The Humble Smartlink Revisited

[This article deals with the benefits and problems of directly plugging a gun into your nervous system – what probably every cyberpunk PC everywhere does all the time.]

Author: Chris Lupton.
Taken without permission from his site at (now dead). It pains me to violate his copyright, but the article is just to good to let it be forgotten. I’m sorry Chris and hope you approve what I do here.

The History of and Information about Smartguns

Origins
Operation
Advanced Systems

Origins

The first smartgun systems were developed independently by the US and German militaries in the 1990s. By 2001, smartguns had been adopted by several corporations and were beginning to appear on the street. The US military created the Milspec Smartgun Standard (MSS1) in 2003, after disastrous compatibility problems amongst the smartguns used in central America caused embarrassing problems and several fatalities. Today, almost every smartsystem in the world conforms to this standard. To ignore it means ignoring the large profits to be made selling smartlinks to the US military. In 2013 an improved standard (MSS2) was released, though it has yet to be universally adopted. The army considered it too expensive for its benefits and has yet to make compliance a requirement in weapons trials.The MSS1 standard was essentially very simple. It defined the data protocol between the smartgun and the neuralware smartlink, in terms of required and optional information/functions. This meant that one smartgun link mounted in a neuralware processor or smartgoggles could interpret the data from any smartlinked weapon. Continue reading “The Humble Smartlink Revisited”