best movie prop ever.
If you ran a poll among science fiction geeks, and asked them about the most memorable fictional firearm in movie history, eight out of ten would probably nominate this puppy:
(Ignore the gag reflex that may occur when watching avowed gun hater Sigourney Weaver holding a rifle, movie prop or not. At least someone instructed her to keep her finger off the bang switch.)
That, of course, is the M41-A pulse rifle. For a fictional piece of hardware, this thing has stirred the imagination among the more than any other hand-held weapon save maybe the light saber. Twenty years after Aliens, there are non-functional resin models out there selling for hundreds of dollars, and working airsoft versions selling for north of a grand. Rumor has it that some folks have even tried to figure out how to build a live-firing replica.
As fictional weapons go, the M-41A is not particularly impressive or capable, considering it’s supposed to be a 24th century infantry weapon. Even allowing for the continued use of chemically-propelled projectiles in 2300-whatever, the M-41A has very few amenities that would put it on par with even a moderately pimped-out present-day AR-15. There are no combat optics (which may be explained away by the intended use of the gun as a close-quarters device), no accessory rails for lights or lasers, and no modern amenities such as vertical foregrips. There is no flash hider, so the thing has a muzzle flash measured in feet. There’s a spiffy digital ammo counter on the side, but that’s about all that’s battery-powered on the gun. No lasers, phasers, wind speed indicators–any standard U.S. Army M-16 currently issued has more hi-tech bits bolted to it.
On the plus side, the weapon has an impressive 99-round capacity (although they must have some awesome spring technology in the 24th century if they manage to stuff that many 10mm rounds into what looks like a thirty-round Thompson magazine), and it’s heartening to see that the future Colonial Marine Corps will move away from the ever-decreasing caliber trend by adopting a 10mm bore. The underslung 30mm grenade launcher is pretty spiffy, too.
In real life, the movie prop was created with a WWII-era Thompson M1A1 submachine gun, and lots of resin molds for the futuristic-looking shell. The “grenade launcher” was a short-barreled Remington 870 shotgun, mounted into the shell of a Franchi SPAS-12 and bolted to the bottom of the Thompson.
The end result of all that prop design work was a mean-looking device that looked like it could be a plausible issue rifle for the future grunts in that gritty-looking Aliens future. It was one of those cases where the whole thing is way more than the sum of its parts. I mean, the movie is twenty years old, and you can type the search term “M-41A pulse rifle” into Google and still come up with a few hundred web sites dedicated to either talking about the thing, making 3D models of it for use in first-person computer shooters, publishing fictional technical manuals for it, or trying to graft non-functioning Remington shotguns onto soft-air Thompsons.
(And just between us, it might be a sacrilege to even consider using a functioning Tommy Gun for such a profane purpose, but if I ever have fuck-you money, I’ll track one down and pay somebody a backpack full of cash to make me a live-fire version. Hell, yeah.)
Shit, now I feel the need to dig out my Aliens vs. Predator 2 CD-ROMs and blow some xenomorphs to bits…alas, sprog #2 is calling for service from her room, so it’s feeding time.
January 30, 2008 at 1:02 pm
That was an awesome weapon. It was even better when they attached the flamethrower to it.
January 30, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Remember that the 10mm rounds were caseless. I would also assume that the increased technology would have made the propellant much denser therefore we can assume that the total cartridge was much smaller. So I could see maybe 4x capacity on the magazine. Still not 100 rounds, but again, the weapon was so cool you just didn’t give a shit.
Another thing I believe is that if we do determine how to fly amongst the stars, technology won’t propagate as fast. As people move further and further away, it will be harder to change their technologies. So, I’d expect entire groups to be stuck with centuries old technology.
January 30, 2008 at 3:42 pm
No offense, but give me Capt. Reynold’s handgun any day.
January 30, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Roooobb is a fanbooooy.
January 30, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Speaking of Aliens, you might be interested in this.
January 30, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Commenting further, the magazine actually looked to me like something that you slapped into a Barrett .50. OK, not quite that long, but close, so Robb is not that far off the mark. Sorry, Joe, as much as I love Firefly Malcom’s pistol isn’t nearly as cool as Zoe’s mare’s leg.
January 30, 2008 at 11:33 pm
But if you do get that kind of money, and build your thompson/870 m41 gun… you’ll have the thompson rechambered in 10mm, right?
January 31, 2008 at 12:54 am
“Remember that the 10mm rounds were caseless. I would also assume that the increased technology would have made the propellant much denser therefore we can assume that the total cartridge was much smaller.”
Yes, but diameter is the controlling variable in magazine capacity, and no matter how much the technology advances, 10 millimeters is still going to be ten millimeters.
January 31, 2008 at 4:24 am
It’s definately the late 21st Century’s iconic sci-fi boomstick. You had Kirk’s phaser pistol, your oversize-paperclip lasers in Space:1999, Avon and the rest of Blake’s crew with their curling tongs. You had Picard waving a dustbuster (now you know how they kept the Enterprise-D looking to clean), and you had Deckard’s hand-cannon, which admittedly still holds up well for sheer testicle size.
But then you had the Pulse Rifle. An instant icon. Between it’s plasible, grunt-geared styling and the sound of it - that rolling, dopplering bellow that still curls my toes just thinking about it - it still is the manliest sci-fi weapon of all time.
