Whitehall Workshops Experimental Energy Weapons pt 3/???
More portable and lighter than more common EM-Rail platforms & far more accessible to the armchair gunsmith in you, the Tesla Driver was devised for defense against big game animals like Yao-Guai & Mirelurks. As with most arms from the Whitehall Workshops family, the Tesla Driver’s design has in mind availability of ammunition as well as weight & ammunition management when dealing with high-power civilian weaponry. It fires steel ball bearings from a small top-mounted magazine rigged with a tiny electric motor usually from toy cars or Giddyup Buttercup limbs—which are also a great source of the weapon’s ammunition along with the array of robots roaming the Commonwealth.
A corded pre-war hand drill makes up the receiver and electric generator to power the firing mechanism, with the power cord braced into an energy cell caddy located under the drill’s handle. Steel and copper hull pieces are scavenged from wherever possible, while the drill motor’s function is reworked to draw more power from the weapon’s fusion core & store it until the trigger is released. A battery of six accelerator coils with one stabilizer under the weapon’s muzzle send the Driver’s payload downrange at an enormous velocity—enough to punch through a charging Yao-Guai’s skull at short range. Some settlers report that the projectiles even carry some electrical charge with them as they leave the weapon, causing additional harm to targets.