Message no. 1

From:	Evan Hughes <ehughes@****.CARLETON.CA>
Subject:	SI Shipment of Autocannons
Date:	Tue, 3 Oct 1995 12:00:03 EDT

>>>>>[ Before we left Sheppard-Intrepid, we heard a bunch of of magically
triggered Vigilent autocannons were being sent to the Seattle area.

The imaging software in the new guns is _very_ well written, with
some thermal cancelling algorithms for cybernetics. Before you scoff:
We've seen the Omega and FireTech versions of these guns, and I know
how unreliable they are (Combined FT and Omega profits on the
autocannons was something like 1.24 million nuyen. That didn't even
cover their preliminary research costs) -- But the SI version is NOVA.


SI has some of the best code running (We had the priviledge of
seeing some portions of it. Clean, tight, hard. Not even NanoSoft
writes this well), and the scoping hardware is native built. None of
SI's usual handshaking problems. The autocannon itself is a modified
ClearShot minigun chasis, with inline gyros. The only drawbacks we
caught were in the cooling, capacity, and armour: It'll shutdown after
about 45 seconds of continious fire (with terminal overheat after about 60
seconds), but it's fluid cooled, so expect it to be back online after
about a five to ten second pause. The capacity is also pretty low
(most of the inline room is taken up with shock mounting), it only has
enough ammo for about 100-120 seconds of fire, but it can also be fed
from external sources, so don't bank on emptying it's clip.

A somewhat scaled down version of the Vigilent (the WatchMan) is
available. The only difference between the two is that the WatchMan
has no onboard imaging software. The video feed is sent to some
central site for processing, and then a relay comes back to tell the
gun what to do. The lag isn't great, or even very noticable, but
apparently, a Physical Adept can run past a Watchman so long as the
another WatchMan is being run by the same software (most corps are
cost-conscious enough to have multiple guns run from the same
software).

The gyros are supposed to be fairly overpowered on the current version
of both the WatchMan and the Vigilent. A fast target _might_ be able to
run through the gun's field of view without harm, just so long as it's
already firing at something else. But don't quote me on this one.]<<<<<
-- Righteous <12:01:55/10-03-56>