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Every lifeform with an intelligence and body that can still be called human can point the lasgun and shoot. THAT is the biggest advantage. There is no ballistics to take into account (unless we are assuming the silly Gaunts Ghosts laserbullet) and no meaningfull recoil. Very little training is required, compared to assault rifles.

Especially since in 40k the calibers are all rather large -> lots of recoil & slow muzzle velocity -> more bullet drop over distance and high innacuracy at longer range.
Everyone who has shot rifles with larger caliber (e.g. 7,62mm) will know that it requires a bit of training for accurate shooting at combat ranges of 200-400m. Not the best situation for a weapon that needs to work in the hands of almost every citizen of the empire.

That lasguns are more reliable i can hardly believe. There would have to be a bunch of high electric voltage/current components in addition to fine optics and some sophisticated tube or semi conductor (or 40k equivalent) technology. Its unlikely the battery can transmit the entire energy of a single shot in an instant (which would magazines extremely dangerous to handle). So it would likely load over a longer timespan and store the energy in supercapacitors, that can discharge it in a fraction of a second (thus a slower rate of fire).
Such components can be damage quite easily if subjected to physical abuse or heat/water penetration or penetration from projectiles.

Gunpowder weapons are not too difficult to build or repair for a mechanic in the field. Lasguns on the other hand... the key parts can't be bend or hammered into place in a field workshop. Only replaced with proper replacement parts.
So for me it doesnt make sense, that they would be so much more maintaineable compared to autoguns and the likes. Equal they migh be, but much better? na.

Regarding the "ammo availability":
We are talking about energy levels that vaporize organic matter in an instant - in such a short timeframe that it causes a cracking/whipping sound -> a pressure wave of expanding hot air/gas faster than speed of sound.
To restore this amount of energy with a little camp fire would take many many hours/ days. Even with a 100% efficiency solar panel the size of a standard pocket calculators panel (inbuilt into magazines like some artworks suggest) likely multiple weeks/months/years.

Seems pretty silly to me. It makes more sense if they would be charged with a large charger, consisting of an alternator that is driven by a combustion engine. That seems more reasonable.
This would also explain why lascannons rounds in thunderbolts and so on are limited to a small amount of rounds, rather than beeing "unlimited" - the jetengines would sooner be out of fuel before the magazine would be recharged properly.
The chargers would be part of the standard logistical train and smaller variants would also be installable in all vehicles. So as long as there is fuel for the vehicles/engines there would be ammunition resupply available (but only slowly over time.

I don't think a lasgun would be vulnerable to water penetration, since it has no moving parts the gubbins could be water or even air tight. It's possible the power packs have a kind of tape or something over the contacts which is torn/broken/ripped off before/upon insertion into the weapon, keeping the contacts fresh (at least the first time).

The biggest issue I see is with the muzzle lens (objective lens?). I see two ways you could play that, firstly recessed. This makes it protected against physical damage such as smashing or scratching, but it makes cleaning it hardly, since you'd have to dig the mud out of the recess. But how often do you get mud in your muzzle? A soldier would have to point that out to me, but I would assume mud in the barrel was worse for a laser since a solid projectile would just blast it out unless it was really bad mud.
Or, secondly the lens could be flush with the muzzle. This would have the advantage of being easily able to just wipe the end clean of any dirt of dust or whatever, but make it rather vulnerable to scratching.
Or maybe there's a third option, rather than having your traditional convex lens [looks like () ] you could have a lens which is flush with the barrel, and the outside face is slightly concave, leaving you with a lens looking like ( (, you could still make this a converging lens rather happily, so this would give you the advantage of having a slightly recessed lens (although not as protected as an actual recess) whilst still being able to quickly wipe the end clean.

We can never be sure how the Lasgun deals with or bypasses clogged barrel issues, but given the breadth of possible worlds and environments the Guard will fight on, I think we can safely assume it's not a major concern.

