Blue and Red: Stories From Shanxi
The Battle of Hunter Hill: Day 6
Specialist Adrien Kaelos
"Spirits, there's a reason I requested a transfer out of the hastatim. Urban fighting is always messy: no room to maneuver, limited fire support, very little cover, and long firing lanes that force you to advance through a natural kill zone.
"Of course, in turian cities, a lot of that is deliberate.
"Although the specifics were different, all of that applied equally to the complex under Hill 120. It took an hour to advance maybe ten meters of featureless, alloy-lined hallway... and another hour to lose it again. Still, we gained more than we lost in that first day of tunnel fighting, inching our way along.
"Thank the spirits our hardsuits came with hearing protection, though."
EOD Specialist Janet Ruckman
"Close quarters combat with explosives is an art, one we were damn good at.
"What made us good at it? Well, if we were bad at it, I wouldn't be sitting here, discussing it with you, now would I?
"Sorry, sorry. Touchy subject for me, for reasons I won't go into. Anyway, we didn't use all our Tango Nine around the hill. We kept some in reserve and used it to collapse the main entrance and the garage entrance to the hill's underground complex, in addition to sealing the doors, forcing the turians to come at us through a maintenance tunnel.
"The complex wasn't as big as you might think, as it wasn't meant to be manned full time, but the turians didn't know that.
"The first layer of our internal defenses was an MG position with a pair of century guns, supplemented by grenades."
Specialist Adrien Kaelos
"For all the fancy weapons the humans had at Shanxi, their machine guns were rather primitive. Spirits, they were still using chemical propellants, and despite the larger slugs, the lower velocity compared to proper mass accelerators meant they didn't do very well against kinetic barriers.
"The grenades, however, were brutally effective in close quarters. Even with our hardsuits' hearing protection, it was deafening.
"To be honest, the fighting was so intense, we lost track of time. It wasn't until we had actually managed secure a solid foothold that we realized we had fought all through the night and into the next morning."
Codex: M-100E4 Machine Gun
The M-100E4 machine gun, also known as the "century gun," is a tri-barreled 12.7x99mm rotary machine gun, the latest iteration of a design over a century old, hence the nickname, and was the UEDF's general purpose machine gun of choice until the Relay War. The century gun can fire from a pintle-mount or bipod or used as a handheld Cyclone weapon.
In its handheld configuration, the century gun's cyclic rate is throttled down from its normal 1,800 rounds per minute to a much more manageable 600 rounds per minute, and it trades out the disintegrating belt feed for a pair of 100-round detachable box magazines. It can interface with a Cyclone's targeting system to provide bullet spread probability cone for greater accuracy in order to compensate for the reduced volume of fire.
After the Relay War, the M-100 series was deemed obsolete due to a combination of ammunition weight and lower velocity as compared to equivalent mass accelerator weapons, rendering it ineffective against kinetic barriers, and it has since been discontinued and removed from active service, replaced by the M-76 Revenant.