M41A pulse rifle


 * This article refers to a fictional weapon featured in the Alien series.

The Armat M41A is a fictional 10 mm pulse-action air-cooled assault rifle used by the U.S. Colonial Marine Corps and the U.S. Army in the Alien films. The weapon is seen with an over-and-under configuration incorporating a PN 30 mm pump-action grenade launcher.

Since the release of Aliens in 1986, the M41A has become one of the best-known and most popular science-fiction weapons in cinema history. The M41A makes a brief appearance at the end of Alien³, carried by the company soldiers, but the props used in Aliens were re-painted black for that film and the audio used for its gunfire is also different.

Prop design
The M41A Pulse Rifle was designed by James Cameron and built by British armorers Simon Atherton and Andrew Fletcher from the parts and components of three firearms supplied by prop armory Bapty & Co., U.K. The rifle component utilised a World War II-era Thompson M1A1 submachine gun while the grenade launcher component was built around the action of a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun and the shotgun was encased inside the shroud and foregrip of a Luigi Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun. It was originally designed around a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun but the MP5 is said not to have produced a muzzle flash as large as desired for the impression of a futuristic infantry rifle.

Depiction
The M41A Pulse Rifle is an air cooled, fully automatic, short- to mid-range combat rifle. Made of light alloy plates, it fires 10x24mm Armor Piercing Caseless Rounds from a 100 round U-bend magazine in either semi automatic, four round burst, or fully automatic rates of fire. The magazines could only practically hold 99 rounds and were usually underloaded to 95% capacity to avoid jamming. The Pulse rifle has a small battery powered digital readout screen that displays number of rounds left in the magazine; the battery is located in the handgrip. With a retractable stock and an underslung 30 mm PN grenade launcher, this weapon can be used as a carbine and an assault rifle.

M41A and Airsoft
There are several kits available to convert the Tokyo Marui M1A1 Thompson airsoft gun into an M41A Pulse Rifle. One version is available from Monsters In Motion. Monsters in Motion/Tek Arms also created a non-functional model kit that could be modified to house the TM M1A1. A less expensive kit (with a 100% static non-working shotgun) is currently under development at Arnies Airsoft. Another is available from AirSoft Extreme that features a non-firing shotgun with sliding action. The counter system starts at 95 and counts down each time a BB is fired through the use of an IR sensor at the muzzle; once the counter reaches 0, it resets to 95.