Which brings me onto another broad assumption....Lasguns are largely immune to the effects of extreme conditions. Without a solid projectile, heat and cold are less of a concern. No loosing a volley in sub-zero temperature and having the weapon explode for instance.

kirotheavenger wrote:I don't think a lasgun would be vulnerable to water penetration, since it has no moving parts
The biggest issue I see is with the muzzle lens (objective lens?).

whats this obsession with "moving parts" beeing responsible for "weakness" by people ? Guns work fine even after bathing them in mud or having them submerged in water for longer periods. Some work even underwater.
Everything electrical does not like beeing in conducting liquid. There are ways to seal certain parts, but damage to the exterior will cause leaks.
The lens is not really an issue. Just make a shutter on the muzzle, that opens just in time before the shot is fired and then closes again. This will keep out most of the dirt. Your not supposed to stab the barrel into the dirt after all. Everything that comes through the shutter over time needs to be cleaned after battle, comparable to a normal guns barrel. Thats why soldiers get a cleaning kit after all.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Which brings me onto another broad assumption....Lasguns are largely immune to the effects of extreme conditions. Without a solid projectile, heat and cold are less of a concern. No loosing a volley in sub-zero temperature and having the weapon explode for instance.

Have you used your phone in -10°C temperatures outside? Cold is a big concern. Batteries generally dont like cold. No it doesnt explode, but having 1/10th of the charge available is not great... Heat is also a concern. Maybe not heats that are survivable by humans, but 100°C or more is not good for most electrical components either.

Moving parts require maintenance to keep your Dakka in good condition. Lasguns removing that issue reduces supply line headaches, increasing your logistical options.

Electrical components also have a maximum lifetime if you didnt know... And that is often in the same range as mechanical parts. Mechanical parts can be partially fixed by a mechanic, electrical components require a total exchange.

Well no moving parts means you can completely seal it away, whereas solid shots are constantly feeding things in one of of gubbinz and out the other.

I disagree that a solid gun can be fixed by anyone, but a lasgun needs specialists.
Once a guns parts are worn down, they're worn down. Sure you can machine a new part, but you could just rewire it as well.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Once a guns parts are worn down, they're worn down. Sure you can machine a new part, but you could just rewire it as well.

"Wiring up" means connecting pieces. Equivalent to assembling mechanical parts. You cant "wire up", as in "create" a laser or important electrical components (capacitors, transistors, ...) just like that. You can't simply make semiconductor or tube technology in the field. You can machine a broken boltcarrier in a field repairshop. thus you have a new part. The point where handguns fail from excessive wear exceeds the life expectancy of a soldier in battle.

Plus there are moving parts on lasguns as well! Trigger, magazine catch, safety lever, energy slider. There are fittings and other things where seals have to be installed that can fail. Lasguns are disassembled regulary for cleaning (as mentioned in IUP). Electrical components over time degrade just like mechanical parts. If they go, they can burn up - especially high energy components. Anyone claiming lasers and electrical components beeing more failsafe just doesnt have a lot of knowledge about this stuff...

Much though the debate of the reliability of components we think are used in Lasguns is interesting, it's neatly sidestepped by the fact that we don't actually know the specifications of what goes into a Lasgun, but we are told that they're more reliable than standard firearms.

Oh, and you can make a homemade capacitor out of a water bottle and some other bits and pieces. Who knows what's commonly lying around on the battlefields of the 41st millennium

 TheCustomLime wrote:

 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.

Exactly.


It was logistics that led to the switch from the autogun to the lasgun in the 32nd Millennium, despite the autogun, like the bolter, being a superior tactical weapon when compared to the standard issue lasgun.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Well no moving parts means you can completely seal it away, whereas solid shots are constantly feeding things in one of of gubbinz and out the other.

I disagree that a solid gun can be fixed by anyone, but a lasgun needs specialists.
Once a guns parts are worn down, they're worn down. Sure you can machine a new part, but you could just rewire it as well.

Most modern military firearms are designed for easy parts swaps, even by people in the know who are not trained gunsmiths. Just very familiar with their weapon.


It stands to reason that autoguns in the 41st Millennium are still easy to maintain, and are more durable than modern, real world military firearms (which are designed and built to work in the harshest of environments). While lasguns might not need to be broken down for cleaning and whatnot, when they break, you will need (as you correctly pointed out) a specialist (i.e. techpriest or other tech savant) to fix the problem because of the higher tech level. Whereas the average trooper, if he or she has access to spares, can swap out most of the parts of an autogun themselves.

