Didn't even bother to try the other then default TR pistol, it's the best vanilla side arm in the game.
Would like to see pistols, shotguns and rocketlaunchers as secondary weapons. Then you could choose what you wanted to bring to the fight. Bit it'll never happen...
Default Repeater is the best close range Pistol. It's spread/recoil is worse than NC or Vanu's so it's not as good for distance combat. As for Emperor people tested it, and found it's accuracy/damage are not significantly increased despite being single shot. So in other words it's just a straight downgrade compared to the default. An oversight by the devs I guess.
The Repeater used to do about 30% more damage per shot. Other empires complained and it got nerfed into uselessness.
But the default pistol also has a single shot mode.... wouldn't this make it literally the emperor with better stats?
I just trialled the Emperor to try and answer this question but, I couldn't tell either. It feels like the Repeater sans burst fire. So I looked at some numbers somebody took from the game, and still can't see any meaningful differrence. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AuOojvNLMApVdEtIU1NKenEzNzZOSWNaanFqSUVxLWc&gid=12 Either the weapon has placeholder stats or it requires a better FPS player than me to appreciate its subtleties.
