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From what i understad, and correct me if im wrong, bolt pistols fire casless ammunition. Do bolters dfire casless rounds too? In alot of artwork they are shown ejacting shells, yet so are bolt pistols.

Yes the ammunition is supposedly caseless, and yes, art frequently shows great piles of shell cases.

I read the thread title as "A question about boilers.", and find myself oddly disappointed.

English Assassin wrote:Yes the ammunition is supposedly caseless, and yes, art frequently shows great piles of shell cases.

I read the thread title as "A question about boilers.", and find myself oddly disappointed.

Lol, thanks.

You pick your source on this one. I find that there are vastly fewer 'WTF?!... yebbut...' problems if you embrace the case and ignore anything that says otherwise.

English Assassin wrote:Yes the ammunition is supposedly caseless

No it's not.

Bolter shell casings are a well known good luck charm, especially ones fired from astartes or sororitas boltguns.

Melissia wrote:

English Assassin wrote:Yes the ammunition is supposedly caseless

No it's not.

Bolter shell casings are a well known good luck charm, especially ones fired from astartes or sororitas boltguns.

I know that, and I can indeed distinctly remember, back in 1995 or whenever, tutting at the inconsistency of the marksmanship award in the Ultramarines codex being a bolt shell from Guilliman's gun, since at the time boltgun ammunition was described as caseless.

Or so I thought... not only is the ammunition now cased (having bothered to check 5th edition) but I can't actually find anything in RT or 2nd ed to explain why I though so at the time. Perhaps I'm going senile and only imagining that I'd remembered it...

I vaguely recall having read about bolt ammunition being described as caseless in at least one book, but that bit disappeared as quickly as it showed up. *shrug*

I have a very distinct memory of having read it somewhere, but since I cannot find it, I humbly abandon my assertion.

But it's going to bother me...

Yeah, I've defo read it in a studio source meself; which will more than likely have been ~10++ years ago, since I've bought very little studio fluff since (I consider the more recent studio stuff to be anti-fluff, with negative information value).

Also seems to be a lot of confusion whenever this is discussed where most folks take the existence of the rocket propulsion phase to be exactly synonymous with caseless.

BTW Master of Arms: Used to be that all Bolt weapons less than the Heavy Bolter fired exactly the same ammo....

I think bolt ammo was case-less, but then i rember reading somewhere that GW switched to cased ammo because having a bolter spew casing out of the side in art "just looks cool." and to be honest i have to agree.

tsz52 wrote:BTW Master of Arms: Used to be that all Bolt weapons less than the Heavy Bolter fired exactly the same ammo....

"Used"?

As in: 'I can say with confidence that ... used to be the case. With the current crop of clowns in the studio, however, changing everything that I knew to be the case, always for the worst, just for sh!ts and giggles or out of laziness, I can't really claim much of anything now with confidence, but value precision and would hate to give anyone erroneous information.'

'Used to be ...' was just a bit more brief.

Oh, phew. And here I thought I missed something obvious.

There is indeed evidence for both, and I usually see this chalked up to differences in manufacture. It seems that bolt ammo was intended to be case-less, and that it was initially propelled forward either by an internal charge or rail like technology before the gyro-jet kicked in. But Imperial tech production is all over the map, every world and chapter doing things a little differently.

So maybe some organizations like to remove a point of failure form the bolter and find cased ammo more reliable, others may just find it easier to manufacture, and still others may not have the capability to produce the tech required for caseless propulsion.

Of course the real reason is that, yes it was initially written as caseless, but bullet casings are a powerful symbol, so they stuck around anyways.

Different places producing different designs is a good justification though.

riplikash: Most Astartes use the Godwyn pattern, which is not caseless.

Ergo, it wasn't intended to be caseless, because the Godwyn pattern is basically the pattern that all other boltguns are based upon in some way or fashion.

I'm not going to say your wrong, Melissia, but is there a source for all boltguns being based on the Godwyn pattern? I know it is very common, but I have never seen it called dominant, or the origin of the design.

I also don't know that most Astartes officially use the Godwyn pattern anymore than most guardsman wear Cadian gear. In the fluff things are much more diverse than in the model range, for obvious reasons.

Regardless, bolt guns have consistently been described as using caseless ammo since RT days, and also have consistently been described as using cased ammo, so from a fluff perspective it seems likely both are true and that the differences come down to where and how they are manufactured. Heck, the differences may even be in the ammo rather than the gun, and the gun just provides an extractor (the portion that ejects the case) for cross compatibility.

The 'Godwyn' is the name given to a range of bolters from the, I think, MkI to the 'standard' MkVb. Sororitas use a variation of a Godwyn pattern called the Godwyn-De'az. However you've got loads of variations, such as the Phobos, Ceres, Locke etc.

It bears importance to mention that the old style 2nd Edition bolters don't have an ejection port molded on them (neither a charging handle, but it's believable they could have an automatic charging system). Now whether this falls into the classic GW connundrum of being designed entirely by guys who don't have any functional knowledge of weapons or warfighting, or was indicative of supporting the older fluff that existed about caseless bolt ammunition, remains to be decided. The modern heavy bolters only have one ejection port, which means they are probably unable to eject both links, and casings. Again, though, a problem with the model design, or intentional, who knows.

Generally speaking (and I mean generally, so don't bank on it too much), I think it depends on the type of round being used. It's possible that some rounds, perhaps the more specialised ones, are caseless, which is why the prevalence of artwork and source fluff which includes bolter cases is still just as correct as the caseless one.

Just suggesting a fluffy reason for both, chiefs.

riplikash wrote:I'm not going to say your wrong, Melissia, but is there a source for all boltguns being based on the Godwyn pattern?