Lasguns are only superior in the areas of routine maintenance and logistics.

It's not unlikely that the lasgun started life as a civilian hunting rifle. After all the AR15 was originally designed as a hunting rifle that was converted into the military M16.

I think a lot of the problems with establishing its power are the abstractions ​we use for game balance. Even if the lasgun was the equivalent of a 5.56mm rifle it wouldn't be a weapon that wounds human beings only half the time. The bolter is more the equivalent of a 40mm grenade launcher and I'm pretty sure that's an automatic kill on a human target.

Freman Bloodglaive wrote:
It's not unlikely that the lasgun started life as a civilian hunting rifle. After all the AR15 was originally designed as a hunting rifle that was converted into the military M16.

I think a lot of the problems with establishing its power are the abstractions ​we use for game balance. Even if the lasgun was the equivalent of a 5.56mm rifle it wouldn't be a weapon that wounds human beings only half the time. The bolter is more the equivalent of a 40mm grenade launcher and I'm pretty sure that's an automatic kill on a human target.

I like the idea the Lasgun was a DAoT hunting rifle. Seems to fit

The way i'd worked 'to hit' and 'to wound' as percentages is that 'hit' doesn't necessarily mean it strikes someone dead in the chest. A bolter 'hit' might mean it detonated a couple of metres away and the shrapnel hit you.

Same thing for 'wound'. As most units are 1 wound, that 1 wound represents a significant enough injury that you're incapacitated from the battle. If soldiers have access to some pretty extreme medical equipment/drugs/stimulants then they may be able to continue to be effective on the batllefield with some fairly grevious injuries.

Lastly, who knows actually how tough baseline humans are in the 40k universe? There's been 38,000 years of evolution under some pretty extreme circumstances, as well as an unknown amount of genetic tampering. It's perfectly believable that if a 40k human was time-warped back to the year 2015 (for the Back to the Future reference) they'd be significantly tougher than any human alive today.

It's a definite possibility.

Thats how i suspend my disbelief anyway

I would say there is too much of a lack of granularity in the tabletop to be a good reference point. Working instead from the novels is a problem itself. But as previous posters have already pointed out, there is a huge lack of consistency - bruising the throat to going through ceramite.or armor literal inches of feet thick.

As for the ability to repair lasguns, I remember in one of the Ghost novel's it mentioned scavenging the dead for repair kits, which leads me to think that the lasgun is itself incrediby easy to repair (though there is a good chance of it exploding). It would likely be highly modular as a result which would also help with refurbishing regiments during down time.

Strip the gun down, ID the part busted, turn in busted part, get the proper requisition hopefully, pray to the Big E that it doesn't bust again for a couple more thousand years.

Freman Bloodglaive wrote:
It's not unlikely that the lasgun started life as a civilian hunting rifle. After all the AR15 was originally designed as a hunting rifle that was converted into the military M16.

I think a lot of the problems with establishing its power are the abstractions ​we use for game balance. Even if the lasgun was the equivalent of a 5.56mm rifle it wouldn't be a weapon that wounds human beings only half the time. The bolter is more the equivalent of a 40mm grenade launcher and I'm pretty sure that's an automatic kill on a human target.

I can get behind the idea of the basic "modern" military lasgun design originally being a civilian sporting weapon in ages past. After all, the Terminator Tactical Dreadnought Armor was based on civilian mining suits used during the Dark Age of Technology. And considering the hints we've had over the years regarding the power and superiority of Dark Age weaponry, and the third rate nature of that era's leftovers being considered the "pinnacle" of Imperial technology, it would make sense.



