As it stands, Rubber bullets are a bit of a grey area. There is nothing about them in SOP as far as I can tell, and I do not recall there ever being a ruling on them. So I would like to make a suggestion.
Allow MPs to carry rubber bullets at all times. They are both useful for MPs, while also not being completely broken. They don’t stun for an overly long amount of time, but they also slow people significantly.
Also from an RP standpoint, it is just common sense. Using rubber bullets as a tool to arrest someone that is not complying makes sense.
IDK, I just think that there needs to be some clarification on if they are a riot tool, or if they can be used by MPs during normal gameplay.
I believe the last ruling on them is that if you get shot at with rubber rounds and don’t know it’s rubber rounds you can return fire lethally - which makes sense, to be fair, since even in real life rubber rounds are quite dangerous and in game you can’t actually tell what’s hitting you until you go down or if you are paying attention to your chat (which is enough to get you killed.)
The riot shotguns kind of avoid this since they’re very obviously marked and have a different firing sound, but blindly firing rubber rounds down a hallway at people who don’t want to get shot at is usually going to end… poorly.
It makes sense to use these for prisoner control and stuff but not really on other marines.
As noted by others, there is a exception that no punishment is levied to anyone who returns fire with lethal force against someone using rubber bullets since, in the moment, there is no way to tell apart a rubber bullet from a real bullet.
Essentially, using rubber bullets as an option of first resort is valid for escalation, but you open yourself up to being fired on by any other person with lethal force, including third party personnel who may intervene in the interests of self-defence for another person.
I like this in theory but in practice giving MPs rubber bullets would justify them being gun downed if used. Part of my thinks that is utterly hilarious the other part of me thinks that is a mod headache.