Silencing energy weapons?

[Piers Arkan]

Ah energy Weapons. Sometimes I like you. Sometimes you're completely useless. Sometimes you're the holorifle with max charge and the meltdown perk and I never want to let you go, but we gotta talk about your neighbor. I know, the suppressed sniper rifle is the bane of every XP-holding non-essential civilian, animal, or thing that moves within 100 yards. He's a showboat, but he has something to him. Sure, it may be game breaking, exploitation, or just boring to kill everyone quietly, but what about those times when it works really nicely in close quarters? That's what I want to talk about. Suppressing an energy weapon gives some of us sneaky people who enjoy using these rare weapons some leeway and some reason to stay away from bullets. 

But Piers, laser guns make a line you can conveiently follow so long as you have one good eye, and the same goes for Plasma weapons and the gauss rifle is really friggin loud. 

 

I get that. But there are other energy weapons, and no I don't want silenced Incinerators. Talking about pulse weaponry. The little pulse gun may be dangerous as hell to robots and power armored boy scouts, but how can you feasibly trace a pulse to its source unless you have radar? and the only reason you see the pulse in action is probably to see what you've shot. And what about the Mesmetron, the Microwave Emitter, the Sonic Emitter? These few tiny mobile niche weapons all work in such a manner that it could be feasible to have them listed as silent weapons. This gives infiltrators a chance to use some small energy weapons for good use.

 

    I know its not a lot of weapons, but perhaps there is also the topic of mods, the other unique guns brought in from Fallout 3, and the prospect that one of these guns could be marked as silent to compensate for their other changes from Vegas. Like the Microwave Emitter. But what about little MPLX Novasurge? It consumes double ammo, like how plasma pistols already do. That was its thing for Fallout 3, but vegas already handles that. 

So there's my pitch, pulse weaponry and a few other guns getting silenced treatment. What say ye? 

[Trm8r]

I say ye. I never use energy weapons because I'm a skulker. I always look at em, and think 'that would be so Fallout', Harold would be proud of me. But then I remember how bad of FPS player I am and decide to stick to the shadows.

[Puppettron]

PN has a stealth laser pistol that's pretty f'n awesome if you're spec'd for energy weapons.  the real problem is that energy weapons pretty much suck for most of the game and then suddenly when you're perk'd up, they're awesome and way better than pretty much everything.  so it's kind of a balance issue at that point, especially considering the drawback to most firearms is the ammo and there's only 3 or 4 types of energy weapon ammo, making a stockpile of ammo for your silenced laser rifle really easy to get, especially in NV's "tons of damn ammo everywhere" build.

[Piers Arkan]

I went to Vegas to get ammo. Yeah. It's pretty bad when some characters can have several thousand rounds of ECP and Energy Cell to just sling around every 3 days. But right now in DC, having never went to Vegas, i'm sitting on 5000 Electron Charge rounds optimized. And yeah energy weapon ammo can be hard to find early on and few people use them, and the rounds basically can't punch through most DT's, but till you get to the end of course. By that time though, you have access to the weapons I outlined. Weapons which could be for the stealthier folks. 

 

What if the ammo expenditure is increased? Take for example the Microfussion emitter as a parallel to the Gauss Rifle's treatment in Vegas. In standard Point Lookout, it has 5 rounds in the magazine, using 1 Microfusion cell each shot. Gauss Rifle in Anchorage was similar, having one microfusion cell expended per shot, only you had to reload after each. I don't recall what has been done to the ammo capacity of the Microwave emitter now, but the gauss rifle consumes 5 microfusion cells per shot, still requiring a reload after each shot. Why not do the same to the Microwave emitter, adding the little caveat that you have to reload it after each shot, and it is close quarters?

[Puppettron]

simple.  set the microwave emitter to have a 5 round clip and 5 rounds used per shot.  same thing they do with the gauss rifles and the dbl barrel shottys.

[Thatchor]

If you don't like the fact that you find so much ammo and if you are using PN, you can modify a setting in PN that drastically reduces the amount of ammo you can find based on rarity. I have had it something like a 10% chance to receive common (compared to vanilla's 100% chance)  and only a 1% chance to receive rare. I like the challenge.

Anyway, energy weapons by design are loud. I wouldn't be against the idea of adding some sort of silencer to them at the cost of decrease range/power/projectile speed. As for the actual sound, I'd just open up the wav file and lower the volume. It doesn't belong natively in TTW, but it'd make an interesting mod that I'd personally use.

[Puppettron]

i've yet to find a way to make an imod affect more than one weapon trait.  i haven't been looking all that hard though, but i figure the best route is to go the stealth laser pistol route and just make a new weapon, and then do all the stuff you would normally do with weapons you're adding to the game.  in my case, it's "make 6 recipes activated by a perk or three and make the player feel like he's doing something amazing, which he kind of is"