The original ArmaLite AR-15 wasn't conceived as a hunting rifle. Eugene Stoner, while at ArmaLite, designed it as a scaled down version of the AR-10, responding to an Army CONARC request for a lightweight .223/5.56mm rifle. Colt ended up with the rights to both rifles in 1959. The original AR-15 was a select-fire military weapon. The reason that the name "AR-15" is used to refer to semi-auto only Stoner pattern rifles today is because of Colt trademarking "AR-15", and marketing their civilian semi-auto versions as the "Colt AR-15", after the military adopted the original AR-15 as the M-16 (after some modifications by Colt at the DoD's request). And the name "AR-15" stuck for any civvie version as a result, even though these other manufacturers have their own model designations because of the Colt trademark.


There are popular hunting variants of the AR-15 and AR-10 type rifles, in various calibers, on the market today. But it's another case of military rifle and ammo design influencing the civilian market, much like the Mauser action and .30-06 Springfield cartridge.

 Olgerth Istaarn wrote:
While a weapon's value in warfare is determined by a balance of factors, its effect against the intended target is among the most important.

You don't hunt elephants with the same gun that is used to hunt doves (and, oddly enough, vice versa). A modern 5.56/5.45 assault rifle issued to infantry represents an adequate balance between man-portability, ammo weight, penetration and the ability to kill and more importantly maim the enemy.

If lasguns were introduced to modern military, and assuming they are about as powerful as a modern assault rifle, they would indeed be an excellent weapon. Absence of recoil, superior accuracy and larger and lighter ammo supply (which can be replenished from a variety of power sources) would be the main factors here, because "standard issue" is already a thing.

In 40K setting though, lasguns are inadequate because they appear to be reliably lethal only against regular humans and lesser targets. It is not quite, but almost like an army of guys with dove-hunting guns fighting an army of elephants.

The lasgun in 40K, therefore, is not a "miracle weapon", it is a sad and inadequate leftover from the days when human soldiers faced other human soldiers on the battlefield. And that is perfectly grimdark...

For a contrary view: The guard's primary foes are humans and orks, and to a much lesser extent tyranids.
*Humans- as noted its excellent.
.
*Orks- perfectly fine here as well. In the fluff it is indeed capable of taking down orks (Fifteen Hours).

Frankly in either case its not going to be the lasgun creating casualties, but artillery and other things that go boom.

Quickjager wrote:As for the ability to repair lasguns, I remember in one of the Ghost novel's it mentioned scavenging the dead for repair kits, which leads me to think that the lasgun is itself incrediby easy to repair (though there is a good chance of it exploding). It would likely be highly modular as a result which would also help with refurbishing regiments during down time.
Strip the gun down, ID the part busted, turn in busted part, get the proper requisition hopefully, pray to the Big E that it doesn't bust again for a couple more thousand years.

I dont see how that would make the lasgun special compared to other things - salvaging functioning pieces or parts of equipment to repair damage or replace stuff has been employed in basically every warfare theater IRL.
Conventional powder weapons would have the exact same trade as the lasgun in this regard. Only exceptions are maybe selfmade weapons by hive gangs and the likes.

Freman Bloodglaive wrote:It's not unlikely that the lasgun started life as a civilian hunting rifle. After all the AR15 was originally designed as a hunting rifle that was converted into the military M16.

I think a lot of the problems with establishing its power are the abstractions ​we use for game balance. Even if the lasgun was the equivalent of a 5.56mm rifle it wouldn't be a weapon that wounds human beings only half the time. The bolter is more the equivalent of a 40mm grenade launcher and I'm pretty sure that's an automatic kill on a human target.

The bolter comes in many different calibers, but its certainly not the same power of a 40mm grenadelauncher round. Its not only the caliber but also the volume of explosive thats important. Bolters are basically submachineguns with oversized caliber using high explosive rounds. Due to the large rounds you can't take many of them with you - so its not wise to equip everyone with bolters. Logistical nightmare and for troops that only hit every 20th bullet the whole squad will run dry very quickly. Thats why its astartes and elite/veteran humans get to use it - they can hit consistently and therefore dont need so much ammo.

