Realistic/Deadly Combat Mod

[TimmyTheNinja]

I am currently working on a mod that will change the way damage with different calibers and make them more consistent across all guns using the same ammo type. It will also effect the DT of all armors and what kinds of calibers would penetrate and which ones would not. I looked to see if any mods had done this before by searching key words, but all I found were mods that removed hit scan and made locational hitboxs matter much more than they already did. The main goal is to raise the difficulty of the game and make the ballistics feel more analogous to real world data. I have the majority of the work done already after looking through many different forums and watching different penetration tests of different calibers, as well as, looking up Kevlar ratings and other armors effective use in combat against bullets. The problem that remains is the data on items that don't exist in the real world (ex Super Mutants skin and Power Armor). Wanting to keep this mod realistic, but still lore friendly I was wondering if anyone can recall any text entries or conversations about certain properties of weapons and armor from any of the Fallout games from the original to New Vegas. Thank you for your time and help.

[madmongo]

Guns using the same ammo type do not do the same amount of damage in the real world. For example, the barrel length has a huge impact on muzzle velocity. A .22 round fired out of a rifle will have probably almost double the muzzle velocity as the same .22 round fired out of a pistol, simply because the longer barrel allows the expanding gases to give the bullet more acceleration. Pistols and shorter carbines will do less damage than a full length barrel.

 

In Fallout, this means that the .357 revolver is going to do a lot less damage than the cowboy rifle, even though they fire the same cartridge.

 

The specs for the muzzle velocity and the weight of the bullet will give you a rough idea of how much damage a particular round will do, but even that isn't accurate in many cases. A great example of this is the fact that the rifle-muskets of the Civil War were the worst standard infantry weapons to get shot with in all of history. They produced worse wounds than the round ball muskets that preceded them, and they produced worse wounds than the cartridge rifles that replaced them. The M-16 fires a round at roughly 3 times the velocity, so ven though it's a smaller round it has more kinetic energy in the round than the Civil War musket. And yet, the wounds produced by the musket were worse. On the other hand, the M-16's round will penetrate body armor much more effectively.

 

For my own use, I combined a bunch of weapons mods and then went through and pretty much doubled the amount of damage that the weapons did, which seemed to make the combat much more realistic (IMHO) and much more difficult. I think the vanilla game has the weapons damage much too wimpy. It makes you a lot less likely to charge blindly into a group of raiders if you know that any one of their bullets can easily kill you.

[TimmyTheNinja]

Thanks for the tip about barrel length affecting muzzle velocity. I always had though that barrel length had to do with accuracy and trajectory and not actual damage. One issue that I am running into is the penetrating power of shotgun slugs. I hear some claims that they can go through certain steel plates no problem, while other people say that they have a hard time going through more than a .45 round could. Also I'm going to make energy weapons ignore DT entirely, but make sure they no longer spawn on raiders or fiends, because that was always stupid to me.