If you had continued reading you would've read that he explains in great detail why he said "WTF is a .38 round?" with mention of extreme details like dimension, casing type, grain, etc.
I have seen some lore and immersion purists before, but this is another level. All those gigantic white letters just to say you're going to rename some ammo...wow.
And before you asked, I clicked on your mod page and read it because I'm making a pack for my own use.
I don't get this lore stuff. The Fallout universe supposedly diverged in the late 1940's - that timeline is at the heart of any lore. Yet.... The two most prevalent things in terms of weaponry in the first two Fallout installments weren't even created until the 1980's: 10mm Ammo Deagle
It seems as if there are two divergences. 1) Cultural, i.e. the arts - that diverged in the late 40's. 2) Military, which apparently didn't diverge at all until at least the late 1980's.
Yes, I don't see any reason for why people think weapons and guns from up to the 90's and 2000's couldn't exist in this world. There is nothing wrong about the Desert Eagle being invented in the 50's on the Fallout world, as far as I can see. In fact, the presence of it in prequels show that it was CERTAINLY invented and produced. It is also stated that Heckler & Koch developed the Gatling Laser, why couldn't they also invent the MP5 and the G36, since they are much simpler concepts?
I just try to rationalize when the ballistic weapons research dried up - and if you put real life events into the picture it's pretty easy to see it.
Just look to when the technological advancements and mass fielding of body armors by military's takes place - late 1980's. It's at that point where a universe that is suffering from depleted resources realizes the folly in continuing to try to evolve a dying technology - ballistic weaponry.
Cue the Gauss technology - the bridge between traditional ballistic weapons and the future - laser and plasma weapons.
The 10mm, Deagle and P90 become the last of a dying breed. Governments see the folly of trying to evolve a dying techology (ballistic weapons). Governments cancel any future ballistics weapons programs The SBR craze never happens What we see today in terms of ballistic weaponry never gets developed - it would have been considered a complete waste of time.
Not necessarily. We see on the intro of Fallout 4 some examples of ballistic weapons not being as outdated as we imagine. From the 80's to 2077 there is almost a hundred years, and after that we see how much the sturdy design of some weapons continue to exist. In fact, energy weapons weren't that much of an old invention when the Great War happened. Plasma were just on its first steps, and, on what we see while looting, ballistic guns were much more widely produced and available. Also, energy ammo seemed to be a worst trade-off when comparing is cost/efficiency rate. Most energy cells seem made of polymer or plastic, which were the resources on the largest shortage.
If you open the CK and put all the rounds on a table, the sizes are telling. The .38 is modeled after a 9mm or maybe a .380. The 10mm looks normal as do the .44, .5.56mm, .308 and 7.62x.39. the .50 is the largest and the second largest is ... the 5mm. It's way bigger than the next smaller size.
As far as bullet size in relationship to damage it's not a direct relationship. It would be fine to fire a small 5mm round out of a cartridge the size of the one in the game and it would move fast and hit hard. A 5.56mm is roughly a .22 caliber bullet moving at over 3K fps.
What does not make sense is the second largest overall round (5mm) does the least damage due to the mini-gun having such small per-shot damage. I suppose they needed to balance the rate of fire of the MG with the mag size to keep it from being op but it really left us with a weird 5mm round that is huge in size but does small damage.
Maybe the 5mm should have been labeled 12.7mm and used in more than one gun. It could then be a MG round and a sniper round. But you'd end up with thousands of them since 5mm tend to be found in large amounts. It would mess with the ammo economy if the round could be used in more guns at higher damage values.
Thank you for checking out my mod! Really I'm just having fun with that description. It's just an affectionate rant from a long time fallout fan, tryina give lore buffs a chuckle or two on the way to the files page.
I didn't know that the 5mm rounds were the second biggest round in-game! That's really interesting because now it makes even less sense! 5mm rounds were used for assault rifles in previous games, so I just assumed they were a similar size to 5.56. Why is it called 5mm if it's that much bigger than a 5.56mm round?
Round sizes are best expressed in two parts. The actual bullet (the lead/copper item housed at the tip of the case) has length, width and weight (grains). The correct longhand for NATO sizes would be 7.62x51 (roughly a civilian .308 round).
The 7.62mm is the bullet diameter. The 51mm is the length of the case. When gun people refer to a 7.62 they are using shorthand. It's confusing shorthand at that since they could mean a 7.62x39 (used in an AK47) or a 7.62.51 NATO used in an AR10 or M14, etc. If they say 7.62 NATO then they mean the 7.62x51mm round. Typically if they say just 7.62 they mean 7.62x39mm AK-47 round.