And it looks like you could smash a door down with it, then shoot your way through the back wall. What was the quote from that Black Horse novel? “The sights are for shit, but anything not wearing Class V Spidersilk armour gets blown into bloody mush”. Something like that….
January 31, 2008 at 10:12 am
Tam, I was assuming that the overall length was decreased and that the magazine somehow utilized this space savings. Maybe like some sort of internal linkage?
And as for the fan boy comment, you have NO idea
Seriously, I consider Aliens to be probably my top most favorite movie of all times. Action packed. Scary. Somewhat plausible. Of course, the original Alien is in my top 10 as well. III and IV were shit (III being unwatchable, IV being totally non-plausible but at least partially entertaining).
January 31, 2008 at 10:50 am
More about it
http://olegvolk.net/gallery/technology/arms/pulserifle.jpg.html
January 31, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Most memorable sci-fi weapon? What about that auto fire, grenade launcer guided missle thingy from ‘The Fifth Element’? Don’t remember what it was called, but the BAD GUY that owned everything on the planet was selling them to the Mangalores (ugly bad guys) in exchange for the stones.
January 31, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Oleg, where’d you get that from?
January 31, 2008 at 11:32 pm
The ZF1! It’s light, handle’s adjustable for easy carrying, good for righties and lefties, breaks down into four parts, undetectable by X-Ray, ideal for quick, discrete interventions. A word on firepower: titanium recharger, 3000 round clip with bursts of three to 300. With the Replay Button, another Zorg invention, it’s even easier.” One shot…. and Replay sends every following shot to the same location. And to finish the job, all Zorg’s oldies but goldies: Rocket launcher, Arrow launcher, with exploding or poisonous gas heads (”very practical!”), Our famous netlauncher, The always sufficient flamethrower (”my favorite…”), And for the grand finale…The All-New “Ice Cube System”.
February 1, 2008 at 9:31 am
[...] fiction guns here, here, here and here. I dunno, I always liked Robocop’s gun. And you can buy an airsoft [...]
February 2, 2008 at 7:45 am
“Even allowing for the continued use of chemically-propelled projectiles in 2300-whatever”
I think that’s perfectly reasonable. Whenever I see a SF raygun, I wonder about the power source. The rapid burning of a chemical explosive in a confined space provides a very, very high power to weight ratio, and it’s going to remain the best technology unless new principles of physics are discovered that give us something like a pocket-sized fusion power plant. In man-carryable devices, the only things that can beat it are larger chemical explosive devices and suitcase nukes, neither of which do what a gun does.
This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of possibilities for improving firearms - including many old ideas that so far have been little used. Sabot ammunition, for instance; with this, a soldier could carry a heavy caliber carbine (10mm, .50, or even larger), use ball ammo for knock-down power at close range, and then flip up the scope and change to sabot ammo for those 800 yard shots or for penetrating light armored vehicles. It costs more for better performance, and requires a bit more training and intelligence on the part of the man who has to decide which kind to load - aren’t these what the modern American military is trending towards?
Caseless ammo is an old idea that I suspect never will be useful for the infantryman. Metal casings solve so many problems at once, keeping your powder dry even when you’re soaked through, giving the cartridge the strength to feed without being damaged, sealing the breech, and carrying away heat and any still-burning powder residue so it’s safe to feed the next cartridge. These factors are well worth the weight and cost of an aluminum casing. There might be ways to solve these issues for heavy machine guns, when you’re willing to give up ammo interchangeability with the rifleman. There also the Metalstorm type of weapon (a many-barrelled gun with each barrel loaded with multiple caseless cartridges, nose to tail), which has obvious limitations but can put more metal slugs in the air at once than anything ever invented.
More speculative:
1) A chemical laser, using one chemical cartridge per shot.
2) Use blank cartridges to provide a power input to a high-power, short duty cycle electric generator. The cartridge could compress a piezoelectric crystal to produce an electric pulse; I don’t know what the chances are of scaling up the piezo technology we now have to the energy needed for a weapon. Or dope the blank so the blast from it is ionized and fire it into an MHD generator (uses magnetic fields to separate the + and - charges in the stream); this is technology proposed forty years ago, but still pretty undeveloped, AFAIK. What you do with that pulse of electricity once you generate it is another whole issue…
February 3, 2008 at 1:21 am
JoeMerchant24 beat me to the punch. I will take Captain Reynold’s pistol over the Aliens rifle any day of the week… Granted, I would probably be considered a “new” generation of science fiction junky, just due to my age, but, hell, a pistol arguably accurate at 100 yards, give or take, shooting a variety of 10mm rounds (AP, HE, incendiary), and very usable as a club if all else fails… Yeah, that works for me.
February 5, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Well, there was one real blooper regarding the “pulse rifle”. Supposedly it used 10mm caseless ammo, yet you can clearly see in several sequences a stream of ejected casings flying away from the rifle. Oops…
April 4, 2008 at 6:00 am
I like Ronin’s handgun on Stargate Atlantis. Don’t know what it fires, but really like the terminal results.
Wasn’t Robo Cop’s pistol a modified AMT .30 carbine? Can’t recall the model #.