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gun thoughts
>a caseless gun
would be good but we lose the advantage of heat dissipation, every case ejected could be a heat sink taking shells out of the action, which would improve cooling significantly. alternatively we could use spacer heat pump magic to route heat to somewhere else, like a part of the magazine or something.
>action
i like the idea of an electrically operated/ignited firearm but this is a no go, we have faced EMP in the past and everything we make MUST be shielded (faraday cage) so we either have to shield it or avoid it for a purely mechanical design. toss up, advantages both ways
>users
is this weapon going to be used purely by humans or does it need to be cross species compatible? I'm leaning towards human only design as it would simplify the design and ergonomics. we could make the grip module interchangable for different anatomies to allow them to use it somewhat but I don't want to compromise caliber selection for interspecies ergonomics.
>manufacturability
I'm torn regarding nanofabs. on one end we want them to be easily manufacturable without eating up fab time, on the other we want to take advantage of the technology. we have. maybe certain parts or modules of the weapon should only be able to be made via nanofab, while others could be more quickly manufactured via more traditional manufacturing practices. I am assuming that nanofabs will be a bottleneck, and this would dodge that somewhat.
>power armor use
is this gun designed to be used with or without power armor? if it's designed to be used with power armor we can shunt certain functions of the gun off to the power armor (targeting, cooling) while making the weapon have a larger caliber or more ammunition. this would come with the downside of being harder to operate across all species unless augmented or wearing power armor.
>grenade launcher
pic related. the main problems with the k11 was that it's heavy, bulky, and doesn't work. we can probably make it work, and we could for sure make it lighter. A grenade launcher inbuilt to the weapon would be very useful as the shells have enough space to contain different payloads. however, a m320 under barrel side loader style might be better, keep it simple stupid, and not everyone needs a grenade launcher.
>ammo selection
what do we want to optimize? do we want the weapon to be armor piercing, do we want it to have a large caliber so we can put payload in the bullet, do we want the weapon to have low recoil and be used by as many ayys as possible? do we want to push it to the limit and make it operable only by humans? do we give a fuck about overpenetration?
>electronics
what kind of electronics do we want to cram into this? some kind of linkage to power armor obviously, as well as sights and thermal/night vision capability. I think a good ground rule for the weapon is that the action should be purely mechanical, unless we decide to focus on EMP shielding, which we should anyways for everything we put on it.