Firearms Expert Reacts To Fallout: New Vegas’ 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 the 2010 classic fallout new vegas well i put a smile on the face doesn't it the fat man nuke launcher based on some real technology the davey crockett tactical nuclear launcher 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 armies museum and continue to support jonathan's work check out the links in the description of this video right over to jonathan oh i've not played this in a long time but this this has been one of my favorite games but we're not here to talk about that we're here to talk about weapons and the the laser rcw or the uh tommy gun in space is almost a direct translation of the actual silhouette of a thompson sub machine gun to a fictional laser weapon so much so that in the first person view you've actually got the the disassembly button on the back of the receiver so there are features that are taken from the tommy gun that wouldn't even wouldn't really make sense on the laser gun but um looks the part we've still got the iconic thompson drum magazine but it stays on the weapon and the laser energy pack is taken off and inserted from the front of it so that's interesting as well in the why is it shaped like a drum when the drum doesn't even come off and you're replacing the thing in the middle so it's a deliberate homage to the thompson gun something i noticed because of the the third person side view that we got there is the recoil so this is this is called a laser weapon and it fires a pretty much a beam like a pulsed beam of ostensibly laser light light doesn't recoil so unless this is actually a plasma weapon of some kind and it's just called a laser gun it should not recoil into the shoulder like it does so i think that's a stylistic choice because a gun that's as powerful as relatively powerful as this and is representing the tommy gun might look weird if it didn't recoil well uh to my shame i did not put this on the table behind me but this is effectively the anti-materiel rifle from fallout new vegas it's by far the closest to a real world weapon in the game that i can think of that i remember and this is a 50 caliber browning machine gun monster and it kind of has to be hefted to be believed it pretty much functions as it does in the game and of course in fallout this thing is absolutely devastating and because of the ability to load make your own ammunition in various different flavors we saw incendiary in use as well interestingly when an incendiary round hits the ground which i hadn't remembered um doesn't initiate seemingly but when it hits a target human death claw whatever it goes up in flames appropriately enough and i'm going to put this down before i hurt myself as befits a desert western type setting albeit in a parallel desolate future the single action army cult is still going strong it's actually quite a good representation of the single action army the well the most interesting thing is the ability to load different ammunition and to manufacture different ammunition so we saw hollow points there which work well against unarmored targets not working well against an armored target and so we see a switch to normal ammunition either either hard cast lead or full metal jacket would have much the same effect and that has the penetration to defeat not modern body armor but um repurpose sportswear of the sort that we see in the fallout universe we've got yet another very convenient reload animation which i don't blame them for at all you'd be there for quite a while if you had to depict it realistically so we have the player incredibly adept at simultaneously rotating the cylinder and ejecting the the spam cases which in reality ten tend to stick in the chamber and need to be ejected by the ejector rod and then immediately pressing home the uh the replacement rounds it's a system that can be leveraged for gameplay reasons to make if you want to make the revolver more powerful but slower to reload here it's kind of a balance where it's moderately powerful but not as slow to reload as it would be in real life come on we've got a suspiciously mad max looking character there wielding that characters or a take on it iconic double-barreled sauna shotgun in fact the fallout version is actually a craft produced weapon it's not an old world pre-nuclear cut down shotgun like the one behind me there it's been made from scratch on the subject of the coin shot that's i suspect based on real history in well or at least folklore where you load a shotgun cartridge with a stack of quarters or whatever as a sort of home brew form of shot as the game calls it coin shot if metal is scarce why wouldn't you do that and it wouldn't be as effective as lead shot but it would still hurt well that puts a smile on the face doesn't it the uh the fat man nuke launcher based on some real technology the um davey crockett tactical nuclear launcher it's not quite as portable as this but it's not too far off crew served so you need several guys to carry and operate it terrifying the idea that we we were sort of looking at not only battlefield nukes but tactical battlefield news so you'd be within hundreds of meters of a nuclear explosion absolute insanity and luckily we didn't go down that