Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Mainly thinking Space marine variants for scouts? long barreled bolters, souped up lasguns with scopes?

The latter. That explains how crappy they are.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
The latter. That explains how crappy they are.

I reckon sniper rifles should just always pick targets and have proper stats. I would use them a lot more.

In the older space marine fluff they fired frozen slivers of poison, the always wounds on a 4+ thing was down to that. Now its just used to represent a headshot or whatever. Guard sniper rifles are portrayed as just heavy lasguns, like in gaunts ghosts.

As someone who uses sniper scouts, they arent terrible and can actually be fairly useful against tyranids or anything with high toughness and low armour, you just really need something to distract your target for a bit so the snipers dont get attacked.

I only use snipers for fluff reasons. I have yet to find them useful unfortunately.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To answer the OP they can be many things. Needle rifles, Scoped Bolter variant, Normal rifle and so on. Make it as you want for as long as it has a long barrel people will know its a sniper rifle.

Yeah it is a niche, i had one game where they sat on top of a building killing genestealers and warriors until deathleaper popped out behind them and butchered them unfortunately. They did last almost the whole game though.

Space Marine scouts have sound suppressors on their sniper rifles which would indicate a projectile weapon. On the other hand they also have power cables coming to it from a belt pack... No idea what it is or why. Maybe it's not a power pack but instead the cogitator unit for the rifle's targeting gear.

Yeah im quoting the 3rd ed rulebook, i dont think they thought things out much then. Nowadays i think they just shoot those solid core bolts, like kraken rounds. Not that a suppressor would help, the bolt is still rocket propelled.

Could be a laser propelled weapon? For extra silence? I.E shoot a laser into the charge to ignite it at a huge speed and the silencer just adds to the sound suppression or something?

Im just pulling this out of a hat but its 40k so...

Yeah could be, youre right anything goes. If it looks cool they just run with it i guess. Umless its centurions, then they run with it anyway.

pax_imperialis wrote:
Not that a suppressor would help, the bolt is still rocket propelled.

It's not like suppressors magically turn off the sound anyway - unlike in the movies a gun still sounds like a gun, just a bit smaller. What the rifle suppressor does is tone down the muzzle flash and break up the sound a bit so it's harder to spot where the first shot came from. And it helps with recoil to a degree.

Spetulhu wrote:
Space Marine scouts have sound suppressors on their sniper rifles which would indicate a projectile weapon. On the other hand they also have power cables coming to it from a belt pack... No idea what it is or why. Maybe it's not a power pack but instead the cogitator unit for the rifle's targeting gear.

Sounds like a railgun to me. But who knows.

As to silencers it only muffles the noise over distances. im fairly certain.

A suppressor will make a gun quieter only if you use subsonic rounds. That is, most rifle cartridges achieve above supersonic velocity and the crack is the bullet breaking the sound barrier. A suppressor doesnt stop the intial ignition sound of a cartridge, however guns which fire from a closed breech can be relatively silent. Mp5sd's only sounds are the click from the firing bolt and a hiss of escaping gas.

The subsonic rounds smell pretty bad if i remember correctly though.

Cant say i notice the difference lol, maybe it was what you were shooting :p

Thanks alot, its primarly for some background fluff on how a scout squad got shoot down over an imperial world being invaded by orkz, and they are forced to survive conducting guerilla warfare with the local PDF and population, whom hid in underground vaults, once the orkz made planet fall.

The Dark angel ship the scouts where part of buggered of on some goose chase after the fallen and left the planet to its own demise, the fluff mostly details how these events shaped them to what they are in the 40k millenium.

Ah yes back to the sniper rifle, Im gonna go with them being lasguns with scope and one of the character at one point swaps out the accesories and puts it on a lascannon instead and uses it as his trademark weapon.

Nice scenario the lascannon thing reminds me off that sniper in vietnam who used a browning m2 with a sniper scope.

I think Telion and legion recon use Stalker Pattern Bolters for their rifles.

Sniper rifles should be: +1 to hit, precision on 4+, no LoS. you really need to be able to hit more often and do more meaningful hits. As it is, 5 BS4 snipers barely manage 1 wound on MEQ. The bonus to hit and precision means you could possibly be killing 2 melta out of squad of guardsmen or taking out a grav weapon on a bike squad. That MIGHT be worthwhile. Currently they are absolute crap as they fufill almost no role. Not enough wounds for anti-special weapons, pinning is unreliable at best, not enough rends for anti-MC, and LoS negates all usefulness vs characters.

Neither, they're something like powerful lasguns that then fire poison.

Needle sniper rifles use a laser pulse to penetrate armour before a sliver of crystalised toxin is fired down the beam through the now breached armour. This is the traditional Imperial sniper weapon.

Sniper rifles are a variety of different weapons. Back in the 1st and 2nd Ed days, they were all Needle Rifles. Needle Rifles, as has been mentioned before, use a laser to burn a small hole in armor a millisecond before shoving a crystalized shard of poison into the hole. They always wounded on a 4+, except against a laundry list of critters which included most of the things that you would want to use them on. According to the fluff in the IG codex, Ratlings still use Needlers. Also according to the IG codex, long-barreled lasguns (called Long Las, conveniently enough) are used by regular, non-Ratling IG snipers. They are big lasguns, with overpowered charge packs and longer barrels (as if the extra rifling in a longer barrel will help a LASER be more accurate). Long Las models look very similar to the guns carried by Space Marine Scouts, which implies that SM Scouts use Long Las, too. There is a bolt gun called a "Stalker Pattern" which (judging by the name) sounds like something a sneaky infiltrator-type person would use (which means it could be a sniper rifle boltgun, or just a suppressed, short-range boltgun, like a Sten Mk II... the SM codex isn't clear on the subject).

 Flinty wrote:
Needle sniper rifles use a laser pulse to penetrate armour before a sliver of crystalised toxin is fired down the beam through the now breached armour. This is the traditional Imperial sniper weapon.

So much for 1 shot 1 kill lel.

I pretty much always think of the Stalker Pattern Bolter for snipers, not quite the same as it's a little between a true sniper rifle and a DMR.

Not really sure. Space Marine snipers are, for my money, the most worthless snipers in the game. (Of, you know, the ones that are trying to be snipers. Clearly Khorne Berserkers are worse at it...) I always assumed their sniper rifles were the ones that the AdMech rejected sending to the IG because they failed quality control.