Non NATO specs would just refer to the caliber of the bullet with no direct reference to the length of the case as in .308 (which is a 30 caliber bullet) with no mention of the case size. But people who know guns know what a .308 or .44 is since that term is only applied to those specific rounds.
There are also different bullet weights (grains) that can be fired from a given round. You can get 5.56x45 round that have 55 grain bullets, 77 grain, 90 grain to name a few. The heavy bullet will have different ballistic characteristics and would be chosen for those characteristics. You can also use different grain bullets in most every ammo type.
In the end the 5mm is a made up round for the game whose model is in stark contrast to the the damage it does when fired from the one gun in the game that uses it. They should have made it much smaller or made the mini gun much deadlier and maybe required it be fired from Power Armor to balance out out.
I'm working on a game balance mod the past week and the 5mm has been a problem. I'm not sure what to do with it at the moment and am leaning towards ignoring it as in not allowing it to be rechambered into other weapons due to the two sides of the user market. Those that think it should be weak since it's in a weak gun (per shot wise) or those that think it should be strong because they've seen the size of the round. Maybe more damage for the MG with a slower rate of fire might free the round up logically for use in sniper type rifles.
This is very comprehensive, and the kind of information that anyone looking to design a game should definitely take a look at.
I'm familiar with all the things you mentioned, and I agree with everything you said, I just don't get what 5mm could possibly mean. I've never seen a shorthand term for ammo in millimeters that isn't referencing the rough diameter of either the bullet or the neck of the casing. No matter what grain it is, a 9x19mm parabellum bullet is 9.01mm in diameter since it's mass manufactured.
There may be some explanation for it deep in Fallout's lore, but I simply prefer having the 7.62 NATO rounds. This way you can also use the ammo in many other firearms (using mods like Legendary Modification) without wondering if it would make sense or not! I rock an M60 in 7.62 NATO and a FN FAL in .308. I know the rounds are somewhat interchangeable, but I like to roleplay that the random 308 rounds I find on gunner corpses aren't reliable enough to feed through the M60, which is already prone to stoppages... yeah, I'm a huge nerd.
Yeah, 5mm is a real head-scratcher balance wise. Lowering the ROF sounds like the best option - I'm not an expert, especially when it comes to anything bigger than small arms, but the MG in-game definitely seems higher than what one would expect from an action movie. Maybe a little Hollywood inaccuracy would be forgivable in this case, since it definitely sounds like the most fun option imo.
It makes a lot more sense to re-chamber the minigun in 5.56mm as it's plentiful because turrets use it whilst also not coming in such large amounts to make it game breaking, and it also justifies giving the minigun greater damage. Re-chamber the pipe gun to use 5mm might balance it a bit better and also chambering the pipe bolt-action to 5.56mm could also be useful.
If you don't care about the lore of a game then why are you playing Fallout, an RPG? If you don't even play the game then why are you commenting on a mod for it? Unless your only interest in the Fallout universe is to mod the s#*! out of it to make it look & play like CoD or Battlefield in which case you should care more about the accuracy of the weapons than other players might.
if you dont care then dont install the mod. some people really like guns and are disappointed when the game does a poor job of representing guns, and so they make mods to fix that.
Speaking from experience modding New Vegas and Fallout 4: The casing ejected from the gun not at all matching the round being used is common, and usually done as a time-saving measure, or to make the gun look more impressive. Just as examples, the Hunting Rifle uses the same casing as the Assault Carbine and Marksman Carbine, both of which use sub-rifle caliber rounds. Yet, the Sniper Rifle, which uses .308 ammo, uses a suitable casing, 762mmCasing.NIF. If anything, the Hunting Rifle ought to use that same casing (Yes, 7.62x51mm NATO is not the same as .308 Winchester, but for the purposes of gameplay, they may as well be clones).
In Fallout 3 and NV, the 5mm caliber miniguns always used the .308 casing instead of a smaller one readily available in the game, such as the Assault Rifle casing, which would at least match the ammo it uses. In the case of Fallout 3, this is the devs not caring that much about the little details of the guns (true to Bethesda's style), and in New Vegas, it's because Obsidian re-used many of Bethesda's assets and was pressed for development time. Considering how much more effort Obsidian gave to the variety of weapons in New Vegas, I imagine that they would have made things more accurate if they had had the time.
Never mind the Cowboy Repeater (a pistol caliber carbine), which uses the same assault rifle shell casing as the Assault Carbine, Light Machine Gun, and Minigun, and Varmint Rifle, or the 10mm Pistol, which uses a .45 casing.
