Pogo's Weapon Discussion -- The M41A.

[Wibble]

The M41A Pulse Rifle, its a cool movie gun but holy shit would it be crap in real life.

[CABAL]

Now try to fluff explain IC caseless shotgun shells.
It's cool thread, by the way. Do more, next about flamer.

[drover]

It's just a bad weapon design. A heavy rifle is bad not only because it means less ammo carried, but more importantly, it's going to tire the shooter out when firing faster. A lightweight rifle means that Marine can shoot longer, and more accurately, from any unsupported firing position. When comes to firing, modern training focuses on accuracy at all ranges, so being able to maintain a consistent shooting stance is important. Having a tired arm holding the end of your rifle will cause your muzzle to sway and the smallest variation at the muzzle can mean misses by yards at the target.

When it comes to heat venting, it does in fact have an ejection port. It's possible to remove a round from the chamber, so I imagine the rifle's action behaves in similar way to a current M16A4 rifle, albeit, no cartridge is ejected unless done manually. Even so, the weapon doesn't have enough ammo in a magazine to cause such heat to create a cook off scenario unless you have several extended magazines and are firing at cyclic rate, which is highly unlikely for a semi or burst rifle.

Another important to note drawback is the ammo counter. In the video shared here earlier, it's a bright red light on the side of the rifle. If you're a right handed shooter, the counter is doing nothing for you at best, and at worst, giving away your position in the darkness. While it's easily concealable with some well place tape, that completely negates the entire reason behind it. Ultimately, it would have been removed after the first variation of the M41, or relocated to rear of the bolt. As to powering it, Maxim_Inc wrote that it's battery life lasts for three thousand rounds, which is absurd because the U.S. Gov't estimates two hundred and fifty thousand rounds fired per single insurgent killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. That's a lot of batteries that need to be carried by a patrol of Marines and maintained by a company's armory and maintenance sections. Shucks, modern Radetec's RISC has release an ammo counter for Glock pistols that has a life of twenty thousand bullets.

Back to accuracy, it has a complete lack of iron sights. If a Marine is unable to obtain optics from supply, they will be required to essentially hip fire or pointer fire. In game, it's hardly noticeable as the valid target is only 10 tiles away, but from a realistic standpoint, completely ludicrous. Marines from the '40s could fire accurately on range targets at 500 yards without any optic, proving the necessity of iron sights regardless of modern attachments. The standard issue rifle in American arsenals have a Trijicon ACOG 4x32 with them, as well as back-up iron sights in case the RCO fails in anyway.

And, to counter point Madventure's statement about Marines being lowly trained is completely against the purpose of their missions. You'd have to be well trained to assault from orbit and secure an area that will likely be swarmed by rebels or UPP from the minute they land. Marines are often heavily involved in campaigns in the past and can be assumed they would maintain their involvement until the planet/region/country is deemed secured and pacified. I have seen no mention of any sort of army forces outside of planet side defense units, so I assume Marines do the heavy lifting in all major combat theaters and to be issued a weapon intended to be only in situation is a travesty.

For the development groups to fail to create a more universal rifle for Marines is clearly because some one is getting their palms greased. Realistically, no general would be able to survive a political backlash for so long in terms of giving the military forces poor quality weapons. Look at the horribly unreliable M16, it took about a year and a half for the M16A1 to rectify the faults of the M16 and to fully replace it in the field. The M16A1 received widespread acceptance within U.S. forces in Vietnam after proving it's reliability.

That's my opinion, I apologize if it reads like I'm all over the place, I was trying balance realism in the game to real life equivalencies, which is difficult to do seeing such stark differences in technology. I like what you did here, Pogo, and I'm eager to see what else you have to say about other weapons.

[Steelpoint]

When you think like that, the COs M46C Rifle looks far more in line with an actual, functional, firearm.

[Heraclitus]

I believe on the aliens wiki it mentions that most veteran USCM soldiers would put a bit of sticky tape over the ammo counter, just to be extra sure that it didn't give their position away.

Despite all the draw backs listed for the M41A, it's still my favourite sci fi rifle, after the bolter that is. The bolter is everything wrong with the M41A on steroids, and that's what makes it great.

[PogoMarimo]

I hadn't even thought about the lack of iron sights, although to be honest modern militaries are likely to move away from iron sights on standard-issue small arms in the next 20 or 30 years thanks to the increase in reliability of optics and the exceptional increase for soldiers in both precision and target identification that comes with magnified optics (And even non-magnified optics, to a lesser extent).

I do think visually it's impressive, it gives the same vibes as Starship Troopers and WH40K--A big gun hurling explosive lead down range, spraying bullets at alien monsters--While keeping it in a bit more reasonable a package. I imagine the writers that contributed to it had some concepts of futuristic features they wanted but no concept of how a gun comes together as a package, and what issues a gun needs to be able to withstand on a battlefield. Certainly there are better weapons even within the primary Alien lore than this big boy.

[Dorkkeli]

Now talk about sharp sticks

[jjia]

Anyone else think this rifle fires subsonic ammo at least in our fluff? It would make sense for marines that fight mostly in spaceships as to not over penetrate hit the atmo system and kill everyone. It would also explain its weird ballistics in game.

[PapaNicholas]

genius

[CABAL]

Anyone else think this rifle fires subsonic ammo at least in our fluff? It would make sense for marines that fight mostly in spaceships as to not over penetrate hit the atmo system and kill everyone. It would also explain its weird ballistics in game.

It does makes sense since suppresor nearly completly silence every shot. That would be also true to any other firearm that can get suppresor, even MAR-40.