Firearms, Gaming/Film

Crye Associates MR-C Proto Rifle

Crye has a not insignificant track record of coming up with very interesting prototype weapons. Unfortunately they always end up only seeing combat use in video game form. I was however lucky enough to very briefly asked Caleb himself about it when I first attended SHOT in 2016.

This is the Modular Rifle – Caseless, designed to fire a 6.8mm calibre bullet way back in the early 2000s if you can believe that. I’d imagine the biggest reason that nothing came of the idea is that it was designed around a potential caseless round, and even when HK took their best stab at that they couldn’t get it quite right.

The MR-C featured prominently in the Tom Clancy/Ubisoft shooter series affectionately known as GRAW (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter). Those games are quite fractured however, as if you played on XBox/PS2 you got quite a different game to XBox 360 which again was quite different to the PC version. I had GRAW and GRAW 2 on PC myself and when I played the original it was on an old computer of my parents that barely met minimum specs. I had the settings so low I could hardly make out the early Multicam gear on the operators.

As you can see the rifle is a bullpup layout and the magazine is essentially a brick shape that is fitted under the stock. It’s kind of like taking a caseless P90 and then clicking both mirror and invert in your image editing software. The capacity of 50 rounds is shared. Might have been envisioned as a quad stack given the short and stubby nature of the mag? Hard to say.

The strangest feature for me is the charging handle/mechanism, the control for which is in fact the concave disc visible in the middle of the stock area. In the game if you fired to empty the shooter would replace the mag then twist that dial about half a turn then let it go. I’m sure the G11 is coming to mind for a few of you given that fact.

On paper this is an amazing rifle. Large capacity, light ammo, very high muzzle energy/velocity, lots of rail space that will reliably hold zero. The XM7 we now see however is far more rooted in very conventional design elements with some tweaks, rather than the step change that a caseless bullpup would be.

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