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If i recall, since i haven't played HH3rd only HH1st, Rotor Cannons are technically considered a special weapon and not a heavy weapony (so i suppose that means that its more lightweight, mobile and cheaper than a heavy bolter), so my question is, has a reason ever been given for why modern marines can't take these?


I assume if clearing out hordes of lightly lightly armoured opponents and if you wanted to keep some distance, surely a rotor cannon would be preferable to a non-heavy flamer as it has better range?

Heavy Bolters are just better in every way. Flamers also cause the fear factor of being y'know being set on fire.

I think the Codex Astartes is the go to "reason" why certain weapons aren't used in 40k marine forces.

Certain weapons were selected and the Mechanicus started producing those weapons specifically to arm Marine chapters.

Every other weapon fell by the wayside and either became a chapter specific weapon or was eventually lost and replaced with a more common weapon.

The most likely reasons for any weapon system from 30K falling out of use are logistics and loss of technology.

The original 2nd edition Chaos Codex gave these same reasons for why Chaos Terminators used Reaper Autocannons instead of Assault Cannons, and for why they did not have Land Speeders or any other anti-grav vehicles any longer. The Traitor Legions could no longer count on stable logistical support and kept using the most reliable least maintenance intensive weapons they had from the time of the Great Crusade.

Similarly for the loyalist Space Marines, the shattered Imperium had to rebuild and settled on certain weapons to keep producing/maintaining and then things ossified.

Their role also fundamentally shifted.

Rotor Cannons are best employed against lightly armoured hordes, where their volume of firepower matters more than sheer stopping power.

Since the Second Founding? It’s kind of rare Astartes will have to fight in such a manner. They’ve been replaced as the premiere armed force of The Imperium by the Imperial Guard.

Yes, they will still have to tackle numberless hordes, but having shifted to essentially strike and fade tactics? The Rotor Cannon just doesn’t really offer much compared to Bolter fire, or the massed ranks of Imperial Guard firing Lasguns, because Marines can no longer deploy in the sorts of numbers where the Rotor Cannon finds it niche.

It is obsolete, is the short answer. It's simple to produce compared to other heavy weapons but that is unimportant in an Imperium that is no longer rapidly expanding. It's also underpowered compared to a heavy bolter and completely outclassed by assault cannons (if GW updates the Devastator squad, I'd not be surprised to see assault cannons featured).

IIf the role for a Rotor Cannon is anti-light infantry, that's also the role of a Heavy Stubber, which is even less complex to produce and maintain.

 Insectum7 wrote:
IIf the role for a Rotor Cannon is anti-light infantry, that's also the role of a Heavy Stubber, which is even less complex to produce and maintain.

except i couldn't find a single precedent for any space marine squad using heavy stubbers, but i could find references explicitely stating that Space Marine Tactical Support Squads could take rotor cannons

The main reason is that the dev team don’t want it as an option in 40k marine lists. That trumps all other reasons. In-universe, its role probably overlaps a lot with bolters and storm bolters. If you need anything heavier than that they the heavy bolter steps in. Marines aren’t mowed down all that much by the heavier weapon, so an intermediate choice seems redundant.

On the stubber front, I’m still grumpy they started putting stubber-like things on marine vehicles. Seems counter productive to add a whole new logistics stream when it could just be more bolters.

Heavy stubbers seem to be cheaper to build and easier to maintain and repair, plus they have longer range. The ammunition is lighter and smaller per bullet, too, so you can have more rounds in any given volume.

So there is something to be said for it, I think. It
would make sense as a potential special weapon, too

Does anyone actually use Rotor cannons in the 41st millennium? I thought they became just another piece of lost tech since Heresy..

 tauist wrote:
Does anyone actually use Rotor cannons in the 41st millennium? I thought they became just another piece of lost tech since Heresy..

Voidsmen-at-arms team has one.

EDIT:

And of course Chaos has reaper chaincannon which seems like basically the same thing.

 Crimson wrote:

 tauist wrote:
Does anyone actually use Rotor cannons in the 41st millennium? I thought they became just another piece of lost tech since Heresy..

Voidsmen-at-arms team has one.

EDIT:

And of course Chaos has reaper chaincannon which seems like basically the same thing.

Ok, point taken with the Reaper Chaincannon. But a Rogue Trader's personal retinue having one could mean its just a relic from the Heresy Era

Rosebuddy wrote:
Heavy stubbers seem to be cheaper to build and easier to maintain and repair, plus they have longer range. The ammunition is lighter and smaller per bullet, too, so you can have more rounds in any given volume.

