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FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
There is a reason most catachans don't use lasguns, but Shotguns, bolt pistols, and HBs, or combat knives.

Because they removed the option for officers to have lasguns when Cruddace started his crusade to Vallhalanize the Guard.

Seriously. That's why.

Arguably the greatest living jungle fighter of all time, (Redacted) only uses a combat knife and a Needle Pistol.

You mean a terrible meme is a terrible meme.

Otherwise, Harker uses Payback, and the other guy uses a special shotgun.

Harker's "Payback" is a heavy bolter used by a bigger than average guy, set up as a "ripoff" of Bragg from Gaunt's Ghosts. That's all it is.
Straken uses a shotgun because, again, officers have not been able to take lasguns outside of the FW lists since Cruddace started screwing up the Guard's lore+rules.

Are we going by fluff or real world here. Because in both, lasguns are the wrong weapon for Catachan-esque environments.

Oh, I must have missed where we have reliable laser weaponry in real world?


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 PappyNurgle wrote:
I forget the book, but a special boat unit-esque regiment had to assault a jungle fortress and had a solid number of autoguns and slug thrower weaponry. I wanna say they quoted that it dealt with brush and foliage better than lasguns, but its kind of a hazy memory and I think I lost the book when I moved cross country.

It was Henry Zou, and it's worth noting that his books should effectively be ignored as he was plagiarizing stuff pretty heavily.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Jarms48 wrote:
Pretty sure Catachans use the galaxy pattern of lasgun, which is shorter than the ones Cadians use (name escapes me what that variant is called starts with a K from memory).

"Kantrael". It's the name of the Forge World dedicated to producing lasguns for the Cadian regiments.

They also produced Hellguns for the Kasrkin regiments.

At least the online wiki is pretty specific that the Catachans use the "Mark 4 Catachan lascarbine".
On the general note: I'll think about it. Maybe add some stubbers ans Bren guns etc. Or just roll with my own interpretation of "can lasweapons shred foilage or not?"

A downgraded Multilaser also sounds cool, I like them a lot anyway.

The point about starting fires in the dry season (or when deployed in a dryer type of forest) might be an interesting point. Could be used in a story.

This is a really interesting thread OP, I've enjoyed reading it a lot.

Based off of your fluff, it sounds a lot like you guys will be going into jungles, rather than fighting invaders in jungles. This particular dynamic is really important for jungle warfare, as the home side has a really steep advantage in terms of infantry combat. Staging an ambush can be relatively easy to do in a jungle environment, and can require really very few men, without any particularly advanced equipment. A single sharpshooter, backed up by a small squad of other troopers with as little as automatic rifles can be extremely effective at engaging much larger targets, and turn a routine patrol into a disaster.

However, one of the great military challenges is how to effectively invade and subjugate jungle terrain. For a long time, the British Empire at it's hight regarded this as a near-impossible task, and would rarely commit British troops to such targets, believing them to simply be impossible until relatively late into the 20th century(note: they would happily throw colonial troops with next to no jungle combat experience at said targets, but we all know why that was). Jungle campaigns, historically have almost always turned into disasters for at least one side. They are exhausting for infantry who become stressed, tired, malnourished and sick in this environment exceptionally quickly, they are hard to watch for commanders, especially from the air, and no matter how tooled up the attackers are, whoever is ambushing and knows the terrain best has a HUGE advantage. In campaigns like Burma in WW2, they can easily devolve into a long, slow, slugfest, where neither side really wins.

For what it's worth, probably the most effective example of being able to go out and take a jungle target (if not hold), the US doctrine from Vietnam (and one that really largely informs how squad level tactics operate to the present day) might be your best bet.
You're gonna want a point man (a lot of stuff makes sense here. You want to be able to drop one or more people quickly. Shotgun, LMG, SMG, etc), a couple of ammo carriers, and then a range of weapons to engage potential targets. Because this is an RPG setting, like others have suggested, this would be a great place to get a bit creative with different marks of lasgun. My gut says that lighter, more compact carbines would be better on your grunts, as they won't be as tiresome to carry as something longer and heavier as you're yomping through the jungle, which in and of itself is exhausting.
While iirc, grenade launchers were pretty unpopular in Vietnam, and if you were given one, it usually meant you weren't very popular with the rest of your squad, the ability to put shrapnel into the approximate position of whoever is shooting at you is invaluable in an ambush. Most guard grenade launchers seem to be more modern, around 6-shot, which gets rid of one of the key problems of the original US bloop tube, namely that it was really slow to reload. (though slightly strangely I believe it's still really popular among spec ops operators? Not sure if I'm recalling that right)

