In ET the spread of your standard weapons (mp40, Thomson, Luger, colt, Sten, …) is affected by 5 factors:
1 View: moving your cross-hair / looking around increases spread
The more you move your cross-hair around, the more weapon spread you will get. In times you move your mouse, spread increases while in times you don’t move your mouse, it will decrease steadily. Player velocity does not have any impact on spread of unscoped weapons. You can see the size of your weapon spread by activating cross hair-pulsing for example:
set cg_crosshairPulse 1 // activate cross-hair pulsating
set cg_drawcrosshair 4 // cross-hair: little spot in center plus pulsating circle around it
So be aware of the ET’s hitbox model (hitboxes are much bigger than the models which makes some cross-hair-movement unnecessary) and reduce cross-hair-movement to a minimum. Especially avoid erratic mouse-movements and trace as smooth as possible
big hitboxes (jaymod): hitable behind a corner
2 Shooting: continuous shooting increases spread
Short range fights usually don’t last long and every hit is crucial, so in most cases you are forced to shoot continuesly and shooting bursts is no option. Long range combats often last longer. Shooting small bursts of 3 to 5 bullets each should be considered if you can’t start of the fight with doing massive damage to your opponent. Concentrate on short range duels to get the maximum out of you rounds.
3 Receiving Damage: getting hit by bullets increases spread
When you get hit by your opponent, your screen shakes. This will hurt your aim. Further more the knock back will raise weapon spread ,Both make it inevitable for you to do your best not to get hit – strafe with and without stamina, use obsticles as cover, crouch, prone, …
4 Movement: crouching and proning decrease spread while beeing in the air dramatically increases spread
an analysis on how movement affects weapon-spread back in 2003. found out that spread in standing/crouching/proning-position is nearly equal, when you fire small bursts of 2-3 bullets. If you fire continuously, the spread of crouching and proning is still the same but in standing position it is much higher (see screenshot). Further more in 2006 that crouching will reduce spread to 50% from standing position. Being in the air (jumping, free fall, strafing on rough terrain, …) will result in twice the maximum spread you get when shooting in standing position. And proning will give you maximum spread for the first second and then decays to half the spread as crouching does.
5 Experience-Points: light weapons level 4 and covert ops level 3 decrease spread
When you receive light weapons level 4, your weapon spread will reduce by 35%. Further more covert ops level 3 reduces spread by 35% for the Sten and the FG42. Interestingly this spread reduction seems to be transportable on the standard-weapons and also combineable with light weapons level 4 for maximum spread reduction .
6 Your weapon choice: the MP40 (Axis) seems to have slightly less spread than the Thomson (Allies)
Spread: MP40 vs. Thomson
An analysis was made my planet wolfenstein some years ago in RTCW on how many rounds a weapon is able to fire per second. they found out that the MP40 has a slightly higher firering rate than the Thomson (~ 6 vs. 5 rounds per second). You should now probably expect compensating the Axis advantage by having more spread. On the contrary: from the screenshots he made you can conclude that the MP 40 also has slightly less spread when fired in small bursts from 3 to 5 rounds. Of course all on the condition that the analysis is a.) correct and b.) also applies on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Spread: MP40 vs. Thomson
