Shotgun

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A shotgun is a large caliber smoothbore firearm which is designed to fire a cluster of small projectiles (once commonly lead pellets but for environmental reasons steel is more common, either way they're known as shot) in one shot, though most shotguns can also accept solid slugs. The cluster of bullets spread out to cover a wide area after exiting, taking some of the burden off of aiming and causing considerable damage to an unprotected body. It comes at the expense of hitting power and precision at long range due to the sheer spread. The earliest shotguns were large caliber muskets known as blunderbusses. Today shotguns remain widely used by police, hunters and sport shooters and see some use as a secondary weapon by soldiers. Modern-day shotguns are extremely reliable, fairly accurate (for what they are) and relative simple to produce and operate, while being devastating in close combat. The "gauge" used to measure the size of the shot used in a shell. 12 gauge means that it takes 12 lead balls of the diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun to equal one pound in weight. So 16, 20 and 28-gauge take 16, 20 and 28 lead balls of the diameter of a matching shotgun to equal one pound. This means that the higher the gauge, the smaller the shot is. 12-gauge is the most commonly used in combat, with the smaller gauges being used when hunting small prey. when in doubt, carry two. If you still have doubts, attach two to your fists and two to your boots, then carry two in your hands again.

Notable shotguns

A pair of SPAS-12 Shotguns. The lower has a fixed stock and a shorter magazine tube, while the upper has its signature folding stock unfolded.

• Double Barrel: One of the most common shotguns available, the double-barrel is a very basic, no-frills firearm that, instead of having any sort of magazine or ammunition tube, simple has two barrels with one shot each. This simplicity and the generally low price tag makes it popular with farmers and hunters. The double-barrel is typically used for hunting and can come in side-by-side or over-and-under configurations, the latter being popular in sports shooting. Rare triple-barrel shotguns exist, but at this point you're getting a heavy hunk of metal. Double-barrels are sometimes chopped down to create a nice personal defense weapon, though this modification is oftentimes illegal.
• Winchester 1887: The shotgun made famous by Terminator 2, this is a 10-gauge lever-action shotgun, giving it a strong Old West vibe to it. Firing it one handed is not recommended unless you really are a terrifying robot assassin. A trick associated with this weapon is spinning it around to chamber a new shell, but unless you have an extra-wide lever that is at least as wide as two fingers you're only going to break your fingers trying to do this. Not to mention that this is very dangerous.
• Remington 870: Pretty much the pump-action shotgun. Used by everyone from hunters and sports shooters to police and elite special forces units. Tough, durable and simple to use; there's a good reason the Remington is as popular as it is. Because of this there are oodles of aftermarket parts available so that you can make your shotgun as tacticool as you want.
• Mossberg 500: The Pepsi to the Remington's Coke. The two are very similar and arguments between fans of the two are sources of major skub amongst firearm enthusiasts. In practice they are pretty much the same, with the Mossberg being lighter and cheaper than the Remington, but it does not come in as many different gauges.
• Benelli M4: Made by the Italian Benelli corporation, the M4 is famous for its wedge-shaped stock and being the spray-and-pray stick in Counter-Strike. While used by civilians it is more commonly used by special forces units and police.
• Saiga 12: A Russian-made shotgun derived from the popular AK layout. It is a semi-automatic shotgun loaded via a detachable box magazine unlike the two above. Used by Russian security forces it is also popular amongst hunters because the required licence is far easier to obtain than that for a rifle. Factory-made box magazines go up to 8 and the aftermarket makes magazines for 12, 20 and even 30 shells, but the latter is very heavy, expensive and bulky.
• USAS-12: Built by a subsidiary of the Korean Daewoo (the car manufacturer) based on the AA-12, the USAS-12 is an automatic combat shotgun exclusively used by militaries. A semiautomatic version was put on the American market in the early 90's, but it was declared as to "having no sporting purpose" and was branded a "destructive device", immensely limiting its potential buyers. It has a nice 400+rpm rate of fire, allowing it to empty a 20-round drum in 3 seconds or less.
• AA-12: The Atchisson Assault Shotgun is a fully automatic shotgun most famous for its low recoil: through some clever engineering the user gets only 10% of the recoil they'd normally feel from a 12-gauge shell. This makes the AA-12 highly controllable even with its 300rpm rate of fire. It has also been associated with the FRAG-12 round, a miniature grenade the size of a 12-gauge shell. While the FRAG-12 fits in any 12-gauge shotgun, there is something alluring about being able to hold your shotgun on target while shooting 20 grenades at it in 4 seconds flat.
• SPAS-12: A shotgun with a capital SHOTGUN. It is a big honkin' piece of metal capable of double-action: it is both a gas-operated semi-automatic and a pump-action shotgun at the same time. This allows it to both act as a semi-automatic weapon with lethal shells and a pump-action weapon capable of firing bean bags, tear gas and other less-lethal shells that do not generate enough pressure to cycle the action. This is also how they are used in movies because blanks are too light as well. Movies and games almost always show the shotgun with its bulky folding stock folded in on top of the weapon. While no longer in production the SPAS-12 retains its reputation as a big, menacing son of a shotgun and fetches quite a bit on the second-hand market, even with its failure-prone safety.
• KAC Masterkey: Developed by Knight's Armament Company, the Masterkey is an underbarrel attachment for the M16/M4 assault rifles. It is essentially a short pump-action shotgun intended for breaching doors that can be slapped to the underside of a rifle so that soldiers do not need to carry around a separate weapon. To fire it the user has to shift their hands so that they hold the shotgun as normal, using the magazine of their rifle as a makeshift stock. Because of its lack of grip or stock firing a Masterkey as a stand-alone weapon is a very bad idea.