route but they did in the fallout universe and so we now have a shoulder-fired nuclear weapon used at point-blank range uh technically point-blank range is is something else but um in terms of too close is the definition of point blank that yeah that wasn't great i think i saw some crippled limbs there i think that's the minimum you'd expect from a nuclear bomb going off in your face but it definitely took care of the critter there i did forget for a while that the browning high power was actually in the game but of course you start the game with it and it's pretty much vanilla it's as low it's been hanging around for 200 years or whatever and it's still working which is not entirely implausible like so many of the game of the guns in this game weird glitch in the reload animation well lesser glitch more of an oversight we've seen in other things where the gun the slide is forward and when you reload the slide magically opens to the rear um sort of shortcutting the the animation i suppose but um the high high power is pretty well represented the cartridge cases coming out are immense though for some reason they look like grenade launcher rounds not quite sure why that is they wouldn't they wouldn't fit in the gun uh we've got a modifications with extended magazine and a ipsc style sight mount now that's something that definitely wouldn't survive 200 years knocking around in the wasteland guns are quite robust optical sights really aren't that was the 10 millimeter pistol of course this one's been fitted somehow i think it's modded with a suppressor which has no hole in the end which is bizarre and would result in it blowing off the end of the gun now where um reality intersects with this is that weapons like the well rod used rubber wipes and they do in fact seal off the end of the suppressor so it almost looks like there's no hole in the end and then the first shot is super quiet because it's having to penetrate the the layers of um rubber and then the subsequent sort of ten or so shots are very quiet because they're the gas is sealed behind them as they squeeze through the rubber and then after about a dozen shots the rubber is sufficiently abraded and worn out that basically it's back to being a normal suppressor so it's still working but it's not as quiet that's not what we see here what we see here is a cock-up to my shame i have still not gone back and played fallout one and two i gather that the the blade runner blaster which is obviously what we see here first appeared in fallout 2 i think and made a reappearance in this game it's a fair a pretty faithful representation of this fictional detective sidearm it's a bit of a deviation from the real blade runner blaster in that well we don't know what ammunition that chamber is but we don't even know how it chambers ammunition because the real prop was a charter arms bulldog 44 special um with a swing out cylinder as we see in the fallout version looks amazing it's one of the most iconic sci-fi weapons ever but in terms of how it would work in in the universe it makes little sense what do the lights mean what do they do in in fallout we see the amber and green light as to to sort of denote loaded and unloaded although you kind of know when it's loaded because the cylinders in and so they've kind of recognized that the blinky lights might have a purpose the ones on the prop they're just for show one of the enjoyable things about the fallout games is the mixture of projectile weapons and effectively ray guns obviously the the gameplay difference they've gone for here other than green versus red is a slow-moving blob i wanted a better term for the plasma that when it if if you manage to hit with it does high damage whereas the laser is more of a beam and per shot it's lower damage but if you get more on target you do the same damage it's that classic rpg trade-off but i really like the design with the exception of the bizarre energy system firstly that this power pack at the bottom is so tiny doesn't really make much intuitive sense and secondly that you for some reason it's installed on a really flimsy looking bracket which you then have to you have to rotate it into contact why can't you just plug it in but i quite like how kind of heath robinson the designs of these are it's almost like they've got plasma and laser technology but they haven't got too far into the technology of it before the nukes hit now it's always a bit sad when we come to a weapon that we don't have in the royal armouries collection and the china lake grenade launcher is sadly one of those it's not a bad depiction but the limitations of the graphics they based it pretty closely on the real thing it's got one extra round uh the china lake only fits three rounds in you think of the length of a even the standard short 40 millimeter grenades you're struggling to fit more than three in a weapon that compact uh we also see plasma rounds being used and i always find that intriguing in in my fiction when you've got a sort of legacy firearm that is power is multiplied by changing the ammunition and we've already seen that you know we've got modern ammunition loads for the same cartridge type for guns 50 100 years old that make them noticeably more effective and there's no reason why