A bearded man with slicked back walnut brown hair stared nervously into the camera, as a crudely printed fake wall of guns flapped in the breeze behind him. He removed his sunglasses slowly and took a deep breath.
“If you’re watching this video... I’ve been abducted by aliens.” He said as the camera dramatically zoomed in and a pair of pale, almost glowing boobs stepped behind him. “Aaah, I’m just F**kin with ya. Hey there you sexy Spooftube bastards, I’m Braden Hernandez, from Cursed Situations, I mean Cursed Weapons. And we have a very special treat for you on Spooftube. As you all know, aliens exist, the world was stunned when we discovered that 3 months ago, and now they’re doing a Spooftube channel, and as we all feared, it’s about firearms. Standing behind me, right now, is the infamous Gizzy who has shocked the world by her internet reveal that frankly most of us assumed was A.I. government bullshit or a prank like usual to distract us from some political sex scandal. Except this time it wasn’t a hoax, and they don’t like our government either. No shit. Literal aliens. I thought it was bullshit too, and yet here I am…no idea where here is because I’m mildly terrified to ask if it’s even still Earth after what I'm gonna call a confusing flight. Hey, can we pan the camera up, she's like 6 foot 4, I just got my face and a set of alien tits in frame.” Braden whispered.
“That’s intentional, don’t move the camera.” Gizzy muttered, brushing her white hair back to keep the cleavage in view.
“Okay then. So before we get into why I’m wherever here is, is it okay if I ask a few questions?” he asked.
“Yea, of course, if it’s anything I can’t answer for security reasons I’ll just cut it in post.”
“Rumors have it that you’re starting a Guntube channel almost immediately after first contact, specifically to flex on humanity that you have better weapons. Is that true?”
“Absolutely. See, we don’t want any conflict or problems, and after several first encounters and numerous simulations, we decided the best way to initiate relations with violent species, is simply just show you that you have absolutely zero chance of winning any conflict by flexing our weaponry.”
“But… I’m confused, you said this was a detailed breakdown. A gun. Theme. Review. Why tell us how your technology works if your goal is intimidation? Wouldn’t that just, I dunno, show us how to make better guns?” Braden asked.
“I’m glad you noticed that. Actually the point is to show you that our obsolete tech is so advanced that we don’t mind literally showing every nut and bolt to you with confidence you still can't replicate it, and these are antiquated guns we don’t even use anymore, so it gives a nice perspective to how far behind you are and the level of absolute fucked you’d be trying any unsolicited attack. It also weeds out the humans trying to reverse engineer our shit early. Why did your fuck get bleeped out? Can we not say fuck?”
“Oh, you can say fuck, just not at the beginning of the video.”
“That’s stupid as fuck.” Gizzy sighed.
“God do I know. But let me get this right: you are so convinced of our incompetence as a species that you’re not worried about us replicating these guns at all, and making any conflict worse?” he detailed.
“It takes you people a year to make an AK47 bigger.”
“We’ll cut that in post. He sighed.
“…maybe.” She shrugged. “Anyway, we want to get the ball rolling by embracing social media and getting the attention of the mass population that owns guns, by getting some human guests to be on the show, and frankly Braden here has a big following and I don’t wanna spent years trying to farm up viewership.”
“Yep.” Braden smiled. “So she is using my fanbase and fame to fluff her popularity and in exchange, I get a lot of money.”
“Enough to bribe the right people and get that Congress job you wanted.” Gizzy said, patting his shoulder awkwardly with a set of inch long metallic nails rounded to a claw-like point.
“I don’t rig elections.” He said, looking mildly annoyed.
“Yea, probably why you’re still doing this job. It’s almost like the only way to win is to pay for the…”
“So today Gizzy has brought is a very interesting weapon platform.” He said, stepping away from the background and to a table in the breezy outdoor set. On the table sat a rather intimidating black rifle, an assault rifle, clearly designated from the color of it. “This struck me as rather odd that the gun looks really human in design. You’d think alien guns would be more…alien.”
