YCS/186

The YCS/186 is a unique weapon in Fallout: New Vegas.

Characteristics
The YCS/186 is a unique variant of the Gauss rifle. Its appearance is that of a standard Gauss rifle with a sandy or rusted texture along the barrel and main body; it also appears to have black stripes on the wooden stock. Additionally, the lens of the scope is tinted red instead of the regular untinted lens found on the standard Gauss rifle's scope. It also has 4 more coils around the barrel, possibly explaining the greater damage, while still remaining the same length. This weapon uses 4 microfusion cells per shot, instead of the normal 5 of a standard Gauss rifle.

Possibly due to the added coils, this weapon is 1 pound heavier than the standard version. It is also slightly more accurate. The YCS/186 also is 25% more more durable than its standard variant.

Like the standard Gauss rifle, it boasts several advantages over the anti-materiel rifle. In addition to its increased damage output, it also tends to cripple limbs on a direct hit, providing you do not kill the enemy immediately. When using max charge microfusion cells, this weapon can deal a devastating 210 base damage. With all related perks, this can be increased to 249.9 per shot.

Variants

 * Gauss rifle, the common variant.


 * The Faderator, a cut content Gauss rifle from the Dead Money add-on that is fully automatic and does 20,160 damage per second (DPS).

Location
The YCS/186 Gauss rifle is found at the Mercenary camp east of Brooks Tumbleweed Ranch. A hostile mercenary with reinforced combat armor or reinforced combat armor mark 2 is carrying this weapon and will attack the player character on sight.

However, if the player has the Wild Wasteland trait, the mercenaries are replaced with aliens who have the alien blaster instead, making the YCS/186 unobtainable during gameplay.

Behind the scenes

 * The YCS/186 is a reference to the "Your Console Sucks" section of the The Something Awful Forums. Additionally, 186 is the forum ID number of YCS.

Bugs

 * The Pip-Boy's displayed damage per second (DPS) for the gun doesn't account for the need to reload every shot, unlike other single shot weapons such as the missile launcher. This is due to the game mechanics not taking into consideration the weapon use of more than 1 ammunition per shot.
 * Extremely rarely a projectile is fired, but no hit is detected although the projectile can clearly be seen to travel through the target. On the Xbox 360, this occurs primarily at long-range and most frequently against deathclaws and is very rare to happen on anything else (9/10) times it is mistaken for the glowing blue corona around it hitting the target instead of the fragment therefore dealing no damage but being mistaken for going straight through the target.
 * The impact power of the gun is very high, resulting in the enemies being knocked through solid objects and into the terrain or through the game world (falling beneath it) making retrieval of their bodies and any goods impossible. Surprisingly Meltdown does not exacerbate this problem, but somewhat remedies it by changing the trajectory of the corpse or causing the impact force of the shot to dissipate when the energy explosion occurs.
 * The Gauss rifle in Fallout: New Vegas is almost identical to the one found in Fallout 3, and thus suffers from similar bugs, including the one that affects its damage output when fired via V.A.T.S. When used in V.A.T.S., any hit will do exactly 95.244% of the maximum damage, regardless of enemy damage threshold, critical hits, or sneak attack critical. This means, that with energy weapons skill of 100, the Gauss rifle shot will do 114.29 points of damage with every V.A.T.S. shot. This is still lower than free aiming, and no bonuses are applied to head shots. The damage bug is related to the Gauss rifle's "explosive" visual effect, which affects its V.A.T.S. damage calculations. Removing the effect via user-created mods is currently the only known solution to the issue. Notably, the displacer glove, which applies a similar visual effect on impact, is not affected by this bug.
 * An incorrect normal map texture is specified for this weapon when it is equipped by the player, resulting in highly irregular shading across the weapon. Additionally, the weapon uses lower-resolution textures than most other weapons found in the game.
 * The YCS/186 has separate mesh files for the first- and third-person models. It also specifies incorrect normal maps which don't line up with the textures, and doesn't use the high-res textures on all the appropriate parts of the weapon. This can be fixed with a mod.