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 Bobthehero wrote:
The Guard also has some boltguns. And I have no doubt that if the Imperium wanted a smaller, but better equipped military, they could make way more bolters than pulse weaponry, there's just not enough demand for the weapon.

EDit: And I wonder if the Tau could make pulse weapons at the same rate as they are now if the role were reversed. And then there's hotshot weaponry, which might lack some punch, but has amazing armor penetration compared to well, any other standard weaponry, except the pulse blaster at extremely close ranges.

It's also shorter ranged.It's a specialist weapon for killing troops in power armor. You put it against fire warriors in the open and it'd might as well be a pistol.

I guess, this is why most units using said guns are dropped near enemies where their short range doesn't matter as much, its also more reliable to go through combat armor, while pulse will not go through carapace armor reliably.

I heard the only reason guard don't field Bolters as standard is that a bolter can pose a legitimate threat to an astartes.
And we wouldn't want guard doing that now would we? They might turn traitor with them!

Impressive though the Tau's manufacture of the pulse rifle en-mass is, it doesn't quite compare to the scale of the Imperium.

In galactic terms, the scale and population of the Tau Empire is orders of magnitude smaller than the Imperium, as is their logistical challenge.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the Lasgun is more impressive as an industrial feat, it just means that we need to look a little deeper than 'standard Tau infantry have S5 guns'.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
The Tau Empire is able to mass-manufacture a far more powerful weapon.

The pulse rifle is also an incredibly widely-available, standardized weapon... that also shoots farther and harder than a bolter.

The pulse rifle doesn't even have a bayonet lug! It might be a nice toy for plinking cans down in the gravel pit, but it is not a serious weapon of war.

At least that's what the Commissar tells me.

I'd need to buy the novel and read it again, but there's a bit in one of the Last Chancers novel where the narrator tells a Tau diplomat the population of his home hive world. The Tau is astonished - that single planet has a greater population than the entire Tau empire.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
The Tau Empire is able to mass-manufacture a far more powerful weapon.

The pulse rifle is also an incredibly widely-available, standardized weapon... that also shoots farther and harder than a bolter.

To maybe a few million soldiers. In one particular part of the galaxy. Plus, Bolters are more compact and tactically flexible than Pulse Rifles. It's the difference between a submachine gun and a semi-automatic full powered rifle.

The reason why Bolters aren't more common mostly have to do with logistics rather than the Imperium's inability to make enough to supply their soldiers with them. Lasguns are powerful enough for the most common foes an Imperial soldier is likely to face, require far less maintenance, are cheaper to produce and use rechargeable power packs as ammunition. For an army of uncountable billions the Lasgun is the perfect fit. Bolters are cumbersome weapons that can only be used effectively by elite soldiers who train heavily in their exclusive use. Or by officers who really want to make a statement and a bolt pistol just won't do.

Bolters aren't that hard to produce. The Imperial Guard uses heavy bolter on almost all their tanks and in heavy weapon teams. There is probably very little regiments who don't have at least a dozen or so of these weapons or somthing similar. Their ammunition is something else. A Bolt shell is a mini rocket. It's very high tech, long and difficult to produce compared to all other types of ammunition. A gun is only useful of you have ammo for it else you might as well call it a bad club. In that regard, the lasgun is a far better weapon.

I'm not sure bolters should be held up as a high point of technological prowess. Apparently they're notoriously finicky to keep in working order, requiring a fair bit of regular maintenance just to keep them shooting.

That info comes from Necromunda where Bolters are pretty much kept as a status symbol, rather than useful as a standard weapon.

I'd definitely put both Pule Rifles and Lasguns as more impressive technological feats.

Yeah, but that's in the context of scooters living in shanty towns. The rules for properly-equipped forces like the Adeptus Arbites removed the need for ammo rolls, as they carried properly-maintained weapons and plenty of spare mags.

True, but the fact that Lasguns still remain reliable at that level of misuse is a massive tick in their favour. In a protracted engagement, it's difficult to properly maintain your equipment, and even harder to get parts/replacements.

Reliability in terrible situations is a massive boon for a firearm that's going to see active combat.

 Talizvar wrote:
Well, it is a freaking weaponized laser so it is inherently awesome.

[/thread]

I see the LG as more of a Star Wars blaster then something that uses simply laser. Like people have said before poor weather conditions such as heavy fog, heavy rain, terrain, debris easily clogging the barrel would negatively effect a laser. Something that generates a solid plasma projectile that wouldn't be effected by those things is a different story.

