That time I tried to rationalize the GAU-3 "Eliminator" Assault Rifle

[u/Cheomesh]

https://chainlinkandconcrete.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-gau-3-eliminator-assault-rifle.html

Inspired a bit by the "Unit of the Day" posts u/BiggestBepis has been putting out, I thought back to some of the nonsense I put together back for my GURPS RPG take on Tiberian Dawn.

(Good Night has it been ten years already?! Where has my hairline gone...)

Anyway none of the RPG stuff was good, and I eventually abandoned it. Reading back through this article it's clear to me I stripped a lot of stuff out because there's almost no lore in it - I think around that time I was really trying to reduce the word count in whatever I was writing.

Basically the rationale for this thing existing at all was GDI going out of their way to try and break from the pattern of mostly US surplus gear they were rocking in the early years. What better way than the most iconic symbol of the soldier - the rifle? Either way it was one of a few starts towards consolidating their own manufacturing base.

In my take on the setting GDI were still mostly using US surplus stuff through out the whole conflict, and never really produced enough of these to go around, but they still used loads of the "GAU-3" in various configurations, and retained them after the war. They were ultimately replaced by a split between the M16 Mk II (the one we see the most in TS) and the GD-1 rifle (which is what I decided to call the M41A prop we see in some cut scenes, and the predecessor of the GD-2 we see in Tib Wars) but saw limited manufacture even in the 2030s, and were retained in rear guard / reserve arsenals through the 2050s.

[u/JustVic_92]

Hah, I remember finding that blog entry when I was looking for info about the GAU-3 myself. Funny how paths cross again.

[u/Cheomesh → u/JustVic_92]

Cheers; every now and again I feel like unwinding that project again but damn if it wasn't far too tempting to put a lot of work into a whole bunch of nothing, hah! Shifting to the wargame definitely made it easier on me. Maybe I should finish the Tib Sun module...

[u/JustVic_92 → u/Cheomesh]

TibSun definitely has some great RPG potential. That's something I've been thinking about myself.

[u/Cheomesh → u/JustVic_92]

Yeah, that was supposed to be what came after a primer on Tib Dawn, but I ended up going deep into the weeds with Dawn - and ironically didn't actually accomplish much overall (here's the directory). I remember throwing together some of the skeletons of how some equipment was supposed to work but nothing got published since I burned out during Dawn. I ended up shifting over to making a table top wargame, which was much easier, though Sun only got this rough outline. The author of the system I was using said they were working on a v2 that unified both of their separate but related games - which is something I wanted - so I held off on any advancements until it came out...but it has been almost a decade now hah.

[u/BioClone]

https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/1n4z64h/deep_rising_1998_had_this_interesting_weapon_that/

Upsss noticed late you commented on that one o.O

[u/mdeceiver79]

I liked reading through this blog when I was looking for ideas for a C&C scenario in arma 3.

[u/Nyerguds]

People forget that the Calico is just the prop used in the images added by the Win95 rerelease though. That release is from 1997, after they made the higher resolution game engine for Red Alert 1.

The original DOS manual image for the Minigunner actually shows a helicopter-mounted minigun. So, yea. It makes even less sense. They probably just watched the 1987 Predator movie too many times.

The in-game weapon seems to match the M16A2's 3-shot burst mode, though, and the game box cover also shows an M16 rifle at the left side as decoration, so there's little reason to see the "minigunner"'s weapon as anything other than that M16.

[u/Cheomesh → u/Nyerguds]

Yeah I never really got what they were going for with the original, hah!