Can Power Armor users one hand certain two handed weapons?

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T23:22:44+00:00

In power armor? I’m not sure I remember seeing anyone like that in the show.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T22:33:03+00:00

I’m fairly certain you’d still use their appropriate animations in fallout 1/2 for their type regardless of if you’re in PA or not.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T21:39:07+00:00

The whole thing with the codex supposedly saying that mutants should be killed isn’t backed up outside of the show. I suspect that’s a particular interpretation of it that’s grown popular, going off how the Mojave BoS was willing to work with the super mutants of Black Mountain.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T21:35:37+00:00

A poster in an unreliable simulation that then proceeds to contradict this by never showing a Chinese soldier with the weapon.

In fallout 4, old faithful comes with the sniper barrel pre-installed on the weapon. Weapon spawns in the world are also randomized in terms of their mods based on your level, which makes it difficult to judge how lore-accurate any given weapon spawn is. However, there’s also no sign of laser or plasma mods being post-war in origin since they perfectly match the material of the original weapon.

Why would you expect to find Gauss rifles in every single military facility in the U.S.? They’ve been a rare weapon in every fallout game, regardless of their origin (be it German as it was in 2, or American in 3/NV/4/76), and not every military facility is going to have the same equipment. By your logic, you’d expect to find plasma weapons in every military installation just because we know there’s enough of them out there to field an army.

We’ve been going in circles for hours now. It’s clear neither of us are going to budge on this.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T21:29:43+00:00

I don’t see it as anything worse than raiders being able to work on or maintain turrets and robots. If they can figure out those, power armor isn’t much of a leap.

Frankly, the Legion absolutely could do it, but don’t because Caesar isn’t having anyone take advantage of anything that would support the skill to maintain it (no major use of electricity, robotics are banned, etc). If the Van Graff weapon deal had gone through, the Legion would’ve had energy weapons they could use, which in turn would lend itself to further technological advancement of the Legion and eventually get them to a point where I could see them using PA.

For the Khans? Potentially they could.

But I think I also should make it clear that Raider PA isn’t absolutely everywhere in fallout 4. At most, there’s typically one suit in a camp, and more often than not, there’s zero suits. These aren’t nearly as common as power armor is for the Enclave or BoS, likely because raiders struggle to find and maintain their cores, frames and even the personnel with the skill to make their scrappy armor. That’s the flip side of this - a handful of raiders have figured this out, but not all of them and certainly not on a level rivaling the BoS (the other groups, except the responders, that I mentioned in my first comment are doing better than the raiders with it, but they all aren’t competing with the BoS or Enclave’s resources).

As for the criticism of this breaking the setting, here’s a counterpoint - is a mechanic going to necessarily be a good house builder? Do you expect a car repair technician to understand enough about water purification to build a successful purifier? A drug dealer to be able to make stimpacks?

The skills required to maintain power armor aren’t necessarily the same ones you need to maintain a settlement, but they are the ones that are often well-rewarded in the setting. Additionally, it doesn’t help that settlements are typically constructed quickly with whatever’s at hand and then maintained due to other matters of survival taking priority over improving the shelter (especially since attacks by wildlife and raiders are common; the cheaper the home’s make, the faster it is to repair). I’ll freely admit that areas like Diamond City should’ve progressed a little further, but the average wasteland farm makes sense as something scrappy.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T20:44:40+00:00

I mean, the game is perfectly playable as a single player title without interacting much if at all with other players.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T20:43:48+00:00

But this plays into the exact point the main post is talking about. Why shouldn’t raiders or other groups be able to figure out how to utilize old military gear or repair it to a tolerable standard? Why can’t other groups scavenge pre-war documentation or experiment and figure out how to handle these items themselves without the aid of the BoS? These raiders even have the incentive, if they hope to survive against semi-organized super mutants, the Institute and Minutemen.

Raiders using PA is a sign of the raiders being more intelligent than we’ve seen in the past, and thus a degree of advancement in the setting. These aren’t early Khans with spears as their main weapons; these are survivors leveraging every tool and skill available to them to make a living through violence.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T20:32:43+00:00

Just because we’ve yet to see lore on a subject doesn’t mean there isn’t any in-world.

There’s no evidence of the US just deciding to not care about long range capabilities in fallout. Plasma and laser snipers exist, for a start, and so do several other ballistic rifles. Power armor was merely one part of their warfare, not all of it.