If your dudes are, as you say, more accustomed to fighting in the jungle, it might be worth thinking about squad weapons that are a little less conventional. One of my favorite military history nerd stories is how the USMC Stinger machine gun came into being - namely, there was a gap in the needs of marines attacking tropical islands, and some smart guys figured out how to fill that gap. A lighter weight Stinger-style heavy stubber would be v. cool, likewise perhaps with a multi-laser. You might want to look at elysian heavy weapons, too. Air support, while often inaccurate in a jungle environment, even in the modern era, is still vital. Being able to drop in something like a heavy bolter or autocannon somewhere that could be quickly put together and used would absolutely be a method for evening the balance against ambushers - and it would give you more scope for a bit of variation in your squad's loadout.
I could also see stuff like bolt weapons being popular as an attacker, for the same reason as grenades make sense. That kind of explosive firepower, and fast, would be invaluable against a sudden ambush.
Not forgetting that this is 40k, and it's something you've already mentionned, but! Flamers! The flamethrower is a pretty handy tool for dealing with plant terrain, and a special weapons squad, or even a team of veterans who get called in to clear LZs, or indeed, burn out really dug in enemies is VERY 40k, but also kind of practical, too. Not unlike the machine gun, they make a lot of sense for scaring enemies out of cover, which is something to keep in mind as an attacker.

Well, the default weaponry for catachan regiments is

Lascarbine
Flamer
Mortar

so....that's clearly what they think, anyway.

As far as laser vs cover....it's actually something 40k gets right
a high power laser is a lot better antitank weapon than anti-infantry weapon, because hitting 'squishy' stuff with it is a lot less effective.

Obviously it's a matter of relative overkill, but water (i.e. people and plants) takes about four times as much energy to heat a kilo of the stuff one degree as carbon steel.

obviously you need to heat metals hotter to damage them, but essentially it means that thermal transfer which can burn body armour is not necessarily overkill at the squishy person inside it, hence the wierd "penetrating but low damage" profile of the hotshot.

Basically, with dense organic cover, solid shot is better. The reason the guard don't use it is logistical not tactical.

The reason I said lasguns might not work in foliage is that it depends on how the lasbolt delivers it's energy to the target.

If it hits and instantly dumps all its energy into the target, it'll hit a leaf and vapourise it rather wastefully.

Or, if it acts more like a bullet, losing only as much energy as it takes to overcome the obstacle it'll burn a neat hole through and keep going.

The idea of a "lasbolt" doesn't really make sense in general; the energy requirements to instantly vapourise material like that is immense. So applying real world laser logic doesn't really work.

I floated the idea as just something to consider for your own canon. It might be a cool way to inject a little unique flavour by having your guys use autoguns instead if you wanted to rule the former.

I reckon a lasbolt can punch through leaves and so on. If the guard were hampered by scenery all the time that would be a bit of a bugger.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:There is a reason most catachans don't use lasguns, but Shotguns, bolt pistols, and HBs, or combat knives.

Aren't most Catachans modelled with lasguns?

Lascarbines probably due to manoeuvrability. Reliability probably isn't a care because squads are probably deployed around the support weapons and when your gunner dies another man takes over.

I'd suggest grenade launchers, flamers, missile launchers, and other man-portable support weapons with little to no set up time because ambushes and lower visibility.

Likewise a few shotguns are probably a good choice because they're a bit more likely to hit a target when firing wildly into undergrowth. Longlas would also be good for setting up ambushes of your own.

 Olthannon wrote:
I reckon a lasbolt can punch through leaves and so on. If the guard were hampered by scenery all the time that would be a bit of a bugger.

Well in our autogun carrying present day, riflemen are hampered by scenery. We can't see anything, penetration on our weapons isn't great at anything but short range, and we far prefer to let the heavy weapons deal with such stuff.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:There is a reason most catachans don't use lasguns, but Shotguns, bolt pistols, and HBs, or combat knives.

Aren't most Catachans modelled with lasguns?

I was referring more to the fluff than the table top. On the table top they are re-skinned Cadians, with better rules. In the fluff, they are basically Rambos and Arnolds running around sport hunting Lictors.

@ Fezzik: which parts of fluff mention them prefering solid projectile weapons? At least in the 8th edition codex artwork they are shown with lasweapons and flamers

But I don't own any BL books focussing on them

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Las weaponry is notoriously weak to things like chaff and detraction over distance. It's why ship to ship weapons don't use them much, and most drop flyers deploy smoke and chaff, because it literally blocks and nullifies Las Cannons. If you are telling me that a Las carbine has better punch over distance than a las cannon, I don't know how to respond to that. Solid shot weapons are better.

Be in mind, a laspistol can literally part water and take peoples arms off. It is weak only in comparison to many stronger weapons in universe.