“This is actually designed FOR humans, we won't get into the reason why we have humans on my moon, but I assure you they are virtually the same as your humans. Before we get into the weaponry, we’d also like to thank our weaponry providers, Medusa Arms, which I own. If you don’t get the Joke, check out The Medusa’s List on Royal Road. We'd also like to thank our camera sponsors, Photoshop CS2, generic printer paper, and ultra-fine Sharpie markers. if you dont get that joke, just stare at the pictures longer.
...which is a convenient shameless plug and segway to this little classic, the 20-50 Reaper.It’s called that because this platform, designed for the Medusa mission, is an over-under double barrel battle rifle in 20mm and 50 caliber. The platform is meant to look like humans built it, with stolen technology, while being advanced enough to actually do the mission justice. Hence why it looks like an AR15 fucked a Saiga 12 bullpup mod.”
“God I hate bullpups…and Ar15s.” Braden sighed.
“Well, we wanted to pin this mission on some specific assholes if it went badly. It did go badly, but in a different way where we didn’t need to frame anyone. And it has to be a bullpup; where else would the second magazine go?” she asked.
“Fair point.”
“The mostly human…-ish crew of the Medusa Mission and some smoking hot chick named Charlotte needed a human-friendly ergonomic platform. Originally named the 20-13 reaper, we changed it because 20mm over 13mm is too many Metrics for Americans, and people get super hard over 50BMG. The 13mm OSH is basically a 50BMG without the bullshit."
“How the hell does it fit in the magazine?” Braden asked.
“You’ll notice the ammo here looks rather underwhelming, that’s because your bullets are compensating for weak dick energy with big brass bluff energy. Unlike traditional ammo you’re familiar with, which sucks, instead of using ancient Chinese fireworks technology lightly modded to smokeless gunpowder, crammed into a massive bulky brass casing, to drive a tiny little damn 700 grain bullet, we eliminated the waste while adopting and adapting the same familiar ballistic performance, and just replacing the entire brass case with a tiny stub of this blue metal you see here. That is both the extraction and loading rim, but also the propellant in the form of solid metallic explosives. When the firing pin strikes, the electrical connection arcs at the base of the case, igniting the metal inside. The blue coating is a sacrificial-printed jacket that keeps rounds from igniting out of the chamber and acts as a sealing metal just long enough for the round to exit the barrel, and disintegrate. Basically it protects the propellant and acts like the brass case, and since the propellant is inside the bullet and goes with the bullet rather than staying in the chamber, the thin metal coating stays behind and burns up as the receiver begins to open. This avoids cookoffs and gas leakage, and requires highly advanced timing in combustion technology.”
“So it’s like a Gyrojet that doesn’t suck ass and yeet the barrel off.” He nodded.
“Well, sort of. It’s halfway between bullet and rocket, since technically it’s a self-propelled round, but it's a kinetic impacting round and the near-instant ignition and rifling puts it back into rifle class, and it doesn’t need 30 meters to reach full velocity. Needs about 8 inches of barrel. This little blue stub has the same 13,000 foot-pounds of energy as a whole cigar sized 50BMG, but in a 2.3 inch long package. Shorter bolt movement, smaller magazines, smaller gun. Sometimes when it comes to things, making it bigger is not better, Braden.”
“Says the 6 foot 4 alien with her E cups poppin out. So why the blue color?”
“Let’s not get into racial preferences, all tit colors are accepted here.”
“No I mean the damn bullet stub.” He corrected aggressively.
“Oh, Honestly, it’s all silver when we print it. We colored it blue because it looked cooler than silver on silver and since we run steel ammo, I wanted a clear division between the propellant and the bullet. Blue and silver is sexy. I really wanted to get away from the brass on copper look to drive the point that this is not a brass casing, it’s the whole damn package. Anyway the electronic firing pin sparks the case, the projectile screams out and all it ejects is a little metallic dust that is apparently not great for humans to breathe in, so thankfully everyone using these guns is either alien or a disposable clone. Last thing we want is a mesothelioma midroll because while our troops full-auto rain hate on 200-pound alien spiders to save their ass, some humans got the Reaper black lung. Hey don’t look at me like that, your people did Agent Orange in Nam and gave zero shits, and we have cloning and free healthcare so don’t even.”
