The rifle looks basically like the Barrett M82A1 .50 BMG used by most US Spec Ops. Although it fires a .50 caliber round I've seen these fired first hand and they have almost no muzzle flash whatsoever, actually out of 20 rounds I saw fired at night I saw the flash for 1 and it was barely visible. However it is loud as hell, a super sonic .50 caliber round is going to make some serious noise ^_^

In Bob Mayer's book "Eyes of the Hammer" now unfortunately out of print, he describes a sniper rifle called the Accuracy Internaional Model PM sniper rifle(made in the UK). The rifle is a single bolt action with a high carbon steel receiver and free floating barrel. One of the very cool features of this rifle is that it has an intergal suppressor and when firing subsonic rounds it is still extremely accurate but very quiet. It fires a 7.62 mm round and is accurate from a far less range than the BMG but the silence is a real edge. However perhaps the armor classes of the Covenant warrant something a little more chunky like the aforementioned BMG.

I've seen a few people wonder if the laser would be spotted easily by Covenant soldiers when it drew a bed on them. There are several solutions to this problem. One is to use an alternate spectrum type light so as to make the laser totally invisible to the naked eye and only detectable via artificial enhancement.(of course this depends on what spectrums register to the aliens in the Covenant to work effectively)

The other is to use a standard conventional laser. In the book "Twilight Warriors" by Martin C. Arostegui, he describes an incident at the Falkland Islands where an SAS observation post came under attack by Argentine SpecOps teams. When the SAS drove the Argentine back they came under sniper attack. The sniper, which took them all night to weed out, was scoring very tough hits from an extreme range. Turns out he had a standard laser on the rifle...yet no one noticed this until they found the rifle.

One of the elements now introduced into the game will be one of crippling enemies to draw their comrades into the open ala "Full Metal Jacket" or "Messiah". One also wonders if we will be able to employ the machette to torture captured Covenant troops for info.