The M56 Smartgun is the Colonial Marines' squad machine gun in the Alien franchise. It hangs from a powered harness, tracks targets through an infrared headset, and fires heavier 10×28mm caseless rounds than the M41A Pulse Rifle. In Aliens, Vasquez and Drake made the system famous. The Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual later filled in how the harness, tracker, and M250 ammo actually work.
The M56 Smartgun Of The USCM
The Tech Manual calls the service model the M56A2: a 10mm general-purpose automatic squad support weapon, effective out to about 1,500 meters. It is the core of a Colonial Marine fireteam's gun pair. One Marine carries an M41. The other carries the Smartgun. The gun is not shoulder-fired. It rides a self-aiming stabilized mount on the operator's harness, so the team does not have to plant a bipod before opening up on full auto. An infrared tracker above the barrel steers the mount toward a target's center of mass. The Marine still has to pull the trigger.
Harness And Tracking
The Tech Manual breaks the system into four parts: combat harness, Head Mounted Sight (HMS), articulation arm, and the gun itself. The harness uses composite micromesh ballistic armor with heavy padding at the shoulders and hips. The breastplate holds the PRC 489/4 radio and the tracking processor. That processor is a sealed black-box LRU that can be swapped in the field if it fails. The articulation arm mounts on the left hip and plugs into power and data on the breastplate. The gun clips onto the end of the arm. Power comes from a DV9 lithium battery good for about 50,000 rounds. In the field, Marines often let the battery hang free under the gun so they can swap it fast.
When powered, the infrared tracker watches a 30° cone ahead of the barrel. A cooled platinum-silicide array feeds a thermal image to the eyepiece. Detected targets get a lighted box over center mass. The arm then steers the barrel onto that point and lights a lock circle when the gun is boresighted. The operator can override at any time by forcing the barrel elsewhere. Standing, the gun swings from front to left, or straight up. Prone, the Marine lies on their back and uses the fore grip with the cocking handle locked forward as a side grip. The arm is gyrostabilized so the gun stays usable while walking or running.
Specifications And Ammunition
Construction is mostly molded carbon fiber and light-alloy stampings, with some plastic interior parts. The pulse-action uses a free-floating, recoil-dampened motorized rotating breech for the M250 10×28 caseless round. A muzzle booster helps feed that larger cartridge. Cyclic rate is about 1,200 rpm. The barrel is a replaceable air-cooled unit, with an optional heat-sink jacket. Gun length is about 122 cm. Barrel length is about 54.5 cm. Harness, gun, and a full ammo load come to about 17.82 kg.
The M250 round is a 230-grain (14.9 g) caseless projectile in a rectangular nitramine block. It hits harder than the Pulse Rifle's M309 10×24 load. A grip switch sets electronic fusing as each round chambers: Super detonates on impact against soft targets, while Delay waits until after armor penetration. Ammo rides a continuous plastic non-disintegrating link belt in a drum that can be reloaded in the field. The gun motor drives both the feed and the rotating breech. A side cocking handle clears stoppages, and Marines are told to cock manually with each new drum because the first belt round often jams if the gun loads itself. Fire control sits on the forward grip or rear firing handle. The selector offers Safe, Burst (four rounds), and Autofire. Clicking off Safe charges the weapon. Autofire keeps the cyclic rate going while the red fire switch stays down.
Smartgun Types
The Tech Manual's infantry standard is the M56A2. Later games and comics add successors such as the M57 and the M59/B from Aliens vs. Predator 2010. Some stories also park Smartgun tech on tripods for fixed defense, closer to a sentry than a walking gun team. Early teething problems show up in the Manual too. One instructor story from Aurore has dust seizing swing-arm bearings and wrecking IR tracking until the unit dug old M38 guns out of storage.
The "Electrolaser"
Aliens: Defiance adds an experimental heavy support weapon that keeps Smartgun-style tracking but fires energy discharges instead of caseless rounds. Marines nicknamed it the Electrolaser. It was meant to hurt Xenomorphs through that energy effect, not as a replacement for the M56A2.
Smartgun Operators
Private Peter O'Neal
Private Peter O'Neal was a somewhat annoying sidekick to Corporal Winter in the ill-fated Aliens: Colonial Marines video game. He tagged along with the protagonist through most of the missions and often got in the way of the player. Early on, he gained access to his trusty smartgun and provided fire support, which was often low-damage so he kept shooting the same Xenomorphs over and over. In the end, he did survive his mission, managed to avenge his girlfriend Bella, and escaped with his fellow marines from LV-426 on a Weyland-Yutani FTL ship.
Private Phil Sandberg
Private Phil Sandberg was one of the few Colonial Marines whose perspective we see on Earth during the Earth-Alien war that started in Aliens: Outbreak. Smartgunner Sandberg and two other fellow marines were stranded in an abandoned police station in New York. First, they tried to find answers to the cause of the invasion from a nearby bio-research company. Unfortunately for them, a dying employee sets off a nuclear bomb, mirroring the title of the story - Aliens: Countdown. Fighting through Xenomorphs and hostile marines, they try to reach a ship but are eventually overwhelmed.
Private Rucker
Rucker was one of the two Smartgunners from the USS Hasdrubal as depicted in the epic Life and Death comic series. He was one of the few Colonial Marines who fought against the Yautja, fighting over the ownership of a Derelict Ship on LV-797. Rucker killed the legendary Hive Wars Predator, but accidentally shot Private Lee in the head. Later on LV-223, the smartgunner walked into a Xenomorph ambush, being dragged into the bush while the other marines were attacked. Rucker died in an Alien hive when a chestburster emerged from his chest.