Honestly you'd pick Carbines, SAWs, Flamers, Snipers, Shotguns, and light Mortars combined with a few other weapons that'd be easy to get through the overgrowth.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
@ Fezzik: which parts of fluff mention them prefering solid projectile weapons? At least in the 8th edition codex artwork they are shown with lasweapons and flamers

But I don't own any BL books focussing on them

There is no books that I am aware of that focus on who I am referencing. Sly Marbo, Harker, and Strakken are all the most iconic Catchachans in the "Fluff", and they are all pictured using solid round weaponry. There is also this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/908617.Death_World

They're all special characters, never do you see a special character wielding standard weaponary so I do think it's fair to point to those individuals as evidence of anything.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
There is also this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/908617.Death_World

??? in that exact bookcover (which is also on page 20 of the codex) they all have las/flamerweaponry.The dude in front and the one with the knife in the back both have laspistols, both guys on the left lasguns (you can see the characteristic barrels and Lasgun "tops" as well as a "power" bar on the side of the left front dudes weapon)

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes is a book written by a Vietnam officer veteran, and is great for the difficulties of even just moving through the jungle.

Some non-fiction stalwarts are also worth a read:

Chickenhawk by Robert Mason, about the travails of a Huey pilot.

We were Soldiers Once, and Young by Hal Moore - the initial helicopter assault in the Ia Drang valley, and the horrors of extracting on foot the force that relieved his 7th Air Cavalry force.

Hue by Mark Bowden - written more recently, by the journalist who wrote Black Hawk Down. Although there's clearly more of a component of urban fighting, there are significant sections with US forces pinned down in woodland and jungle, and it has good coverage from the NVA/guerilla side too.

Plenty of books on jungle fighting in WWII, which never seems to have been less than utter Hell on Earth for the participants.

Mortars have a great advantage in woodland - you can set the impact sensitivity of the fuse. Rather than setting it so the bomb will explode on ground impact, many armies learned that if you set it to be more sensitive, it will explode as it descends through foliage. That means it bursts DOWN into entrenchments - nasty if the defender doesn't have a roof.

It worked in the Huertgen forest in WWII. I'm not so well-read on Vietnam, although the jungle there is so-called "triple canopy" forest, so the bomb may explode too high.

Light bullets tumble when they hit brush - less effective at penetrating skin and armour, but still scary scary for suppressive fire. I'd imagine lasguns lose energy quickly firing though humidity, and thick leaves and brush.

As an Infantry man who learned his 7-8, your talk of Tumbling bullets making for less penetration on skin makes me want to cry.

The 5.56 round was INTENDED to tumble, especially the green tipped ball ammo. It is not intended to punch through armor, but to hit flesh, tumble, break apart, and basically careen off bone and bounce around inside the target. It creates devastatingly hard to heal wounds, as anyone training in combat casualty can tell you. 5x56.45 ball ammo is also remarkably flat trajectory, unlike it's heavier father, the 7x62.51 or grandfather, the 7x62.63 (30-06). Which hits like a truck, but unless you are shooting 163gr BTHP, does crap on accuracy over repeated use.

I don't know where I was going with this, but you stike me as someone who never had this beaten into you by an NCO, and that's not your fault. Just don't disparage my sweet 5.56 nato.

Whatever you include, there has to be one soldier with a hand flamer and a machete! That combo just sounds awesome

also, claymores

Chainsword, without any doubt or regret

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
As an Infantry man who learned his 7-8, your talk of Tumbling bullets making for less penetration on skin makes me want to cry.

The 5.56 round was INTENDED to tumble, especially the green tipped ball ammo. It is not intended to punch through armor, but to hit flesh, tumble, break apart, and basically careen off bone and bounce around inside the target. It creates devastatingly hard to heal wounds, as anyone training in combat casualty can tell you. 5x56.45 ball ammo is also remarkably flat trajectory, unlike it's heavier father, the 7x62.51 or grandfather, the 7x62.63 (30-06). Which hits like a truck, but unless you are shooting 163gr BTHP, does crap on accuracy over repeated use.

I don't know where I was going with this, but you stike me as someone who never had this beaten into you by an NCO, and that's not your fault. Just don't disparage my sweet 5.56 nato.

I'm a fat old Scotsman, not a gun or military guy - thank you for that. But does my point stand - the round penetrates flesh, then tumbles to make a messy wound, right? So does tumbling before it hits a person make it less likely to penetrate?

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Olthannon wrote:
I reckon a lasbolt can punch through leaves and so on. If the guard were hampered by scenery all the time that would be a bit of a bugger.

Well in our autogun carrying present day, riflemen are hampered by scenery. We can't see anything, penetration on our weapons isn't great at anything but short range, and we far prefer to let the heavy weapons deal with such stuff.

