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I've been reading Gaunts Ghosts novels lately and a couple times Dan Abnett talks about lasrifles jamming, how does a las rifle jam? From what I understand there are very few if any moving parts on a lasrifle so is not a mechanical failure perhaps?

A lot of high powered modern lasers use compressed gasses as a means of focusing the beam. Maybe it's similar technology and whatever mechanism used to generate the gas compression is the one that jams?

Honestly I have no idea, annoying oversights like these are why I rate Graham McNeil over Dan Abnett most of the time.

Some problem with the electrical circutry transferring the charge of the 'shot' from the magazine to the area of the rifle that produces the shot?

Loose connection, charge too small, charge too great, gases (as suggested earlier) not in appropriate condition, focusing lens/crystal misaligned.... many ways.

An importaint wotsit comes loose, causing a critical gubbin to missaligh, resulting in catastrophic failure! Oops thts for orks, could be weather conditions for the lasgun?

"Jam" is simple speak for 'weapon malfunction'.

Dirty contact points, faulty connections, twitchy capacitors, part of your comrades femur lodged in the lens assembly...

Technically it wouldn't be a rifle either.

It jams when you don't recite your prayers to the omnissiah and he punishes you with no pewpew.

I believe that everyone's ideas on here are perfectly reasonable explanations since a lasgun theoretically has so much tech crammed in it (gasses, cables etc...)

Lazy writing imho, as jamming refers to mechanical parts and specifically the ammunition feed seizing up.

Although there is a lot of tech in a lasgun and presumably a lot of complicated systems that can potentially go wrong, jamming is not really going to happen.

So I agree RedGuardian.

zeonicman wrote:It jams when you don't recite your prayers to the omnissiah and he punishes you with no pewpew.

I believe that everyone's ideas on here are perfectly reasonable explanations since a lasgun theoretically has so much tech crammed in it (gasses, cables etc...)

And all that cabling can produce a whopping strength of 3 on the tabletop!

CMON people.....everyone knows that lasguns fire LAZOR BULLETS! Not just lasers. They are 2 totally different things. I mean why else do they have magazines on the lasgun, if not to hold LAZOR bullets. And bullets jam

Made in China.

I'm not sure of the particular incident, but at least some of the incidents of jamming that I can recall apply to power cells not being seated properly, which, for a lasrifle, would be an "ammunition" problem.

Also, as pointed out, "laser rifles" certainly don't have rifled barrels for stabilizing the laser being emitted, so I think that it would probably be safe to assume that, just as "rifle" is being used to indicate a weapon which almost certainly is not technically a rifle, "jamming" is being used to indicate a sudden malfunction of the weapon which prevents it from firing.

In addition, I am assuming that Imperial Gothic is not perfectly identical with modern English, so presumably, the "actual" words used in the setting might not be "rifle" and "jam" anyway.

For Adnett, I blame his laser bullet shenanigans (good characters, lazy tech).

In my Dark Heresy games I've described Las weapon 'jams' (where a weapon 'jam' is a mechanical term, that makes sense for everything but las, flamers, and meltas) largely as fuse/component burnout ("no, the magic-blue smoke is escaping, fetch the omnissiah quick!") misaligned optics, or loose wiring.

Da Butcha, it may just be that the authors couldn't be assed to dig into their vocabularies and find an alternative.
Imperial gothic being like English at all is highly unlikely

In anycase the technical term, especially in the critical moments of battle when one's life is in the balance, would be, "Oh gakk, the lasgun's fekked!"

maybe the do maybe they dont...if you dont pray to the ommisiah atleast

The post about the clip being inserted wrong makes the most sense to me, so whomever posted that Good Job!

What about dirt in the firing mechanism or in the focusing crystal?

S_P

Well based upon simple simple laser tech it has to be the power has failed, the emitter has failed, or the focusing device has failed. Of the three the power should be easiest to screw up. Try rubbing a 9 volt battery in the mud then connect it directly to a motor and see if it works. If the emitter goes your screwed. That means something important broke, and you probably can't fix it in the battlefield by spitting into the housing. The focusing device could be tricky, but still very possible. Maybe its dirty, or maybe it was jostled. That would take time to fix, but could probably be done in a battlefield situation.

