A radical departure from traditional assault rifle designs, Calico's philosophy centered around creating a gun that is simple and straight-forward in design, has a massive magazine capacity (fifty or one hundred rounds), and being stable enough to allow a person to simply pour on the dakka without worrying too much about hitting the target.

And despite some early issues with burred feed lips, they more or less succeeded. The only reason why they aren't more popular now is because in addition to the feed lip issue, they never landed any law enforcement or military contracts, and then along came the high capacity magazine ban.

Ouch.

But the company somehow lingered on, and every great now and then you'll see one at a range. People may chortle and guffaw at the seemingly sci-fi looking gun (to whit, it actually has been used in several sci-fi films, most notably and ignominiously, Spaceballs) and are immediately silenced when the shooter burns through several targets, leaving nice, tight groupings, only ever reloading once, and all in a matter of just a few minutes.

Ian McCollum has heard much about the 'unreliability issues' these guns supposedly have and is curious to see how much of it had to do with improper use of the high capacity helical feed magazines, which has a button to relieve the tension on the spring that pushes the feed follower, and a crank to reapply that tension.

Video one, where Ian goes over the pistol and carbine, along with their quirks and features.
https://youtu.be/CbKj2t7MnBg

Video two, where Ian takes the Carbine out to the range with a 100- and a 50-round magazine...
https://youtu.be/YqhLfEmNuEA

Video Three: Endurance testing...
https://youtu.be/5pu1M6ZffiM

Video Four: Endurance testing continued...
https://youtu.be/72yM_wrcb1k

Video Five: where issues really seem to finally set in.
https://youtu.be/AB-53jXwz6Y

The last video... we have no idea what happens afterwards. Some commenters speculate that the firing pin may actually be worn out. When Ian last cleaned the gun, he may have removed the bit of carbon from the firing pin that was letting it fire reliably. But until he gives us an update, we won't know for sure.

In the UF-verse, I can see a small number of these guns floating around, each one modified in some way or another, or even one-off productions based on a Calico. Wielders of such weapons would certainly think them priceless as few would ever expect such a relatively small gun to carry so much ammunition without some kind of transmat magazine (which is the province of only the most well-heeled mercenaries and operatives).

Perhaps a young man from a family of (lovable) crazies with penchants for fast ships, insane mods, a run-watcha-brung (to the battle field) mentality, and coffee with highly inadvisable caffeine content would possess such a gun... ;)