I have a question about some of the explosive weapons. How is the damage calculated from the AoE, my char has 80 explosive x3 demo expert, and the splash damage perk. My grenade rifles seem to do just about the same damage as the grenade launchers (both fully repaired). For example, I was testing them out and it took 9 shots from the launcher to kill everyone in Novac, and 10 with the rifle. I was hitting them dead on or right beside also. I also went to test them on the gun runners, 6 for the launcher on 1 guy, like 8 for the rifle. But the most interesting thing is that with 50 unarmed and a 52 dmg powerfist it only took 2 power attacks and a regular attack to kill a gun runner guard.

Is the grenade launcher bugged in any way? other than the fact that it has the same glitch as the cowboy guns.

The problem you run into with explosives is:

- A lot of them were over-nerfed by the Obsidian developers
- Some have tiny splash radius settings
- Line of sight issues (something as small as a box can be enough)
- There's no such thing as armor penetration for explosives by default.

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/readmes/Deadlier%20Explosives%20New%20Vegas_readme.txt

40mm is 40mm is 40mm... doesn't matter whether you use the Grenade Rifle or the Grenade Launcher, the damage is calculated solely by the explosion data in GECK. The only diff (I think, without looking at GECK) between the rifle and the launcher is the # of shells that it holds before you have to reload. That, and the rifle has a weapon mod (+100% projectile velocity) and the launcher doesn't. So you can get a bit more range with the modded rifle (I think). The only minor difference between the launcher and the rifle is that the launcher's projectile gets a base damage of 30 vs 2, so if you manage to hit someone with the projectile it will do 30 dmg.

And we'll completely ignore the issue that a Grenade Launcher can be repaired with a Minigun...

(The over-nerfing of explosives is why I mod the values so that they're more effective due to DT.)