Totally Not An AR

-= Service Rifle? Wat dat? =-

Ever wondered why there are no service rifles in the Commonwealth and you gotta stick to that silly looking thing officially known as the combat rifle? Well, I used some headcanon to retcon the weapon a little bit and also gave it a somewhat less off-putting design (if you still don't like it: not my problem, I like how it turned out :P).

-= Sooo ... what happened? =-

"In the mid-2060s, the highly corrupt government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issued a new law to ban civilians from owning the widely spread service rifle which was brought into the civilian market by U. S. Army veterans who took the rifles with them after leaving the military. This was mainly to prevent violent uprisings as tensions within the american society already had grown to dangerously high levels, and it was no secret that the politicians in charge at the time had been lining their own pockets for ages. In order to not tangent the Second Amendment the new law was deliberately tailored around the service rifle itself, and it deliberately targeted specific features of the weapon like the receiver design, caliber, shaft, parts of the sights, and various other features not present on popular civilian weapons like hunting rifles, for example. Once officially declared, the law would also target the various companies building civilian versions of the service rifle in order to drive them out of business.

Unfortunately for the Commonwealth's leadership, plans about the law leaked through and made their way to exactly these companies very early. With their entire existence at stake, the companies formed a secret alliance and tried to figure out how to circumvent the new law to both stay in business and keep their market share. The solution was a radical redesign of the service rifle itself to use any loophole available to make the weapon compliant with the new law. The new weapon, internally dubbed the "New patriotic all-American Combat Rifle", was rechambered into 45 caliber and had a complex gas-operated receiver to be initially sold as a weapon for personal protection, but due to the similarities of the bolt faces the weapon could also be upgraded to 308 caliber for "hunting purposes" by simply swapping out the barrel and the gasport attached to it. Other modifications derived from the civilian market completed the design, which made it possible for the factories to build the new weapon without massive retooling while still complying with the soon-to-be-announced new law.

As intended, the new law backfired - spectacularly. Shortly before the law had been officially released, a massive buyback campaign for service rifles started. The companies offered massive discounts for the new "Combat Rifle" when customers traded in their service rifles at the counter. With the chan