That is not the case, “turns” are 6 seconds long (though I plan to shrink that to 1 second at some point), but a standard player has 100 moves per turn, and an action can take as little as a single move (or approximately 1/16th of a second). In other words, we could easily tweak firing times to be that fast, though in general that wouldn’t be 6 individual firing actions, instead it would be a single action to fire until the magazine was empty.
I agree, I’ve been planning to adjust the definition of a turn to be one second instead of six for roughly two years now, but it’s never bubbled up to the top of my priorities.
Wow, that video is REALLY compelling. I don’t know how much is the muzzle brake and how much is the reciprocation, but that makes it pretty clear that for a gun with those features it’s simply a matter of being strong enough to hold it up while shoulder-firing. I knew reciprocation helped a lot, but I didn’t realize it was that much.
Keep in mind though, it needs to be a gun with this kind of feature set to keep recoil down like this.
It looks like the Barret isn’t the only Antimaterial rifle to do this: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/02/26/gm6-lynx-50bmg-reciprocating-bullpup/ so it’s not unique by any means, but it is also not what you’d call a “standard feature”.
Re: conservation of force, there’s nothing surprising happening here, the thing that makes simple guns (revolvers, automatic pistols, bolt-action rifles, shotguns) really hard to handle is Impulse, i.e. you get all the force of the shot delivered in a very short amount of time. With a reciprocating bolt and/or barrel, that sudden impulse is spread out over a much longer period of time (in the case of the Barret, it’s fairly clear it’s somewhere close to 1/6th of a second, which for impulse is a really long time). For comparison, that 6/second turns into a cyclic firing rate of 360 rounds per minute, or a little higher than half the speed of a typical SMG. This is the same reason that a .45 pistol is extremely harsh to fire, but a Thompson .45 firing in full auto is manageable (not necessarally in a “holding it on target” way, but in a, “not having huge bruises” kind of way).
I am completely open to power-armor mounted weapons not following the limits we’re talking about here. Between greatly increased mass, much higher rigidity of the arm holding the weapon, and potentially features like further shock absorption being built into the PA arms, it would be totally reasonable to treat it as a mounted weapon platform.
I’m not particularly open to treating simple increase of mass the same way. At some point as you scale strength and the impulse of force from the gun, you’re going to reach a point where the firer is going to get injured when firing the gun. It doesn’t matter how big your muscles are if the cells they are made of get crushed when you fire the gun.
