Chaingun

From Doom Wiki

The player can obtain a chaingun at the start of MAP29: The Living End.

The chaingun in use in deathmatch mode on Decamatch.

The chaingun is a rapid-firing, multi-barrelled automatic weapon. It uses the same ammunition as the pistol, and is fed from the player's shared stock of bullets. Each bullet inflicts 5-15 points of damage.

The chaingun's rapid rate of fire means that a single enemy caught in its hail of bullets will have little or no chance to retaliate (except boss monsters, whose pain chance tends to be very low). The weapon is also highly effective at mowing down hordes of zombies or Imps.

The chaingun always fires at least two shots (if the player has at least two bullets, of course). The first two shots in a volley will always be exactly on target, but the weapon's recoil will cause later shots to wander rapidly off-target. This makes the chaingun an ideal weapon for sniping, as the player can tap the fire button for accurate two-shot bursts.

The chaingun is first found in a secret area of E1M2: Nuclear Plant, and again in a secret area of the following level. It then appears in a non-secret area on E1M4: Command Control.

The chaingun contains 20 rounds of ammunition when picked up (40 on the I'm Too Young To Die and Nightmare! skill levels). Chainguns taken from dead zombie chaingunners contain 10 rounds (20 on ITYTD and NM) and, unlike pre-existing chainguns, disappear when crushed beneath doors or moving ceilings. Note that, although shots fired by chaingunners inflict only 3-15 points of damage each, the bullets in their dropped guns behave like any other bullets when used by the player.

1 Notes
2 Data
3 Demo files
4 Appearance statistics
5 See also

[edit] Notes

As with the rocket launcher and BFG 9000, the full chaingun sprite (after pickup) is slightly too large for the screen, and can only be viewed with a level or resource editor.

The target of chaingun fire often appears to turn and shuffle rapidly in place, due to the continual interruption of its sprite sequences. Doom's instruction manual refers to this motion as "the chaingun cha-cha."

The chaingun first appeared in the Doom press release beta. Its graphic was slightly different, in that the tips of the barrels did not extend past the barrel band.

Strictly speaking, the "chaingun" in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom should be called a Minigun.

[edit] Data

Chaingun data
Weapon number	4
Damage	5-15 per bullet
Included ammo	20 (40 on skill 1 & 5)
Max ammo	200 (400 with backpack)
Ammo type	Bullets
Shot type	Hitscan
Shots / minute	525.0
Sound	DSPISTOL
Appears in	Shareware Doom Registered Doom Ultimate Doom Doom II/Final Doom
Thing type	2002 (decimal), 7D2 (hex)
Radius	20
Sprite	MGUN (before pickup) CHGG (wielded) CHGF (firing) PUFF (impact, miss) BLUD (impact, hit)
Class	Weapon Pickup

Damage done by one chaingun tap

Shots needed to kill^1,2	Mean	Standard deviation	Min	Max
Barrel	2.31	0.49	2	4
Trooper	2.31	0.49	2	4
Sergeant	3.23	0.70	2	5
Wolfenstein SS	5.18	0.91	4	8
Imp	6.12	0.95	4	9
Chaingunner	7.12	1.10	5	11
Lost Soul	10.00	1.20	8	13
Commander Keen	10.00	1.20	8	13
Demon	14.79	1.48	11	21
Spectre	14.79	1.48	11	21
Boss Brain³	24.42	1.46	20	29
Revenant	29.23	1.53	25	33
Cacodemon	39.02	1.93	35	44
Pain Elemental	39.02	1.93	35	44
Hell Knight	48.60	2.39	42	56
Arachnotron	48.60	2.39	42	56
Mancubus	58.28	2.60	52	64
Arch-Vile	68.04	3.09	61	75
Baron of Hell	97.06	4.32	87	107
Spider Mastermind	290.57	12.48	265	314
Cyberdemon	387.40	16.66	355	415

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-bullet average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
In the case of continuous fire, the target must be close enough to compensate for the weapon's recoil.
Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.