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I was just wondering if you could use the bolters from the tactical squad box on heresy era marines?

Thanks.

Yea its no problem to use regular bolters for chaos marines. If you want fluff for it just say that they your chaos marines scavenged or stole from marines they killed or a supply point.

Those bolters weren't invented til well after the heresy, so if you wanted to be "historically accurate" you wouldn't want to use them.

Yeah. The old bolters look a fair bit different:



Compared to what they were during the heresy days:



It's not just that the old ones were blowback and the new ones aren't. They're basically different guns. Only the barrel and the part at the back look the same.

I agree with SRM. If you're going to go to all to bother to recreate a pre-heresy army, you might as well do it right. If you don't want to put in all the effort to get the detail right, just do a 40k marine army, rather than a 30k one.

 Ailaros wrote:
Compared to what they were during the heresy days:

The equipment on the old RTB marines is not automatically 'Heresy-era'... it's just old designs. GW is still figuring out how to shoe-horn a lot of it into the timeline as they go.

While it is closest in design to Forgeworld's 'Umbra' pattern, which was in use at the close of the Great Crusade, so far as I'm aware it hasn't really been 'officially' fit into the current background.

insaniak wrote:The equipment on the old RTB marines is not automatically 'Heresy-era'... it's just old designs. GW is still figuring out how to shoe-horn a lot of it into the timeline as they go.

Oh, they did stick with it.
On page 166, the 6E rulebook has a picture of Great Crusade Space Wolves, and this is the gun that they carry. At least it looks like it - you can't see the entire weapon, but it is a bolter with the magazine at the front, which seems fairly iconic.

Also see these miniatures: http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat440161a&prodId=prod1710010a
Now, the second from the left seems like a Great Crusade era Space Marine who already carries a newer boltgun, but I'm going to assume that they switched from that Thunder Warrior's gun to the newer model sometime during the Great Crusade - and after the Heresy, no new look was ever invented because of tech stagnation.

[edit] I suppose it does mean that the "current" bolters are also okay for Heresy Era Space Marines - they were just still "new" back then and not everyone already had them issued.