Pistol



The pistol is the player's default weapon, and fires bullets. Each player enters the game with a pistol, fifty bullets, and his fists, with the pistol selected as the active weapon. None of the monsters carries a pistol, though the trooper appears to be armed with a rifle that fires pistol bullets.

Combat characteristics
The pistol fires individual bullets, each inflicting 5-15 points of damage. If the player holds the fire button down, the marine fires the pistol repeatedly. As with the chaingun, the initial shot accurately strikes the object in the centre of the screen, but if the trigger is held down, subsequent shots have a dispersal (standard deviation around 2°, to a maximum of ±5.5°).

Tactical analysis
The pistol is an extremely weak weapon, doing damage at a rate barely 10% greater than the fists, and generally should not be used if any better weapon is available.

Accurate fire is possible if the player repeatedly taps the fire button, and the pistol is, together with the chaingun, the preferred weapon to hit very distant targets.

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, blood splats, and bullet dispersal are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) The target must be close enough to compensate for the weapon's recoil.
 * 3) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.