Backwater Rifle

The Backwater rifle is a unique lever-action rifle which is added to Fallout 3 with the Point Lookout add-on.

Characteristics
The Backwater rifle boasts the highest damage-per-shot of all 10mm weapons in Fallout 3, while also possessing the second-highest damage-per-shot of all rifle-type weapons, the highest being Lincoln's repeater.

It should be noted, however, that despite this weapon's attacks and critical bonuses each being 5 damage lower than those of Lincoln's repeater (resulting in 10 less damage total on a critical hit), the backwater rifle's 5x crit-chance multiplier is capable of offering up to a 90% chance to critical for a character with a maxed-out base critical chance (10 Luck, the Finesse perk and the critical chance version of Survival Expert), where Lincoln's repeater, with its lower 2x multiplier would only offer a 36% chance to critical with the same stats.

In this light, the Backwater rifle may be more powerful in practice for high-Luck characters, as it offers a base damage of 45 (assuming no bonuses) with a 90% chance to achieve a 90 damage critical hit, as opposed to Lincoln's repeater which causes a base damage of 50, but only has a 36% chance of achieving its 100 damage criticals. This also makes the backwater rifle an effective alternative against tougher enemies, against whom Sneak attack criticals may not guarantee a kill.

It can only be repaired by using other lever-action rifles, vendors, or alien epoxy.

Durability
The Backwater rifle can fire a total of about 519 rounds, the equivalent of 52 reloads, from full condition before breaking.

Variants

 * lever-action rifle

Location
The Backwater rifle is found on a shelf next to the door in the room downstairs in the Chinese Intelligence bunker.

Related quests

 * The Velvet Curtain

Behind the scenes
Backwater is a type of river that has no current, and is also typically used to describe areas that are considered primitive or unsophisticated (eg: a backwater town).

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