Railway rifle (Fallout 3)

The railway rifle is a craftable weapon in Fallout 3.

Background
It is constructed with a crutch as the weapon's buttstock attached to a steam gauge assembly, which serves as the weapon's action; a pressure gauge on the assembly displays and regulates the amount of pressure built up within the pressure cooker, which uses a fission battery to heat water into steam. The trigger releases this pressure, propelling the railroad spikes from the steam gauge assembly. Railroad spikes in a stripper clip are inserted into the ammunition slot, beneath a latch.

Characteristics
The gun uses railway spikes as crude flechettes. Though only moderately damaging, it is very effective at dealing limb damage (due to a 3x limb damage multiplier), able to cripple limbs often with just one shot. On the killing shot, a spike may tear off the struck limb or head, and possibly pin it to a fixed object, for example a wall or the floor. While it has a low amount of spread, its accuracy is not perfect and the rifle will often miss at long range. However, its projectiles have much more mass than bullets, making it more effective at short to medium ranges, and most effective in V.A.T.S. where its limb-destroying effects can be put to precision use. It is also remarkably effective at disarming enemies, as it will often launch their weapons a substantial distance on a V.A.T.S. hit. It has a high critical multiplier stat that, depending on your base critical chance, may make the railway rifle one of the best non-unique Small Guns.

The railway rifle can fire a total of 222 railway spikes before breaking.

Locations

 * Laszlo Radford uses the railway rifle, he is a random encounter who may be found at certain "random encounter" locations throughout the Wasteland, but only after you obtained at least 1 schematic of it.

Construction
The rifle is built from a crutch that comprises the stock and grip part of the gun, a pressure cooker that acts as a firing chamber, a fission battery that acts as the firing pin and a steam gauge assembly that comprises the grip, ammunition storage and barrel of the gun.

Bugs

 * On the PC, you might rarely run across a reload bug, which will make the railway rifle fire without ending the reload sequence, if you keep firing, more strange bugs will start occurring with the weapon like shooting multiple shots at once or stop shooting and still hearing gun fire noises...
 * This only seems to happen on the unpatched version and is not confirmed on all PCs since it rarely happens.