true a .22 is not always deadly but there is no one who survived a shotgun blast to the head at close range
Probably not many who survived large caliber shotgun blasts to the brain, but the head is more than the brain and there are plenty of people who have been horribly maimed by shotgun blasts to the head without ever losing consciousness. Even penetrating brain injuries are more survivable than many seem to think.
Civilians with gunshot wounds to the head or other penetrating brain injuries have a 42% chance of surviving, according to a study of more than 400 patients at
medicine.yale.edu
Risk, III.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
A consecutive series of 67 patients who had sustained self-inflicted gunshot wounds of the brain was reviewed retrospectively to evaluate factors determining outcome. Weapon caliber, site of bullet entry, degree of brain wounding on computerized tomographic scan, and presenting Glasgow Coma...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The points about damage to one hemisphere of the brain are dramatically evident from cases like Phineas Gage, where he had an iron tamping rod destroy a large part of his left frontal lobe (several ounces of his brain were excavated or later fell out), but was able to walk within minutes of the injury and didn't die until twelve years later.
Of course,
most of the time, being shot in the brain should be immediately incapacitating and ultimately fatal (without prompt medical attention, which, in a video game will usually consist of another shot to the brain).
That’s why all this talk of “Bullet Sponginess” in this game doesn’t seem quite right to me. We’re not wearing flimsy space suits where the tiniest puncture means death. We’re effectively wearing low-grade power armor.
Even without the armor high level characters can absorb a huge number of hits from some weapons before going down.
The sponginess is implicit in the health and damage scaling. It's why heavily abstracted health and inconsistent damage figures have never felt right, to me, in real-time first-person games.
I have had a Magpulse for several weeks already, but I cannot use it much because the 6.5mm MI ammunition is on permanent short supply, at least for me. But when I used it in the Mantis quest, I noticed it's very good. Since then, I have used it only occasionally. I have gotten some Mag weapons as loot, most lately two Magshears and one Magstorm, but I sold them because the serial fire models would spend their ammo in a minute, and because I get good prices when I sell them. My other weapons have been quite effective, too, so this is not a big problem. I'm using mostly an improved semi-automatic Beowulf and an improved Orion, because then I don't need to buy ammunition.
Once I stopped blowing all my character's money on ships ammo was never a problem again, even with liberal use of full-auto magshears and magstorms.