Bethesda is well-acquainted with the practice of mangling gun design. Just look at all the left-handed receivers in Fallout 4, and the pipe rifle, and the "Assault Rifle" that has more in common (loosely speaking) with a Lewis Machine Gun or other WWI-II era water-cooled gun than any typical automatic rifle.
Edit about the size of the 5mm round: In relation to the Minigun, 5mm is negligibly smaller in diameter than 5.56mm, but the casing could be larger and longer, thus packing more propellant for a faster, flatter-trajectory round, much like the FN 5.7mm round used for some FN pistols and the P90 submachine gun. It's very small, but very fast, which is more important than size or diameter when determining armor penetration. It's effectively a small rifle round, but used in pistols and smgs. There was, at one point, a lighter variant of the M134 Minigun, known as the XM124 Microgun, chambered for 5.56x45mm NATO cartridges instead of 7.62x51mm. The Fallout 5mm minigun is conceptually similar to this; after all, it is known canonically as the CZ53 Personal Minigun.
Technically, there is such a thing as a 5mm round irl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5mm_Remington_Rimfire_Magnum However, as others pointed out already, the FO4 "5mm round" is bigger than most other rounds (especially the Nuka-World "7.62mm round"), pretty close to the diameter of a .50 caliber round. If I go by the weapon size instead, what FO4 calls a "minigun" might be closer to an M61 Vulcan, which uses 20x102mm rounds (I've looked at the barrels in-game next to a 10mm pistol, I could easily believe they're double the diameter)
.38 predates 9mm especially in the States for quite some time. I can only assume if it's not a modern weapon/"ammo" you "don't get it" lol, what wld be your response I wonder to a .54 flintlock?
I was just having a little fun with that description, but I'm just wondering - are you referring to .38 LC? That round is also rimmed, unlike the in-game model. I mentioned .38 ACP in the description which I thought was short-lived due to the popularity of the 1911 and .45 ACP, but I'm not an expert.
Anyway this mod wasn't meant to be taken too seriously. Most of the weapon mods on the nexus are post WW2, so I just wanted a mod that makes guns like the MP5 more immersive without the need for ammo overhaul mods, but I would definitely recommend Calibers Complex if you're in to having older weapons use the right ammo.
Why do cartridge calibers need to make more sense? Nothing else in the game makes sense in the common wealth of 10 million tires. Or 210 year old burned out wood houses that stop .50 cal armor piercing bullets, and are napalm proof. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Might want to do some homework before bashing an extremely popular type of gun/round.
If you had continued reading you would've read that he explains in great detail why he said "WTF is a .38 round?" with mention of extreme details like dimension, casing type, grain, etc.
Sincerely yours, someone that can read.
And before you asked, I clicked on your mod page and read it because I'm making a pack for my own use.
The Fallout universe supposedly diverged in the late 1940's - that timeline is at the heart of any lore.
Yet....
The two most prevalent things in terms of weaponry in the first two Fallout installments weren't even created until the 1980's:
10mm Ammo
Deagle
It seems as if there are two divergences.
1) Cultural, i.e. the arts - that diverged in the late 40's.
2) Military, which apparently didn't diverge at all until at least the late 1980's.
Just look to when the technological advancements and mass fielding of body armors by military's takes place - late 1980's.
It's at that point where a universe that is suffering from depleted resources realizes the folly in continuing to try to evolve a dying technology - ballistic weaponry.
Cue the Gauss technology - the bridge between traditional ballistic weapons and the future - laser and plasma weapons.
The 10mm, Deagle and P90 become the last of a dying breed. Governments see the folly of trying to evolve a dying techology (ballistic weapons).
Governments cancel any future ballistics weapons programs
The SBR craze never happens
What we see today in terms of ballistic weaponry never gets developed - it would have been considered a complete waste of time.
As far as bullet size in relationship to damage it's not a direct relationship. It would be fine to fire a small 5mm round out of a cartridge the size of the one in the game and it would move fast and hit hard. A 5.56mm is roughly a .22 caliber bullet moving at over 3K fps.
What does not make sense is the second largest overall round (5mm) does the least damage due to the mini-gun having such small per-shot damage. I suppose they needed to balance the rate of fire of the MG with the mag size to keep it from being op but it really left us with a weird 5mm round that is huge in size but does small damage.
Maybe the 5mm should have been labeled 12.7mm and used in more than one gun. It could then be a MG round and a sniper round. But you'd end up with thousands of them since 5mm tend to be found in large amounts. It would mess with the ammo economy if the round could be used in more guns at higher damage values.
I didn't know that the 5mm rounds were the second biggest round in-game! That's really interesting because now it makes even less sense! 5mm rounds were used for assault rifles in previous games, so I just assumed they were a similar size to 5.56. Why is it called 5mm if it's that much bigger than a 5.56mm round?