Maybe I'm wrong though, I do not understand how lasers really work so....

It hasn't been depicted as a "hard light" blaster in media outside of Dan Abnet AFAIK. The thing is, it's true that we don't really know how it functions. Only that it does. And it's the most reliable ranged weapon on the 40k battlefield.

icn1982 wrote:
size, 3.5 and size 5 (I read that bit yesterday, which is why I mentioned the different power cells.

With regards to why a las weapon doesn't clog the same as a solid shot, I imagine they do, but if the lenses are deep enough inside, all you would need to do is fire several rounds to clear the blockage - in a solid shot the ammo would explode, a las weapon it wouldn't

Well with that case wasn't it carbine vs rifle? Different type of weapons logically would have different cells

What? No. The M4 and the M16 both have the same mag wells and fire the same bullet. Its really more comparing an AK vs an M16

 Ynneadwraith wrote:
I'm not sure bolters should be held up as a high point of technological prowess. Apparently they're notoriously finicky to keep in working order, requiring a fair bit of regular maintenance just to keep them shooting.

That info comes from Necromunda where Bolters are pretty much kept as a status symbol, rather than useful as a standard weapon.

I'd definitely put both Pule Rifles and Lasguns as more impressive technological feats.

They were apparently the second choice as the main weapon to outfit the Legiones Astartes. Bolters were favored over Volkite weapons because of they were easier to produce.

Hardly any moving / friction parts would be a great advantage. No bullets or casings or bolt or piston to unjam. No bullet drop to deal with (no need to zero for different ranges if you just zero to infinity). Cleaning may just require cleaning the lenses and scraping carbon from the barrel. I'm assuming even if the power packs don't fit, they'd probably have some sort of cable and adapter to connect the nodes. No hearing protection needed. Can be made water proof. Can be made out of lighter polymer as it does not have to withstand heavy recoil.

The whole question about Tau pulse riffles makes me wonder about other Xeno tech. Specifically, the Eldar once ruled over an Empire at least as big, if not bigger than the IoM. How do their standard weapons stack up against the lasgun? Could the LasBlaster be mass produced?

KayTwo wrote:
The whole question about Tau pulse riffles makes me wonder about other Xeno tech. Specifically, the Eldar once ruled over an Empire at least as big, if not bigger than the IoM. How do their standard weapons stack up against the lasgun? Could the LasBlaster be mass produced?

The Eldar Empire was much smaller than the IoM. Lexicanum says about 10,000 star systems. I think most of it was in what is now the Eye of Terror. However, it was much more technologically advanced.

All Eldar small arms excel the Lasgun in all respects but one: Logistics. Lasguns have the advantage of having rechargeable ammunition packs. This makes supplying Guard troops a much easier task as you only have to issue a few power packs per trooper and the occasional replacement magazine. The inability of the Lasgun to harm the more exotic warriors of the galaxy means this logistic advantage is cold comfort for the Imperial Guardsman who has to face down a charging Carnifex only armed with what amounts to a glorified flashlight... but it's a miracle weapon for the paper pushers in the Departmento Munitorum.

Does this mean anything for the average Eldar trooper? No, probably not. Eldar do not fight the protracted battles the Guard often finds themselves in and thus resupply isn't as much of an issue. Plus, what may take a Guard soldier 5 shots to accomplish a Dire Avenger only needs one. This is just discussing the technical merits of each weapon, though.

The thing that I always think about Eldar weaponry in 40k is that it probably bears little if any resemblance to the weaponry that was around during their Empire.

Part of their fluff is that in their height, the Eldar were so technologically advanced that they had no need to enter wars themselves. All of their border control was done by 'psychomatons'.

So, after the Fall and the enforced limits on their psychic potential (which presumably was used to run the psychomaton armies, as it's been stated that pretty much all Eldar tech aside from DEldar is psychically activated), they would have had to scrabble to either develop new weaponry to defent themselves with, or figure out how to work these thousand+ year old relics that their ancestors used before they invented their automaton armies.

Hence you end up with things like the Dark Eldar vehicle fleet, which is basically modified pleasure craft.

Also, as TheCustomLime said the Eldar don't fight in the same way the Guard do. They utilise their movement advantage with the webway to strike where and when they want to, and then withdraw before they get bogged down in a protracted conflict.

Furthermore, the eldar are probably fully capable of mass-producing their basic weaponry. However, they're not capable of mass-producing Eldar themselves, so they'd end up with a massive pile of Shuriken Catapults and no-one to shoot them...

