Hey,

I am going to work in a new unnoficial corp, and need answers for some questions, as i don't have any sourcebooks.

1 - What are the main weapon producing corps?
2 - What is their percentage of market domain(example: Ares 60% of Pistols, HK 50% of SMGs, etc.)?
3 - Ten years are enough to create a big enough weapons corp without 'too "deus ex machina"' factors?

Um...well, there's several. Ares, for certain, and most of the brands nowdays. I don't know what you mean by "percentage." Generally, you can find knock-offs of any given weapon anywhere, there are no hard stats...unless you want me to go through every sourcebook looking for who produces what and calculate percentages.

I'm thinking that's exactly what he wants.

If you could do that AH, that would be nice.

While it is always possible for new manufacturers of weapons to appear, especially if they come out with some new way of killing people. Pick up a gun catalog to find almost an innumerable amount of companies and corps that make them IRL. What is most common will generally follow what is available to local police and military forces. For example: Kalashnikovs will be by far the most available in the former east bloc and China (which will have knock offs), H&K s will be prevalent in Germany, etc. Ares, while global in its sales, will probably be concentrated in North America.

I'm gonna need a while.

You forgot Colt firearms

what about ingram?

Also, those are the "high quality" manufacturers who make the main model of the various weapons. For every model, there's probably at least half a dozen or more rip-offs that are pretty much exactly the same thing. IE There's the Ares Preditor, the HK Carnivore, the Ingram Stalker, the Colt Hunter, etc. that, for game purposes, uses the exact same stats but have small differences, like a slight variation of shape, different grip, the clip release switch is located somewhere else, etc.

10 years would be a good amount of time for one of these knock-off companies to carve out a small market share, but not enough to break into the higher eschalons. These companies have been around for centuries makeing firearms with only a few exceptions, so they have name recognition -- Ares being the exception, but they probably bought out some well known weapons manufacturers, plus they have the megacorporate muscle to force name recognition for their products.

The Abstruse One

Where's NMAth when you need him?

Does it say somewhere in SR books that China uses Kalashnikov-copies? Because they might as well have gone the way of the Norinco QBZ-95.

A large number of weapons are based on a patent, and they aren't copied very widely. The ones that are copied are generally the "legendary" (very widely known) weapons, like the RL AKs, M16s, M1911s, Beretta M92s, etc. There probably wouldn't be actual copies of weapons other than the most common ones, like the Ares Predator (which was already mentioned), the AKs (same) and a few others. There will probably be tons of weapons rather similar, differing mainly in looks and minor things (like +/- 100g weight, longer/shorter barrel, larger/smaller magazine) that cost about the same. The difference between a copy of a weapon and a weapon of the same type doesn't really translate to SR terms, but for an IRL example consider the Beretta M92, the Taurus PT92 and the CZ75.

You can bet that most firearms manufacturers mentioned in SR will make a wide range of guns (in addition to those actually mentioned in the books), so that each large manufacturer will have a weapon similar to the Ares Predator, a weapon similar to Beretta Model 101T, etc. Each will produce each type of gun that sells, and most weapons mentioned in SR3/CC are of the types that do sell.

Of course when many manufacturers are owned by the same larger corp, they might specialize. Since the owners of most of the firms in question haven't been mentioned anywhere, this is totally up to the GM.

The H&Ks are certainly not limited to Germany. The H&K MP5 is by far the most common SMG in existence and the standard one in just about every western police department and military force. Their pistols are used by the USSOCOM and (hopefully) by the US Transportation Safety Administration. Since it's one of the few large European firearms manufacturers mentioned anywhere in the books, it's likely that H&Ks are extremely common everywhere in Europe, together with FN's guns.

I doubt there are many canon figures as to what the market shares of the guns manufacturers are, and I won't even try to hazard a guess (I haven't even got a clue what the numbers are IRL), but I can tell you for a fact that no one manufacturer will have a share as large as 50% in a broad classification like SMGs, nevermind pistols. It's hard enough to get as high as 30%, and already at that point the same guns seem to pop up everywhere. IRL, the only ones that might get close are Izmash in assault rifles or H&K in SMGs, the former especially if you consider all the license-built AKs (that are actually called AKs) to be Izmash weapons, too.

You may also want to check Raygun's website for a long, long list of guns and manufacturers as well as the history of many types of guns. His site is invaluable resource for anyone interested in guns.

It seems lately I am plugging his site a lot! Great site Raygun!

20 years is a long time to churn out assault rifles... But certainly the Kalashnikov copies would still prevail, no argument there then. Just forgot about the collapse-bit.

NMAth has a good point in that "weapons manufacturers" are very likely to get most of their income from sources other than firearms/small arms. Even the largest firm that specializes on small arms isn't all that big. Colt (subsidiary of Ares?) and Izmash might be pretty large on the overall scale of firms, but they are hardly "corps" as generally used in SR. Even for H&K, which is pretty darn big, an order of 10,000 handguns is still a big deal, and that's only up to $5 million, which is nothing. 300,000 assault rifles to Spain might sound like a big deal, but it only amounts to a few hundred million dollars, tops. The megacorp accountants won't even mark down an income less than 1 billion.

Mauser, for years one of the names in quality hunting rifles now only makes heavy weeapons- mainly anti-aircraft stuff. They sold the liecences for their otics and rifles to a swiss company a few years back.

Thanks people.

I got some info for my text.

Thanks a lot.