Submachine gun (dNetHack)
| ) | |
|---|---|
| Name | submachine gun |
| Appearance | strange broken crossbow |
| Damage vs. small | 1d2 |
| Damage vs. large | 1d2 |
| To-hit bonus | +0 |
| Weapon skill | firearm |
| Size | one-handed |
| Base price | 250 zm (+10/positive enchant) |
| Weight | 25 |
| Material | iron |
- For the weapon in SLASH'EM and its derivatives, see submachine gun (SLASH'EM).
A submachine gun is a type of firearm that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack. The submachine gun is a small futuristic launcher, making it one-handed for all users, and uses the firearms skill. It is designed for use with bullets, silver bullets, blood-bullets, and blood-spears.
The submachine gun has a default material of iron, and appears as a strange broken crossbow for heroes in most roles when unidentified—Anachrononauts, Androids, Pirates, and Undead Hunters will instead see the unidentified item as an "unfamiliar gun".
Generation
Anachrononauts and Androids start each game with knowledge of the submachine gun's appearance. Vampire Anachrononauts start each game with a pair of uncursed +4 submachine guns and two stacks of ammo: a stack of 200 uncursed +0 bullets and a stack of 50 uncursed +0 silver bullets.
Submachine guns 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.
Some submachine guns can be found on the Anachrononaut quest and Android quest: two are randomly placed around the locate level at level creation, and four more are randomly placed around the goal level at level creation.
A few monsters can be generated with submachine guns if they are created specifically in the future (i.e. the Anachrononaut quest and Android quest):
- Deep ones and deeper ones have a 1⁄6 chance of being generated with a submachine gun as their firearm weapon and 3 different stacks of bullets as ammo, with the properties of the submachine gun itself dependent on which monster is given one: deep ones will have fully eroded submachine guns, while deeper ones will have submachine guns with 1 level of erosion and an enchantment ranging from +1 to +4.
- Vampires will always generate with a cursed +7 submachine gun which has a 1⁄20 chance of being given the unholy object property, and will also be given 20–39 cursed +7 bullets as ammo.
- Vampire lords will always generate with a cursed +7 submachine gun which has a 1⁄10 chance of being given the unholy object property, but will not receive ammo for it.
Description
The submachine gun has a range of 10 squares with a base rate of fire of 3, and has three different modes of fire that it can switch between: fully automatic, burst, and single-shot. Submachine guns are always generated in fully automatic mode, and applying one will switch it between modes.
Origin
The submachine gun (commonly abbreviated SMG, also known as a "sub-gun") is a magazine-fed automatic carbine designed to fire handgun cartridges. The term was coined by John T. Thompson, the inventor of the Thompson submachine gun (colloquially known as the Tommygun), to describe an automatic firearm with notably less firepower than a machine gun that does not use rifle cartridges, hence the "sub-" prefix. Submachine guns tend to feature stability-focused improvements—the magazine often, but not always, acts as a foregrip, and they usually have a folding or fixed buttstock.
There are some inconsistencies in the classification of submachine guns: British Commonwealth sources often refer to SMGs as "machine carbines", while other sources refer to SMGs as "machine pistols" because they fire pistol-caliber ammunition, e.g. the MP-40 and MP5, where "MP" stands for Maschinenpistole ("submachine gun" in German, but cognate with the English term "machine pistol"). However, the term "machine pistol" is also used to describe a handgun-style firearm capable of fully automatic or burst fire, such as the Stechkin, Beretta 93R, Glock 18, and the H&K VP70. Furthermore, personal defense weapons such as the FN P90 and H&K MP7 are a subset of submachine guns.
The submachine gun was developed during World War I (1914–1918) as a close quarter offensive weapon, mainly for trench raiding. At its peak during World War II (1939–1945), millions of submachine guns were made for assault troops and auxiliaries whose doctrines emphasized close-quarter suppressive fire. New submachine gun designs appeared frequently during the Cold War, especially among special forces, commandos and mechanized infantrymen. Submachine gun usage for frontline combat decreased in the 1980s and 1990s, and they have largely been supplanted by assault rifles in modern armies; they are still used by police and special forces who expect to engage in close-quarters combat, as their size makes them easier to handle than assault rifles in such circumstances, and their low-power rounds are less likely to penetrate walls and cause collateral damage.
Submachine guns tend to have higher rates of fire than other automatic weapons, primarily due to their lightweight construction and lightweight bolts. Notably, the Ingram MAC-10 was said to be able to "saw a man in half" due to its 1500 rounds/minute rate of fire—while highly likely to be an exaggeration, the gun's rate of fire was indeed approximately twice that of most machine guns or assault rifles. Other iconic SMGs, such as the Uzi or MP5, still have quite high rates of fire in the 900-1000RPM range. It is not clear which model of submachine gun that the weapon in variants of NetHack is meant to be based on—one guess is that its much lower rate of fire may have been an attempt to scale it to multishot mechanics, since replicating an SMG's actual rate of fire would be highly impractical.