So there is something to be said for it, I think. It
would make sense as a potential special weapon, too

Agreed about their simplicity, it there are only 1,000 marines per chapter, and not all of them need a support weapon. Heavy bolters are better in every way, and Marines can fall back on the logistics of the Imperium to keep them in bolt rounds if their own prodigious manufacturing facilities fall short.

Marines are not there for efficient logistics, they are there to rip the face off very specific targets and blow gaping holes in whatever else happens to be in the vicinity.

the-gentleman-ranker wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
IIf the role for a Rotor Cannon is anti-light infantry, that's also the role of a Heavy Stubber, which is even less complex to produce and maintain.

except i couldn't find a single precedent for any space marine squad using heavy stubbers, but i could find references explicitely stating that Space Marine Tactical Support Squads could take rotor cannons

Probably because if we're looking for anti-light infantry role, that's just any Marine with a Bolter or chainsword, frag grenades or straigt up fists.

Off topic but heavy stubber wise I would love a range redesign where the Marines and sisters get bolt weapons and the guard get all the heavy stubbers instead of the heavy bolters.

It would be interesting to make a guard army that had different weapon tech to the marines.

Lasguns are already designed with logistics in mind, and a stubber is certainly going to be easier to manufacture than a bolter, or specifically, a bolt round. Autocannon is just a big stubber and a lascannon can do what a lasgun does on a bigger scale. The real weird one is plasma, which is supposed to be rare and poorly understood tech, but your average guard army has been toting dozens of plasmagunners for decades.

Be a bit harsh to change that now, I reckon. Invalidating people's collections. But it would make more sense of plasma was rarer for guard. Melta I'm not sure on - the way it's described as working, I'm not sure it would need "ammo" as such, just a power supply. If your batteries that run your lascannons were universal tech they could work off that.

Autocannon is closer to light field artillery. Comparatively rapid firing as its self-loading.

Autocannons seem to vary greatly too.

There seem to be smaller variants than can be readily used by people, like "try again" Bragg and various no-name Guard NPCs in the Eisenhorn novels.

Meanwhile larger autocannons, like the crew-served ones, can be -larger- than a human, and don't exactly match the readily carried ones in the novels.

Sort of like how boltguns implicitly have several size categories, some of which are perfectly comfortable in human hands (Yarrick famously uses a stormbolter one-handed, but he's not unique in this, Eisenhorn does the same in Malleus) whereas in other accounts you encounter Astartes boltguns so big and heavy that unaugmented humans struggle to so much as lift and carry them, let alone fire them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
Autocannon is just a big stubber

At its most simple, this is true, though there seems to be a lot of variance in the ammo used. Basic explosive or solid shells seems the default, but per the 2nd edition Liber Astartes, Space Marines load theirs with advanced armour-piercing rounds.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Off topic but heavy stubber wise I would love a range redesign where the Marines and sisters get bolt weapons and the guard get all the heavy stubbers instead of the heavy bolters.

Well we got the opposite in the Primaris vehicles where they pack a bunch of stubbers/heavy stubbers.

Autocannon are supposed to stretch from 20mm up to 50mm cannon. Thats quite the range from (just about) man portable up to light tank primary weapon, and this is reasonably well set out across the various model ranges. Anything bigger is supposed to be a battle cannon.

 Ashiraya wrote:

Sort of like how boltguns implicitly have several size categories, some of which are perfectly comfortable in human hands (Yarrick famously uses a stormbolter one-handed, but he's not unique in this, Eisenhorn does the same in Malleus) whereas in other accounts you encounter Astartes boltguns so big and heavy that unaugmented humans struggle to so much as lift and carry them, let alone fire them.

It is typical BL marine hyperbole. On the models we see that the marine and normal human bolters are basically the same. Though of course now the primaris marines actually have bigger versions of bolters.

"Astartes Boltguns" being their own, larger category of weapon compared to the human-wieldable versions is also a thing in the RPGs, it's not restricted to BL Marine hyperbole.

Indeed, and I am very wary of using tabletop miniature scale for this. Scale creep aside, a great many miniatures are also out of scale with each other, some of which is intentional (vehicles are made much smaller for gameplay practicality) and some of which is not.

