There is a question of quantifying just what the cyclic rate of the various weapons are in Rifts. If we take your average soldier who is usually somewhere betweem level 4 and 6, you're going to have a guy wiht about 5 to 6 attacks per melee round. For the sake of argument, let's say it's six because that will worlk out better. If this soldier has a burst capable weapon like, say, an old C-10, and opts to fire an old fashioned full burst, he'll deplete the entire magaizine of all power in two melee actions. Remeber, a burst that burn through the entire magazine in one mega-rip is an action that consumes two melee attacks. So if Soldier X has six melee attacks and a melee round is 15 seconds, then each and every one of his attacks represents 2.5 seconds of time. Now if it took 5 seconds to burn though one magazie, (lets say it was a long e-clip with 30 shots of power in it), then his cyclic rate was only 6 shots per second, or 360 per minute. That's pretty good, but I wouldn't call it "Full Auto". I concider true machine-gun ROF's to
start at 600 RPM, like that of an Uzi or M-60. But since this is about half that, odds are the shooter of weapons like the are squeezing the trigger for each and every shot fired. Or it could be that energy weapons just have lower cyclic rates than primitive slug throwers.
Say we up the antie and see what the same weapon could do in the hands of someone with even more attacks per melee. What if the C-10 were being fired by a level 15 Juicer with HtH Assassin, the boxing skill, WP Sharp Shooting and is wearing Samas power amor, (with which he has RPA:Elite in, of course), giving him a grand total of 14 melee attacks per round. Well, 15 seconds /14 actions = each action being representitive of 1.07143 seconds. Two melee actions uses 2.14286 seconds. 30 rounds fired in 2.14286 seconds = a cyclic rate of 14 rounds a second, or
840 rounds per minute!!!
Same gun, different user. Under this extreme case I guess it would be safe to call the C-10 and all similar rifles "Full Auto Capable".
Oh, and for future reference, accoring to my math here, if you want to know what the cyclic rate is for the weapon in a particular character's hands, it just
Number of Attacks per Melee = shots fired per second. That would be less indicitive of the weapon's efficiency than the user's proficiency, I guess.
Did I get off topic here? I can't tell any more.