“So did you just say 200-pound alien spiders?” he asked, looking worried.
“Now you’ll notice the stubs are mostly the same size and shape, that’s because much like the Desert Eagle that can use the same extractor group for different calibers, this platform can fire basically all these rounds on this table from 5mm to 20mm with a simple barrel change or insert. Being dual barrel, you have a customizeable light and heavy caliber option in the same gun. Again, like the Desert Eagle, it utilizes a rotating bolt, but with a solenoid in the fire control groups to move a breech block and delay the blowback, which due to the higher ignition speed versus inefficient lame-ass gunpowder, actually gets full velocity in shorter barrels and there’s no need to adjust the gas system. It’s all electronic delay, and the hardware knows the timing and gassing based on backpressure alone. Which brings me to the barrels." She said removing the suppressor cowling "Now you’ll notice the barrels have these thin grooves cut in them, and lots of little holes. That’s because the barrels are very heavily rifled and the straight grooves intersect with the rifling to create ports down the entire barrel. Like a compensated handgun, but the whole way down. Because the propellant burns behind the bullet as it goes, and rockets down the barrel, the backpressure venting out the barrel follows the bullet and creates a series of tiny jets that actually run into each other as it exits the barrel and vents into the surrounding baffles. Think of it like baffling in a silencer, but the baffles connect and push gas at each other equally from both directions. This not only reduces noise and recoil, and makes the barrels look absolutely badass, but it acts like a Tesla valve.”
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“I assume you mean the airflow valve with no moving parts invented by Nikola Tesla, and not something used in the electric car company.”
“Right, Nikola Tesla. Not the toy car owning insult to both trucks and autism who just steals ideas from other inventors, the actual guy who he stole the name from, who got basically everything stolen from Edison. The guy we sent ideas to via brainwave parrot way back in the…never mind, the actual Tesla, not the brand. Anyway, Google how the damn valve it works if you people don’t understand. So the integral suppressors knock recoil out by 70 percent, the gas flow counteracts itself and actually flows through both barrels, because the ported barrels run through one large baffling suppressor and the gas exits both barrels, making these guns…still kick like hell because I may have overpowered them a little. It shoots a damn 20mm Vulcan grenade round at 38,000 foot-pounds of energy. The fact that humans could fire this in semi auto is impressive. I mean you know what kind of force a 50 cal has in semi auto and how hard that kicks in a huge rifle, imagine that in something the size and ergonomic approximation of an AR15. You do have experience in already existing platforms scaled up to handle a 50 caliber, right?” she smiled subtlely, glowing blue eyes shimmering with a smart-ass flicker as she displayed her pearly white tusks and canines.
“Is this going to just be a theme, constantly dunking on me about the 50 cal?”
“Well we’re trying to get in as much human dunking as possible and the only other Guntuber with 50 caliber trauma was far too serious to make jokes about. We take life-threatening trauma very seriously. The social trauma of having idiots rag on you about making a bigger gun seems fair game to shit on. Metaphorically, obviously, we don’t even shit.”
“The more you know…the less you wanted to know.” Braden cringed, applying the sunglasses. “Why an AR15?” he blurted with annoyance.
“Humans have this weird patriotic boner for the AR15, so we AR15’d it a little, with the selector, the grip shape, the charging handle, and the fact that you can’t fold or remove the stock. Except instead of just being due to a really stupid place for a spring, we used that tube for an entire 20mm barrel and bullpupped your AR15. So the forward magazine you’re familiar with, holds the rounds for the lighter 50 cal, and the 20mm in the back takes a rotary magazine. Think if a Tommy gun and a Bizon got high and were like what if bullpup grenades? And then we swung the buttstock 180 to change drum mags. If you want anything smaller, you just drop in a barrel adapter, 6 second switch. Now because the barrels have universal threads that turn opposite to the rifling and porting, changing calibers is easy. The Reaper comes with a bunch of custom printed barrels that fit inside the fixed barrels. Barrel to barrel, tip to tip, like docking, but straighter. Some of the military guys are already familiar with this process, except this is my rifle, that is their gun, mine is for fighting and yours is for fun.”
“Already stealing our classic movie content.” he smiled, dead inside.
