Just to balance out the karma of losing my Captain's Locker I did actually have some ridiculously good fortune; much earlier in my playthrough, probably around ~20 hours in, when I hadn't bothered to equip my companion with a weapon they randomly spawned an Advanced Regulator. At the time I assumed she'd just picked it up from a random body, and because I'm currently on a pistol/marksman build I immediately swapped it for myself. It's only recently roughly 60 hours in that I suddenly realised that weapon was obviously far too powerful for that early in the game when it's still easily one-shotting tougher enemies, and I can't remember even seeing another Regulator spawn since.
Even now with maxed pistol skill the only other pistol over 50 damage is the revolver that uses 2.5mm whitehot rounds at 77 damage, but those rounds are so rare it's not practical to use. Meanwhile the Advanced Regulator does a cool 150 and .43Ultramag rounds are always in decent supply.
I can't quite remember the exact details for how this exploit happened but I wouldn't recommend it unless you want the first half of your playthrough to just be a cakewalk. They only reason I won't stop using it is because it happened so long ago by chance and I didn't think much of it till now, so I'll just assume the Gaming Gods intended it this way.
