[2022] Is the Auger actually a machine gun?

I mean to actually implement an auger accurately, you’d need to simulate the rotational motion of the screw as it continuously penetrates and collides with a volume of material, probably with a finite element model. Games just don’t go to that much trouble, so we get a machine gun repurposed as an auger that ‘shoots’ discrete short range projectiles at the terrain many times a second. The jackhammer idea is actually brilliant, because then the art and animation would be a much closer match to how the engine actually implements a power digging tool behind the scenes.

My guess would be the materials are what actually changed. The pew pew pew only happens on metals, right? Perhaps there’s a default impact sound when hitting metals, and they haven’t bothered to override that default when user an auger specifically. I don’t really remember how the auger sounded before or what Alpha that may have been.