Actually, I did not remember that part of the will. Or any part. Where can I find the will? I think I need to read it.

stunbolt isn't non-lethal. if you stunbolt someone who's at D stun, you'll deal physical damage to them. do it enough, and you'll kill them.

That is true. It's actually true of most "non-lethal" weapons.

As a martial arts instructor once said, "There are two kinds of weapons: those that kill, and those that kill with a little more effort."

The XM29 is antiquated by SR standards. It's just an assault rifle with an attached 6-shot grenade launcher (or GL with an attached AR), a grenadelink and rangefinder, yet even at the most optimistic was going to weigh 14lbs.

The HK MP7 PDW is just a Machine Pistol.

Good quote.

Also, Stunbolts have the disadvantage of being usable only by a very small portion of the population.

Warning may be fatal to anyone with a pacemaker or wired reflexes

Yeah, but it's a really shiny, well-made machine pistol.

I know what you're saying, but honestly, weapons are getting more sophisticated now and most of the cutting edge tech has already been represented in SR somewhere. And the really high-tech stuff (phasers, lightning guns, ion pistols) I don't see as being all that practical. I think that the weapons in development would simply be advancements on existing platforms (more ammo, less weight, more sophisticated smartguns, etc.)

BTW: I never liked the lasers in SR. I think that without a "fusion cell" or something like that, any high energy output weapon is going to be an emplaced or vehicle weapon. Either that, or it's like the lasers in Akira, with big battery packs, slow recharge, and finicky about how it's handled. I only use them in my games as an R&D prototype, not as an issued support weapon.

Yeah, and a laser is just a slightly more complex radio transmitter .

And the fact that it uses a gas piston return rod to keep the weapon clean and very reliable while helping with a little bit of accuraccy as less gas is used in the piston than a more conventionally designed gas operated weapon system.

...

Fine, you get to carry it.

Not a problem. I'm a huge MF.
I'm 6'6" and 320 lbs. I can carry a hell of a lot, due a lot to the pipe I hauled when I was doing pipe welding for oil rigs.

Loaded, the gun is what, 16 pounds.

I can understand the reliability (might get a MRBF several thousand higher than a blowback machine pistol), and indirect gas operation does allow for slightly better accuracy -- although, considering the other limitations to the effective ranges of these weapons, it might not help much -- but why would an AR-18 or G36 -style gas piston make a firearm inherently more accurate than, say, AK-style gas operation?

I think the basic point is that guns today (and apparently in 2070) still propel a metal slug at high velocity using a chemical explosive, albeit a bit more effiently, pretty much as they did in 1942. The basic delivery instrument of kinetic energy to the human body hasn't changed much. Keeping this in mind would the State of the Art gun in 2070 have changed that much? Or another way of looking at it is would technology have improved enough that totally impractical ideas today become feasible in 65 years, like a man portable railgun (Ala the movie Eraser) or energy beam or pulse weapons (apparently in Quantum physics light can act like either an energy or a particle depending on circumstances) or a compressed air blast weapon. Some of these ideas are already touched on in various expansions (Ares MP lasers, the whole Squirt series of weapons, the ELD AR (paintball anyone?), that mircowave pain gun, the sonic blaster in SOTA 2063 (or was it SOTA 2064).

The GM would run you down with his Fiat (assuming it wasn't in the shop) long before then.

It's not the weight that's the (only) problem. It's the bulkiness of it. It's just plain unwieldy, I don't care how much pipe you've hauled.

Did you mean direct gas operation? For all its faults, direct impingement tends to offer better accuracy than piston-operated systems.

Because long stroke systems tend to be greatly over-gassed. Without a sufficient way to control pressure in the cylinder, this tends to put stress on the barrel just as the bullet is exiting. That's part of the reason why the AK design is considered to deliver relatively poor accuracy, but excellent reliability.

It may be true that it is unweidly, but I'd actually have to haul it around to state to that fact. But, it's sort of funny that you think I wouldn't be used to unweildy and yet you mention pipe. Haul pipe for a few months, and you understand heavy, and unweildy. I mean, these are single and dubble walled steel tubes, sometimes inches wide, sometimes feet.

Now, I do understand that it would not be a gun that just anyone could use. But I like the look, and I feel I could deal with the weight, and the bulk of it.

Now, I might not be able to deal with bulkiness and recoil at the same time, but it would depend on the guns recoil, the grip I could get, etc. And I'd need to physically try it before I could judge it.

I meant compared to blowback guns, like the B+T MP9. I figured a system like that might have a bit more trouble locking up the exact same way every time.

The stroke on an AK-47 doesn't look that much longer than on, say, an AR-18. In both, the distance from where the head of the piston rests to where the gas is vented is around the same. In fact, if I'm reading the schematics right, if you go by the first hole in the AK gas tube, the stroke on the AK is a bit shorter, at something like 30mm-40mm (varies by model) vs ~50mm. For all I know, the small holes in the AK gas tube might release the gases slower than the AR-18 vent and cause the effect you described, but the piston stroke ("portion of time when combustion gases contact the piston head prior to venting") doesn't seem any longer.

