Mehrzweckmaschinenkarabiner 90

Merhrzweckmaschinenkarabiner 90/MzMk90
The MzMk90 was an attempt by famed Tristan Löchler to provide a general infantry defense rifle to the German armed forces. It was Löchler's entry into Germany's "Rifle for the 22nd Century" trials. Early on it showed multiple faults, but it nonetheless entered limited production, produced by Kammerer Eisenwerke.

Design and Development
The Mehrzweckmaschinenkarabiner 90 (general purpose machine carbine) was the brainchild of weaponsmith Tristan Löchler, it was an attempt to provide the German army with a general purpose infantry weapon. It was thought, that whatever circumstances the soldier would encounter, the weapon would fire. So in optimal conditions it used a dual system of a prototype chemical propellent (fluoro-octonitrocubane) and a battery run Gaußian coil to propel the projectile forward. The chemical propellant and the Gaußian coil would each deliver 50% of the energy needed to propel the projectile to an acceptable speed. But it was also possible to use only one of those systems, so one could propel the projectile by using (in practice due to thermodynamics, more than) the double amount of the chemical propellant and bypass the Gaußian system (for example due to an EMP burst) and still have the same effect. Of course the Gaußian sytem alone also could propel the the projectile on it's own, without chemical propellant, by using (always more than) double the energy, which was stored in the battery. This seemed very enticing on paper. The projectile didn't come in cartridge form, since chemical propellant and power pack both came seperately.

Operational Problems
Due to it's novel design, the MzMk90 encountered many problems and was ditched for less complex designs, some of the problems encountered were:

1. Battery, propellant and projectile were loaded seperately and each needed special containers and relaoding procedures, not very conductive for conscripts or logistics.

2. The proptype chemical propellant (fluro-octonitrocubane) degraded faster than anticipated (due to the steric structure of cubane and environmental problems)

3. Prototype low-weight energy packs were unreliable.

These problems meant that the MzMk90 had a fairly short production run and the few produced were generally issued to 2nd line troops, According to one Fahnenjunker "we have them and they shoot". This the reason they are usually not seen outside of certain regiments in the GGR (although there was shipment to a colony that got lost).