Firearms Expert Reacts To Fallout 3’s Guns

this is jonathan ferguson the keeper of firearms and artillery at the royal armies museum in the uk which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history on today's episode he's going to be checking out the varied arsenal of fallout 3. fallout is a weird always a weird mixture of serious and funny and i think that weapon sums it up if there are any other games guns and mechanics that you guys want to see jonathan break down let us know in the comments section below make sure to subscribe for more videos like this one and if you'd like to help out the royal army's museum and continue to support jonathan's work check out the links in the description of this video right over to jonathan right so one of my i'd say one of my favorite games i haven't played it in many years but um put a lot of time in back in the day and one of my favorite weapons to use was the chinese pistol it's one of the more real world firearms in the fallout series full stop it's a very good approximation given the limitations of the graphics of the chansey type 17. all of which is very sad because we haven't got one we've got chinese broom handles one is a copy of the star and the other is this schnell foyer copy so that that's as close as we get to the chinese pistol now reason for pointing that out is that they have actually replicated the different magazine well shape of the type 17 because it's a longer wider magazine to cram in those 45 acp cartridges reload animation not accurate even though the model is very accurate the bolt should in theory lock open there are some quirks of this 3d model there's no firing pin modelled or even um textured on there in 2d so it wouldn't technically work and the other weird quirk is we've got rifle caliber cases flying out of this thing even though we're putting pistol caliber rounds in it via the clip now the ak family we've covered many times on this series would have perhaps made narrative sense to just for the fallout series for the chinese faction to stick with the ak why wouldn't they well i suppose the idea is that it was never invented in the first place and so the the russian rifle that was originally invented in the timeline was something different however it's pretty obviously an ak configured rpd perhaps for me more interesting than that and something i've forgotten about this game is the the fact that weapons degrade over time with use and they they have stoppages but i have i have had to wrangle many a chinese assault rifle jamming constantly in a way that doesn't really do justice to the legacy of uh kalashnikov or dektorov to be honest with you but it's really nice to have in a game especially in a survival type setting it really gives you that idea of having to make doing mend couple stuff together abandon that weapon entirely and switch to something else so i think it really adds a lot to the game so this um if we think about the the sort of narrative of the fallout universe everything sort of 50s and that would have been made 50s and onwards is something a bit different and this submachine gun machine pistol are much more removed from reality i've seen people compare this submachine gun or machine pistol to the hk smg prototype because it has a similar silhouette maybe but it is essentially a completely original design quick word on vats because we do see in this clip it used to it's one of its best effects which is to where you've got a high chance hit on us on a particularly dangerous weapon or the arm that's holding that weapon so we see him target that to take that weapon out of the fight to then switch fire to something else that's a very good use of the system i was always very lazy i would go for high percentage hit on head and if i couldn't i'd go for the go for the torso right the uh well we need a magnum revolver in any video game featuring firearms and we have the daddy of them in fallout 3. it's a pretty good representation of the smith and wesson model 29 of dirty harry fame as i say pretty well represented there's a weird quirk but i think applies to the whole game where we see proper revolver bullets loaded in by speed loader into the cylinder but then if you get a slo-mo fancy shot the bullet you see fly through the air is a pointed boat tail rifle bullet we've said this before about the fallout series but it is a sort of mad max meets wild west so you've got to have a revolver some of them are going to be reminiscent of the peacemaker the single action army some of them are going to be more your classic mid-century 20th century that is uh magnum so 44 magnum revolvers i'm not sure that quite fits with the timeline of where the fallout universe diverges from hours but this came in in 1955 so it's if we if we take that as the divergence point none of this is strict we can't compare the fallout universe two hours but clearly at some point it split off so i guess this one just sneaks in under the wire as common to both universes right so this is um this is another pre-apocalypse gun that's in the game specifically lincoln's fancy repeater winchester it's nearly entirely henry and they've even bothered to render the loading system somewhat correctly so the whole end of the outer barrel just pivots out of the way and you load your rounds into the tube below the magazine