The gun that counts: the 23 mm learns to fire in bursts
The light gun on every hull out here was, quietly, a WW2 fighter's cannon with a new label on it: seven rounds a second, held down forever, a hose of little sparks. It is a cannon now — a heavier shell, a slower thump, and recoil that walks the barrels off the target after four or five rounds and needs a second to come home.
Hold the trigger on the Brick Moon now and you will feel the gun argue with you, which is the whole point.
Fewer rounds, and they land like rounds
The 23 mm used to run at seven a second. It sounded like a sewing machine and it played like one: point vaguely, hold the button, wait for the health bar.
It fires **three a second** now, and each shell is worth more than twice what it was. Three hits kill an interceptor. Seven kill a corvette. A round that connects is a thing you notice — on the giving end and, more sharply, on the receiving one. The shell leaves faster too, which means the lead you have to pull is flatter and the mark on your glass is easier to trust.
Same damage per second as any other cannon in the game. A third as many shells to spend it with.
And then the barrels walk
Here is the part that changes how a gunfight is shaped.
Every round shoves the barrels off the line the mount is holding. Not much — under a degree at the worst of it — but it accumulates, and you can watch it: the tracers step up and away from where the first one went. After four or five rounds the mount has walked off the mark, the gun goes **out of battery**, and it will not fire again until it has settled. Your chip on the glass says so:
**[GUNS: SETTLING]**
About a second later the barrels are home and you are cleared to fire. Then you do it again.
Nothing counts your rounds for you. There is no magazine, no cooldown bar, no rule that says "bursts of five". The gun simply pushes back a little harder than the mount can hold, and the rhythm falls out of that: **line him up, let it bark, ride the walk, come back on, bark again.** Every hull on the roster works this way, and the twin-barrelled Bastion reaches the limit in half the volleys — two trigger pulls, four shells, then the same beat as everyone else.
What it does to a fight
It puts the pauses back. A merge used to be two ships holding their buttons down at each other and comparing hit points; now it is a conversation with gaps in it — four rounds, a beat, four rounds — and the gaps are where the flying happens. You spend them correcting your closure, easing off before you overshoot, or getting your nose somewhere better for the next group.
It also rewards the thing it should: the **first round of a burst is the truest one**, because it leaves before the walk starts. A pilot who lines up properly and fires a short group lands more metal than one who buries the trigger and lets the last shells sail past a hull that is no longer there.
The gun is named for a real one — a 23 mm that genuinely flew, and genuinely fired, in orbit. Its shell is the part we kept.
Roll out.