“You’ve been beaming that into space for years, don’t get mad when aliens pick up your radio waves and watch your streaming services. So keeping with the theme of tips, all inserts have a muzzle brake for changing barrels, and you just pull the charging bolt downward to loosen the barrel, see how the cocking handle has a little up and down rotation, no need for a damn multitool, like an AK47 you just yank that by hand. Pulling downward instead of cocking it back, loosens the barrels for unscrewing the smaller barrel sleeves, you just spin one back in by hand, and as you fire it, the backspin force of the rifling vents tightens it, so it doesn’t self-loosen and fly out. Like a Gyrojet barrel does sometimes. This also just lets your left hand Russian-rack the thing like an AK if you wanna look cool, or gods forbid, you wanna stay on target while racking a fresh round in, rather than move the gun away or yanking the charging handle into your face like a dipshit. We couldn’t make it function too much like an AR15, or people would die using this thing. Now the guns usually weight around 6 pounds depending on ammo, because we like things that are made good, rather than mass-produced and cheap, so almost no steel, certainly no stamped sheet metal, mostly titanium, niobium alloy, nanocarbon composite, and because we actually prefer our soldiers survive and get a new gun rather than die and leave their hand-me-down like your militaries, these are custom printed for each soldier, you get new barrels after every mission, 3d printed to your preferences. That also lets the reaper fire steel jacket ammo at ungodly velocity in full auto without ruining the gun. The barrels get ruined fast, and you just swap it out. Takes 5 seconds. We’ll do a whole episode on the Medusa crew’s setups later, but for now the standard Reaper here is what we’re dealing with. Default assault black, 28 inches long, folding iron sights, flip up hologlass…shit you don’t have those yet. The Hologlass is basically a transparent aluminum screen that acts like a red dot and has magnification, black dot, night vision, tracking, everything you want in an optic but the size of a flip-up sight with an 8th inch thick screen about 2x2 inches and rounded. Basically makes your human optics look like a joke.”
“That’s actually really nice.” He said shouldering the rifle. “I’m gonna hate you if you make me actually like a bullpupped AR15 knockoff, but the sights are really good.” He said looking down the test range. “You said we’d get to shoot this thing, I don’t see any targets down the range.”
“That’s because we have a special surprise for you. Carbonated shooting beverages. We’d like to thank our sponsors Black Talon Alcoholic Energy Drinks. They’re horrible for you, however they also taste like ass. Fortunately, a lot of humans eat ass apparently, and everything you do already is bad for you. It’s 50 proof and may or may not contain crack. We don’t know if that’s an ass joke or if there’s cocaine in the beverages so, I guess…check them out in the link below? I’m not responsible for what you do once you leave, you shouldn’t be watching this channel unless you’re old enough to buy guns, and here that’s the drinking age too, because why the fuck can you join the army at 18 and buy guns, but not drink until 21? That’s just stupid. Now to demonstrate the true lethality and power behind this 50 caliber round, Braden is going to shoot one of those small thin aluminum cans of pressurized alcohol water, which would stop basically anything shy of a sniper rifle round. Ready to shoot it?”
“Do I actually want to shoot?” he asked, bracing the rifle. “There’s no safety concerns? I just wanna be clear before pulling the trigger that these don’t have some weird unexpected downsides.”
“Yea about that. I did overestimate human durability when I designed this, so some of the crew reported the recoil being pretty bad in the 20mm, most ended up running lower calibers and despite the giant suppressor system the sound off the more powerful rounds at high velocity plus the ungodly muzzle flash caused hearing loss and vision problems. All very minor issues since this was a mission where death and being cloned back with brand-new eyes and ears was predicted to be often, BUT I didn’t realize the discomfort to human bodies was so bad even short term. The size of the gun was a problem for the smaller crewmen, but for someone your size running the little 50, the recoil won’t be too bad, the sound is tolerable with your ear protection, and the muzzle flash is…still really insane, don’t panic. It’s absolutely going to look like something broke, but that’s normal. We had to develop the reaper Mikro and implement training, so people wouldn’t jumpshit the first time they threw a fireball the size of a couch out of the gun, thinking something went wrong. Overall despite this being my design I would say I built a perfect weapon... for the purpose. The reason we don’t use them anymore is because they cost 2 million dollars per gun and the ammo has to be made in house, so even with a T38 bullet printers, supplying more than about 6 special ops gets problematic. We have way better tech, this was just for one mission and very cloak and dagger shit that’s now pretty public because of the book series. The new 50x25 reaper Mikro the human military has adopted is in no way a reflection on this version's overkill or flaws. So remember, if you sign up today for the Osirian military training program, you will be entered to win one of the original 6 Reapers used in that mission. Sorry, go ahead and fire.” She nodded.
