Standard weapons for the U.S Army pre-war?

Considering NV, Obsidian would most likely have to follow Beths lead on canon, especially with weapons.
 
Languorous_Maiar said:
It is, but only in Beth literation of Fallout.
But not form original developers.
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I'm not debating what is or should be canon.

I am saying that the original developers didn't realize that energy weapons aren't sturdy or light enough to be standard issue
 
The F1/2 laser rifle, F2 pulse rifle, plasma and laser pistols, all look pretty light. Only the Winchester plasma rifle was out of place and had a not so good design.
 
Ben Soto said:
um... No. No it doesn't. If memory serves, energy weapons (especially lasers) were supposedly fragile. I think it had something to do with lens or a crystal array or something, but laser weapons weren't particularly hardy. Even if they aren't any more fragile than conventional firearms, they've got to be a lot more expensive, considering that microfusion cells are probably using uranium, which is in much shorter supply than lead, copper and iron, not to mention the complex electronics being put into the guns themselves.

For America to field such a large army without breaking the bank, they'd probably wind up using more traditional firearms and leave the advanced tech for the special forces and heavy troops.

I'd wager that the Service Rifle and Assault Carbine, as well as the R91, are the standard service weapons of the US armed forces, with the N80 and potentially the AEP-9 as the standard sidearm.

It is possible that the military wanted to phase out standard firearms, but it's still rather impractical. Then again, this is the same government that spend trillions and trillions of dollars on over 100 oversized death traps, so perhaps money wasn't an issue.

EDIT: I said AEP-9. I actually mean AEP-7, but I was confused because Bethesda did a dumb and fused the AER-9 and AEP-7 into one weapon. Damn it, Bethesda.
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This is reminiscent of a lot of real-life US military attempts to phase out current standard-issue weaponry for new ones, but failed due to financial costs and was relegated to either other countries or certain units only. I think that was the case with Russia and the AK-12, and with the US and the XM8.

Considering the AE series of laser weapons had no exposed parts, though, I think their designs were rather complete. It was more the plasma weaponry that looked like it was still in the prototype stage. Considering how plentiful the laser weapons were, I would say that they were pretty much standard issue at that point. Besides, if they had enough nuclear material for all the cars (while the fuel costs did go up, several cars remained with enough fuel to explode) then they definitely had enough for military tech.

Also, about the AE series. I rather think it's one of two cases - that the AE parts are interchangeable, so both the AER-9 and AEP-7 both exists. The other case is that we only saw AER-9s in Fallout 4, since the AEP laser pistol grip did not appear and the pistol reciever for the AER looked slightly different. We may have seen only AERs in Fallout 4 and all the improvised pistol variants, custom carbine receivers, but not the actual AEP.

Bethesda is good for writing a lot of lore and deciding to leave it out of the game even though it's still right there in their design docs, so I'm not surprised if this is the case.
 
If memory serves, the AER-series rifles were more fragile than ballistic weapons, and more expensive.

I also know Bethesda has nuclear cars, but I honestly think they're rather dumb (not because they explode, but just the fact that they're so prevalent)
 
For what it's worth, the car in FO:2 was powered by microfusion cells, not an on-board fission reactor.
 
Perhaps real world weapons history influenced their thought processes, too. A. Repeating rifles were first mass used by civilians prior to the 1869 adoption by the Swiss of the Vetterli. B. Semiautomatic pistols were first mass produced as civilian sidearms until the German Navy adopted the Luger in 1904[1908 was general adoption by German forces]. Perhaps plasma weapons were simply too pricey due to manufacturing costs involved, so while they were in high end civilian production by 1949, they never went into military production until 2060. With the Resource Wars, that would certainly would have slowed further adoption, too. Remember, innovation can be a dangerous diversion of resources, so that's why the military is not always fast to adopt new stuff.
 
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