Throwing weapons, insane range?

[miguick]

Maybe I'm alone in this feeling, since a quick google search didn't turn much, but I find Fallout New Vegas' thrown melee weapons to behave in a quite unrealistic manner.

 

Take thrown spears for example. While it is true that a good thrower can attain quite some distance with a javelin, in FNV it feels like you can easily reach flat distances of over 200m just angling it upwards enough, and even lose sight of the spear as if it were a missile (well technically their projectiles are 'missile' type). Of course, hitting anything at that distance is the tricky part, but it still feels quite weird. As if gravity and air friction doesn't really work like it should on them. It gets even weirder with the other thrown weapons like axes and knives, which can also reach insane distances just by aiming upwards.

 

I suppose the only way to 'fix' this would be to go over those weapons' projectiles and adjust their speed to something I'm more content with, or changing them to lobber type projectiles, but still, aren't there any other settings you may know of which alter how these missiles work? Or do you think they are fine as it is? After all, I'm no expert on physics or athletic performance.

 

And keeping with issues about throwing stuff, apparently strength does alter the speed of thrown weapons so you can reach further with a higher strength stat. But like agility affecting reload and draw/holster speed, it isn't implemented with a lower cap safeguard, so if something damages your strength under 1, GetAV Strength can report 0 or negative values and your throwing distance is affected accordingly.

And then there is VATS, I'm not sure why, but thrown weapons have exactly the same chance to hit any body part in VATS, so barring weirdness with the projectile you can feel free to always aim for the head with no drawbacks. Is this intended, or correctable somehow?

[RoyBatterian]

PN has strength based throwing because of this same thing, it is super annoying to throw a spear so far you can't see it. :D

 

I'm not sure how it handles that though, you could look in the repository, I think it was hosted on sourceforge.

[rickerhk]

You can try increasing gravity on the spear projectile. I've done that for missiles to make them fall in a shorter distance. The speed can be adjusted too.

[RoyBatterian]

I thought the gravity for ballistics didn't work?

[rickerhk]

I thought the gravity for ballistics didn't work?

I used it on PBrazilVertibirdNukeProjectile. Set gravity to 4 to get it to fall where I want it during a vertibird strike.

[CouncilOfDave]

Gravity for ballistics does work, but seems less apparent with fast moving projectiles.

[RoyBatterian]

hmmm wonder if anyone made a ballistics mod.

[miguick]

I haven't really done much 'ballistics' other than simple high school exercises with moving objects in more or less ideal conditions. From my understanding, it may not be so much the gravity multiplier what's wrong, assuming it applies a sensible acceleration along the vertical axis, but that the projectile doesn't lose horizontal speed due to drag or friction from air.

I understand that would be perhaps impractical to simulate correctly, and trying to simulate things like wind direction and the spear's center of mass vs. trajectory would get ridiculous... but maybe having the projectile lose speed with time through some simple formula could correct it well enough. Unfortunately i don't think there's even NVSE functions to alter a projectile's speed, and having to track them from an outside script would be kinda dragging.

 

Actually I do recall a ballistics mod, it was this one IIRC... but as you can see it's for bullets, not flying junk :P , and it sounds like it just gives (well researched) linear speeds and gravity mults to bullet projectiles, no drag effects.