Ammunition Types

• Buckshot: The most commonly associated ammunition used in shotguns. Buckshot is a shell filled with lead balls that fire out from the barrel in a cone; how tight that cone is depends on whether the shotgun has a choke. Buckshot, as the name implies, is lethal to deer, but works just as well on humans.
• Birdshot: Like buckshot, but the balls are much smaller, and as a result there's less empty space in between each ball when fired. This makes it well suited for shooting birds out of the sky. While each ball individually won't do quite as much damage, you'll definitely give someone a bad day if you hit them with it.
• Slug: A solid piece of lead; this allows shotguns to be used more like a rifle in that you're aiming at a single point in space, though slug shotguns aren't quite as accurate as rifles. They are, however, much bulkier than rifle rounds, making them better suited to hunt large game.
• Flechette: Instead of balls, you fill a shell with long metal needles. These are more aerodynamic than buckshot, but have less stopping power.
• Dragon's Breath: What do you get when you fill a shell with metal shards and flammable liquid? A giant fireball coming out of a shotgun barrel, that's what!
• Frag-12: Mini-explosives crammed into a shotgun shell.
• Rubber Pellet: These are the non-lethal rounds typically used by police. It hurts like hell to get hit by one, but at least you're not bleeding out.
• Breaching Round: Made from metal powder and wax, these rounds will knock out door locks and deadbolts without ricochets, making them safe to use in close quarters.

The Short-Range Shotgun Fallacy

It's a common belief amongst people that shotguns are strictly short-ranged weapons, that their particular method of firing makes them all but useless at a distance. As the title of this segment suggests, such a belief is pretty much wrong. Here's why. The primary reason this idea exists is because of /vg/; because shotguns are preferred for tight confines and urban fighting, most early shooters (other than, ironically, Doom) made shotguns do more damage the closer that you were to the target for balance, and the idea was absorbed into popular culture. The whole shotgun fallacy is similar to the flamethrower fallacy in which both weapons are actually much more accurate and longer ranged in real life rather than being only effective at less than ten feet like most video games.

The entire "shotguns are only good at short range" idea is based on the notion that when a shotgun fires, the pellets it expels will spread further and further apart as they travel, until they are so scattered they're incapable of dealing any real damage to whoever they hit. It's not entirely without basis, and in fact this was a well-known issue with the blunderbuss, but it's mostly false when it comes to shotguns.

See, unlike blunderbusses, shotguns have small, narrow barrels, rather than the tapering wide-bore muzzle of their predecessor. Thusly, whilst a shotgun shell's contents do have a scattering effect that means it's impossible to get the same pinpoint precision accuracy you would have with, say, a sniper rifle, they don't scatter anywhere near so far as a blunderbuss's shot would, even when using a wide-bore. In fact, this scattering effect is precisely why shotguns are considered the best guns for hunting with; the spread of pellets is much more likely to connect with a fast-moving target, and this is especially important when hunting birds or small game.

This said: compared to the multiple hundreds of meters effective range of rifle caliber bullets the shot gun "is" a short ranged weapon. What they don't tell you however is that most fire fights are short ranged anyway, which is the main reason why after world war two army's stopped using what we would call "Battle rifles" and swapped to smaller caliber assault rifles (trading in range for a higher rate of fire). For most situations a shotgun is as good as a rifle if not a little better since it's actually easier to hit your target with a shotty. The main disadvantage is that you can't carry as much ammo (the 12ga shells are bigger and heavier than the average rifle bullet), and shot is rather inefficient against body armor. TL:DR; assault rifle is more versatile than shotgun, hence AR gets used.

One of the few games that ignores the whole 'Shotguns are only useful at close range' trope is hilariously Gears of War, which is one of the most testosterone-poisoning and over the top games made. Whilst its true the Gear's shotgun instakill enemies up close, most players actually use the shotgun at it was intended, which was a mid-range weapon. It is telling when the majority of players prefer the shotgun than the iconic lancer assault rifle in open space firefights as it is amazingly accurate despite the spread and deals decent damage. There are even reports of players sniping with the shotgun better then most snipers.

In Warhammer 40k

Your typical generic weapon found in almost every genre, the Shotgun is a pump-action weapon utilized by the Imperium of Man. It is a short-ranged anti-personnel weapon, and easily fired accurately on the move thanks to its wide spread of fire. Regularly employed by the Adeptus Arbites, the shotgun (also referred to as a scatter gun), have been around since before M3. 38,000 years later the biggest "improvement" is the addition of 50 pounds of metal, allowing it to be used as a club so that after shooting a pissed off Genestealer you have the option of boinking it on the head, but only a Space Marine would consider a 50 pound weapon useful, even as club. Probably the longest lived weapon in the Imperium (right after anything sharp or heavy), it has appeared on nearly every Imperial world and battlefield.

It is also commonly employed by Space Marine Scouts and Imperial Guard Veterans, although the Space Marines are equipped with more powerful "Manstopper" rounds. Its hail of shot can shred through flesh, but its low velocity causes it to be ineffective against armoured enemies. The Imperial Navy uses them when boarding a ship or putting down mutinies because the nature of its rounds make it unlikely to pierce the hull of the ship, which is a good thing. The Deathwatch have their own shotguns, mainly for the specialist ammunition they use to take down many different types of Xenos at close range.

Imperial shotguns also can use a wide variety of different ammunition, including all types of bolts for maximum firepower (though less effective than an actual bolter) (for some stupid reason), web charges for non-lethal takedowns, blazerer charges, that turn a shotgun into a nerfed flamethrower, talk charges for breaking doors, and really about anything you can fit inside the barrel, making it a great utility weapon in any FFG game.

• Range:12 | Str:4 | AP:- | Type:Assault 2 (Space Marine version)
• Range:12 | Str:3 | AP:- | Type:Assault 2 (Imperial Guard version)