First things first: I play exclusively 2nd edition SR (mostly because I have tons of 2nd ed. material), and among the illustrations in the Gear section of the SR2 Corebook, there´s this "Whitney-Morgan Caseless Machine Gun". Well, apparently, that´s all there is to know about this thing. No mention in any of my sourcebooks, nor any else, even the Cannon Companion (that I do have).

I´m thinking of letting my players have one of these, since they see the nice illos and keep asking "how much costs one of these?". But I have no stats aside it being "caseless" and obviously rotating barrels. Is it LMG? MMG? Even HMG?

My guess it´s a LMG, similar to the Vindicator, but using only caseless ammo from a special magazine, maybe integral (can caseless ammo fit into a ammo belt?).

While you´re on it, I found some mentions of a "Colt 6-PAK" in the Lone Star Sourcebook, but without any comment more detailed than "being a cheap rip-off from the Vindicator". Any suggestions? I´m thinking of using this as a support weapon for the Lone Star FRT - which my players sometimes meet (twice, to be precise, and there´s a third in their way as we speak).

Please help.

Did I say please?

Ah yes, the Whitney Morgan Caseless Machine Gun (Not to be confused with the Whitney Morgan 30mm Automatic Assault Cannon, which was a statless piece of art from early printings of the First Edition book).

First and Second editions were kind of funny about military grade hardware (anything bigger than an LMG). I believe the designers only listed nameless generic versions of the assault cannon, the grenade launcher, the MMG, the HMG and the missile launcher because they were afraid that giving them a name would encourage players to take them even though they're really too heavy for a typical Shadowrun. Also, many of those weapons typically get vehicle mounted anyway, which tends to take away much of a weapon's individuality. (Of course, when they put out the Street Sam's Catalog, every weapon had a name, probably because with the layout of that book it would have been silly not to.)

However, the art department had drawings of heavy weapons, and it would have sucked to just put a generic label like "heavy machine gun" on a piece of art, so they invented a name. Unfortunately, because they didn't put the words "heavy" or "medium" in the name, we don't know which of the two generic classes of machine gun the Whitney Morgan was supposed to be representative of.

To address some of your other questions, yes, caseless ammo can be belted, and for the Colt 6-Pak I'd use the Vindicator stats, but maybe give it a longer spinup time and shorter battery life.

You can forget about "spin-up time" if you want. It's a pretty rediculous concept, there more for "game balance" than anything else. Real miniguns don't work that way. They're either feeding ammo (thus firing it) or they're not; how fast the barrels are spinning has absolutely nothing to do with it. It can be rotating at 2 rpm, 6,000 rpm or anywhere in between, it doesn't matter. The thing is going to fire as long as it's being fed ammo. It takes less than half a second for the barrels to ramp up to full rotation and the weapon can be firing during that time.

The Colt 6-PAK is a kind of rip on a real minigun, the GE XM214 (which was also called the "6-PAK"). It's an electrically-driven 5.56x45mm minigun.

Just to make sure, that is Blaine's gun from Predator, right?

Perssek might also be referring to an image of a corpsec goon holding some kind of self-contained minigun on a staircase with a APC and floating mage in the background.

If you really _must_ worry about spinup time, You can use something negligible like 90% max ROF the first turn of fire.

If the rules were being true to the ROF of a minigun, they would pump out between 100-150 rounds in a single combat turn. I don't think they do. IIRC, 15 rounds per action? A RL SAW or M60 can do that.

Not that realistic firing times have anything to do with any other gun, mind you, but yeah. Miniguns should just be called "instant death suppression wands" or something, realistically.

Damn, I'm good.

Miniguns with RoFs up to 200 rounds per CT are available in my games. Yet no players has so far shown any interest in getting one. Weird.

Didn't they also do stats for the statless Chandler Capture 100 shotgun that was featured in early printings of the first edition core book?

You could always bump the range and damage of the Colt 6PAK down to assault rifle or SMG levels. . . . Just a thought to go with the small illustration