in the future that not this but a weapon that we use today that's less effective in the future can keep pace simply by upgrading the ammunition i always found the fallout minigun more appealing as an idea than an actual weapon i didn't get on with it particularly well don't really understand why it's five millimeter when 5.56 is in the game the bores of the barrels are very clearly bigger than five millimeters the design is not that close to the real minigun sitting behind me there it has a cluster of rotating barrels that's about it really um curiously although although the character wears a backpack when he carries this thing that's not where the ammunition is but in the game the ammunition magazine drum thing whatever the hell it is it's like a filing cabinet drawer that goes into the side of the gun that's what feeds the cartridges so the backpack is presumably an enormous battery um it always always used to work me as well that the um cartridge cases which get a far too big for a five millimeter caliber come kind of tumbling out of the side of the gun like 20 at a time rapid fire machine guns like this tend to have like a cascade of spent brass but not like a storm of it coming out the side that always looked a bit weird [Music] this revolver the the ranger sequoia massive six shooter is fairly similar to the magnum research bfr we haven't got one but i'm not too upset because we do have a couple of these this is the century manufacturing model 100 and it is tremendously huge it's also chambered in 4570 which the bfr in the real world is not it is a clone of the single action army like bfr is and it has a gigantic brass frame it's actually bigger than the in-game model unfortunately a quirk of the in-game model is that it fires with the hammer down as though it's a double-action revolver so when you pull the trigger the hammer comes back and is released in one go so yes ludicrous massively powerful impractical revolvers do get made i've never been entirely clear on how the gauss gun gauss rifle in fallout's supposed to work i'm guessing that the reloadable cartridge thing is the projectile and that somehow the thing is powered or possibly that the developers did not know what a gauss gun is there is a real world what was the rail gun which uses parallel rails to accelerate a projectile so it's a projectile weapon but it's using tremendous amounts of energy to accelerate it so it's almost a hybrid between a projectile and a directed energy weapon gauss guns as i understand it are similar principle but with a series of coils that accelerate the projectile that isn't really what we see and i have a feeling this is just a cool sci-fi name attached to a single shot blue energy weapon because the the blue energy release that we see on impact doesn't also doesn't really reflect how gauss or railguns actually work the only flash you see from those is an explosion effective flame from the tremendous heat created by the impact so nice idea but um it's a perhaps a bit of a fudge maybe i think that's probably meant to be a single shot energy weapon essentially of all of the machine guns to survive into the end of the world i'm not sure that the fn minimi will be one of them the thing that really stands out are the terrible sights weird inverse iron sights where the front sight post becomes an aperture and the rear sight is a post uh not how sights work there's also a weird quirk of this in that the in-game enemy light machine gun correctly can chamber and fire both 5.56 and 223 caliber ammunition the game doesn't take that approach the game takes the view that 5.56 is military so it must be more powerful therefore the 2t3 the civilian version must be less powerful just being 556 or 2t3 doesn't make any difference the original loads of both are equally damaging and being again because it does less damage it wears your gun out less quickly whereas it wouldn't make any difference the minimum with a 5.56 chamber could fire 223 all day long until it breaks would not work in in that way you don't get less wear for less damage but of course that's a classic rpg trade-off if you'd like to support what we here at the royal armouries are doing in various ways including over on our own channel as well and here with our friends at gamespot we have links in the description for ways that you can do that otherwise i'll see you again next time thanks very much [Music] you

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 738,023

Rating: 4.9631987 out of 5

Keywords: game, games, video game, gaming, juego, fallout new vegas, fallout, new vegas, fallout weapons breakdown, fallout guns breakdown, fallout expert reacts, fallout weapons, fallout guns, new vegas expert reacts, gun review, weapon review, expert reacts, jonathan ferguson, royal armouries, firearms expert, firearms expert reacts, nuka launcher, minigun, gauss rifle

Id: CP7YVMBtEmU

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Deamonette]

I like this guy. He is pretty open minded about sci fi weapons. Judging them purelly by how viable it might be instead of going the "uuh achkthgually this doesn't already exist in real life so its stupid" route a lot of people take.

[u/judojoker]

I want this guy, Zach, and Ian McCollum to do a collab together.