Assault rifle

The assault rifle is a moderately heavy, multi-shot firearm in RimWorld which fires 3-shot bursts of rounds which deal a low amount of damage each; a slightly shorter delay between each shot; a slightly shorter time between bursts; slightly longer range and slightly higher accuracy.

Combat Performance

It'll take 6 shots to the torso to kill an unarmored human with a machine pistol, or around 10-12 shots against a human with a normal armor vest. The assault rifle can also instantly cripple digits, cripple eyeballs in two shots and cause debilitating brain damage if the victim's skull is unprotected. It takes 4 hits on an unprotected human limb to cripple it. Without factoring in any cover or shooter's accuracy, the assault rifle has an average time to down of 9.6 seconds against unarmored people or 12.1 seconds against a human with an armor vest.

Since the assault rifle is multi-shot in nature, has a fairly quick fire rate and good all-round accuracy, it is a fairly skill-friendly weapon. A healthy level 8 traitless shooter, level 4 careful shooter or level 11 careful shooter can somewhat efficiently use the assault rifle up to 22 cells.

Due to the low damage per shot, the assault rifle doesn't fare very well against armored opponents such as mid-late game mercenary raiders, insectoids, or mechanoids either.

Obtaining

The assault rifle can be purchased from outlander combat suppliers and towns, and also from orbital weapons traders - all at a considerable cost. The assault rifle can also be manufactured at a machining table once the machining research has been completed, for 60 steel, 7 components, and 45,000 ticks (750 secs) of work.

Conclusion & Comparison

As previously mentioned, the assault rifle lacks a compelling reason to really use it other than its versatility. While it's all-round superior to the considerably cheaper machine pistol, the following weapons are generally better choices for the given scenarios:

Pump shotgun for close-range damage output.
LMG for close-medium range damage output
Bolt-action rifle for picking off more-distant targets.

However, the former two weapons may not necessarily be the best class of weapons to compare the assault rifle to; while the assault rifle has both a little bit of DPS and good accuracy/range, it leans more towards the latter class of weapons (along with the bolt-action rifle and sniper rifle) than anything else.