Gauss Rifle (Fallout: New Vegas)

The Gauss rifle is a weapon in Fallout: New Vegas.

Characteristics
The scoped Gauss rifle is an advanced sniper rifle, that uses a series of 11 electromagnetic coils to energize and magnetize a pre-loaded standard projectile round at tremendous speed. In appearance it is almost identical (apart from the addition of the buttstock), to the Gauss rifle of the Fallout 3 Operation: Anchorage add-on. The Gauss Rifle featured in Fallout: New Vegas uses 5 microfusion cells per shot as opposed to the 1 used by its Fallout 3 counterpart.

Like most other energy weapons in Fallout: New Vegas, it can be expensive and difficult to find ammunition for and its rarity can make it difficult to maintain or repair. On the killing shot, the Gauss rifle's powerful shot causes a small distorted shockwave which will send enemies flying back.

The rifle has numerous advantages over its gun equivalent, the anti-materiel rifle. It has a lower strength requirement of 5 compared to 8, does slightly more damage, has double the critical chance (a maximum of 76% compared to the 38% of the anti-materiel rifle), and weighs less in both ammunition and weight. Its ammunition is also more common than .50 caliber rounds. By contrast, however, the anti-materiel rifle is better at punching through armor, uses less ammunition per shot, inflicts 110 extra damage on a critical hit opposed to 60 for the Gauss rifle, and on hardcore the ratio of ammo to weight is worse as each shot of the Gauss Rifle uses .5 WG while the anti-materiel rifle only uses .25 WG per shot. Developers most likely did this to balance the Gauss Rifle's base weight of 7 WG to the anti-material rifle's considerably heavier weight of 20 WG.

For those of you who enjoy the challenges of hardcore the thing to consider is the overall weight package of the Gauss Rifle. If you carry more than 260 microfusion cells, or 52 shots, the Gauss rifle becomes heavier than the anti-material rifle. It is only 60 microfusion cells, or 12 shots, if you take the Heavyweight perk.

With the Jury Rigging perk, the Gauss rifle can be repaired with Laser RCWs, the Q-35 Matter Modulator, multiplas rifles and plasma rifles.

Note: The AP requirement in VATS is actually higher, as reloading a weapon costs some AP as well and this weapon has to be reloaded every shot so the AP requirement is 10 AP higher in practice (as defined by the fActionPointsReload setting in the toolset).

Variants

 * YCS/186 Gauss rifle, a unique variant which does over 16% more damage and uses four microfusion cells per shot instead of five. It can only be obtained without the Wild Wasteland trait, otherwise it will be replaced by an alien blaster.


 * The Faderator, a cut content Gauss rifle from the Dead Money add-on that is fully automatic and does 20,160 damage per second (DPS).

Locations

 * Brewer's Beer Bootlegging - one may be randomly found in the hard locked gun case in the cellar.
 * Hidden Valley bunker - can be purchased from Knight Torres after following the quest lines or taken from unnamed non-player characters around the bunker. Also, many of the Paladins in Brotherhood T-51b power armor wield this weapon.
 * Silver Rush, Freeside - sometimes sells them at higher levels.
 * Carried by Father Elijah.
 * Can be found on Y-17 trauma override harness' most notably near the X-7a "Left Field" artillery launch.

Behind the Scenes

 * The Gauss rifle (aka coilgun) is a device used to propel a ferromagnetic projectile by accelerating them through a process of magnet induction. The Gauss rifle is named after the German scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss, who formulated mathematical descriptions of the magnetic effect used by magnetic accelerators.

Bugs

 * The Pip-Boy's displayed damage per second (DPS) for the gun doesn't account for the need to reload every shot, unlike other single shot weapon such as the Missile launcher. This is due to the game mechanics not taking into consideration the weapon use of more than 1 ammo per shot.
 * The Gauss rifle will occasionally completely pass through an opponent when shot outside of V.A.T.S.
 * The Gauss rifle in Fallout: New Vegas is almost identical to the one found in Fallout 3, and thus suffers from similar bugs, including the one that affects its damage output when fired via V.A.T.S. When used in V.A.T.S., any hit will do exactly 95.244% of the maximum damage, regardless of enemy damage threshold, critical hits, or sneak attack critical. This means, that with energy weapons skill of 100, the Gauss rifle shot will do 114.29 points of damage with every V.A.T.S. shot. This is still lower than free aiming, and no bonuses are applied to head shots. The damage bug is related to the Gauss rifle's "explosive" visual effect, which affects its V.A.T.S. damage calculations. Removing the effect via user-created mods is currently the only known solution to the issue. Notably, the displacer glove, which applies a similar visual effect on impact, is not affected by this bug.
 * The Gauss rifle when scoped in shows a high contrast color computer interface as shown when activating a terminal meaning you cannot see where you are aiming when looking down the scope.
 * When standing still and aiming straight down, then firing the weapon, the character will sometimes go into third-person, and the weapon will then fly out of the player's hands. While in third-person, the weapon will now fire directly from where it lies on the ground, or sometimes, float in the air. If entering first-person, the weapon acts like normal. The bug can be fixed by unequipping the weapon completely (switch to another weapon) and re-equipping it again. This is also possible for it's unique variant, the YCS/186. Since both weapons have a small area-of-blast damage, this will also damage the player for about 1/10 of the players health.