Silencers nigh on useless

In the game I think silencers are pretty useless, I always thought that a silencer was to mask your shots so that the enemy didn’t really know where the shot was coming from, but in this game even using a silencer they know exactly where the shots are coming from and home in on you with unerring accuracy, not to mention that when you relocate they seem to know where you’ll be before you even get there. Don’t know what can be done about it if anything at all, but a bit of leeway with the detection by the enemy wouldn’t go far astray.

4 Likes

SIlencers will not completely mask your shots. The larger the caliber, the lesser effect. They will however mask the report, preventing enemies from hearing it from afar which is good when fighting in areas like the Mountain Region. And the shotgun silencer makes it less deafening when firing indoors :slight_smile:

At longer ranges I’ve noticed that some enemies do have trouble detecting you if you kill one of their allies nearby with a silenced hunting rifle.

2 Likes

They’re mostly useful on the hunting rifles (which is funny) and the Möller PP (which is realistic).

Put simply, there are three sources of sound when you fire a gun (in order of relative noise for the target):

  • The sonic boom from the bullet itself (everything in the game is using supersonic rounds except the Möller PP, which is 100% true to real life for the time period). The amount of noise from this is a function of the Mach number and the size and shape of the bullet.
  • The sound of the powder charge detonating to propel the bullet. There are a lot of things that factor into this one, but the biggest two are the size of the powder charge and the size and shape of the resonant cavity comprised of the barrel and chamber (in short, bigger caliber = noiser, as well as being harder to suppress even aside from the noise).
  • The sound of the action itself cycling. This one usually only matters in fully automatic or burst fire, but is largely just a function of the design of the action (for example, open bolt actions like the Kpist (or the Thompson SMG) tend to be noisier).

Suppressors can only deal with the second item. The third is mostly a non-issue with the stuff present in game except the Kpist (which has a noisy open-bolt action IRL too). What the bots are tracking is the first sound, which is still pretty loud for any of the calibers in game except .32 ACP.

Ultimately, you need to be somewhere where the sound either won’t carry well, or will reverberate in ways that makes it difficult to track, just like in real life (well, just like IRL for the Möller, the hunting rifles would be using suppressors not to make the hunter harder to find, but to reduce the amount of hearing protection they need to wear, because that second point is most of what the person shooting hears).

2 Likes

I agree. They need to not be alerted to your exact location so easily. It would be one thing if the robots called in a few seekers to find you if a bot was killed and they didn’t find a source. It’s another to shoot one, then they auto detect exactly where you are.

I understand the level of difficulty it is to implement something like this though. It’s not easy that’s for sure.