“Risking my life for content with another sketchy automatic 50 prototype in 3,2,1…” he said pulling the trigger and taking the recoil well, blinking and wincing as he took his finger out of the guard. “Holy fuck, that was bright. I got hit with energy drink.” he exhaled, looking a bit baffled.
“Forgot to mention those were incendiary rounds, I should have moved the 12 pack further than 50 yards. Getting covered in carbonated splatter is part of the channel. People love that, which is why next we have the pointless Black Talon penetration test. Your viewers should make your guesses now as to how many of 20 lined up cans of carbonated bullshit seltzer this can go through, because we get them free and people like watching other people get hosed down with random crap.”
“Do you own Black Talon Energy Drinks? Is that why we have 500 cases, and you’re trying to sell them, and also we’re using them like they’re worthless?”
“My lawyer prefers I say no. But the electric lime was giving people the death shits and I fucking hate the electric lime, so we have 500 cases of electric lime we legally can’t sell, and I won’t drink them. I’ve tried. They are terrible.” she said as the fireball backlit her hair and Braden blinked, muttering a soft ah, fuck me! Under his breath. "Well, as we expected, it went through all the cans. Who would have guessed? And that about wraps up this episode." she yawned.
“I thought we were going to do more…practical shooting, like shoot some body armor or steel plates to show off the power.” He said looking back.
“Nah, it’s basically a 50BMG. Ballistics are identical, this was a pretty easy to grasp weapon system made for humans. Episode 1 has to be enough banter to make things feel introductory without too much shooting. We broke down the gun basics. Two light weight automatic rifles crammed into one abomination, modular and custom ammo in tiny compact rounds that hit harder than you’d expect due to the entire thing being mostly projectile, brilliant gas systems to be elaborated on next time, establishing we have better metals that can handle higher power loads than a Barrett or AK50, but with more ammo and in a smaller gun than some of your shitty 556 military battle rifles. I think we thoroughly made the point for episode 1 to ease into the more advanced details later, plus we got you covered in hard seltzer." she shrugged.
“I just…I drove 2 hours to hangar in the desert, and may or may not have left Earth, no, don’t even tell me, I choose to believe this is just Nevada, and after an hour of filming and barely shooting the gun, I just thought I’d get more hands-on time with alien tech.” he said with disappointment.
“Oh you will, we’re gonna keep shooting off-camera for B roll, then we’re gonna let you keep this gun and watch the ATF have a stroke trying to legally force you to release alien tech while having the alien tech to defend that alien tech. You can’t exactly print new barrels so by the time you get through the ammo crate we’re giving you, you’ll have showed off the guns for at least 3 more videos on your channel, and ruined the rifling on all the inserts. These things just eat rifling. Anyway the thing has 20 rounds in that little mag, wanna put on your sunglasses and do a slow-mo mag dump at the ATF poster, for the thumbnail, in full-auto?” she grinned.
“Fuck yes I do.” He said proudly.
“Fantastic, Okay roll the weird German techno music and clickbait links of me shooting in a bikini, even though I never do that in this episode. Humans love weirdly sexualized gun content and scifi ass. Even rage-bait comments boost views. You know how to cut this filler dialogue in post, right?” she asked the camera guy.
“Yea obviously.” he shrugged as the German ending music faded in over a slow motion Gif of Gizzy’s big pale ass jiggling in a thong while shooting some gigantic rifle in a prone position, not seen in this video, followed by the energy drink logo and a wall of legal disclaimers too fast to read so you don’t even need to know.