One of my all time favorite weapons in Halo is the Assault rifle, especially the newest one. It’s cool-looking, it’s fun to use, and it’s versatile if you know how to control the spread. That said, I do have a few questions about it. First of all, doesn’t it supposedly fire 7.62mm ammunition? If so, why? A bullet like that isn’t nearly as effective as some of the rounds we’ve already created, and the assault rifle doesn’t have anything near the stopping power that a round like that would have. Another thing is, how do they fit 60 bullets into the MA5B? That’s a lot of rounds, and they’re fired from a pretty small magazine. My third question is, why does the computer module on the top have to be so large, just to count the ammunition and function as a compass? Over 500 years into the future, it would take almost nothing to produce that kind of processing power. So what’s up with that?
I have a few ideas that would explain the design of the assault rifle, though they admittedly would contradict some canonical “fact”, so to speak. That said, it’s just a thought exercise, not to be taken seriously if you disagree with it, but feel free to tell me if you like the ideas.
My first idea is a complete redesign of the conventional assault rifle round. the standard bullet could be elongated and thin, looking something like a tank round with a smaller casing, propelled by a more powerful explosive than the powder that we use today. These would be exceptional armor-piercers, which would be far more effective against both the titanium composite human armor and the latticework of alloys that make up Covenant armor, though the reduced stopping power of a thin, lightweight projectile wouldn’t necessarily make them devastating against energy shielding. Second is the explanation for jamming all 60 of those bullets into the MA5B. My solution to this is the “suppressive round”, a shorter bullet that has less acceleration and piercing power than the conventional “javelin” design (as I will call it for the sake of brevity). These would be about half the length of the “javelins” but exactly the same width, so that almost twice as many could be put in a magazine. However, instead of a single column of bullets feeding into the chamber, there would be two separate columns feeding first down, then forward, THEN up into the chamber via a series of passive magnetic strips instead of outdated springs. These rounds wouldn’t pierce armor quite as well as the “javelins”, but would be able to be fired very quickly and in very large quantities while simultaneously being much cheaper to produce.
Now on to the computer uplink. First off, we’ll say that most of the mass of the MA5’s computer is insulation and armor, to keep the internal systems from being either physically or electronically damaged. My supplemental theory is that the module does more than just count bullets and tell you which direction you’re facing. Perhaps a small camera in the front (something similar to, say, the camera-lens like protuberance seen here, sticking out above the barrel: Rifle | Halo Alpha | Fandom)enables the user to use the screen as a reflex sight of sorts, or even that it functions as a receiver for tactical information, like a long-range antenna of sorts. In this regard, the assault rifle would not only be a gun, but an indispensable tool on the battlefield.
Any thoughts?