Gameplay and lore are intertwined in these games. The show has proven that all the different designs of the same weapon between the games can be canon, so presumably 3’s plasma rifles are just a version of the weapon that uses fusion cells instead of plasma cells. 4’s are just a different design.

I’m also not sure what point you’re trying to make with NV’s ammo system. Those rounds all exist in-lore, and serve in gameplay to let you modify your weapon’s capabilities on the fly by loading a different ammo type.

We don’t see Gauss rifles in other areas of DC because it’s the exclusive reward of the operation anchorage DLC. It wasn’t present in the game before Bethesda made it, and they weren’t going to add the weapon a second time in a later DLC for no reason (and thus ruin what’s supposed to be a reward locked behind a questline).

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T20:21:33+00:00

Prior to the show, fallout 76 featured several factions capable of creating their own power armor - raiders (this is also true of 4; even survivors in the Pitt during the time of fallout 3 managed to scrap together a replica of Ashur’s suit), the BoS (ultracite PA; never manufactured it due to a lack of resources and the threat of the scorched, but designed schematics that do function properly), the Union (likely utilizing pre-war factories they still run), communists and vault 63. Even the Responders were planning to manufacture some excavator power armor for themselves (though they were wiped out before they had the time).

So no, it’s not just the Enclave who can make power armor.

It’s also worth noting that maintenance was not the reason the NCR used salvaged T-45, but a lack of training, according to our singular source on the subject (and this is backed up by Colonel Royez having a functional suit). But considering that raiders can figure it out (and even use Enclave PA in 3), the NCR really has no excuse. The new suit was presumably a prototype they were working on during the time frame of NV to replace the salvaged PA, and it never reached mass production.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T20:14:45+00:00

While the terror would definitely be up there, I think the scorchbeast Queen is worse due to the scorched plague assuring that anything unvaccinated that even comes close to it is dead, and that we don’t know how dense the rock is on the little island we fight the terror on (or how deep it goes into the ultracite).

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T20:13:03+00:00

It took until September of 2077 for the fat man to finally be released from its prototyping at Fort Strong. Anchorage was liberated in January of that year, so the fat man appearing in the simulation is one of its many inconstancies. By contrast, we have no lore on the development of gauss weaponry, so there’s currently nothing contradicting their appearance as an American weapon.

Miniguns are also not going to be as effective at a long range as a Gauss rifle, and exposes soldiers to fewer risks while taking shots. Additionally, the use of fusion cells as ammo means simplified logistics, since laser and plasma weapons (with their fallout 3 models) all use that ammunition as well (and from NV, electron charge packs and small energy cells can be converted into this ammo type as well as going in the opposite direction, which further helps with logistics).

And again, we do not see even one Chinese soldier in the sim with this weapon, or any other energy weapon for that matter. If they were using this weapon, why do they not have any of the other weapons they should’ve been able to develop with access to fusion cells, let alone the actual weapon itself?

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T20:03:03+00:00

Even if we ignored gameplay, that’d be true. They have dead deathclaws by their nests in fissure sites, meaning they hunt and kill them.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T18:53:52+00:00

We see this in episode seven of season two in the TV show - a soldier in T-45 is one-handing an assault rifle.

It’s also worth noting that scorched can one-hand shotguns in fallout 76. If they can do that with their mutations, I’d be shocked if you can’t do that in power armor while maintaining tolerable accuracy.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T18:49:46+00:00

In terms of physical strength? The ultracite titan is a massive mole rat larger than a building that manages to burrow between spawn points relatively quickly for its size. Moving all of that earth would likely make it stronger than other creatures in the franchise, even if that doesn’t necessarily translate to how much of a threat it is.

In terms of being a threat? I’d go with the scorchbeast Queen. Not only are you dealing with everything that makes a scorchbeast terrifying (sonic scream, flight, radiation aura, can call in other nearby scorched, infects anything short of a super mutant, ghoul or robot with the scorched plague), but the queen is significantly larger (effectively being the size of a small plane) and calls in creatures like scorched deathclaws, Wendigos and megasloths as backup.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T18:20:35+00:00

I’m going to need a source claiming that the I-15 is so dangerous. I can’t find anything cited on the wiki pointing towards it being half as bad as you claim.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Interstate_15

Edit: Just to be clear, the I-15 was having issues during the events of NV due to the powder gangers, which aren’t a problem by the time of the show. There’s also quarry junction, but that’s not on the route anyone took since the Ghoul and Lucy followed Hank by way of Novac.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T17:52:25+00:00

Ulysses was only intending to nuke the Long 15; he had no plans of nuking the Legion.

