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I just had some general questions about the different weapons. Anyone else who has any weapon related questions feel free to hijack this thread and ask them.

Kroot rifle- The general fan knowledge seems to be that it fires hard rounds, but the codex says is a little muddy saying that it uses chemical perpetuate and that it's been adapted to fire pulse rounds. So what is it. Bullets, pulse or both?

Cyclic ion blaster- The description kind of makes it sound like a Ion flame thrower. Is that how it looks?

Fusion blaster- What dose this weapon look like when it fires?

Meta gun- Same question. Is it like a really hot flame thrower or something else.

Bioguns- this is just a general nid question, but why do there guns look so much like guns? Is there some hidden reason for that?

Meltaguns fire an invisible burst of superheated air.

Coolyo294 wrote:Meltaguns fire an invisible burst of superheated air.

So it would look like the tank or the wall just melted away with out being hit by anything?

Meltaguns fire a superheated slag burst into a target.

The Ion Blaster:



Bioguns look like guns because it's easier to know something is a gun if it looks like a gun. Why gaunts weapons have clips, I don't know.

Well, there would be a heat shimmer.

nomotog wrote:I just had some general questions about the different weapons. Anyone else who has any weapon related questions feel free to hijack this thread and ask them.

Kroot rifle- The general fan knowledge seems to be that it fires hard rounds, but the codex says is a little muddy saying that it uses chemical perpetuate and that it's been adapted to fire pulse rounds. So what is it. Bullets, pulse or both?

Fires bullets, but ones designed with high penetrative capabilities and are more advanced then any kind of round that exists today.

Cyclic ion blaster- The description kind of makes it sound like a Ion flame thrower. Is that how it looks?

Gatling gun shooting Ion blasts.

Fusion blaster- What dose this weapon look like when it fires?

Yellow/Whitish blasts.

Meta gun- Same question. Is it like a really hot flame thrower or something else.

Just a blast of superheated air.

Bioguns- this is just a general nid question, but why do there guns look so much like guns? Is there some hidden reason for that?

Just for in-game mechanics, "what you see is what you get" and so on. It doesn't make much sense in-universe, Biomorphs really should resemble Zerg weapons from Starcraft or what have you.

Coolyo294 wrote:Well, there would be a heat shimmer.

And a very, very bright flash and the small of ionized air according to the Cain books.


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Harriticus wrote:Biomorphs really should resemble Zerg weapons from Starcraft or what have you.

No they shouldn't.

I've played the warhammer game for the xbox 360 - Kill Team - and the melta gun spools up slowly producing a high pitched whine, and then produces a focused stream of super-heated air... It's like a hair dryer overdosed on crack...

^ I was going to say a melta's like a hairdryer...

The meltagun doesn't fire superheated air, and it's definitely not like a hair dryer. Super-heated air at the temperatures required to melt straight through metal is called plasma.

It used to be described flat-out as a microwave weapon, cooking a target like your kitchen microwave. That doesn't seem to be favored anymore, which is good because a microwave gun might work against organic targets, but wouldn't actually melt through armor. Now it seems there are two methods of operation for two different variants: "sub-molecular agitation" (presumably caused by an electromagnetic field or particle beam) and a "pyrum-promethium mixture".

The whole sub-molecular agitation bit sounds similar to the microwave gun bit, but because it's more vague it may be a little more feasible. My physics isn't so hot (I'm an aerospace engineer, I don't much care about what's going on at the particle level), but I've seen people saying that a broader spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, with impossibly staggering amounts of energy, would actually melt through metal if you focused it tightly enough. That or a similar concept firing mostly electrons, with lots of radiation as a side effect. Either way you're trying to agitate the atoms in the material and/or break molecular bonds, generating huge amounts of heat very quickly. This is essentially the "maser" version of the melta gun. It would probably superheat the air it passed through (instead of firing superheated air), looking like a bright beam and making a sound like a roar of thunder.

The other explanation, the pyrum-promethium mixture, is more like a very intense flame weapon. You have a highly combustible mixture, and then I suppose you're focusing it narrowly with a magnetic field or something. This is basically a plasma weapon, but a powerful short-range beam instead of a travelling ball of plasma. Perhaps the difference between this and a regular plasma weapon is the containment method. You aren't charging it up and trying to create coherent balls of plasma with long range, so there's less risk of plasma escaping. Instead you have a one-shot jet of intense plasma, created chemically, and corralled in by magnetic fields to allow it to expand directly forwards. It'll lose energy quickly, hence the short range, but on the way it'll be capable of melting straight through things. This seems like a more believable explanation to me.

So a melta gun is a plasma gun. Then what dose that make a plasma gun?

What we call plasma in the real world is not the same thing as what 40K considers plasma... not quite, anyway. 40K seems to have a very narrow definition of what constitutes "plasma". A Melta and a Plasma weapon in 40K do not fire the same thing, and cannot share ammunition canisters. A Melta really is more like a hairdryer than a rifle, though I would hesitate to say that it fires super-heated "air", and rather state that it fires a ray of superheated "energy".