Sure, Ares can design, develop, prototype, produce, market and sell a new rifle. If no other body has a need for such a rifle, then what do they gain by doing so? I challenge that doing so is bad business strategy and would actually loose their Triple A status pretty quickly. If you're looking to improve an existing product or have been engaged by another group to improve that product, that's fine with me. To do it for no reason other than to fill a need you intend to try and create? That doesn't make sense to me.
I also have to challenge that the reappearance of magic is as big a game changer as I believe you think. However, this thread has long since left it's original topic and perhaps it might be best to close it.
It's simple, really. Corporations are nations in their own right. They own territory, the fight over resources, they go to war. When Ares makes an assault rifle, they are filling their own needs and they sell them because now everyone else needs something that competes. That's their corporate strategy - make the best weapons and make the world reliant on them to get their weapons.
And good rifles are more important in SR than they are today. When the war is in the shadows, it's the grunts and ground troops that need the best gear to fight off the Shadowrunners and black ops teams.
Anyway, if you don't want to continue, that's fine. We can end it there.
Which still doesn't make sense if you're actually familiar with how nations and corporations actually work on these types of projects.
The issue is that when you do embark on something like this, it's a twenty, thirty, forty year contract. You're going to be stuck providing parts, ammunition, maybe even manufacturing and training for that entire length of time. The USS Missouri served in Vietnam and was still firing shells made in WW2. Orders in this area in hundreds of thousands of units, millions maybe. Ammunition easily stretches into the billions of rounds. Ten billion, if we're talking infantry rounds.
if it is as you suggest, which is 'let's build a new rifle from the ground up' how many military grade weapons would be out there on the market? Black market? Runners wouldn't need to worry about F rated gear as it''s that easy for them to acquire, the basic Kalashnikov equivalent would be sold at a loss as there are so many higher quality products just as easily available. It means the market for illegal goods is flooded with a constant level of military grade hardware and that stuff is serious. It also in my mind implies and fundamentally requires a constant advancement in body armour. That if everyone can so easily acquire an assault rifle, basic level security guards, greeters at doors are going to need military grade protection.
In everything I've read about Shadowrun, I do not believe that is the case. That projects still have a lifetime of between three and ten years, for infantry grade items, ten to twenty years or so for armoured vehicles and naval warships. Perhaps even large scale civilian vessels as well. There's a period of testing and refining I think you're missing here. As well a large number of trials and prototypes that do get produced. It wouldn't surprise me that the prototype units for the M4 put hundreds of thousand rounds down range, just trying to make the weapon fail.
Also, if Ares sell everything they make, doesn't that lead to a self-defeating path for them? That their opponents can have easy access to a massive number of units, work out how to sabotage them, or design a better item based almost entirely off Ares own work? If this is such corporate and greed given as you seemingly suggest, then you're looking at a world that is either full of patent cases or a place where there are very loose, if only guideline level patent laws.
Here's the thing, let's look at the basic M4 and the HK 416. HK dramatically improved the basic M4 design with the inclusion of their design work. In clear the dirty gases from the chamber, the weapon in theory needs to be clean less, an issue I've heard about the M4. That it needs to be very regularly cleaned to maintain it in full functionality. In addition to that, the design also allows water, sad, other things that would foul the M4. not cause any issues or cause far less issues in the HK 416.
I would suggest, if things worked as you seem to suggest, any company or body that makes the M4 would steal the design specifications from HK and would produce it under their own. In the modern world, doing such a thing would be an outrage to most of the world and lead to such a suite of patent suits that it would take hundreds of years worth of combined court time to resolve. In the Shadowrun world, I'd suggest the Corporate Court would order the destruction of the corporation that did this and would assign assets out to the Top Ten and other corporations as they see fit. From memory, the Court has dissolved a corporation before, they would here.
I would suggest you do some reading on how street gangs progress up the chain to full blown mafia, Yakuza like bodies. There's a concept of behaviour I think you're missing here. That behaviour is very much informal but it's also highly valued. It's also in my mind, how they can use Shadowrunners, making acts of men look like acts of god. They're not allowed to attack each other directly, which is exactly what stealing another company's newest product is. It's also why I say that the Top Ten need each other. They need the competition to drive product research and development. While profit is certainly a goal, the single minded drive for profit and dominance I believe is mistaken and certainly at this end of the RPG (designers, writers, editors etc) the people need to sit down in a Politics 101/Intro to Political Theory class and learn their isms, in this case the difference between fascism and capitalism. Why they're not that different on some level as well.
As a take away note, I'm happy to continue this. However if you're planning on continuing, take this as a warning. I will get exceedingly academic here. I will use plenty of isms, ists and I will research prime examples to provide my evidence. If you're not willing to have that level discussion, let bygones be bygones and all that. Am I being clear?
