Gun Merchant weapons weak!

Okay, so I haven't played since WELL before the last version. Maybe someone can help me out.
My plan was to make a merchant who charged a LOT of money to give you a randomized gun. The idea being "I'm tired of digging through half the f*cking galaxy to find a pistol." But, problem.

HOW DO FIREARMS WORK NOW.
All the guns seem to have pathetic little ratings. 1.2 damage, etc. I assume armor multiplies that. But here's the kicker;
I used the spawn command to crank out a lot of weapons to get used to the new damage types. And yet all of them are pathetically underpowered compared to the ones I found in game. Is that intentional? Is there any way to test out actual high tier weapons? For example;

I found a COMMON rifle on a dead world that deals 4.6 with a RoF of 6.7
When I spawn in a RARE rifle it only deals around 1.2 with a RoF of 6.0

I was going to just use a similar recipie as the "Creative Box" stuff, but... I still get piddly little low-level weapons. what's missing? Why aren't the weapons up to scratch?

 

Weapon damager has been overall reduced. No more big number, but are still effectively the same. Rare weapons don't really have any different scaling from common or uncommon.

Your example rare weapon is really just one of the possible bad outcomes. Weapons typically have high rat of fire and low damage or vice versa. On average.

 

I'd say it was a bad roll if it weren't nearly every single one. I figured out how to force it in the console but not ingame. ><

 

Make a recipe with an output of like commonpistol, or whatever its ID is.

 

That's the thing, that's what I -DID.- But how do I include the level modifier.

 

You would have to patch of config file for the weapons to raise the weapon level from 1 to anything between 1-10. (Typically 6 is the max actually used which boosts the overall damage of the weapon by 4x). Or just make your own randomly generated weapon configs so you don't mess with vanilla things.

 

weapons look weak because they added % damage modifiers to armor. so many of the weapons you get early on will still work ok through most of your game. so if you find a weapon you like (which is important, because of the huge range of types available come 1.0), you can keep killing with it for a good while. but on the other hand, it's harder to find a pwn weapon right off the bat that'll carry you too high.