YCS 186

The  is a unique weapon in Fallout: New Vegas.

Characteristics
The YCS/186 is a unique version of the Gauss rifle. Although it seems to be rather decrepit, it does have a sandy texture along the barrel and stock which can be beneficial in the Mojave Wasteland. Additionally, the reticle (crosshairs) is amber in color instead of the green color found inside the Gauss rifle's scope. Also, it has 4 more coils around the barrel, possibly explaining the greater damage (11 coils around default Gauss rifle, 15 on YCS/186). This weapon uses 4 microfusion cells per shot, instead of 5 like the Gauss rifle.

Variants

 * Gauss rifle

Locations
The YCS/186 Gauss rifle is found at the mercenary camp east of Brooks Tumbleweed Ranch. A mercenary with combat armor, reinforced is carrying this weapon. You need to either pick-pocket him or kill him (no karma or reputation loss) to get it. If the player has the Wild Wasteland trait, the mercenaries are replaced with aliens, making the YCS/186 unobtainable, except through console commands.

Behind the Scenes
The is a reference to the "Your Console Sucks" section of the Something Awful Forums. Additionally, 186 is the forum ID number of YCS.

Bugs

 * Sometimes a projectile is fired, but no hit is detected although the projectile can clearly be seen to travel through the target. On the Xbox 360, this occurs primarily at short range and most frequently against deathclaws.
 * Per the Gauss rifle page "The Gauss rifle in Fallout: New Vegas is identical to the one found in Fallout 3, and thus suffers from similar bugs, including the one that affects its damage output when used 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 DR, critical hits, or sneak attacks. This means, that with Energy Weapons skill of 100, the Gauss rifle shot will do 95.244 points of damage with every V.A.T.S. shot. This is still lower than free aiming, and no bonuses are applied to headshots." and thus this weapon likely suffers from the same bug as it's simply a unique version of the Gauss rifle.
 * The normal map texture is rotated and/or misaligned, resulting in highly irregular shading across the weapon. Possibly uses lower resolution ground item textures on the first-person model as well.
 * The impact power of the gun is very high, resulting in the enemies being knocked through solid objects and into the terrain or through the game world (falling beneath it) making retrieval of their bodies and any goods impossible. Surprisingly Meltdown does not exacerbate this problem, but somewhat remedies it by changing the trajectory of the corpse or causing the impact force of the shot to dissipate when the energy explosion occurs.