base first couple of issues with the game version though most obviously is the way the the first person the animation well actually all the third person just kind of waggles their fingers in the vague direction of the magazine tube and all of your rounds just somehow go in that's a convenience or a fudge the other one is a stylistic choice so they've put a wooden handguard around the magazine tube near the action but there's a reason why the henry the 1860 henry did not have a handguard they didn't put one on there because it gets in the way of the loading system so the bit we're missing here is the action of the spring-loaded follower that you need to position correctly before you open the end of the magazine tube so that has to move through that wooden handguard so the hand guard can't be there for that to happen otherwise it's not a bad attempt at a henry with engraved receiver the proportions are about right it's got an octagonal barrel it does the job it evokes the the very prior era that it's supposed to well first of all i need to say i absolutely love the uh the railway gun brilliant sort of comedy weapon fallout is a weird always a weird mixture of serious and and funny and i think that weapon sums it up completely implausible completely impractical who would make it i'm not sure if the in-universe reason is that it is in fact a tool for planting rail railroad spikes into a railroad that would make sense i suspect that's the idea as a weapon it's just amusing it's got the uh the steam piston visible on the bottom of it it's got the steam gauge it produces steam and it makes the hilarious uh train whistle sound every time you use it it's it's realistic insofar as the projectiles actually do look like railroad spikes when they come out it's it's a slightly weird choice in the uh fallout if anything is more sort of atom punk maybe a bit of diesel punk it's not in any way a steampunk aesthetic and yet this is the most steampunk weapon ever invented arguably yeah that that is not how magazines work this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a magazine is so this shotgun is basically a giant um papashar ppsh whatever whatever you'd like to call it russian submachine gun scaled up to 12-gauge 12-ball shotgun cartridges okay the issue with it is the drum magazine positioned so far forward this could could be made to work but then it has a sort of an ejection port further back than that no way for that to operate that's too small for a shotgun cartridge there's no hole in the drum when it's taken off the weapon for a cartridge to even come out of or be fed into so they've recognized that the drum is in fact the feed device for the weapon it's not just a decorative thing but they haven't thought through in any way how it might work the geometry doesn't work either we've got a weird redundant gas system on there this is a real mash up fantasy weapon the amusingly named rocket launcher i made very little use of when i played this used it for fun gave up i'm not sure i found it super effective and the different mass of the different bits of junk it shoots makes aiming a real pain and damage is the same no matter whether you hit them with a garden gnome amusingly or a teddy bear or a tin can the damage is the same so i wasn't a huge fan great idea not really that effective for me this by request is what i've grabbed to show you really to illustrate what is it what is actually a myth um this is a blunderbuss obviously this is one of about 1730ish but the reason we're here is that flared muzzle and the myth suspect where the rocket launcher idea comes from is we do have stories of people putting rocks nails random objects into these because of course you can in theory put anything into here with a powder charge behind it prime your lock and shoot it and it will come out with potentially lethal force depending on how you load it but was that ever done historically there's just no evidence for it in reality if you could afford a blunderbuss and to keep it in good order you could afford some lead shot and that's what was used the important point is yes you can load random stuff in a blunderbuss no nobody did it as far as we know which leaves our poor rocket launcher pretty much out on its own as an improvised wood chipper based weapon from a parallel universe the base rifle here is very clearly based on the hkg3 this version is particularly wacky it's got a suppressor on it it's got no butt stock it's got a scope on it so a scope suppress rifle in a full power cartridge well let's say it's five five six then in an intermediate cartridge even is really an odd choice if you don't have a bus stock so the reason for no butt stock is something concealable where you're using it very close range now there are other factors in play here probably in game play but it's about as accurate as i would as i would expect it to be with a scope but no butt stock and suppressor's probably a bit too good as well for a rifle caliber it's kind of mechanical chuntering going on rather than gunfire which still sound pretty much like gunfire and it's not really fitting my theory of parallel universe divergence in the 40s or 50s because this really didn't come into service until come into existence until the late 50s but still we can probably massage it to fit the timeline but yeah not