PC+1 vs. CT-D Pellet Spreads: A Small Analysis

Does the Party Crasher+1 really have a tighter spread than Conspiracy Theory-D?

For a while I've operated under the assumption that the Party Crasher+1 has a tighter pellet spread than the Conspiracy Theory-D as a possible inherent quality of those two shotguns. Now I haven't done any testing myself so what you see below is taken from the 44 second mark of this video as seen in this post on pellet spread. Therefore, there are only four pellet spreads being used for each of these two weapons. Clearly this would be more conclusive with more data. The weapons in question are (supposedly) the following:

CTD: Linear Compensator, Battle Runner, Rifled Barrel, Exhumed

PC+1: Smooth Ballistics, Rescue Mag, Rifled Barrel, Underdog

Method

• Screenshot pasted into Illustrator
• Drew a circle that was the smallest diameter possible with the full, 12-pellet spread for all 8 samples
• Drew a second circle that hoped to remove the most extraneous point to create a circle of 11 pellets
• Drew a third circle that contained the tightest cluster of 10 pellets
• Drew a fourth circle that contained the tightest cluster of 9 pellets
• Got a pixel value of the circle's diameter and recorded it
• Calculated the averages of all four values for each weapon, then average of the highest three and lowest three
• Calculated the standard deviations of all four values for each weapon, then std. dev. of the highest three and lowest three
• Calculated the average, average highest 3, and average lowest three, pellet spread size of the PC+1 as a percent of the spread of the respective CT-D spreads

u/maniacgreek kindly did some amusing Levene's Test on the data, but it's all speculation since there are so few data points.

Results

PC+1 vs. CT-D Pellet Spread Diagram

PC+1 vs. CT-D Pellet Spread Data

Here's a table of some of the results:

Metric	PC+1 12	CTD 12	PC+1 11	CTD 11	PC+1 10	CTD 10	PC+1 9	CTD 9
Average	86.4	87.6	81.6	83.9	75.4	76.8	68.8	69.5
% Size (PC+1/CTD)	98.6%		97.2%		98.2%		99.0%
3 Largest Ave.	89.9	90.5	86.3	86.6	79.6	77.8	71.7	70.3
3 Largest %	99.3%		99.7%		102.4%		102.0%

Unsubstantiated Conclusions

My hope was to see a diminishing degree of variance in the spread pattern as pellets were removed, especially since you only need 9 to 10 pellets to kill a full-health guardian (22+ damage per pellet from PC+1 or CT-D). This trend towards consistency is somewhat evident in the data (through decreasing standard deviations), though you can't say it's significant with the small sample size.

The big take-away from this small sample is that it appears that there's nothing significantly different in pellet spread of the two guns. This is especially apparent when you disregard the smallest value for each set of 4 points (essentially eliminating the noticeably tighter upper-left spread and the 3rd spread of the CT-D.) So in the last line of the table that I've formatted for Reddit, you can see that the difference in pellet spread actually favors the CT-D for the 10 and 9 pellet spreads and is less than a percent worse than the PC+1 in the 12 and 11 pellet spread metrics.

Sources of Error

• Obvious lack of an abundance of data
• Possible slight difference in distance from the wall
• Possible barrel influence (for example, the Linear Compensator adds 1.5 impact, while Smooth Ballistics does not)
• My ineptitude

What next? Does it matter?

At this point, I'm not really able to just go roam around the Cosmodrome to get some more data, so if anyone knows of some more testing that exists. Maybe one of our very inquisitive members (/u/gintellectual, ahem) wants to get some more screenshots, that would be great.

Also, this probably won't influence what weapon you use at all, because most poeple all prefer the faster fire rate of the PC+1 and when they get one with Rifled/Reinforced Barrel, they're so overjoyed to stop using that lumbering behemoth of a shotgun (CT-D) that they would use anything else. I'm not trying to convince you to dust off that quest CT-D in your vault, because I certainly won't be doing that, but I just want to see if there's any merit to the claim that the PC+1 has a tighter pellet spread. Lastly, as u/maniacgreek pointed out, there may be some interesting underlying mechanic that exists in the game to change the "feel" of each weapon, and this could be more readily noticed with shotguns as the randomization of the pellet spread is far easier to detect than on tighter grouping weapons or single-round weapons.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps clarify what's going on with pellet spread.