http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M41A_pulse_rifle
QUOTE
The M41A Pulse Rifle is an air cooled, fully automatic, short- to mid-range combat rifle. Made of light alloy plates, it fires 10x24mm Armor Piercing Caseless Rounds from a 100 round U-bend magazine in either semi automatic, four-round burst, or fully automatic rates of fire. Even though it is supposed to fire caseless ammunition the rifle appears to have a shell ejection port for unknown reasons. In the Aliens versus Predator computer game, the rifle can practically hold 99 rounds; according to the Aliens: Colonial Marines Technical Manual, the weapons were usually underloaded to 95% capacity to avoid jamming. The pulse rifle has a battery-powered digital display that displays the number of rounds left in the magazine. With a retractable stock and an underslung 30 mm PN grenade launcher, this weapon can be used as a carbine and an assault rifle.
In the first place, LOL at the shell ejection port, and also how you saw casings coming out in the movie. That's clearly a goof.
Secondly, wouldn't a caseless weapon theoretically be characterized by high reliability compared to one that needs to extract and eject a casing after each round fired? It seems weird that a caseless weapon would need to be underloaded for reliability reasons.
Thirdly, where are the sights on that thing? http://uscmc.wikispaces.com/space/showimage/M41A.jpg
Forthly, it lists a cyclic rate of fire of 900 RPM. That's pretty high, but shouldn't a casless weapons have an even higher ROF? IIRC a micro uzi and a FN Minimi today can have 1000 RPM, and they're both cased.
In terms of SR3, I'd consider statting a pulse rifle so as to have the ability to fire up to 20 rounds per Automatic Fire action, to kind of abstract the high ROF and to sort of abstract the explicitly stated caselessness. Would the damage code for the Pulse Rifle be better potrayed as ~6M or more like a Ruger Thunderbolt at 9M? Maybe a GM could set the damage code as 9M which would justify the rifle being some kind of super prototype designed for bug hunting, which is why pulse rifles are not widespread in the SR world as a whole.
Would the 4 round burst feature override the SR3 3 round burst rule? I guess you could treat it as a Burst with a +1 Power bonus, like a burst and a short burst all rolled into one.
Probably it shouldn't be smartlinked, with that feature reserved for the "smartgun".