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You've all seen it in games and videos, but do Bolt-weapons really eject shells? I mean, they ARE full-auto RPG's.

They do - The bolt itself needs to be ejected from the bolter before the bolt itself starts flying.

GW fluff (depending on which era you use) seems to show them either as...
-a very large caliber traditional firearm,
-a hand held version of an automatic Grenade launcher like the US military's Mk 19 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mk_19_grenade_launcher
-or as a RPG that is ejected from the weapon with a traditional chemical propellant before it's own rocket system take over to propel it toward the target.

Either way, the bolter has always been portrayed as a weapon whose ammunition involves a shell.

In most fluff and the few games/films as well, the bolter is always shown ejecting shells. Even the models, have a space for the shells to fly out of, a la a traditional machine gun.

The art does show this, but there's no practical reason to. Caseless ammunition is already a thing IRL and when the propellant is a rocket on the back of the bullet instead of a charge that goes off once in the gun there's even less reason for an ammo case.

Do you want them to? - if so they do, if not they don't - thats how I see quite a bit of 40k these days

The little piles of spent bolter shell casings that come with some models such as terminaters suggest they do.

Actually, there is a reason for the shells. Bolters are a type of projectile weapon called a gyrojet. The projectile is a self-contained explosive rocket, with a small powder charge to expel it from the weapon. Because the bolt only has a small charge, it has low recoil and the firearm can be built to be more lightweight since it doesn't directly fire a rocket. Once expelled from the barrel, the rocket ignites and accelerates the projectile to the target. There were some military prototypes back in the 60's or 70's, but no one ever bothered developing the design over more practical traditional rifles.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The art does show this, but there's no practical reason to. Caseless ammunition is already a thing IRL and when the propellant is a rocket on the back of the bullet instead of a charge that goes off once in the gun there's even less reason for an ammo case.

Rule of cool.
A gun spitting casings out looks and sounds cool, plus there is a ton of art to back it up, so thats what I go with lol.

 DarkLink wrote:
Actually, there is a reason for the shells. Bolters are a type of projectile weapon called a gyrojet [...]

..but gyrojet ammunition didn't have shell casings as far as I know. All propellant was cointained within the projectile.

Considering the models have ejection ports, I'd assume so.

kodi wrote:

 DarkLink wrote:
Actually, there is a reason for the shells. Bolters are a type of projectile weapon called a gyrojet [...]

..but gyrojet ammunition didn't have shell casings as far as I know. All propellant was cointained within the projectile.

If you have to justify it, then the propellent in the casing is just enough to spit it out the gun before the gyrojet takes over, resulting in a fairly low recoil (edit: compared to an mk19) for the firer but still resulting in a high velocity projectile.

Of course if you absolutely have to justify it, then you're probably putting too much effort trying to force "realism" on a sci-fantasy universe. All you really need to know is that bolters are cool and they have casings because spent casings flying out of a bolter is also cool.

Bolters are described as having heavy recoil, contrary to gyrojets, so it would be reasonable to assume that they have a more significant charge using a shell casing to achieve a greater initial velocity. But, yeah, the whole fluff behind bolters in the first place is "dude, let's make up a sweet assault rifle that shoots exploding bullets and stuff". Logic is not required.

Well, they're still chucking out a huge honking projectile. Even with a low-propellant kicker charge, there would still be a hell of a lot of recoil just from the mass of the shot. Newton's law and all that.
The Gyrojet weapons had abysmal muzzle velocity, as the projectile sped up over distance via it's rocket propellant. They had little recoil, but were also essentially non-lethal at close ranges (one of the main reasons the project was canned).

Roughly the size of a shotgun slug, which has a decent muzzle velocity. If it only pushed the slug out at 500fps instead of 1500fps, it would only have 11% of the kinetic energy, which wouldn't be particularly hefty, though I'm too lazy to research what equivalent round might have that level of recoil for comparison.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The art does show this, but there's no practical reason to. Caseless ammunition is already a thing IRL and when the propellant is a rocket on the back of the bullet instead of a charge that goes off once in the gun there's even less reason for an ammo case.

Caseless ammo has too many issues to make it practical. It jams too often and is prone to misfires, the ammo also degrades too fast so it doesn't store well.

Bolters haven't been caseless since the earliest days of Rogue Trader.

A bolter is a select-fire assault rifle. The standard bolt round is a .75cal armor piercing rocket assisted bullet that has a delay-impact explosive warhead within it. So it fires like a bullet, with all the killing power thereof, and then a secondary propulsion system ignites giving it more killing power. The bolt itself is designed to pierce armor and tough hide, and after penetration explode within the target. Blowing it apart from the inside and turning what may have been only a serious wound into a fatal one, it also counters the resiliency of many alien species. Particularly orks.

Bolters do eject actual casings with each round fired. The bolter also is designed to be ambidextrous, it has an ejection port on either side to accommodate either a left or right handed user. The double ejection port also would be of great assistance in clearing any potential jams.

The reason for the casing is because the bolt is fired exactly like an actual bullet. This solves the problem that a real life rocket propelled bullet had, it had a minimum lethal range. You could literally stick your finger in the barrel and stop the gun from being dangerous, and shots within a fairly long distance were also not lethal. Plus the gun was woefully inaccurate. The inaccuracy and short range lethality problem is solved by firing it like a normal bullet down a rifled barrel. You get instant lethal velocity AND you immediately induce gyroscopic forces to improve accuracy. The rocket increases the damage of the bullet and ensures a longer lethal range.