Ynneadwraith wrote:Much though the debate of the reliability of components we think are used in Lasguns is interesting, it's neatly sidestepped by the fact that we don't actually know the specifications of what goes into a Lasgun, but we are told that they're more reliable than standard firearms.
Oh, and you can make a homemade capacitor out of a water bottle and some other bits and pieces. Who knows what's commonly lying around on the battlefields of the 41st millennium

If you read the infantry mans uplifting primer it reads like a gear / tactics guide for RL korean war/ vietnam war soldiers in terms of equipment "sophistication". Considering that Lasguns are made on many worlds in large quantities, its not unobtainium or mystically arkane - otherwise it would get same treatment as the plasma weapons.
You can make a capacitor on your own if someone shows you how to do it. Except it will not reach nowhere near the energy capacity required for powering a laser that can vaporize flesh of humans/xenos or be light enough to mount it inside or outside the housing of a lasgun. If Humans in 40k would possess this ingenuity and knowledge, they wouldnt have stagnating technology or pray to a machinegod everytime they flip a switch on a machine.

 Keep wrote:

Ynneadwraith wrote:Much though the debate of the reliability of components we think are used in Lasguns is interesting, it's neatly sidestepped by the fact that we don't actually know the specifications of what goes into a Lasgun, but we are told that they're more reliable than standard firearms.
Oh, and you can make a homemade capacitor out of a water bottle and some other bits and pieces. Who knows what's commonly lying around on the battlefields of the 41st millennium

If you read the infantry mans uplifting primer it reads like a gear / tactics guide for RL korean war/ vietnam war soldiers in terms of equipment "sophistication". Considering that Lasguns are made on many worlds in large quantities, its not unobtainium or mystically arkane - otherwise it would get same treatment as the plasma weapons.
You can make a capacitor on your own if someone shows you how to do it. Except it will not reach nowhere near the energy capacity required for powering a laser that can vaporize flesh of humans/xenos or be light enough to mount it inside or outside the housing of a lasgun. If Humans in 40k would possess this ingenuity and knowledge, they wouldnt have stagnating technology or pray to a machinegod everytime they flip a switch on a machine.

It's not unobtanium or mystically arcane to your average Guardsman, but it might as well be to us being technology from 38,000 years in the future. Why does it need to be like plasma weapons for it to be more advanced than we are capable of producing now?

You're also making an assumption on the capabilities of a human 38,000 years in the future based on what we are able to make now. For all we know, it might be child'splay to construct a capacitor capable of functioning in a lasgun from bits and pieces lying around the battlefield of the 41st millennium.

However, why does being able to pull off a gimmick like making a capacitor mean that they wouldn't have stagnating technology? They could be doing that the exact same way as every other bit of manufacturing is being undertaken, by half-remembered facts from thousands of years ago remembered through religious chants no actual understanding required

The fact that you couldn't reliably shoot the weapon in all types of environments and weather conditions is a hard pass for me. Fog, sand storms, rain, mud etc... wouldn't the weapon be rendered useless?

usmcmidn wrote:
The fact that you couldn't reliably shoot the weapon in all types of environments and weather conditions is a hard pass for me. Fog, sand storms, rain, mud etc... wouldn't the weapon be rendered useless?

Yeah pretty much, which is a bit of an issue for suspension of disbelief.

Personally, and it's not exactly a strict interpretation of the fluff, but I think 'Lasguns' work better with their fluff description in action if they basically fire low-yield plasma bolts. But hey, ho.

Actually, thinking about it. There's another way to use lasers as a weapon beyond just having one powerful enough to kill someone. There's technology in the works now that uses a laser to ionise the air between the gun and the target, and then dumps a massive electrical discharge down that ionised path. It's less energy-intensive than a straight laser powerful enough to kill.

Plus, the electrical charge would make a bl**dy loud 'CRACK' as it's discharged, which fits with the fluff depiction of how they sound.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure lasguns are not actually laser weapons, but either a pulse-plasma weapon or an ionized pathway weapon.

I'm more favorable of the pulsed-plasma route because las weapons still work in space.

Either weapon type would still have reduced effectiveness in rain or other atmospheric conditions, but that applies to pretty much any weapon on a technical level. but any such loss in capability isn't going to happen at the closer ranges a firefight in the rain would occur in. A soldier's visibility is going to be reduced to well below any distance at which his gun would peter out.