Proportions in particular have never been and will likely never be true scale, a concession made to ease of painting. Hands, heads, guns, gear and so on are all oversized.

All that aside, it's clear that even particular guns like "heavy bolter" vary greatly in size and specifications between patterns. Even if we set aside Space Marines, some Heavy Bolters are man-portable, and some vehicle-mounted ones would very definitely not be.

Heh. Some minis are not even to scale with themselves. How many of the pistols we see being waved around would fit into the holsters on the mini?

Also many are scaled up for visibility. A lot of guns are comically large so we can tell what they are from arm’s length.

 Nevelon wrote:
Heh. Some minis are not even to scale with themselves. How many of the pistols we see being waved around would fit into the holsters on the mini?

I will say this, I do appreciate that the streamlined Primaris-style bolt pistols seem to have been designed to actually fit in their own holsters in a way the older, more square bolt pistols absolutely never did.

Also true for a number of Horus Heresy pistols.

Marines don’t even need holsters as they can just mag-clamp stuff onto their armour. Although I’m guess only an aesthetic thing, and without a holster, stowed weapons just look like bad conversions with stuff stuck everywhere

 Ashiraya wrote:
(vehicles are made much smaller for gameplay practicality)

I will contest this somewhat. Most of the "golden era" vehicles are fine for scale, and some are actually quite large. They are acceptably in line with the heights (not the girth of "heroic scale") of models at the time. These days infantry models are all over the place, which changes things a bit. I remember seeing a HH box set being built and the character model was alarmingly larger than the troops. Looked all goofy. Compared to a classic Guardsman though, a Chimera is gigantic.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
(vehicles are made much smaller for gameplay practicality)

I will contest this somewhat. Most of the "golden era" vehicles are fine for scale, and some are actually quite large. They are acceptably in line with the heights (not the girth of "heroic scale") of models at the time. These days infantry models are all over the place, which changes things a bit. I remember seeing a HH box set being built and the character model was alarmingly larger than the troops. Looked all goofy. Compared to a classic Guardsman though, a Chimera is gigantic.

Yeah, if you remove the heroic scaling, the older vehicles are usually fine. I don't think a lot of people realise how cramped armoured vehicles are in reality. In fairness a Chimera needs to be pretty big given it is supposed to float.

I fondly remember the FW kit that was literally rows of packed Krieg infantry to fit in the Gorgon hold- it did indeed fit the full transport capacity IIRC. Krieg models at the time being a bit less heroically scaled than the standard GW guard models.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Indeed, and I am very wary of using tabletop miniature scale for this. Scale creep aside, a great many miniatures are also out of scale with each other, some of which is intentional (vehicles are made much smaller for gameplay practicality) and some of which is not.

Proportions in particular have never been and will likely never be true scale, a concession made to ease of painting. Hands, heads, guns, gear and so on are all oversized.

All that aside, it's clear that even particular guns like "heavy bolter" vary greatly in size and specifications between patterns. Even if we set aside Space Marines, some Heavy Bolters are man-portable, and some vehicle-mounted ones would very definitely not be.

Weapons and statlines have always been broad categories grouping analogous things.

I imagine it can make quite a big difference to a Guard trooper if they are carrying an Mars-Galaxy pattern lasgun (near enough standard), a Lucius pattern (slower firing, more powerful shots but depletes ammo quicker), or a Triplex-Phall pattern (bit more complex, known for being able to vary the charge levels). Yet these have always had the same statline in game as "lasgun".

Likewise, an impoverished peasant from a feudal world, a Cadian lifelong professional soldier conscripted from birth, and a musclehead Catachan have typically had the same strength, toughness, and wounds (sometimes the Catachan has had +1 S).

For heavy bolters, we have lore showing a range of calibres- the typical calibre being .75, but the HH-era heavy bolters carried on the shoulder are .70. Same statline.

I could go on.

The granularity of the statlines has generally not been enough to differentiate between small inter-weapon differences.

Weapon scales is something I always found weird.

Like a Predator autocannon being like 4x the size of some other autocannons, but all are just "autocannon".
The Baneblade's coaxial autocannon is smaller than its heavy stubbers!
The gameplay side of that resulting in the Predator carrying a pretty pathetically weak gun until they started giving it a separate Predator Autocannon in 8th edition onwards.

"human boltgun" and "astartes boltgun" coming out in the wash is one thing (although they arguably also separated the two in 8th with the "bolt rifle").