Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[BigD145]

Man, I really don't like how Fallout has power armor or combat-application lasers, because they definitely didn't have those in the 1950s. :^)

>_>

You would be surprised what they had by the 1950s.

There is this weird tendency for inventions to have existed WAY before the time people started to notice them.

Computers (well... computational machines) and guns are two of the BIG ones. I am excluding "batteries" because they didn't REALLY have batteries... at least no more then saying a potato farm has lots of batteries.

Battery electric cars were the fastest vehicles around in the mid 1800's.

[Yoink]

Has anyone else noticed that all the romance-able female characters are impressed by lock-picking? Guess they just like the nimbleness of your fingers...

Okay, this actually made me chuckle out loud. Noice.

[Putnam]

Man, I really don't like how Fallout has power armor or combat-application lasers, because they definitely didn't have those in the 1950s. :^)

>_>

You would be surprised what they had by the 1950s.

There is this weird tendency for inventions to have existed WAY before the time people started to notice them.

Computers (well... computational machines) and guns are two of the BIG ones. I am excluding "batteries" because they didn't REALLY have batteries... at least no more then saying a potato farm has lots of batteries.

Battery electric cars were the fastest vehicles around in the mid 1800's.

the first of those showed up in 1886 and they couldn't go uphill

[Sensei]

Well, if you want to get REALLY picky about the technology details...

Spoiler: The assault rifle makes no sense (click to show/hide)

First, it's not an assault rifle. One of the most defining factors of an assault rifle is that it is select-fire, and there is no select-fire receiver available for it, only semi-auto or full auto. An assault rifle uses smaller rounds than a normal rifle (say, an M1 Garand with .30-06 cal). If a rifle does use "full size" rounds, and is select fire, it is a Battle Rifle. No problem there though- the Fallout 4 Assault Rifle uses the 5.56 round, specifically developed for assault rifles like the M16. It is an "intermediate round" because it is smaller than a rifle round but bigger than a pistol round. One of the design goals of the M16 (and all assault rifles) is to be lighter and easier to handle than guns with larger rounds. Despite the M16 apparently existing (the Assault Carbine in Fallout: New Vegas*, which itself weirdly uses 5mm rounds, implying the 5mm rounds to actually BE 5.56x45mm NATO) we can tell from the design of the Fallout 4 Assault Rifle that it fulfills none of these goals. It has high range and damage, which are uncharacteristic of the intermediate 5.56mm- it basically performs like a gun that shoots full-powered rifle rounds. It is NOT lightweight- with a long barrel it can weigh to the tune of 25 pounds, which roughly matches it up to an M60 machine gun. The M60 is a machine gun, because it uses full rifle rounds, is very heavy, and as a result a soldier can only fire it accurately while resting it on the ground. The Fallout 4 Assault Rifle is visually consistent with this. It's enormous, has what looks like a water-cooled barrel (which should probably make it EVEN HEAVIER than what it weighs), and it also had a top grip which is consistent with machine guns, though you can't actually hold the gun that way. All it's missing is a bipod. Anyway, this heavy gun with water cooling makes sense for bigger rounds, but would be completely unnecessary for a weapon that fires 5.56mm rounds at the rate this does.

TL:DR, the Assault Rifle in Fallout 4 is a weapon which has the weight and appearance of a machine gun not meant to be fired accurately while standing up, the range and power of a standard rifle/battle rifle (depending on whether it's automatic or not), no select-fire feature, but somehow uses the 5.56 round, which is too small for what this gun does or look like. It's a complete aberration.

*To add to the confusion, the Fallout 1 Assault Rifle uses 5mm rounds, and looks exactly like the Fallout 4 Combat Rifle.

[Flying Dice]

Man, I really don't like how Fallout has power armor or combat-application lasers, because they definitely didn't have those in the 1950s. :^)

In case that was implicitly directed at my comments

It wasn't. I was taking the piss from the people who seem to be confusing the 1950s Nuclear Age aesthetic with 1950s materials. FO4 is the closest we've come to a uniform vision of that in the weapons and equipment. Obviously stuff manufactured post-war is excluded because it wasn't a product of that culture.

Take the 10mm pistol as a great example:


The first is FO1/2. It's a totally flat metal L with a tiny piece of wood hardware. The second is FO3/NV. It's a largely flat metal brick with a tiny grip that looks like it came from 40K. The third is FO4. It's a curved, organic metal boomerang with a large piece of wood/synth hardware. Now go look at sci-fi pistols from that era in real life: for the most part they have the same organic shape with few/no right angles, plenty of curves, and grips that aren't tiny compared to the barrel.

