Reservist's Rifle

The Reservist's Rifle appears in Fallout 3 and is a unique version of the Sniper Rifle. This scoped rifle is used by and drops from the Drifter in Dickerson Tabernacle Chapel. It can also be occasionally found in the inventory of Arkansas in the Minefield. It can be repaired with Sniper Rifles. Also, this variation of the sniper rifle seems to have a 60% critical hit chance (70% with Finesse perk), which is much higher than the standard Sniper Rifle or Victory Rifle. It costs 5 AP less to shoot in V.A.T.S. compared to other sniper rifles.

This rifle uses 3 rounds instead of 5 in each magazine.

Trivia

 * The "Reservist's" title might refer to the US Army Reserve, making a reference to some of Fallout 2's weaponry descriptions which give background information about weapons retired by the regular Army and then given to the National Guard or Reserves for their training and use.

Drifter glitch
A random glitch can periodically make Drifter's corpse disappear, taking the Rifle with him. It's not yet known what can cause this. One potential counter to this is to shoot the gun out of his hands before killing him.

The Drifter's corpse is probably stuck on the inaccessible alcove near the window where he shoots the player. His corpse can be accessed with the command "tcl" (noclip mode) in the command console (opened with the ` or ~ key) and then floating up to his body. Or you can blast him out with a missile or grenade, and sometimes it will fall down.

Another means of accessing the rifle if it's stuck upon the unreachable ledge, is to shoot a piece of the Drifters corpse off so that it falls down. The severed piece of the Drifter is lootable and will contain the rifle. You can also try to shoot the rifle itself with a pistol to knock it down. Be careful though, he can hit you pretty good if you are playing on hard, & you have low perception. He took me down to about 40% from 100%. He's an easy kill but he hits you pretty hard if you let him. He also holds a Combat Shotgun so don't get to close

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