a good variant right going really left field here and of course the fallout universe does flirt with aliens and we've got this rare sort of legendary level weapon that crops up in a couple of the games don't know if this was the first one to feature it or not it's classically 30s 40s raygun don't think it's based on any particular toy or film or anything like that it's their own take on it can't help thinking about mars attacks although the guns in that work rather differently and the pistol doesn't really look like this think of the classic buck rogers disintegrated pistol from the from the classic foo fighters album cover that kind of thing super effective as you might imagine from alien technology we've got a reload system with an energy tube thing in the side who cares how it works really doesn't really fit in the universe really for me but it's a fun one and you get the disintegration aspect of it and the sort of it does fit in terms of the fiction of the 1940s and 50s which fallout takes heavily from and i guess that's how it fits but they've just taken the that leap of yeah aliens did crash in 1947. we've seen the fat the fat man in in previous incarnation we've got here the straightforward missile launcher or frankly you could just call it a rocket launcher the typical differentiator of a missile versus a rocket is a missile is guided this is not guided it has some redundant switchology on the sides i love analog switches and lights and things but um these i don't think do much the real kind of where this falls down if we're trying to fit this into the real world is that the thing breaks open like a shotgun which is just not the way to make a missile or rocket launcher at all uh because there's no reason to not load the missile rocket from the front or from the back or if you think of the small munition is part of the entire rear receiver of the weapon essentially and you just fit that fire it dispose of it so semi-disposable or you have a fully disposable system where you just fire and discard this is none of those this is for some reason we have to pivot it open in the middle in a really cumbersome way that wouldn't be practical but it makes it visually different and interesting to watch i suppose although i'm a veteran fallout 3 player i never played any dlc so i'm not seen the microwave emitter before it's a lot of fun it fits that future retro futuristic radiation obsessed aesthetic very nicely it's a terrible weapon though it's not not been designed as a weapon i would i suggest i don't know the back story of the of this thing but um you know we see that the in third person view the characters doing their best to sort of aim jack bauer's style with something that has not only has no sight but blocks his view when he tries to aim it i like the the sort of ray effects the the rings that emanate from it and how it has a battery instead of a magazine more redundant switchology with the big dial it doesn't do anything but it looks cool i suppose the only thing i can contribute here really apart from reacting is for those of you who aren't aware there is in fact a microwavable or millimeter wave weapon system called the active denial system but this used the closest thing we've seen to using a micro millimeter wave radiation to heat the target so it was nicknamed i think the heat ray vehicle mounted though and it didn't look anything like this disappointingly it's a shame how often sci-fi-esque weapons that are implemented in the real world look nothing like their sci-fi counterparts okay we've got a variant of the fat man that i don't think i ever used when i played the game a sort of shotgun version so lots of small warheads instead of one big miniature nuclear bomb if that makes sense because the original fat man munition was a scaled down airdrop nuclear bomb like the the fat man that we've covered before it is in fact a steam catapult or a gas catapult system so the in the original concept it was like a steam catapult on an aircraft carrier for a miniature aircraft carrying a comedically oversized nuclear bomb so it's interesting to see how it sort of drifted from that slightly ludicrous concept to something closer to that davy recoilless weapon system that we know was actually tested but this one is that mirv or multiple independent reentry vehicle which is a a real thing for nuclear missiles so this is riffing on that but it is still firing miniature nuclear bombs not nuclear missiles i might have preferred actually retrospect if they've gone for miniature minuteman nuclear missiles or something like that out of a different launcher but hey um it's still pretty cool and pretty devastating as well you can also find me over on the royal armouries youtube channel we're welcoming visitors if you're in the uk please do come and visit us and we have links in the description for ways that you can help us otherwise i'll see you next time thank [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 808,593

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Id: FspvZxv-qWc

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mike15835]

This happened to pop up on my YT recommended thought you Fallout fans (and Jon) would be interested.

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I've found it interesting and a British guy as the host to boot. lol