Another interesting tidbit:

When guns are used as clubs, Pistols get 2 dice for damage, Rifles get 4 dice. There is no mention that Brawling is an applicable skill (in any case, in MSPE Brawling does not allow any additional attacks), or that the weapon needs to be empty.

Some other observations:
* Agility does not help you dodge ranged attacks. (Will need to investigate which stat, if any, does this.)
* It seems that each level of skill gets you an extra 1d6 or so damage in melee with the weapon type.
* It seems that, when using guns as clubs, you do something like half the damage you would otherwise, though for the Meson Cannon it seems like a bit less than that. (Note that the Meson Cannon is still stronger than the AK-97 and Laser Pistol, while the AK-97 and Laser Pistol appear to be the same strength when used this way.)

Interesting.

It looks like that when they made Wasteland they couldn't use the melee system from MSPE (which involves both people essentially attacking each other simultaneously), they had to add a to-hit roll so that each person could attack in turn. So they added the new ability AGL to affect the melee accuracy and they decided to also use it to dodge melee attacks as well. Then they took a few DEX-based skills from MSPE and converted them to AGL so that AGL would have some other uses.

In the T&T rules (on which MSPE is based) it does mention the optional rule of making a LK check to avoid missile weapon damage, so that should probably be your starting point.

Excluding Brawling I assume, so you're referring to Knife Fighting and Gun skills here? (This extra damage is the way Pugilism works in MSPE)

This is most curious. I assume you're not taking into account extra attacks from Brawling? I wonder how this is being calculated in that case. If the damage dice are the same as the weapon normally used for Ranged combat (or even being increased by the relevant Gun skill??), you'd think if anything the total damage should be much higher because in addition now STR, LK, and DEX are all increasing damage instead of just LK. The main difference I can think of is that the accuracy is possibly using AGL (melee) instead of DEX (ranged).

EDIT: (I've never used guns as melee weapons in this game, I don't have an intuitive feel for how they behave so this is very interesting to me!)

Actually, Brawling is included, provided you're using a weapon with the Brawling skill assigned. I believe this includes Club, Ax, Chainsaw, and Proton Ax. (Spears also use Brawling, and are actually a good way to increase that skill, but they're ranged weapons so you don't get the damage boost.)

It appears that there's no attribute that will allow you to evade ranged attacks; Wasteland Warriors were even hitting a character with 255 in most stats.

Another one:

Without ammo, the Red Ryder rifle doesn't do that much damage; with average stats and no rifle skill, only single digit damage to Vegas enemies. (It took a while to test this because the gun has so much ammo and can only fire single shots.)

Then:
These findings seem to contradict each other: Did you find that Brawling increase damage per attack, or just the number of attacks?

I get it now, thanks for clearing that up.

Decided to test the effect on skill on melee damage by setting skills to 100.

Result: Each point of weapon skill adds 3 damage. (Yes, this is constant 3, not 1d6 or something like that.) It's the same for unloaded guns as it is for "proper" melee weapons.

Neat!

I wonder why the devs went with that choice. Either to simply be consistent with the other damage adds (ST, DEX, LK) in that it adds a definite number to the base damage roll, or they found that adding 1d6 per rank to be too random when stacked on top of the random damage dice for the weapon itself. (I also wonder why they even added this in the first place, MSPE has no added damage due to weapon ranks (except Pugilism, but in that case it replaces the base weapon damage). The devs could have just made weapon ranks increase the accuracy by adding them to AGL, that would be more analogous to the way ranged weapons work, at least in MSPE).

Did you manage to narrow down any further what's going on with unloaded guns (you mentioned earlier that they seem to do roughly half damage compared to what you'd otherwise expect)

I've been thinking that they should have given Pugilism a bigger bonus per rank than other weapon skills, seeing as how fistfighting is so weak compared to other weapons. 1d6 extra per rank (in addition to the +3 damage per rank that all melee weapons get) would put high rank Pugilism at a level between the Chainsaw and Proton Axe, which feels about right. (Proton Axes would stronger at realistically attainable Brawling/Pugilism levels, but there's only 2 of them.)

Also, making Pugilism boost unarmed combat damage more would be aligned with not only MSPE, but also with other games I've played like Final Fantasy 2 and Dragon Wars (though the latter seems to cap it at some point).

As for why they added this, I think the developers wanted to make melee combat worthwhile, especially since:
* You can only advance one square per turn, and each of those turns the enemies will get to fire on you.
* Even when you're in melee range, ranged attacks always come before melee attacks, and acting last puts you at an obvious disadvantage (if KOed by a shot, you don't get to use your melee attack that round). (Of course, with Speed only mattering in melee , and Agility affecting melee evasion, it turns out that the Speed stat is rather pointless; just raise Agility instead.)

I'm suspecting that each gun has its own unloaded damage rating that's different from the damage done when you shoot; the Red Ryder doing such poor melee damage (as opposed to the 200d6 damage it does at range) is strong evidence for this. Perhaps I may need to test each gun individually, or figure out how to extract the weapon data and see if it has such a field for this.

I agree with what you said about Pugilism. I guess for whatever reason they didn't think about how it was being left behind compared to actual melee weapons when they allowed ranks to increase damage for all melee attacks.

Unfortunately they strayed too far though, in my opinion Brawling is completely OP (extra attacks and double XP).

That makes sense.

Found a walkthrough that actually lists the unloaded damage for guns:
https://archive.org/stream/wasteland1walkt/Wasteland%201%20Walkthrough_djvu.txt

According to the walkthrough, the rundown is as follows:
* Clip pistols: 2d6
* Rifles and Flamethrower: 3d6
* SMGs, Assault Rifles, and Laser Pistol: 5d6 (note that this meens that SMGs do more damage unloaded than they do firing a single shot, before factoring in the skill bonus)
* Other Energy Weapons: 7d6 (this is more than a Chainsaw, and since there are only two Proton Axes, these can actually make good melee weapons (as long as Energy Weapons >= Brawling, and remember that Brawling is still needed for extra attacks).