Genna
Genna from Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species was a Colonial Marine smartgunner providing security on the Samara Station. When a female Predator named Big Mama arrived on the station, things escalated quickly and soon there was an all-out brawl between a Xenomorphs, humans and robotic Xenomorphs. Genna ended up joining Big Mama's gang of misfits, which included Ash Parnall. Together they fought the poor man's version of Weyland-Yutani, a company called Montcalm-Delacroix that created White Hybrid Xenomorphs. While initially using the smartgun, she later switched to using Predator gear instead, provided by Big Mama.
Jones
Jones was a heavy weapons specialist onboard the USS Verloc, which answered a distress call from LV-1201 during the events of the Aliens vs. Predator 2 video game. His marine unit was largely successful, taking only a few casualties during the mission. Jones was heavily built and kept to himself, having only a few lines during the campaign led by Corporal Andrew Harrison. Besides the smartgun, he used other heavy weapons like the Sadar and minigun, managing to mow down multiple Xenomorphs. He escaped with his fellow marines onboard the Verloc, being followed by a Predator ship.
Private Freebody
Freebody was the second smartgunner from the Life and Death series and can be considered to be the more successful one. Like Rucker, she survived the Yautja attack on LV-797 but managed to avoid any friendly fire incidents. On LV-223 she successfully fought off hordes of Xenomorphs that attacked the shrinking squad of marines. She wounded an Engineer with her smartgun which enabled Captain Paget to kill the giant later. Freebody was one of the few surviving marines from the LV-223 incident but her final fate onboard the Engineer Derelict Ship is left open.
Captain Kylie Duncan
Captain Kylie Duncan is the only villain in the list, but that does not make her less awesome. Appearing in the acclaimed Alien: Into Charybdis, she was the commander of a platoon of Colonial Marines sent to an Iranian research facility to take it under US control. She was a veteran of numerous Alien encounters, receiving several wounds, including a big scar on her jaw. Although a high-ranking officer, she did not shy away from fighting Xenomorphs herself. Taking a half a dozen marine comrades with her, she descended into an Alien hive and wiped out about 300 Xenomorphs with a smartgun. After her fellow marines died, she received horrible acid damage and fell into a pit of Black Goo Pathogen.
Private First Class Mark Drake
Drake was one of the two smartgunners stationed on the USS Sulaco. He had a special relationship with PFC Vasquez, with them sharing a past together and being possible lovers as well. James Cameron hinted that they were together in a juvenile correctional facility, and joining the Colonial Marines was a chance for a new life for them. Drake followed Vasquez's lead in the atmosphere processor battle and covered their retreat. When his smartgun ran empty, he grabbed a flame unit out of nowhere and continued firing. He almost made it to the APC and would have been a viable asset in the Ops battle, but the acid splash from a Xenomorph killed him.
Private First Class Jenette Vasquez
PFC Vasquez is the most well-known smartgunner in the Alien franchise and rightfully so. She played a crucial part in the Colonial Marine operation on LV-426 and perhaps killed the most Aliens out of all the marines. She was handy not only with the smartgun but the pulse rifle as well, preferring to use the grenade launcher to great effect. Although her actions doomed the atmosphere processor and her friendly fire killed Drake, she redeemed herself in the Ops battle and sacrificed her life together with Gorman, taking more Aliens with them in the explosion.
Space Marine Ellen Ripley
Ellen Ripley took on the role of a smartgunner in an alternate storyline following the events of Aliens. She appeared in the Space Marine comics, which were tied to the Kenner Aliens action figures released in the late 1980s and early 1990s, prior to the release of Alien 3 (1992). Other familiar faces from Aliens, such as Apone and Drake, also made a return in these stories. In this alternate take, Ripley wielded a hybrid weapon resembling a mix of the pulse rifle, flamethrower, and smartgun. NECA later reimagined this version of Ripley as a figure equipped with the iconic M56 smartgun, albeit without the traditional harness or headset. Ripley blasted all sorts of Xenomorph types with this weapon, including giant facehuggers.
Behind The Scenes
For Aliens, armorers at Bapty & Co. built the M56 props around live-firing German MG42 machine guns, then dressed them with motorcycle parts so they no longer looked like WWII weapons. The rear trigger was a Kawasaki brake lever, the forward grip used Kawasaki switchgear, and footpeg hangers helped shape the barrel shroud. Each gun hung from a Cinema Products Model III Steadicam arm bolted to the receiver, which shifted the weight onto a torso harness so Jenette Goldstein and Mark Rolston could walk and track targets with the heavy metal assembly. Vasquez's gun carried the hand-painted ADIOS marking on the receiver. Drake's prop was marked differently, and the two Steadicam arms were not identical builds. That same Steadicam idea later shows up in-universe as the Tech Manual's gyrostabilized articulation arm.
Conclusion
The M56 is the Colonial Marine squad gun that does the heavy lifting while the Pulse Rifle team moves with it. The Tech Manual spells out the harness, tracker, and M250 fuse options behind what Vasquez and Drake carried on the Sulaco. Later games and comics keep renaming the platform, but the walking IR-tracked machine gun is still the same idea.
Sources
- Aliens (1986)
- Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual (1995)
- Aliens: Bug Hunt (2017)
- Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013)
- Aliens vs. Predator (2010)
- Aliens vs. Predator 2 (2001)
- Aliens: Defiance (comic)
- Aliens: Life and Death (comic)
- Alien: Into Charybdis (2021)
- Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species (comic)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Weapons | Colonial Marine Lore | Alien Lore
