Paulson's Revolver

 is a weapon carried by Paulson in the Fallout 3 add-on Mothership Zeta.

Characteristics

 * Paulson's Revolver is a .44 Magnum revolver that functions differently to the Scoped .44 Magnum, firing a group of shots at once. It also lacks a scope, making it the only non-scoped .44 Magnum revolver available to the player without the use of console commands. It is similar to the Mysterious Stranger's .44 Magnum with the exception of firing multiple projectiles at one time. The revolver shoots 9 pellets with one shot. Outside of V.A.T.S., this gun will get devastating critical hits quite frequently. Unlike the Scoped .44 Magnum, this has a shield around the rear section of the cylinder. It is repaired with any (including unique) Scoped .44 Magnums.


 * When used in V.A.T.S. even though it uses the .44 rounds the bullets look like pellets.


 * This revolver can be great side arm for sniper or sneak based characters, or even for any other small guns based characters. Its devastating critical damage, combined with fairly high base damage, can come in handy when you are facing tough enemies like Supermutant Overlords and Feral Ghoul Reavers. Only downside is scarce ammunition and difficulty to find repair parts, though ammo press from The Pitt and fully invested caravan merchants will easily solve this problem.

Obtaining
Paulson uses the revolver as his primary weapon, and can only be obtained by taking it from him. It cannot be reverse-pickpocketed; as long as Paulson is alive, he uses a non-playable version of the weapon. The player-usable weapon is only added to Paulson's inventory when he's dead and the player loots his corpse.

Appearances
appears in the Mothership Zeta add-on for Fallout 3.

Behind the scenes
The modern .44 magnum cartridge is fairly new and thus no weapon designed during Paulson's time would likely be able to handle the immense pressure of firing the round. The Black Powder .44 round available at the time may have been similar in dimension, but loading a weapon chambered for that round with the modern .44 magnum round would likely result in the gun exploding in the user's hand when fired and destroy the gun due to the fact that smokeless powder is much more potent than Black Powder. Theoretically it could be possible to create a revolver around the turn of the 19th Century that could handle the newer cartridge by having it custom made, but since the .44 magnum round didn't exist back then the gunsmith would have had to been very lucky to come up with a weapon that could accommodate a cartridge that wasn't even produced until 1955!


 * A similar anachronism exists with Lincoln's Repeater (see Behind the scenes section).