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Nothing about Bolters really makes sense. They very clearly have been shown ejecting casings and ammunition using casings despite the fact that they've been described as caseless in some places. The fundamental concept of a rocket gun has also largely been proven to be somewhat ineffective, they've been made but since they don't reach maximum speed for some time after they leave the muzzle they can't hit the broad side of a barn (and if they had a booster charge to alleviate this there's no real reason to put a rocket engine in them). Other bolters have the magazines so far forward that a chambered round would basically be sitting right at the muzzle, or how most Bolter magazines would hold a tiny number of rounds...like 10

A 20mm would be about the appropriate caliber, however I'd surmise that they probably wouldn't be any more "explosive" than 20mm, 20mm cannon shells are already explosive, and huge.

I mean here is a 20mm cannon shell next to a .50 BMG round (itself developed as an Anti-Aircraft/Anti-Materiel round), far more akin to something in the Autocannon range than the Bolter range.

I'd expect Bolters to probably be more akin to something like 25mm grenade, like the XM25 Grenade Launcher, that actually has very Bolter looking rounds.

locarno24 wrote:
Whether bolter shells are caseless or not has varied wildly throughout the history of the books and codices.

Regardless, Insaniak is correct - even a caseless round will need ejecting occasionally to clear a jam or other misfire.

This was actually one of the big original selling points, and ultimate pitfalls of caseless ammunition. Since they were caseless, you didn't need an ejection cycle and could cut that part out of the firing cycle entirely and get a resulting notable increase in rate of fire and remove another point of entry for foreign matter into the internals of the gun. That was the big selling point of the concept.

The problem was, yes it made it very difficult to clear jams and misfires, but also, almost as important, brass cases absorb a lot of heat from firing, and their absorbing of that heat and subsequent ejection from the gun actually plays a major role in heat management, and as a result caseless weapons tended to overheat very quickly.

However, reintroducing some sort of ejection mechanism to resolve these issues largely defeated the reason you'd bother with caseless ammo in the first place aside from ammunition weight reduction.