M56 Smartgun
The core of a Colonial Marine squad's fighting power is its machine guns. More effective than a rifle, machine guns can sustain large columns of continuos fire both in the attack and defense, and are frequently the most decisive weapon in a firefight. The M56 Smart Gun is the Colonial Marines' primary squad machine gun.
The M56A2 is a 10mm general-purpose automatic squad support weapon, effective out to 1500 meters. The pulse-action system employs a free-floating recoil-dampened motorized rotating breech mechanism chambered for the M250 series 10 mm x28 caseless round. The replaceable barrel system is air-cooled. The system is mounted on an operator's harness and slaved to an infrared tracking system. The gun is self-steering on the mount, though firing must be commanded manually. The entire gun assembly masses 17.82 kg.
While the operator is standing, the gun is held and steered by its fore and back grips. Operators have a wide degree of motion with the gun and can play it in an arc from their front to their left side's, or point it directly upwards. The articulation arm is gyrostabilized and provides additional recoil dampening to keep the gun steady while the operator is walking or running. When tracking a target, the arm will self-steer the gun barrel so as to boresight the target's center of mass.
When powered up, the gun begins tracking targets via its infrared tracker mounted above the barrel. This system monitors a 30 degrees cone in front of the gun, and transmits high-resolution thermal images in the 8-10 micrometer range to a miniature video display in the operator's eyepiece.
All firing is controlled from either the forward hand grip or the rear firing handle; the operator fires the weapon by depressing the red 'fire' switch or pulling the firing handle upwards. There are three setting on this switch; Safe, Burst and Autofire. The Burst setting will fire four round bursts, while the autofire feature will continue to fire the weapon at its full cyclic rate so long as the fire switch remains depressed. The M250 10mm x 28 ammunition is stored on a roll of continuous plastic non-disintegrating link belt in the ammunition drum, which can be reloaded in the field.
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