Forum:Guns - in-game relationship to real-world weapons

I'll make clear at the get-go here that I am only really talking about FO3 articles.

Many of our FO3 gun articles are full of speculative statements about which real-world gun the in-game weapon is based on... or resembles... or just reminds someone of. As an example...

From the Chinese Pistol page:
 * "The gun is a Shansei Type 17, in our timeline a higher-caliber variant of the original German Mauser." (This is actually written in the opening of the article.)
 * " The Chinese Pistol resembles the C96 Mauser, nicknamed the "Broom Handle," which was copied by the Chinese and produced as the Shansei Type 17."
 * "The Mauser, after which this weapon is based was used as base for several Sci-Fi weapons, including Star Wars' Han Solo's Blaster."
 * "In the first Mad Max movie, this gun can be seen being used by one of Toecutter's gang members in the scene where they shoot the mannequin, while in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Max uses one early in the movie."

It is my understanding that in a fictional gameworld, such as FO3's, in-game guns are just fictions. Modelers base their artistic endeavors on real-world antecedents, but they are not reproducing any one weapon exactly. Add to this the fact that the in-game guns' characteristics bear little-to-no resemblance to their real-world counterparts - different caliber, different accuracy, rate-of-fire, etc. This game is much different in this respect than the Call of Duty games or other like games that strive for accuracy.

In the interest of our articles providing information rather than speculation, I propose starting a new Forum area: Weapon Discussions. We could then remove the speculation and arguing from the articles and their discussion pages and direct editors to the forum. Thoughts?--Gothemasticator 19:15, May 22, 2010 (UTC)

Discussion
Well, I think that weapons with a really obvious anchor in the real world (IE, the Chinese Pistol you used as an example, or the R91) should list that anchor. Other than that, guns like the Chinese Assault Rifle don't need the comparison. Nitty Tok. 19:23, May 22, 2010 (UTC)
 * Question, then: What standards do we use to choose which is the "really obvious anchor?"--Gothemasticator 19:27, May 22, 2010 (UTC)

Here's what I did
I realize nobody else cares about this, but it continues to bug me. So, I've gone through the FO3 small guns and smg and rifle pages and removed most of the speculative and opinionated comparisons to various real-world weapons. In the future I'll continue to do so.--Gothemasticator 05:49, June 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * So how are we going about making guidelines regarding what would be a real world anchor or not? --Kingclyde 15:58, June 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * My two cents: it's a non-issue. Artists for the game use whatever models they want as starting points, and then they make changes from there. On top of that, game-design decisions such as ammo, weight, spread, etc., are made according to game balance, not according to real-world accuracy. So, while it may be fun to play spot-the-similarities, there's no real information in it.--Gothemasticator 16:02, June 28, 2010 (UTC)


 * Then we should remove either all of them or none of them. Just removing some of them would make no sense. An example would be what Nit said above, basically keep the chinese pistol but dump the chinese assault rifle references. That would make no sense as they both can be claimed to be based off of real world guns. If we are slimming down the articles to relevant info, than this stuff should be removed. --Kingclyde 16:07, June 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * Did I miss some? I thought I got them all.--Gothemasticator 16:09, June 28, 2010 (UTC)


 * I didn't know it was done already. I'm a day late and a dollar short as always. I wish there was someway to know when all of these decisions were being made. But like Ausir said, I need to make time to review all of the forums and "hope" I run across one that deals with policy. I wanted to chime in about the capitalization but I was too late for that too. I guess that what happens when you own your own business. Plus the arguments that I got into last time make me feel unwelcome here in the first place. I wasn't sure aware that this was already done. Forgive my ignorance.--Kingclyde 16:14, June 28, 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, as we already said last time, you don't have to check all forums - all you need to check is Forum:Wiki discussion. All policy and other topics relevant to the site globally are in there. A (less reliable alternative) are the weekly digests; ongoing policy discussions are listed there as well. I'm not sure what else you expect us to do; we can hardly leave messages on the talk pages of all 20+ admins for each and every discussion, and even if we did, you'd be swamped by messages, which wouldn't help you either. -- Porter21 (talk) 11:23, June 29, 2010 (UTC)