Not all, but Dark Heresy does mention that most civilian bolters are based on at least the SHAPE of the Godwyn pattern, and Sororitas bolters are an alteration (Godwyn De'az) which are designed specifically for them off of the Godwyn pattern.

riplikash wrote:Regardless, bolt guns have consistently been described as using caseless ammo since RT days

No they haven't.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Sparks_Havelock wrote:However you've got loads of variations, such as the Phobos, Ceres, Locke etc.

Each of those are different patterns that aren't Godwyn pattern.

Melissia wrote:

riplikash wrote:I'm not going to say your wrong, Melissia, but is there a source for all boltguns being based on the Godwyn pattern?

Not all, but Dark Heresy does mention that most civilian bolters are based on at least the SHAPE of the Godwyn pattern, and Sororitas bolters are an alteration (Godwyn De'az) which are designed specifically for them off of the Godwyn pattern.

What book does it say that in? I don't believe it is in the core book, I just checked there. The bolter pictured is Godwyn, but that doesn't really mean much. The FF RPG's make a point of how many patters of every weapon are available.

For now I'm going to discount the idea that the Godwyn is the 'original' bolter upon which others are based. I'm pretty sure it is the the one used in the tac marine kit and art, and therefore the most common point of reference.

riplikash wrote:Regardless, bolt guns have consistently been described as using caseless ammo since RT days

No they haven't.

Read and quote the whole sentence please. I didn't say they are, and have always been described as caseless. I said they have been described both ways for years, possibly as justification due to some of the early models lacking case extractors.

Taken from the 3rd edition big rulz book.

Veteran Sergeant wrote:The modern heavy bolters only have one ejection port, which means they are probably unable to eject both links, and casings. Again, though, a problem with the model design, or intentional, who knows.

Probably the former. With Marine and SoB heavy bolters, it would actually be easy to come up with an excuse for why links aren't necessary (as the feed is a semi-rigid connector to the backpack with the actual rounds and thus their means of transportation not being visible) - but minis such as Harker pretty much ruin this option.

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?prodId=prod40004a

In fact, I just noticed now that Harker's heavy bolter doesn't even have an ejection port - or rather, its "ejection port" is where the gun feeds its ammo from, lol

Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:Generally speaking (and I mean generally, so don't bank on it too much), I think it depends on the type of round being used. It's possible that some rounds, perhaps the more specialised ones, are caseless, which is why the prevalence of artwork and source fluff which includes bolter cases is still just as correct as the caseless one.

That is one way to roll with it, yeah. Not my interpretation, as it clashes with GW's Deathwatch fluff (which pretty much states that stuff like Stalker silenced shells etc are loaded into your standard off-the-rack boltgun) and the usage of caseless ammunition doesn't necessitate the removal of the ejection port (the only thing this would achieve would be incompatibility with cased rounds), but still somewhat viable, given that the Imperium isn't really the most efficient bureaucracy.

A "sort of" variation of your idea would be an assumption that it is just another type of weapon that the Imperium may have fielded for a few centuries until they noticed it's crap. They occasionally do this - I recall having read about the Mars Mk II bolter being distributed to Marines and Sisters before they noticed the gun sucks so it was quickly phased out again.

Personally, I guess the easiest way to deal with this inconsistency would be to just banish it from existence just like antigrav IG vehicles or Astartes MP's - that is, if one truly feels bothered by it.

Melissia wrote:civilian bolters

*twitch*

This right there still ranks amongst my personal top 10 of the most ridiculous, even condescending things I've ever read in outsourced fluff.

Neat!
Well, aside from being interesting reading material in it's own right, this also states that Bolts have casing, at least on the standard bolt.
I think the assumption is that the other types only differ in minor ways, which would mean that they had casing too.


EDIT: Whoops. Yeah, my post was addressing the cool little page posted up, just so's you know. Obvious, maybe, but sometimes it's not clear.

Melissia wrote:

Sparks_Havelock wrote:However you've got loads of variations, such as the Phobos, Ceres, Locke etc.

Each of those are different patterns that aren't Godwyn pattern.

What my tired brain was trying to point out was that there isn't just the Godwyn pattern, but plenty of patterns. I just hate repeating words when I can use others*, so by variations I did mean patterns.

*My deeply seated love of the English language comes from the abundance of words available and I try to use as many as possible. Having listened to "Just A Minute" on BBC Radio 4 for many Monday evenings of my life has not helped either.

Veteran Sergeant wrote:It bears importance to mention that the old style 2nd Edition bolters don't have an ejection port molded on them (neither a charging handle, but it's believable they could have an automatic charging system). Now whether this falls into the classic GW connundrum of being designed entirely by guys who don't have any functional knowledge of weapons or warfighting, or was indicative of supporting the older fluff that existed about caseless bolt ammunition, remains to be decided...

I have a lot of those bolters kicking about and tey have a raised rectangle on one side that I always saw as being for painting black as an ejection port... but that might just be me

However, regardless even guns that fire caseless ammo need an ejection port otherwise how do you clear jams and dud shells?

On the issue of caseless bolters I think they are a myth. I ran through the main sources going all the way back to the RT rulebook and there are no clear statements to support the idea. All the artwork appears to show bolters spilling shells and as soon as the fluff starts actually thinking about such details they describe bolts with casings.

Back in the day all bolt weapons fired the same round from the HB to the standard bolter, bolt pistol and bolt shells for shotguns in Necromunda The heavy bolter just had bigger mags.

OK, well i see the is discrepancy over weather bolters, but what about bolt pistols?

I hold the same position about all bolt weapons.

I know in The Outcast Dead, the Thousand Sons marine makes a note about how the ejected shell casings from Ghota's bolter indicate that it's from an older model, suggesting that 'newer' models don't eject spent casings.

Or that it's just a different style of casing.