40mm Shotgun

The 40mm Shotgun is a weapon attachment found in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. It is simply a canister round that is fired from a 40mm grenade launcher. It is unlocked after getting in the region of 6000 points with the Assault class. It is loaded and fired exactly like a grenade, except that no compensation must be made for a ballistic trajectory. It inflicts very high damage against infantry, has a slow reload time, and a very short range.

It is advisable to use this with burst-fire weapons such as the M16 as they don't perform as well in close-quarters, so a shotgun will compensate for this. Also, due to the large spread of the pellets, it is easy to kill a number of grouped enemies with a single shell at certain ranges.

Bugs

 * The 40mm shotgun makes any type of scope on certain assault rifles disappear when the user switches to the attachment. This does not happen on the XM8, AN-94, M416 or M16 SA.

Trivia

 * The 40mm canister round featured in game is the M576 cartridge.
 * The in-game description states that it fires 12 tungsten darts, but in-game, it fires 24 once. This can be seen by checking your stats, and looking at "shots fired"; after firing 1 shotgun shell, the number will increase by 24.
 * In reality, the M576 fires 20 pellets of #4 buckshot at once.
 * The M576 cartridge was designed for use with the M79 "Thumper" to make it effective in close-quarters combat. It was then utilized by the M203 system once it replaced the M79.
 * When the player switches to their shotgun, they flip up the leaf sights on their rifle, even though they serve no purpose with the 40mm shotgun.
 * If the player zooms in while the weapon is equipped, the dart burst appears to be more concentrated, allowing for greater accuracy.