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The short range of small arms strikes me as incredibly stupid. A boltgun can fire what, 30, 35 yards?
I don't think it would be inbalanced to allow small arms (lasguns, boltuns etc) to shoot say 48", but still rapid fire from12".
What does dakka think?

And Shuriken Catapults?

Joey wrote:The short range of small arms strikes me as incredibly stupid. A boltgun can fire what, 30, 35 yards?
I don't think it would be inbalanced to allow small arms (lasguns, boltuns etc) to shoot say 48", but still rapid fire from12".
What does dakka think?

Sorry, what? A 48" standard weapon?

That's a very bad idea. If this were rules, then assault will become absolutely pointless, as it'd be a suicide mission getting through the board.

Also, it's 48". That's Lascannon and ML Range, NOT WHERE A STANDARD GUN WOULD GO TO.

Joey wrote:The short range of small arms strikes me as incredibly stupid. A boltgun can fire what, 30, 35 yards?

There is no conversion scale from tabletop distance to real life distance for 40k.

Joey wrote:
What does dakka think?

It thinks this is an insipidly bad idea.

48 inches is a tad extreme.

Maybe 30 inches would be better. In an edition where assault is king, it would balance it our i think.
Make tau guns rapid fire at there usual range.

But keep rapid fire at 12 inches. 12 inches is assault range, so Joey is right about keeping that at this level.

BlapBlapBlap wrote:

Joey wrote:The short range of small arms strikes me as incredibly stupid. A boltgun can fire what, 30, 35 yards?
I don't think it would be inbalanced to allow small arms (lasguns, boltuns etc) to shoot say 48", but still rapid fire from12".
What does dakka think?

Sorry, what? A 48" standard weapon?

That's a very bad idea. If this were rules, then assault will become absolutely pointless, as it'd be a suicide mission getting through the board.

Also, it's 48". That's Lascannon and ML Range, NOT WHERE A STANDARD GUN WOULD GO TO.

Why would assault become pointless? Most assault armies take one round of shooting before they get into assault, are you that afraid of 20 BS 3 lasgun shots hitting your meched-up guys?
Most troops are just an excuse to take a special weapon. Would be nice if they could do a bit more.

Could we also agree that vehicles should move daster than infantry? Or even better, let's just make LOS unnecessary, too... /sarcasm

The range is short to show the "battle range" of the weapons. I'm sure in the fluff there is one example of standard weapons killing at ridiculous ranges, but not in these brief, violent skirmishes.

Realistically, assault rifle has effective range of ~500 meters. Heavy machine gun has effective range of ~1800 meters. Tank cannon has effective range of ~3-5km
Artillery has effective range of ~10-30 km

So "realistically" if you give 30" range for bolter, heavy bolter should have 90" range, battlecannon should have 180" range and artillery should have range of 600"-1 800"

From these numbers, it becomes obvious that 40k has no "scale" per se. Instead we have large amount of fudged numbers that are internally semi-consistent, but are not "realistic" at all.

Lets not go to the "Supersonic jets fly at most 4x as fast as infantry". 2x as fast if the infantry is running or assaulting.

Artillery does have a range of 900+".

'Realism' here is written assuming 40k works like our world. In a world where you tend to face unholy terrors from Hell/ravenous alien bugs/green-skinned fungoid lunatics charging at you with the intent to rip you into tiny pieces on very enclosed battlefields (spaceships, ruined cities, the like), do you really think weapon designers would focus their efforts on making guns longer-ranged, or would they focus on increasing weapon durability, rate-of-fire, and stopping power? If the metagame of war in the universe was focused entirely on long-ranged firefights your rules alteration would make some sense, but the metagame of war in 40k is focused on killing enemies at close quarters; the rules as they stand make perfect sense from the standpoint of the background.