A shell is a hollow piece of metal with explosives, something you find on the beach, or a company owned by dutch.

Casing. Casing. The word you're looking for is casing. "Shell" is about as appropriate as "chocolate syrup" or "library card".

The casing could just be there to improve feeding, as it would be difficult to cycle what is effectively a bomblet. Alternately, it could just be there to provide some recoil so that the action worked correctly. But what's far more likely is the conventional bullet with exploding shell (that's how you'd use that word correctly), or the just enough gunpowder to get it going and then the rocket takes over.

And clips are actually magazines and there's no such thing as an accidental discharge and it's debatable whether or not manual safeties are a meaningful contribution to safely handling a firearm. But who cares? Heck, a bolter doesn't even really meet the description of an assault rifle, since it doesn't fire an intermediate cartridge. No reason to nitpick minor details when real life firearm conventions don't even really apply to imaginary weapons tens of thousands of years in a made-up future.

The bolter does in fact discharge shells. It is not caseless. It has a case with an initial charge - which launches the projectile out of the barrel and then once it leave the barrel the bullet becomes a self propelled rocket. This is how marines win fights...everyone is armed with an automatic rpg's.

RPG isn't really a good descriptor. A bolt round doesn't explode large enough to compare to a real grenade. Some specialty rounds do, but not the standard round.

Armor piercing explosive bullets is a better descriptor.

a casing for a shell is really useful for weapon reliability - it prevents heat build-up around the bolt and chamber., delaying a weapon jam or misfire.

makes sense for a bolter when fighting hordes. there are other things about the bolter which make less sense though.

SirDonlad wrote:
a casing for a shell is really useful for weapon reliability - it prevents heat build-up around the bolt and chamber., delaying a weapon jam or misfire.

makes sense for a bolter when fighting hordes. there are other things about the bolter which make less sense though.

Other than the gyro-powered projectile explosive round? Please, continue. After that, describe what's wrong with the chainsword.

Fluff and the models themselves say yes... what other arguments can there be?

Has anyone ever considered how impractical of a weapon a bolter is. It fires projectiles way over 50. cal most of the art I've seen looks like the projectile itself is the size of a grenade. This also means that you can carry very little ammo and you would have to be reloading constantly. Also its size would render it useless if you weren't trying to blast through a bunker or a carnifex. Considering that regular IG trooos use lasguns that run off of battery packs that are mass produced it would be much more practical for space marines to use larger more powerful lasguns that are integrated into the generators that run their power armor and can also use standard issue battery packs if needed. It would give them a weapon that is superior in nearly every way no reloading, can actually continuously fire, incredibly versitile and you are never in danger of running out of ammo if you are anywhere near any imperial facility. Not only that but the reduced bulk of the ammunition you would have to carry would increase combat efficiency by a lot. And their fluff would be accurate no one is going to be heroicly saving planets or holding up to a tyranid swarm when you are constantly reloading AND tethered to a supply depot

 Grey Templar wrote:
RPG isn't really a good descriptor. A bolt round doesn't explode large enough to compare to a real grenade. Some specialty rounds do, but not the standard round.

Armor piercing explosive bullets is a better descriptor.

I think you are correct - the standard bolter round likely has much less explosive and much more solid slug than a standard grenade round.

The guns appear to have a forward assist and a breech bolt. I expect they will eject casing of the bullet.

You can argue that caseless ammunition is a current thing and that it would be expected in 40K, but then they are technologically backwards and so having bullet casings could also be a thing.

hawkhaven667 wrote:
Has anyone ever considered how impractical of a weapon a bolter is. It fires projectiles way over 50. cal most of the art I've seen looks like the projectile itself is the size of a grenade. This also means that you can carry very little ammo and you would have to be reloading constantly. Also its size would render it useless if you weren't trying to blast through a bunker or a carnifex. Considering that regular IG trooos use lasguns that run off of battery packs that are mass produced it would be much more practical for space marines to use larger more powerful lasguns that are integrated into the generators that run their power armor and can also use standard issue battery packs if needed. It would give them a weapon that is superior in nearly every way no reloading, can actually continuously fire, incredibly versitile and you are never in danger of running out of ammo if you are anywhere near any imperial facility. Not only that but the reduced bulk of the ammunition you would have to carry would increase combat efficiency by a lot. And their fluff would be accurate no one is going to be heroicly saving planets or holding up to a tyranid swarm when you are constantly reloading AND tethered to a supply depot

From the fluff I have read on the weapon. The bolters inefficiencies with ammo are more than made up for by it's destructive power. Marines are particularly immune to the bolters weakness because they don't typically fight in drawn out engagements.

Looking at the Heckler and Koch etc, I can't see a breech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_didDgUjn0

Probably doesn't suffer from the 'Bolter Jammed!' that I keep reading about, or that my Terminators keep complaining about when a shell gets stuck in the breech

Look at the models.
If there's an eject slot on the weapon, it's supposed to eject shells. IIRC, bolters have them.
But, since the fluff states that bolters fire mini-grenades, they don't fire many, and the clips are fairly small.
I remember mention of them being caseless, but I think that was an early one-off mention, back in the RT days.

 jreilly89 wrote:


Other than the gyro-powered projectile explosive round? Please, continue. After that, describe what's wrong with the chainsword.

uh, not sure what you're trying to say there.

if you're having a bad day, keep it to yourself - don't take it out on other people.