A lot of why the lasgun is considered so weak is that it's the standard weapon of an army that in terms of game stats is weaker than the standard weapons of most other armies. On a scale of "weapons seen in a casual game of 40k from most powerful to least," where power level is determined by how much damage a single instance of the weapon does in a turn, the lasgun ranks close to rock-bottom. Lasguns are a miracle of warfare, but the tabletop shows only extraordinary conflicts where it's rapidly outclassed. In Dark Heresy where the lasgun is basically the average in terms of power level it's much easier to see it as the innovation that the fluff portrays it as.

Yet another thing to consider is that almost all 40K tabletop weapons are for large scale war, in which Lasguns are at the bottom of the food chain. But they're pretty high up when just considering "daily life" in the Imperium, even when including Hive Gang combat, PDF action, etc.

 KiloFiX wrote:
Hardly any moving / friction parts would be a great advantage. No bullets or casings or bolt or piston to unjam. No bullet drop to deal with (no need to zero for different ranges if you just zero to infinity). Cleaning may just require cleaning the lenses and scraping carbon from the barrel. I'm assuming even if the power packs don't fit, they'd probably have some sort of cable and adapter to connect the nodes. No hearing protection needed. Can be made water proof. Can be made out of lighter polymer as it does not have to withstand heavy recoil.

I always assumed the barrel is the lasing rod, with the lens at or near the muzzle. An actual hollow tube after the emitter is useless. Worse than useless, as it makes the weapon needlessly long and heavy.

Differences in power packs is down to different patterns of lasgun.
A longlas is just a lasgun with a longer barrel (normally fitted with various other hardware as well) which presumably improves the focusing of the laser.
Laspistols potentially use a different, probably smaller, powerpack. But that could have just been a different pattern to the lasrifle the regiment was using, as it was noted pistols weren't standard issue.
Who even knows exactly how a hot-shot lasgun differs from a regular lasgun, since regular lasguns of course can carry hot-shot charge packs.

I'm not sure what the logistics on shuriken weapons is though, since they're monoblade weapons you can fit an awful lot of shots in a relatively small magazine/clip/whatever. But that requires technology superior to what the Imperium has, and who knows how much of a bitch maintaining a shuriken weapon is, it must have some complex gubbin's.

Lasweapons are described in dark heresy as being louder than an autogun, and cannot be silenced (but tabletop models and other books seems to say they can) which, combined with the visible laser, makes them pretty bad for clandestine work.
Kind of makes sense if you can't silence them to me, as I would imagine the noise is created by the super heating of the air it passes through, meaning the noise would be generated along the entire length of the laser (also making it impossible to identify the position of the firer by noise)

Used to be the hotshot lasgun used up all of its laspack's power in one shot. Nowadays that's no longer true sadly, and they've melded it in with hellguns.

 Melissia wrote:
Used to be the hotshot lasgun used up all of its laspack's power in one shot. Nowadays that's no longer true sadly, and they've melded it in with hellguns.

Well a hot-shot laspack seems to be a powerpack modified to dump the whole pack in one shot.
A hot-shot lasgun operates off of a back pack power supply. They also seem to have a canvas shroud on the barrel. So perhaps they're similar to regular lasguns modified to always draw hot-shot levels of power, using the backpack supply to not have to end up reloading constantly. The canvas shroud is presumably to keep the barrel cool and handle-able during protracted firing.

All lasguns can be equipped to a backpack, they don't have to be modified. Even las PISTOLS can be attached to a backpack if you want. Heck, a lascannon can be, if you want to avoid having to reload every time you fire.

 Melissia wrote:
All lasguns can be equipped to a backpack, they don't have to be modified. Even las PISTOLS can be attached to a backpack if you want. Heck, a lascannon can be, if you want to avoid having to reload every time you fire.

Indeed. A so-called Hellgun will actually accept standard power packs, which means vice-verse is also true, a lasgun will accept a hellgun's power pack(which will just give it more ammo).

Las weapons are indeed amazing weapons, but not in the areas where it matters on the table top. Their advantages are more in the areas of logistics and attrition. Its given up power to make supply and maintenance easier.

Oh I know regular lasweapons can have a backpack power supply, my point on hot-shot lasguns was that they were locked to firing hot-shot lasers and because feeding that kind of juice through standard power packs is inefficient they use backpack power supplies.
Whereas regular lasweapons need a special hot-shot charge pack, which is presumably modified to dump it's whole load in one shot rather than rationing it over however many shots.