| abstract
| - A revolver using .32 caliber ammo not even scratching your targets, that's fine. The same bullet in a hunting rifle taking off limbs with ease = what?
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* That's not too surprising; the power of a given unit of ammunition is based not just on how much gunpowder and lead is involved, but how much powder can burn before the bullet leaves the barrel. .223 is physically similar to several military rounds and is a good if borderline deer hunting round in a long rifle, while it's drastically less impressive in a shorter handgun barrel. You can typically see a doubling or even tripling of velocity going from a short revolver to a long rifle. This doesn't excuse the horrible game design choice, but that's a different issue.
* This one is Truth in Television: in the Old West, the two most popular weapons were the Colt Peacemaker Single Action Army revolver and the Winchester 1873 Repeater. Why? Because BOTH USED THE SAME AMMO. The revolver allowed for faster drawing and shooting, but the rifle, with its longer barrel, allowed for more precise shooting and harder impact because of its rifling. Rifling is to cut spiraling grooves into the inside of a barrel (hence the term itself, rifle). These grooves cause the bullet to spin as it leaves the barrel, making the bullet more aerodynamic by gyroscopic motion. This results in a faster, more accurate, harder-hitting projectile.
* Rifling has nothing to do with making a projectile hit harder, it just spins the bullet so it remains more stable the flight path, just like spiraling a football. Also, most pistols have rifled barrels as well, at least most modern ones.
* That would mean something if a point-blank range shot to the face with each gun did the same damage, yet they don't.
* Bullets fired from rifled barrels are more accurate and more ballistically stable over long ranges thanks to spin stabilization of the projectile. They are not faster, nor harder hitting at short range; the rifling effectively converts some of the projectile's forward velocity into angular momentum. However, longer barrels do generally mean higher velocity from the same ammo (there are a few caveats, however, and it's not so much of an issue with fast-burning powder).
* The fallout series seems only differentiate by projectile size, not case size, since there are no case length dimensions (5.56mm is just 5.56mm, not 5.56X45mm). The hunting rifle looks like a M98 mauser, which is 7.92MM, which is .32 caliber. So, when you shoot the .32 ammo in the Hunting rifle, you're shooting 7.92mm Mauser ammo.
* Fallout calibers are not necessarily the same as real world calibers, they are just probably very close since there's not much reason to reinvent the wheel. IIRC both Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics do have use of historical guns from our Post-Divergence timeline (Fallout 2 sticking mostly to guns that never had real production runs), but this has been declared somewhat non-canon by Bethesda. Remember, the current NATO calibers are all post-Divergence. The .32 can just be treated as a caliber invented for Fallout that's a pastiche of real-world .32 pistol and rifle rounds and was designed to be used for either.
* At any rate, the FN P90 and the FN Five-Seven as well as the other weapons in the family were all designed to use the 5.7mm round, mainly for logistical reasons. Other than that, it's probably best to just call it gameplay reasoning as it's not exactly enjoyable to juggle 15 different ammos types just for your handguns and rifles alone.
* Among reasons already listed, you have to consider that a revolver dumps a surprising amount of the generated pressure through the gap between the cylinder and the barrel.
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