The 7.62mm is the bullet diameter. The 51mm is the length of the case. When gun people refer to a 7.62 they are using shorthand. It's confusing shorthand at that since they could mean a 7.62x39 (used in an AK47) or a 7.62.51 NATO used in an AR10 or M14, etc. If they say 7.62 NATO then they mean the 7.62x51mm round. Typically if they say just 7.62 they mean 7.62x39mm AK-47 round.
Non NATO specs would just refer to the caliber of the bullet with no direct reference to the length of the case as in .308 (which is a 30 caliber bullet) with no mention of the case size. But people who know guns know what a .308 or .44 is since that term is only applied to those specific rounds.
There are also different bullet weights (grains) that can be fired from a given round. You can get 5.56x45 round that have 55 grain bullets, 77 grain, 90 grain to name a few. The heavy bullet will have different ballistic characteristics and would be chosen for those characteristics. You can also use different grain bullets in most every ammo type.
In the end the 5mm is a made up round for the game whose model is in stark contrast to the the damage it does when fired from the one gun in the game that uses it. They should have made it much smaller or made the mini gun much deadlier and maybe required it be fired from Power Armor to balance out out.
I'm familiar with all the things you mentioned, and I agree with everything you said, I just don't get what 5mm could possibly mean. I've never seen a shorthand term for ammo in millimeters that isn't referencing the rough diameter of either the bullet or the neck of the casing. No matter what grain it is, a 9x19mm parabellum bullet is 9.01mm in diameter since it's mass manufactured.
There may be some explanation for it deep in Fallout's lore, but I simply prefer having the 7.62 NATO rounds. This way you can also use the ammo in many other firearms (using mods like Legendary Modification) without wondering if it would make sense or not! I rock an M60 in 7.62 NATO and a FN FAL in .308. I know the rounds are somewhat interchangeable, but I like to roleplay that the random 308 rounds I find on gunner corpses aren't reliable enough to feed through the M60, which is already prone to stoppages... yeah, I'm a huge nerd.
In Fallout 3 and NV, the 5mm caliber miniguns always used the .308 casing instead of a smaller one readily available in the game, such as the Assault Rifle casing, which would at least match the ammo it uses. In the case of Fallout 3, this is the devs not caring that much about the little details of the guns (true to Bethesda's style), and in New Vegas, it's because Obsidian re-used many of Bethesda's assets and was pressed for development time. Considering how much more effort Obsidian gave to the variety of weapons in New Vegas, I imagine that they would have made things more accurate if they had had the time.
Never mind the Cowboy Repeater (a pistol caliber carbine), which uses the same assault rifle shell casing as the Assault Carbine, Light Machine Gun, and Minigun, and Varmint Rifle, or the 10mm Pistol, which uses a .45 casing.
Bethesda is well-acquainted with the practice of mangling gun design. Just look at all the left-handed receivers in Fallout 4, and the pipe rifle, and the "Assault Rifle" that has more in common (loosely speaking) with a Lewis Machine Gun or other WWI-II era water-cooled gun than any typical automatic rifle.
Edit about the size of the 5mm round: In relation to the Minigun, 5mm is negligibly smaller in diameter than 5.56mm, but the casing could be larger and longer, thus packing more propellant for a faster, flatter-trajectory round, much like the FN 5.7mm round used for some FN pistols and the P90 submachine gun. It's very small, but very fast, which is more important than size or diameter when determining armor penetration. It's effectively a small rifle round, but used in pistols and smgs. There was, at one point, a lighter variant of the M134 Minigun, known as the XM124 Microgun, chambered for 5.56x45mm NATO cartridges instead of 7.62x51mm. The Fallout 5mm minigun is conceptually similar to this; after all, it is known canonically as the CZ53 Personal Minigun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5mm_Remington_Rimfire_Magnum
However, as others pointed out already, the FO4 "5mm round" is bigger than most other rounds (especially the Nuka-World "7.62mm round"), pretty close to the diameter of a .50 caliber round. If I go by the weapon size instead, what FO4 calls a "minigun" might be closer to an M61 Vulcan, which uses 20x102mm rounds (I've looked at the barrels in-game next to a 10mm pistol, I could easily believe they're double the diameter)
I can only assume if it's not a modern weapon/"ammo" you "don't get it"
lol, what wld be your response I wonder to a .54 flintlock?
Anyway this mod wasn't meant to be taken too seriously. Most of the weapon mods on the nexus are post WW2, so I just wanted a mod that makes guns like the MP5 more immersive without the need for ammo overhaul mods, but I would definitely recommend Calibers Complex if you're in to having older weapons use the right ammo.