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to expand on this, let's look at the 'movie marines' list (arguably the closest table-top equivalent to fluff accurate marines):

a regular dude has: WS/BS of 5, S/T of 6, 2 wounds, 3 attacks base, and I of 5. They have a 3+ re-rollable armour save, and a 3++ invuln. Their knives are rending, their chainswords are AP: 3 and cause double wounds. All still accurate to what we see in the fluff. Then we get to the bolters: 36" range, S: 6 AP: 4 Assault 4, rending. Not perfect, but LEAGUES more accurate to what we see in the fluff. Would a full army (40+ models) of this be fun to play against? No, hence why it's toned down.

There is a slight balancing point between the two - I do quite like the Knights Errant in the Horus Heresy game - their custom-made 'Paragon Bolters' are Assault 4, Master-Crafted, and Rending.

Why don't marines all run around with lascannon? The Admech obviously can churn enough of them out to arm the billions of tanks they make a year. 40k marines have always had bolter and as bolter are fundamentally the benchmark for small arms in the game everything else just gets better.

How many points are HS Volley Guns? It seems odd to compare a squad special or heavy weapon with the armament of the common soldiery.

Nomeny wrote:
How many points are HS Volley Guns? It seems odd to compare a squad special or heavy weapon with the armament of the common soldiery.

This is meant to be fishing for fluff reasoning, not tabletop reasoning. There are obvious balance issues when you use the TT as your metric.

Nomeny wrote:
How many points are HS Volley Guns? It seems odd to compare a squad special or heavy weapon with the armament of the common soldiery.

This is the background forum. Points costs do not exist in the background.

True, but whilst there aren't points costs, there is an actual cost implication.

At the same time, we don't really know how rare stuff is. Plasma guns are supposedly rare, but guard squads are issued with them.

Even if they're a lot rarer in the universe than the game implies (say....of a regiment, 90% of special weapons are common stuff like grenade launchers or flamers and only one in ten get a plasma gun), clearly there are a hell of a lot more astra militarum plasma guns than there are astartes bolters.

But are hotshot volley guns rarer and more expensive than astartes bolters?

(You could ask why the Militarum Tempestus don't use volley guns as their standard weapon - I'd bloody love it if they did!)

The Tempestus are obviously more common than the Astartes, but we've no metric for how much more common.
The supposed 'thousand chapters' means there are probably a million or so astartes. There's no real definition of the tempestus' net fighting strength that I'm aware of. Obviously it's more but is it ten times? A hundred times? A million times?

Hotshot weaponry is common enough that whilst their numbers are restricted, it's the standard weapon of scions, and there's no indication that the Volley gun is in any way rarer or massively more complex to produce than the standard rifle or pistol.

Also, since we're talking background forum, it's worth pointing out the 'astartes weaponry' argument. I know people often disagree on this, but one thing that has been a thing in the RPGs (and not just FFG, even when Black Library published Dark Heresy is was still a concept) is the idea of "astartes calibre weaponry" - whilst in the simplified version of 40k a bolter is a bolter is a bolter, in the more narrative and detailed universe (and rules) of the RPG, believe me you bloody well know the difference between a bolt round from a commissar's weapon and a 1.0 Astartes mass-reactive.

In RPGs, Hotshot weapons fall into a nice bracket - better at punching through armour than bolt rounds, but worse at doing organic damage (which makes a certain amount of scientific sense; the human body is 90% water, which has 10 times the specific heat capacity of steel).

Astartes bolt rounds, by comparison, are much, much scarier and frankly a lot closer to 'normal' heavy bolter rounds.

This all makes sense, yes.

The bolter is very mobile and more useful in melee than heavy weapons, which is why Astartes don't all use heavy bolters. The bolter's high ROF while maintaining devastating power is why they use it over mass plasmas, to help them deal with renegade and ork hordes they often face.

The bolter is lightweight (...relative to things like assault cannons), powerful, more reliable than plasmas, have a high rate of fire and a decent ammunition capacity while also doing quite well as clubs in melee.

IOW they do not suck as much as their tabletop equivalent. They are the perfect counterpart to the lasgun for Astartes use, trading reliability for raw power.

This is IMO the only cinematic clip ever to show boltrounds correctly in accordance to the fluff:

Apart from the fact they look like they're sticking flares to the Tau instead of actually detonating because of the PG rating of the game...

Which Marines are those killing the Tau?

Raptors, I believe.

Personally from my experience of the FLuff the bolter is the better weapon.

However to play devils advocate lets say on a gun v gun with everything else being equal the volley gun IS better....

Its clearly not being used by everyone , or any marines.

Therefore we can safely assume that there is a reason, perhaps one we are not, and cannot be aware of becuase of our limited real insight into the setting that means its not issued out as a general arm ahead of the bolter. vis a vis the bolter is better its just that we dont know why....