[Edit]Been trying to wrap my head around this... Let's say there's 130mm of barrel on an AR-18 in front of the gas tap. The velocity of the bullet for these last 130mm of the barrel averages at somewhere around ~850m/s (~2800fps). AFAICT, the piston cannot safely move at even 1/50th this velocity or you'd get all sorts of bad shit happening, so at the most the piston could have moved back ~7-8mm before the bullet leaves the barrel. In other words, with just about any gas piston and tube design, no pressure is released out of the cylinder before the bullet has already cleared the muzzle. Or have I got this all wrong?[/Edit]

The rifle part of the XM29 minimal recoil -- it's a short-barreled, gas operated 5.56x45mm rifle attached to a 12lb pile of junk. The grenade launcher might have a bit of a shove, but a lot less than your average 2-3/4" 12G.

As for bulk, which do you think you could easier swing around to accurately engage the target: you wielding this or the enemy wielding this?

No, you really don't. All you have to do is know how much the thing weighs, then look at it. Compared to say, an M16A2 with an M203 attached, it's going to be about a 9 on the unwieldy scale.

It's one thing to haul a bunch of shit around and be okay with hauling it. It's quite something else to haul all that shit around and shoot decently during the act or directly afterwards. You'll be accomplishing the shooting part much better with a rifle that doesn't get in your way quite so much. Hell, some machine guns aren't as bulky as the OICW was. Other than the complexity, cost and ineffectiveness of it, that was why the OICW tanked.

I must get one of those.

The two greatest revolutionary firearm innovations were breech loading and the brass cartrige with the magazine, the cylinder, and automatic operation following in some arbitrary order.

The reason I make this claim is quite simple. The purpose of a firearm is to put a hole in a target. These innovations made it possible to put more holes in more targets more quickly than ever before and we haven't been able to improve upon them too much. We've been able to refine them, yes, but have not yet surpassed them and probably never will.

Portable rail guns are simply because they aren't going to make more holes or bigger holes compared to conventional man portable weapons up until you start shooting at tanks and that is debatable. It is difficult to measure the potential armor penetrating abilities of a weapon that does not exist. The ammo will be lighter and smaller without propellent but the giant battery pack poses a problem.
Likewise, lasers aren't too usefull when it comes to mankilling. They're nice for shooting down ballistic milliles, though.


The Ares MP Laser, the EldAr, and the microwave pain gun are all gimic weapons. They do their thing well but they are ultimatly unreliable. The MP laser's battery is far too small, the pain gun can be resisted, and chemical rounds aren't so useful against people at MOP lever 1 or greater.

Surely rifling should be in the top three?

I remember seeing those a few years ago. It was SS, bolt-action, and weighed about 14 pounds. On the upside, that weight worked wonders for recoil compensation, to the point where you hardly felt any at all.

One of my friends said, "It's single shot. While you're working the bolt, they'd gun you down!"

I said, "If someone pulls this out in a firefight, who the hell would stay to shoot back?"

Not really. Considering that an M82 (much higher muzzle velocity, but also a much heftier muzzle brake, and a form of operation that reduces felt recoil significantly) is often said to have about as hefty a kick as a 12 gauge slug, I would not recommend firing a .50 BMG handgun without taking some precautions. Improper technique could lead to serious trouble.

Oh, duh. (The MP9 is recoil operated with a rotating barrel; but I get you anyway). There are so few pistol-caliber, gas piston operated firearms that I think it would be pretty difficult to say that the piston-operated platform offers better accuracy. In the case of the MP7, I'd say it's the cartridge more than anything else. I don't think I've seen any accuracy testing figures comparing the P90 to the MP7, have you?

Between rifles using the same cartridge with different forms of operation (short/long stroke gas piston, direct gas impingement, delayed blowback), direct impingement and delayed blowback tend to be the most accurate of them. That's what I was getting at.

The exhaust ports have nothing to do with it. Once the piston passes those exhaust ports in the AK or AR-18 cylinders, the bullet is well out of the barrel and the bolt is unlocked. All those ports do is keep the piston/bolt carrier from continuing to accelerate.

It has to do with how fast gas is tapped into the cylinder from the barrel, as well as the fact that the reciprocating mass of a long stroke system tends to be heavier than that of a short stroke system (especially AK-based rifles). So, the faster the gas is tapped, the more pressure there is going to be in the cylinder in a shorter amount of time. That pressure is going to push against both the piston head and the front end of the cylinder (which is rigidly attached to the barrel). The more gas that's tapped and the more inertia there is to overcome, the more pressure that's going to be put against the end of the cylinder, causing the barrel to literally bend (a little bit goes a long way) as the bullet is exiting the muzzle. This is why the G36 has an exhaust port at the end of the cylinder directly opposite the piston; it allows the system to self-regulate and prevents the barrel from being stressed excessively.

Obviously, some excess of pressure is built into most unregulated gas systems so that the firearm will function reliably under adverse conditions (this is where Kalashnikov decided to go a bit crazy). It's not beyond possibility that a short stroke system could suffer from the same problems; it's also possible that by careful design, the problem could be mitigated in a long stroke system (like the SG550, for example). Direct impingement systems aren't as dramatically affected by this, and blowback or delayed blowback systems aren't affected at all.

Another thing the short stroke system has over the long stroke is that the piston rod doesn't reciprocate the full distance of the bolt carrier (hence short stroke), so not only does there tend to be less reciprocating mass total, the piston rod doesn't shift what mass it has to the rear as far. That tends to make them a bit more accurate in automatic fire or allow the shooter to recover a little quicker in semi-auto.