooting a 10mm AP with my pistol... The problem is that with the existing game balance there's zero way to implement the M82 in a way that realistically depicts how much more powerful the .50 BMG round is without making it so powerful as to make an M2's "advantage" in being able to rapidly fire .50 BMG utterly ineffective ammo-wasting overkill when compared to the M82 If a sniper rifle firing .308 Winchester/7.62 NATO does 40 damage, the .50 BMG should realistically do at *least* 200, probably more like 250 or 300 honestly. There isn't a damn thing in the game, except perhaps behemoths, that a 200 damage shot to the head wouldn't be an instakill. To keep up with any sort of modicum of realism, you can't possibly suggest that a .50 BMG round to the head *WOULDN'T* kill anything instantly, muties or power armor or whatever doesn't honestly matter once you get to that level. So now we've got a 10 shot semiauto that makes for headshot VATS insta-kill with each shot. Thus, the only thing an M2's presence in the game is going to achieve is to guarantee that M82 a lengthy and healthy ammo supply that could guarantee it's use for game-breakingly long periods of time, perhaps even indefinitely. Weight wouldn't fix this, it would only give people that much more motivation to ditch all other weapons for the sake of carrying as much .50 as possible. The biggest issue with AP ammo or any ammo variant is that the way armor and damage resistance works in the Oblivion engine is a cheapshit hackjob excuse for an armor system. I can't forsee a way to make AP effective against armored characters work correctly, leaving FMJ ball ammo as the generic medium and offer JHP or softpoints that do awesome damage against lightly armored characters. Having dug in the .esm I can't see a way that would work right without a significant amount of additional scripting.

Enter console, type setpccanusepowerarmor 1 :) Considering that canon didn't establish any funny need for training to use power armor in FO1 and FO2, I don't have a problem with this. Especially since the vanilla power armor in FO3 is rubbish compared to the PA of FO1/FO2. In the GNR quest after defeating the behemoth, Sarah Lyons will notice if you're wearing Power Armor when you talk to her - so I know that Beth didn't always think they were going to force training. I do wish like hell that they'd have put more NPC reactions to Power Armor in the game, though. For instance, BOS outcasts probably shouldn't be suggesting that you go bang rocks together if you're wearing Power Armor and carrying a Plasma Rifle.

Having a Browning .50 machine gun would be neat, too, though. ^.^ Not really, considering that either you'd be utterly starved for ammo to feed it, or there'd be so much .50 floating around that you could just use the Barrett through the whole damn game.

Having fired an M82, I'd say that the muzzle brake makes it *survivable* :) Firing prone will keep the gun more stable in recoil and allow to sight in on the target for successive shots more rapidly, but at the expense of the recoil being more uncomfortable since your body can't flex with the rifle the way you could while sitting at a bench or standing offhand. On a dare, a friend of mine fired a McMillan .50 BMG with the muzzle brake removed... prone... the bruise was purple and green.. Then again the handloaded .50 BMG ammo we were using was pushing a 680gr FMJ at almost 3150 feet per second :X

Please see my previous post in this thread - Yes, its a big ass rifle. But it is ultimately a gas-operated semi-automatic that fires from a 10 round detachable magazine. In function (and in the actual skills and experience one must have to use it effectively) it has everything in common with the vast majority of more typical rifles. It is a handful but speaking from experience I'd keep it small guns and just put a minimum STR of 6 or 7 to use it - particularly since in Fallout 3 you'll be doing crazy nonsense like running around shooting it from the standing position and from the hip. In typical deployment any .50 BMG rifle would be fired from a bipod, either resting on a wall or on a solid surface like concrete. An M2 .50 HB is a different story - belt fed and never intended to be fired from the shoulder or carried by a single person. It is a hardpoint or tripod mounted weapon that is deployed and used in a vastly different role. That'd be 'big guns' all the way. And please, take anything you see in movies with the proverbial grain of salt, and please don't EVER use one as a technical reference for anything related to Firearms... or cars.. or pretty much anything LOL. Most helicopters are ridiculously easy to shoot down - ask any Vietnam Veteran. I've lost count of how many stories I've heard of helos getting dropped by perfectly normal small arms.. an old friend of my Fathers was shot down by a teenage VC with an old Mosin-Nagant bolt action. As they were taking off the kid got to the edge of the vegetation in front of the helo and just put a bullet through the windscreen right into the pilot's chest.. they lost control & crashed. Not just Hueys, either.. plenty of stories of Cobras getting shot down just the same, and simple gunfire and RPG's hitting the right things on our Apaches dropped plenty of them in Iraq, too.

The Barrett M82 is a lot closer in nature to a sniper rifle than a heavy support weapon, so I would strongly recommend making it relevant to the small guns skill, not big guns. The US Army qual for the M82 is essentially a sniper's course, not a course of fire as you'd see with an M240B or other support weapon where the idea is more of area effect on target, not precisely hitting with single shots as you would with a rifle. Marksmanship is a totally different and precision art when speaking of a single shot at 1500 Meters and lumping it in with a skill that implies % of rounds in target area on full auto.. well... its just incorrect, plain and simple. Think deployment & use in what separates the skills the two skills, not caliber or size. That is what separates the 'big guns' skill from the 'small guns' skill and what makes the two different skills a good idea.. rocket launchers and such aside.

hmmm probably, but they had same coats, so there must be more guys with same coat as Autumn at the Enclave HQ, but there wasnt. Only Autumn have the coat. This idea could be explained in that the standing Colonel was the one that got offed by the radiation, and the trippy psycho loose cannon Major Autumn gets breveted to Colonel in the aftermath. That also explains how suddenly Enclave troops are deploying EVERYWHERE after the Project Purity incident - new Commanding Officer wants to sweep the wasteland and off some people

Matebas are fantastically rare.. and basically precision-made junk. Its a pistol with all the disadvantages of a revolver and all the disadvantages of a semiauto. They'd be a tiny footnote and a collector's curiousity at best, except Japanese animators suddenly fell in love with it for no good reason. Of all the guns to get fascinated with, a freakin Mateba of all things..

The only console I still own is my SNES, and FFII and FFIII are the only two games I still play on it. Hell I played FFIII for about 3 hours just the other night. Scary to think that I've been enjoying that game for close to 15 years now :X Played through FF7 several times and it really was a great game, but the characters just didn't immerse me the same way that FFII and FFIII did. I played FF8 for probably 30 minutes and I just didn't get into it. I haven't touched a FF RPG since :\

It'd be an easy reskinning of the 'hunting rifle' with a corresponding .esp to change the mag capacity and change the caliber to .308.. and probably up the damage a good bit as well. Even the detachable mag would make the vanilla reload animation work correctly. That sounds like you've got a fine example of a SMLE - But I'm a Mauser man myself ;) I <3 my Israeli Mauser for its history as well as its rechambering in 7.62 NATO. The poor thing doesn't have matching SN's but it does shoot far, far better than any old military bolt action has any right to.. but most SMLE's and M1903's and M1917's I've fired all are much the same in that respect. My Mosin-Nagant M44, as much as I love its huge muzzle flash for sheer entertainment value, is a crude and unrefined weapon when set next to a SMLE or Mauser.