If I were designing a laser rifle in 40K there are lots of things I would do to make it foolproof and fail safe.

1. No moving parts. The trigger and safety catch are fingerprint sensitive touch patches, not buttons. Even the battery (clip) is held in by magnets not a catch.

2. Safety test of the barrel before every shot. This consists of sending a very low energy pulse and timing the return. If it is too short, it shows the barrel is blocked and should not be fired until cleared.

3. No electrical contacts. They would be asking for frequent battery explosions considering the amount of energy packed in a battery. Instead, the battery sends its power to the gun by an induction loop.

4. All the internal electronics will be solid state and encased in some protective epoxy resin. Basically the only force that will break any of the internal parts will shatter the casing.

5. Electronic self test for circuit integrity and so on.

Oh come on... hasn't anybody else ever discussed the theoretical possibilities of a Bolt-action Laser Carbine?
Would work similar to a regular b-a type weapon but instead of cartriges the 'clip' is loaded with powercells, which, if the bolt is not properly cleared, would cause a jam to occur.

Well if i remember from DH Lasguns fire 10-20 shots and then you need to change the batteries ... Battery can easily jams as you try to ...
A) remove the old one
B) as you put the new one in.
... ether way the guns jammed and no pew pew till you unjam it and fit a fresh battery.

The omnissah is not pleased, or some wires have come loose after being dropped on the floor by a scarred trooper or from being used as a makeshift CC weapon.

I figure the easiest way for a lasgun to jam would be the trigger getting stuck.

Can't the terms "rifle" and "jam" be used for ease of reading?

You understand what is meant, don't you? So where is the issue.

To me, reading a pulp Scifi War book, Rifle tells me that it is a weapon roughly equivalent to an assault rifle, M16 or other.

Jam tells me the weapon didn't fire as intended, and the operator has to spend time fixing it/clearing the jam.

There are other, much larger logical holes to pick at if you must. This is really a very minor thing.

I have had electronic equipment fail on me that would be best described as "jammed".

A simple matter of it overheating and stopping part way through an action.

There was mention of barrel overheats for the long-las so they need replacement often, so picture if you get a little too happy with the shooting and the sucker shuts down on you: that is a jam.

Makes sense? I can picture it because I would be one of those fools pushing the thing too hard.

I can see it now... "please wait the weapon is re-booting, please wait, here is some soothing music while you wait... repeated pressing of trigger will not speed process and is potentially dangerous... please wait... "da-dee-da-da-da-da" your gun has been restored from last good run, happy shooting - the emperor protects"

dark falcon wrote:I figure the easiest way for a lasgun to jam would be the trigger getting stuck.

That's why my design doesn't have a trigger. It has a fingerprint activated solid-state switch instead.

The magazine is V shaped to make it impossible to be inserted the wrong way round, except by members of the Royal Artillery, and it is kept in the slot by magnets like the power plug on a MacBook.

"rifle" and "jam"

rifle + jam =

Thank you Skrulnik for a refreshing dose of common sense on the internet. When you are writing fiction (especially genre fiction, and double-extra-super-double when you are writing science fiction) you have to balance the flow of your story with your explanations of terms, concepts, or facts that the reader may not know. As a for instance, in a 40k book, you have to at some point explain what a space marine is. Fortunately, it doesn't require much. You don't, as a writer, spend a ridiculous amount of time describing each of the marine's individual enhanced organs, nor do you launch into a ten page diatribe about the history of space marines in general.

Now, I try not to speak for everyone, but here I am afraid I am going to. I don't want to read a technical manual. Nor do I want to stop every five minutes in a sci-fi novel for backhistory about the inner workings of every bit of advanced technology. And, I think, I am in the majority on this. What most people care about is the story, not the imaginary technology.

So, when reading a Gaunt's Ghosts novel, I don't give a damn WHY the las-rifle jammed. (All of the above possibilities are more than acceptable to me.) I just want to know now that the las-rifle has jammed, what are Gaunt and his Ghosts going to do about it?

It isn't lazy writing, it's tight writing. Lazy writing is when you divulge for entire chapters into nonsensical tangents about...say...the history of pipeweed.

...when did that las-rifle jam anyway?

like the slight at Tolkien there: LOTR is super-boring.