Aye man but that's a given obviously. Don't think we are in any doubt that jungle fighting is a mess? I meant it more in the discussion further up where the talk was about lasrounds wasting all their energy on a leaf rather than knocking through it.

If the leaf was defeated by the firepower of the Lasgun then it was not an Imperial leaf and therefore an enemy of Mankind. The Guardsman has been diligent in their duty to destroy the enemies of Mankind in all their forms.
Mission accomplished.

 Momotaro wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
As an Infantry man who learned his 7-8, your talk of Tumbling bullets making for less penetration on skin makes me want to cry.

The 5.56 round was INTENDED to tumble, especially the green tipped ball ammo. It is not intended to punch through armor, but to hit flesh, tumble, break apart, and basically careen off bone and bounce around inside the target. It creates devastatingly hard to heal wounds, as anyone training in combat casualty can tell you. 5x56.45 ball ammo is also remarkably flat trajectory, unlike it's heavier father, the 7x62.51 or grandfather, the 7x62.63 (30-06). Which hits like a truck, but unless you are shooting 163gr BTHP, does crap on accuracy over repeated use.

I don't know where I was going with this, but you stike me as someone who never had this beaten into you by an NCO, and that's not your fault. Just don't disparage my sweet 5.56 nato.

I'm a fat old Scotsman, not a gun or military guy - thank you for that. But does my point stand - the round penetrates flesh, then tumbles to make a messy wound, right? So does tumbling before it hits a person make it less likely to penetrate?

Depends on what it's trying to penetrate? Human flesh, no. Imagine I throw a coin at you that weighs about 5grams. It's not going to penetrate, or even leave a mark, even if I throw it as hard as possible likely at a speed of 66FPS, or 45mph. Now imagine that I throw it at a speed of a M-4 round. 1700FPS. That is a speed of about1100MPH. That coin is going through your chest, tissue, even level 1 body armor or bone if it's a direct shot.

 Momotaro wrote:


I'm a fat old Scotsman, not a gun or military guy - thank you for that. But does my point stand - the round penetrates flesh, then tumbles to make a messy wound, right? So does tumbling before it hits a person make it less likely to penetrate?

Any modern bullet, once it hits a suitably resistant medium, will start to tumble. The degree to which it tumbles will depend on its size and density, its velocity, whether it passed through other objects/layers on its way to the meat and so on. Generally, a slower and heavier bullet will accomplish fewer "tumbles" and deflect less as it goes through fleshy stuff, while a lighter but faster round will tumble more, and take a less straight path. The 5.56 NATO round is a bit exceptional in that it tends to deform and throw off small chunks when it hits the body (despite not technically being a hollowpoint or frangible bullet, which would be naughty according to our interpretation of the rules of war). This creates a larger and more destructive wound path than it would if the bullet remained structurally intact.

No firearm or bullet in common use is intended to "tumble" as it flies through the air. That would make it hilariously inaccurate, slow, and less capable of penetrating whatever it does hit. Sometimes people will claim that, and are repeating some misunderstood factoid they got from some other ill-informed sort. (But for clarity's sake, neither Fezzik nor any other poster here has done so.)

This is what I was getting at.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
At least the online wiki is pretty specific that the Catachans use the "Mark 4 Catachan lascarbine".
On the general note: I'll think about it. Maybe add some stubbers ans Bren guns etc. Or just roll with my own interpretation of "can lasweapons shred foilage or not?"

A downgraded Multilaser also sounds cool, I like them a lot anyway.

The point about starting fires in the dry season (or when deployed in a dryer type of forest) might be an interesting point. Could be used in a story.

It’s definitely the galaxy pattern, if they call it something else now it’s a retcon.

5th Ed Guard Codex says the Catachan Regiments favour the Mk.4 Lascarbine, which looks exactly the same as the Galaxy one you have shown. So, who cares what the name is?

The Galaxy pattern might just simply be known as "Catachan" pattern for the sake of ease.

Knowing the imperial guard and supply chains they would likely get long coats and sniper rifles.

I think in an entrenched position in a jungle a heavy bolter would be awesome. The explosive rounds would mess up cover and those out of sight and make all the plant life into shrapnel as well as being a great image when they opened up and destroyed everything in front of them.

Ooh man, on the topic of which, I remember an interview I listened to with an AC130 gunner (afghanistan war) who got his first confirmed kill because of plant life.
Fired a shell (he said what type I think but I'm stupid and don't remember) that was supposed to explode before it hits the ground, and shower an area with shrapnel. There was something wrong with the shell, and it didn't detonate when it was supposed to. Went into a tree, THEN blew, turning most of the trunk into flying shards of wood, and dropping the rest on two enemies, killing them. Never forget, OP, the the trees can be your friends, too.