Rifle (dNetHack)
| ) | |
|---|---|
| Name | rifle |
| Appearance | broken crossbow |
| Damage vs. small | 1d2 |
| Damage vs. large | 1d2 |
| To-hit bonus | +6 |
| Weapon skill | firearm |
| Size | one-handed |
| Base price | 150 zm (+10/positive enchant) |
| Weight | 30 |
| Material | iron |
- For the weapon in SLASH'EM and its derivatives, see rifle (SLASH'EM).
A rifle is a type of weapon that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack. The rifle is a huge futuristic launcher, making it two-handed for medium-sized heroes, and uses the firearms skill. It is designed for use with bullets, silver bullets, blood-bullets, and blood-spears.
The rifle has a default material of iron, and appears as a broken crossbow for heroes in most roles when unidentified—Anachrononauts, Androids, Pirates, and Undead Hunters will instead see the unidentified item as an "unfamiliar long gun".
Two other "rifle" weapons exist in the same variants as the standard rifle: the assault rifle and the sniper rifle.
Generation
Anachrononauts and Androids start each game with knowledge of the rifle's appearance. Dwarven Anachrononauts start each game with an uncursed +3 bladed rifle that is made of mithril and a stack of 100 uncursed +3 bullets as ammo.
Rifles are not randomly generated, though they can be found in bones and can only be wished for by Tourists. They cannot be created by smithing unless the hero is an Undead Hunter that knows their appearance.
Several rifles can be found on the Anachrononaut quest: A chest in the northeastern-most hall of the base on the Anachrononaut quest home level contains 4 rifles, and 4 more rifles are each randomly placed around the locate level and goal level at level creation. These also appear on the Android quest, though the rifles in the chest only have a 1⁄2 chance each of generating.
Dwarven monsters that are created in the future (i.e. the Anachrononaut quest and Android quest) outside of level generation are always generated with a bladed rifle if they are an overlord to their kind—a dwarven monster that is a lord to their kind and meets these conditions has only a 1⁄3 chance of generating with a bladed rifle.
Description
The rifle has a range of 22 squares with a base rate of fire of -1, and has a +6 to-hit bonus. When wielded by a hero who is Skilled or better in firearms, rifles gain the "focus fire" expert trait.
Origin
A rifle is a long-barreled firearm designed for accurate shooting, distinguished by having a barrel cut with a helical or spiraling pattern of grooves (referred to as "rifling"). The invention of rifling separated such firearms from the earlier smoothbore weapons (e.g., arquebuses, muskets, and other long guns), greatly elevating their accuracy and general effectiveness. The class of firearm was originally termed the "rifled gun", with the verb "rifle" referring to the early modern machining process of creating grooves with cutting tools.
Most rifles are designed to be held with both hands and braced against the shoulder via buttstock for stability. Like all typical firearms, a rifle's projectile (bullet) is propelled by the contained ignition of the propellant compound within the projectile, originally using black powder; nitrocellulose and other smokeless powders are the standard for most modern rifles, although other means of propulsion are used such as compressed air, which is designed for air rifles used in vermin control, small game hunting, competitive target shooting and casual sport shooting (plinking). The raised areas of a barrel's rifling are called lands, and they make contact with and exert torque on the projectile as it moves down the bore, imparting a spin; when the projectile leaves the barrel, this spin persists and lends gyroscopic stability to the projectile due to conservation of angular momentum, increasing accuracy and hence effective range.
Rifled firearm technology has existed since the early 16th century, but early muzzle-loading rifles were rarely used in a military setting, since they were far slower to load and far more expensive to produce than contemporary smoothbore (non-rifled) muskets. By the mid-1800s, industrial fabrication processes made rifled barrels practical to mass-produce, while the prior invention of breech-loading firearms meant that rifled weapons were no longer slower to load than their smoothbore cousins. As a result, the rifle soon became ubiquitous in armies of the time. Given their default tile and the fact that soldiers can carry them alongside weapons such as assault rifles and grenades, the rifles seen in variants of NetHack are likely to be some type of mid-20th century semi-automatic service rifle, such as the M1 Garand.
