After issuing your weapon specifications, you got down to the Very Serious business of bumming around the college looking for bright young sparks to throw at managing the eternal contractor horde that was running a project.
That's when the Kaiser, having turned eighty nine last month, decided it was a good time to kick the bucket and send the whole country into a massive succession crisis. Louise Victoria was the elder heir of the Kaiser's first marriage, while Wilhelm Viktor was the oldest male heir. There had been no designated Imperial Succession, which was a problem and a half, but the country would keep running. There were provisions for this. Of course, your office would be closed down for a week, but that wasn't a problem so much as the politics. Everything in the country was gearing up to pick sides while you got down to business.
After requesting an automatic cannon that could sustain fire in over thirty millimeter, you quickly discovered that, suprise suprise, the only person who'd actually worked on a project to that (domestically) affect was the Potsdam Armory, with their automatic thirty five millimeter cannon. Using a pull-and-push system to feed, it fired from an open bolt and had around a four hundred round a minute fire rate. The gun was apparently designed for the Luftwaffe as a truck and armored car breaking weapon to be mounted on the new prototype Heinkel 74 ground attack aircraft in a pair of gun pods under the wings. Belts were two hundred rounds and the system had a new metallic disintegrating belt to help reduce weight of the system, although the gun was completely reverse-compatible with a standard metallic belt.
Interestingly, there was a non-domestic entrant from the Baal Company, who had found themselves on the wrong side of a coup in the Balhk capitol and were fleeing for their lives. The test prototype used the trademark heavy-duty Baal Long Recoil system to eject a case at extreme velocity, then via a top-mounted rammer system would reload the gun as it came back up into the battery position, with the breech slamming closed, firing, and then flying backwards. It operated from an open bolt, and the only real issue you had with it was the caliber- 46x400mm. It was an absolutely titantic piece, nominally designed as a fast tank destroying gun, and also as a bunker suppression system. Examples existed back in Balhkchivian if you adopted it, but the fact it had a top feed and could take a three round stripper clip with continual feed made it very attractive to you.
Finally there was the latest Torpedo Boat Gun from the Reichsmarine. Chambered in 40x360mm rimmed, it used an eight round spindle that could be topped off by a hopper and was gas operated with a rotating locking bolt. The spindle could nominally be replaced, but for all practical purposes it was fed loose shells or by a loose feed box that held nine rounds over the gun. The Reichsmarine was unhappy to part with it, and notified you it sometimes had issues at elevations over twenty degrees with the extraction system.
Naturally, there were several lighter entrants to the competition as well.
The most interesting, to you, was actually a colonial design by the gentlemen at Furrer & Mukami Arms, a Nyasalander munitions company that had recently earned a colonial patent and contract for a self-loading service rifle. Their weapon was an utterly massive toggle-locked variant of the Mg.51, upscaled piece for piece and then brutally stripped down in an effort to reduce weight and increase tolerances for the machining. The gun could fire either 28x165mm Short Thunder, which was chambered on modern Propellant Mix F (you said modern with your tongue in your cheek- they were technically up to Mix I or so, but nobody used it yet except the Luftwaffe) or with a surprisingly minimal series of modifications to the tune of a different barrel and toggle arms, fire the 28x210 Long Thunder Straight chambered on Propellant Mix B, an antique powder still shot in the old single shot Nyasaland service rifles. Naturally you'd only order in the Short Thunder variants if you got any.
Then there was the Armor Branch's own brain-child, an Slk.69 with a belt feed. Apparently some old fart said the magic word "commonality" and wanted it tested. Honestly, it probably wouldn't be worth fighting some old Oberstgeneral on this, so yay. More guns.
Lastly there was the civil-designed and civil-market Lightning Knife program, built around doing pest control and area defense in the deep Ostafrika jungles or on the wilderness preserves slash untenable hellholes like Tanzia and Skull Island. Based around a six barrel rotary system feeding from a loose tray(thus dodging just about all the laws against automatic weapons) it used an open bolt system that charged, armed, discharged, and extracted each barrel individually. Legally, it was 'only' six guns working together with an assistive device, but considering it managed to fire 19x110mm rounds as fast as the operator or electric motor could crank, generally in the range of six hundred a minute over the length of ten seconds to blow through the standard feed tray. The developers, Kalmund und Herman, however, assured you that feed trays could be made as large or as small as needed.
While your Board got to scratching and butting heads over what they thought were good ideas for a carrying vehicle, it was time for you to make sure your, and by extension your family's, political orientation was nice and nailed down for the inevitable questions and issues. Why was it always politics, again?
VOTE
(This is a one item no write-in vote and anyone being a schmuck will get their vote banished to North Carolina)
[] Declare for the Death's Head and Hussars; Prinzessin Louise Victoria Hohenzollern
[] Declare for the Long and Short Hands of Travel and Governance; Prinz Wilhelm Viktor Hohenzollern