I'm just going to jump in here and say that one really major advantage of a lasgun over the likes of an autogun/modern assault rifle is cost of manufacture. A lasgun may be incredibly cheap to produce (I think I've read that it can be constructed from basically any material and still function, but don't quote me on that), but mainly in terms of ammunition.

While the obvious thing is that they simply use battery power, to be simple about it, think about the cost of ammunition the IMperium would have if every man was armed with a solid round weapon. The IG numbers in the decatillions or more, in fact, most sources don't even put a number to it, simply saying "uncountable" or similar. How much would it cost in terms of currency, raw materials and manufacturing time to make the rounds, compared to a Lasgun mag, which is in essence a large battery? Considering this is a society where fusion reactors are extremely common an can be tiny (Space Marine backpacks all have one), I think its simply more sensible to make a one-off battery pack that can be constantly recharged (even from non-electrical sources, such as heat or light) that hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of rounds every single week. That's no to mention actually having to ship and transport those rounds from Forge World to battlefield, and this doesn't even take into account the unreliability of travel in the 41st Millennium, the time it would take for a Priest to say 3 Hail the Omnissiah for each bullet casing, inscribe each one with the proper runes, and then have it all blown up and lost when an Eldar Corsair fleet attacks your supply line.

The thing about bullets is that you'd need to ship either them or the manufactorums to make them across a massive distance. Supplying huge numbers of soldiers with physical bullets or supplying the ship or ground based military factories to make them in a setting where human FTL travel is notoriously unreliable is a terrible idea. I mean, the Allies had enough trouble supplying bullets across the atlantic and pacific oceans in world war two. Imagine the difficulty when you scale the number of troops up tremendously and scale the distance up exponentially. And also the ocean is full of Kaiju who want to eat your boats.

Rechargable batteries are just infinitely more convenient logistically.

The ability of the lasgun power pack to taker a charge from an electrical supply or convert light or heat energy is another of those "magic" things that the audience takes for granted, too.

I can't help thinking that I bet some types can be charged by shaking, too, like self-winding watches.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The ability of the lasgun power pack to taker a charge from an electrical supply or convert light or heat energy is another of those "magic" things that the audience takes for granted, too.

I can't help thinking that I bet some types can be charged by shaking, too, like self-winding watches.

"Commissar we're out of ammo and the 'nids are closing in, what do we do?"

"There's only one thing we can do sergeant."

"What's that ma'am?"

"DANCE!"

 Kain wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The ability of the lasgun power pack to taker a charge from an electrical supply or convert light or heat energy is another of those "magic" things that the audience takes for granted, too.

I can't help thinking that I bet some types can be charged by shaking, too, like self-winding watches.

"Commissar we're out of ammo and the 'nids are closing in, what do we do?"

"There's only one thing we can do sergeant."

"What's that ma'am?"

"DANCE!"

That might actually be a viable tactic. I could just imagine the Nids stopping dead to reconsider this scene. I imagine conversation being something like this

Hormagaunt: "Ughhh..."

Synapse: "Boss, they're dancing..."

Hive Mind "We probably shouldn't absorb them, they'll make us ret***ed"

perhaps that's why Imperial Guard tanks have no suspension - the bone-rattling ride helps charge the passengers' lasguns.

Leman Russes don't have lascannons, just well rattled lasguns

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
perhaps that's why Imperial Guard tanks have no suspension - the bone-rattling ride helps charge the passengers' lasguns.

I thought that had torsion bar suspension.

So In theory, you could shake a lasgun when you run out of ammo and manage to keep firing because Lasgun physics?

 Tactical_Spam wrote:
So In theory, you could shake a lasgun when you run out of ammo and manage to keep firing because Lasgun physics?

I don't think you'd get the chance but it might work. I say that because imagine Recruit number 1387246872424990248-T, AKA, Guardsman Pyle, shaking his gun when he runs out of ammo. He'd have a techpriest and Commissar Hartman over asking " What is this Ratling Rick gak? What in the name of The God-Emperor are you animals doing to my rifle? Why is this chicken-gak excuse of a guardsman shaking his magazine? Why is Private Pyle holding that weapon? Why aren't you affixing your bayonet?"