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This is kind of random:

After seeing some dreads throughout the forum, I noticed one thing on them, that I haven't seen on any other ballistic weapons in the game. Maybe I never noticed it on any of the models. Where in the world does the brass(fired casings) for the assault cannon, and the links eject from? Bolt guns, bolt pistols, and heavy bolters all have ejection ports where the spent brass is ejected. With the assault cannons the feed chute seems to run into where one could reasonably assume the casings fall from, which is the bottom. One *might* argue it fires caseless ammunition, but then where would the links go? I understand how a minigun works(M134s), but this kind of confuses me. It also appears that the assault cannon fires off of a single bolt(the mechanism that strips rounds off of the belt, into the chamber, fires, then ejects the spent round), how would it achieve such a high rate of fire? Last but not least, is the "support" beam underneath the barrels actually a piston to operate the bolt? Can anyone provide any evidence, that might shed some insight as to how the Assault Cannon works?

Now I'm going to be up all night contemplating these questions.

This vid shows it at 0:33




Note that it doesn't seem to line up to the gun barrel correctly, so it's just a bad design on GW's part.

All my assault cannons have that little ejection chute. I even took the ejecting brass bit from an Ork big shoota for my GK dreadnought's assault cannon.

It almost lines up with the barrel, slightly lower perhaps. It is possable that the ejection force is made to go downwards and to the side(unlike most of our current weapons which go up and out)

Dreadnought Assault Cannons do have ejection ports, they are just in a slightly incorrect place, because they don't line up with the bottom barrel. Everything I have seen has them firing cased ammunition.

I assume the under-rib is just a chunky piece of support structure, like most things in 40K, that the bottom barrel lines up with to fire through. The Terminator Assault Cannons also have the same design.

It might simply have a double-endded feed system.

The GAU-8 Avenger thats on A-10 Warthog's recycle's spent casings back into the ammunition drum.

its contradicing fluff, in the games and cutscenes of dawn of war they used brass cases, but in the entrys under rulebooks assault cannons use caseless rounds

 sierra 1247 wrote:
its contradicing fluff, in the games and cutscenes of dawn of war they used brass cases, but in the entrys under rulebooks assault cannons use caseless rounds

That's because hot brass showing down is awesome.
Awesome > Effective.

-Matt

HawaiiMatt wrote:

 sierra 1247 wrote:
its contradicing fluff, in the games and cutscenes of dawn of war they used brass cases, but in the entrys under rulebooks assault cannons use caseless rounds

That's because hot brass showing down is awesome.
Awesome > Effective.

-Matt

Pretty much.

What I want to know is what happened to the poor assault cannons? They used to be fully automatic krak missile launcher, lol.

Well can we not use the cut scene as a source? i mean the Sargent in that vid is missing half his brain, "Well we got all these bolters, and heavy bolters, and a dread with an assault cannon, we are in a fortified position with back up on the way and we are fighting orks that are running down a hill at us....CHARGE UP HILL TO BATTLE!!!!"

 Backspacehacker wrote:
Well can we not use the cut scene as a source? i mean the Sargent in that vid is missing half his brain, "Well we got all these bolters, and heavy bolters, and a dread with an assault cannon, we are in a fortified position with back up on the way and we are fighting orks that are running down a hill at us....CHARGE UP HILL TO BATTLE!!!!"

Well, to be fair to him, moments before he just lost his armoured support to an artillery strike. Sitting still and waiting to be bombed is hardly a great idea either.

Flame Boy wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:
Well can we not use the cut scene as a source? i mean the Sargent in that vid is missing half his brain, "Well we got all these bolters, and heavy bolters, and a dread with an assault cannon, we are in a fortified position with back up on the way and we are fighting orks that are running down a hill at us....CHARGE UP HILL TO BATTLE!!!!"

Well, to be fair to him, moments before he just lost his armoured support to an artillery strike. Sitting still and waiting to be bombed is hardly a great idea either.

so the obvious solution is to move to a safer position. i.e a mass of charging bezerk ork infantry?

You must be new to 40k. The safest place to be when artillery (or any gun) is firing at you is in close combat.

 pretre wrote:
You must be new to 40k. The safest place to be when artillery (or any gun) is firing at you is in close combat.

somehow that only works on tabletop, artillery firing into a mass of infantry is definately how things work in fluff and just about any other war, and also in that case then most of the blood ravens would have survived the ork shooting phase