About this mod
This mod adds the classic Lewis Gun to the Mojave, complete with custom meshes, 3 sets of 4K textures, sounds, and icons. A gun sure to put the Hun on the Run!
- Permissions and credits
The Lewis Gun is a gas-operated open-bolt machine gun with a mechanically indexed pan magazine. It uses a long-stroke gas piston to operate the bolt and index the pan. The bolt is locked to the rear in normal operation, and linked to the gas piston through a cam track. The mainspring puts tension on the gas piston with a rack-and-pinion gear powered by a circular torsion spring (similar to a clock spring). When the trigger is pulled the bolt moves forward, picking up a cartridge from the feed tray on the top of the receiver and chambering it. When the locking lugs on the bolt clear the locking surfaces, the firing pin is allowed to continue forward in the bolt's cam track, rotating it into the locked position and firing the cartridge. The bullet moves down the barrel, and eventually reaches the gas port. High-pressure gas is vented into the gas tube, where it pushes backward on the gas piston. By the time the gas piston moves rearward far enough to cam the bolt back open, the bullet has left the barrel and pressure has dropped to a safe level. As the bolt now moves backward due to the recoil of the firearm, a lug on the top of the bolt cams the indexing plate to the left, which simultaneously rotates the pan magazine by one position and loads a new cartridge from the pan into the feed tray. When the bolt reaches the end of its travel, the old case is ejected and the process repeats itself until the trigger is released.
Another unique feature of the Lewis Gun is the aluminium cooling shroud which was standard on the infantry model. Early machine guns were prone to overheating with extensive use, so they needed some way to dissipate the heat from the barrel to avoid damaging it and negatively impacting accuracy and power. Most machine guns in the WWI era did this with a heavy water-cooling system which dissipated the heat into a water tank around the barrel. However, Lewis came up with an ingenious way to air-cool the barrel with much lighter materials, making a man-portable machine gun capable of high volumes of fire without overheating possible. He did this by surrounding the barrel and gas tube with aluminium radiator fins to act as a heat sink. A metal shroud was then fitted over the radiator fins, which has a constriction in front of the barrel. This constriction creates suction at the rear of the shroud when the high pressure muzzle blast is forced through the constriction - a phenomenon known as the Venturi effect. As air is sucked through the shroud by the Venturi effect, it radiates the heat away from the aluminium fins.
The locking mechanism of the Lewis Gun is nothing special. Gas-operated rotating-bolt firearms are extremely common today, used in some of the most common autoloading rifles such as the Colt AR-15 and AK-pattern guns. However, the top-feeding pan magazine is a very unique operating system only found on a few other guns. Only 2 other pan-magazine firearms were produced in any significant number, the Russian DP-28 LMG and the American-180 SMG. Luckily, the Silenced .22 SMG in the vanilla game is an American-180, so the animations line up very well with the Lewis Gun's operating system.
I originally intended to put this gun in Fallout 4, but it has taken so long to make this thing I might as well put it in New Vegas too. When I do get around to putting it in Fallout 4, it will have custom animations and a few more attachments and accessories. For now I'm working on smaller projects.
Click here to view the model: https://p3d.in/9Tnyc
Important Info!
The model is very large and fills half of the screen when using Asurah's animation pack. I recommend either using a different set of animations or an FOV higher than default. Even with vanilla animations the gun looks best with an FOV of 90 or so.
Also, you need a pretty good PC if you want to use the 4K textures with an ENB. If you experience crashes or lagging, use the 2K textures.
Custom meshes
3 sets of custom 4K textures
Custom sounds
Custom icon
Two attachments: a cooling shroud and a full stock
Optional CaliberX Compatibility
The gun and its mods are located in a rocky chasm on the east side of the Colorado River, near the base of the Hoover Dam. The location is due east of Ranger Station Delta. It is also sold by the Gun Runners.
Alternatively, the gun can be obtained via console commands. The base ID is "xx000ade", where "xx" is the mod's position in your load order.
The full stock is "xx000adf".
The cooling shroud is "xx000dbe".
All meshes, textures, sounds, and icons made by TactaGhoul.