The Assault Rifle is another great example; every single one up through New Vegas was either literally a real-world assault rifle, an expy of one, or closely resembled their aesthetics. The FO4 one is a total divergence; it looks like someone took the barrel of a Vickers and strapped a bunch of pipes and wood hardware to it. It's a weapon which could not have been created in our world. And I've just been ninja'd on that.

[Rolan7]

I'm learning a lot!
As an aside, ever notice that the FO1/2 10mm is a revolver?  Or at least the appearance of a revolving cylinder thingy.  Might just be aesthetic.  IIRC, ammo in those games was depicted as individual bullets instead of clips/magazines/speedloaders, so...

[TheBronzePickle]

The thing is, the assault rifle was already a thing by the time of the 1950s. People would have been familiar with two weapons in the class: the German StG series and the AK-47.

That doesn't mean that the 50s sci-fi aesthetic couldn't have been incorporated. The main thing about the assault rifle in FO4 is it's just a little too silly, though. It doesn't look like an assault rifle at all, and even besides that it looks like something out of WW1 instead of something sci-fi-esque. Something more akin to a fusion between the XM8, F2000 and AK-47 might be more appropriate: sleek woodwork, curvy, interlinking grips, a cylindrical or elliptical receiver, and maybe even a bullpup configuration.

[motorbitch]

aside from the look, the assault rifle very much is an assault rifle. it has less dmg per shot then the combat rifle, but is much more steady on automatic fire and has a higher rate of fire.
selective fire... who cares. burst mode just is not very good in fps games, and if i want to shoot single fire shots, i use something with a higher dmg per bullet.
generally, realism is very overrated. gameplay is much more important. and gameplay whise, the assault rifle fits that role perfectly fine.

[Aseaheru]

The assault rifle looks (at least to me) like someone took a Lewis gun and modded it a fair amount, starting with completely changing the feed system.

Also, Dice, dont forget the big-ole blocky stuff you can slap on the front of the 10mm pistol.

[Greenbane]

Fallout 4's true assault rifle is the Combat Rifle, which looks like the R91 from Fallout 3. It's probably a battle rifle due to the .45 calibre, which I thought was a nice touch but might've been a less deliberate decision, considering the ammo type other weapons ended up with.

The LMG-like "Assault Rifle" is the result of an artist not having a clue and thinking this is a steampunk game or somesuch.

[majikero]

I feel like I'm the only one who actually likes the assault rifle. At them very least its not another AK16 or some other boring gun.

[JimboM12]

I feel like I'm the only one who actually likes the assault rifle. At them very least its not another AK16 or some other boring gun.

I agree, i kinda like the assault rifle; its what an assault rifle would look like if it was designed for power armored soldiers. But, I feel as though it shoulda used .50 cal rounds and been named "Heavy combat rifle" and they shoulda returned the service rifle from new vegas to take that 5.56 slot.

[majikero]

I think it would be great if it can shoot the minigun ammo.

[TheBronzePickle]

I feel like an assault rifle for power armor would look more like a modified M2. Unless it had a blistering rate of fire or some other reason to need the extra cooling power, air cooling would be a vastly superior option.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that's the thing: Fallout isn't 1950s with 2070s level technology, it's 1950s which took all the crazy sci-fi stuff and ran with it for 120-odd years. It's an extrapolation of what might-have-been. With the assault rifle, keep in mind how muddled the field of "long gun with automatic fire" was in the first half of the 20th century. By just about any standard things like the BAR, FG 42, &c. could be classed as either an AR or an assault rifle. The AK-47 is close to the Ur-example of true assault rifles, and it didn't see widespread use until the '50s, and NATO was still playing with battle rifles like the M14 and FN FAL until the early '60s.

It's completely plausible that part of the historical divergences of Fallout was that the battle rifle/GPMG paradigm persisted longer than it did in our history, which could allow for the existence of "assault" rifles that are really closer to alt-history versions of light machine guns alongside proper assault rifles. So, for example, the FO4 Assault Rifle is the RPK to the R91's AKM. This would mesh with the near-total absence of actual LMGs and MMGs apart from the LMG in New Vegas (which, fittingly enough, also matches that paradigm, looking very much like a MG variant of the R91).

Granted, the real explanation almost certainly is that the design team cannot into guns, but it's more fun to brainstorm good lore to fit the lazy design.

Also, Dice, dont forget the big-ole blocky stuff you can slap on the front of the 10mm pistol.

Yeah, but check out the form of the suppressor and compensator. They're not cylindrical, nor are they rectangular prisms; they're some weird prism with... I don't remember how many sides since I don't have the game open..