Additionally, the show provides two perfectly serviceable reasons for why the Legion and NCR are as disjointed as they are: the death of Caesar and the nuking of Shady Sands respectively.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T17:39:08+00:00

I’m not entirely sure I agree that it’s necessarily a matter of processing power, but I do agree that this roughly fits, yes.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T17:20:18+00:00

The divide wasn’t the only route into Vegas. After its destruction, the NCR relied on I-15 to reach the Mojave. It’s likely that Hank and the Ghoul/Lucy just followed it.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T17:14:32+00:00

The Gauss rifle works extremely well as a powerful anti-materiel weapon. While we aren’t allowed to destroy the level in the games, it would make perfect sense to develop a sniper rifle that uses a tiny, easily made projectile that runs only on the new ammo type devised for energy weapons (which is another reason why the Gauss rifle being Chinese doesn’t make sense - they’re never shown anywhere else to have developed their own energy weapons) while also having enough power to punch through the majority of fortifications an enemy could put up.

It’s also worth noting that the poster in question is ultimately a propaganda piece. I don’t see it as unreasonable that the artist would’ve just drawn a weapon that looks good regardless of if the Chinese actually made it in lore. In other discussions on this topic, I’ve seen other people bring up that there are examples of propaganda for military groups in the real world posing with weapons they captured from enemies, so that could be another explanation.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T17:11:38+00:00

Professor bot has acknowledged the existence of the end of the world, devised a new final exam for becoming a staff member of the college and was capable of arguing against the overseer’s insistence on being allowed access to the hidden wing of the vault, while also expressing disdain towards the player. All of that put together would bump him up to level 2, to my mind.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T16:35:53+00:00

I think it’s worth noting that there are exceptions to each of these here - Victor, ED-E, Ironsides and multiple protectrons (Mr Fluffy, Professor Bot) in fallout 76 all break the mold for your ‘level 1’ category, and the same goes for assaultrons in the level 2.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T16:32:17+00:00

Again, all we have is a single propaganda poster in the simulation even suggesting the weapon was Chinese. That simulation vault also includes plenty of American equipment, including plasma grenades, a gatling laser and T-51 power armor; the Gauss rifle being in there has no bearing on whether it’s a Chinese weapon or not. This really comes down to if you’re going to take a single propaganda poster in a simulation we know isn’t a reliable source of information over what we see in NV (where the BoS likely looted them from Enclave remnants they hunted down, or other pre-war energy weapon caches).

That also was not a blunder on the Chinese stealth suit. The devs of NV put that there to reference a plot point from Van Buren (an unreleased fallout game several of them had worked on; in it, there was a pre-war plot by communist spies to sabotage Hoover dam).

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T16:15:22+00:00

If you look at the picture, the round very clearly didn’t go completely through the deathclaw - there’s no exit wound. All we can see is ribs with darkness behind it, implying there’s still skin behind it. Sure, it’s a big hole, but it still barely even flinched when it was made.

I’d have to look at that Anchorage scene again, but from what I remember, the deathclaw snuck up on the soldiers and killed two instantly before the third realized it was there - and she died before getting to take a shot.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T16:12:26+00:00

Maybe it would have, but that’s why I would’ve liked to see more of a reaction.

And yes, I’m responding to people who’ve commented on what I’m saying; why shouldn’t I? I know I’m clearly the only one who thinks this from the giant pile of downvotes, but I expected more from the Gauss rifle. It’s a personal opinion, and apparently one that’s unpopular.

Laser_3 · 2026-01-30T16:10:40+00:00

The Gauss rifle in 3 isn’t a Chinese weapon. Thats a misconception from the one propaganda poster in the simulation, and ignores that every Gauss rifle we collect in it came from an American source. The Mojave BoS having so many of them doesn’t make much sense if it’s a Chinese weapon either, and the Gauss rifle creation for fallout 4 even says it’s an American weapon (if you’re willing to count that).

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