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Teehee...

DakkadakkadakkadakkaBVVVVVvvvvvvvvvv....

Dang it!

There are modern sonars that can measure hardness. They used them to locate Hood and Bismark wrecks.It is not beyond the realm of possibility to use radio waves - or some other electromagnetic waves. And have the detonator set for just as density decreases. We have had radio proximity fuses since WW2. There could even be a delayed fuse backup - so many milliseconds after initial detection.

HEAT affects requires a broader warhead. There is a reason RPG7's have a bulbous warhead. HEAT has reduced effectiveness also when spinning - modern tanks have smoothbores for a reason.

The Deuterium tip is junk. Well they could use it as a filler so that the core doesn't get completely deformed on impact or something. Probably better if they used mercury (Here take explosive damage and mercury poisoning).

Mass reactive: Seems to be a lot of effort to put a sonar system into a bolt, just to activate a fuse.I'm not saying it's a bad idea but there are easier options.

Have you seen a bolt round it's quite round and it does not have to puncture hundreds of millimeters of armour. For killing someone in power armour and the table top performance a small(20mm) HEAT round makes sense to me.
A small missilette with an AP head (uranium(because it's crystalline structure self sharpens, can be swapped out with something similar and not radioactive)/adamantium/diamond/tungsten(even though it self blunts) would make sense in this context)HE charge also makes sense, but there is no depiction of the bolter firing, slim, long rocket projectiles that are fin stablised.

The reason why an RPG is so bulbous is so the shaped charge is bigger. Bigger charge, more penetration. 70-105mm in diameter. Anyways. Velocity don't matter with HEAT, so it's as effective as a 105 HEAT round. In WW2 I think HEAT rounds had around twice effectiveness, relative to diameter. German 75mm rounds could puncture 150mm of Rolled Homogenous Armour on a flat surface. Churchill MK 7 had 152mm on a flat surface. So if it were using WW2 HEAT tech it'd puncture 210mm RHA on a flat surface(obviously it is going to be more than this using post war HEAT tech).

Cap could be filled with plastic, or just a hollow tip behind the jacket of the shell. You could then put poison/etc in said hollow cap and therefore make more specialised ammo without the drawbacks. Although you'd want it potent. Something nice like a coagulant that also effects the nervous system.
I guess mercury would give extra weight, and if you have something with a rocket strapped to it, extra weight is just momentum... Then again regular old lead works pretty well.


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Main issue I have with a HEAT round, is the Marine is wearing the black carapace under his armour, and well his armour is big and bulky. So it is entirely possible that in key areas there is a space between them and you effectively have spaced armour.

A heat round would make a bunch more sense for piercing SM armour, although as mentioned previously you may need a double shaped charge. Hesh wouldn't really be appropriate for combating space marines as there is no empty space for the inner armour to spall into.


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See I always imagined their armour to be quite close to their body. Obviously it needs room to allow for muscle contractions, but I still think it would be quite tight fitting.

A shockwave powerful.enough to spall chunks off the inside of armour plate is likely to.do.relatively unpleasant things to internal organs.

With regards to shaped charges penetrating SM armor, in general, I'd think anything in Bolter realm size would be too small to reliably manage a meaningful Munroe effect to form a sufficient penetrator. I don't ever think I've seen a shaped charge of any sort below a certain size threshold, though I make no claims to being such an expert.

 Flinty wrote:
A shockwave powerful.enough to spall chunks off the inside of armour plate is likely to.do.relatively unpleasant things to internal organs.

This was something that always struck me as odd with the old AP system. Yeah, CaptainHeroHammer's armor might no be physically breached by an explosive rocket or massive crushing claw or impact hammer slam, but his ribcage and organs probably aren't as intact as the armor

Um, guys, bolters aren't designed to be good against space marine armour. It's actually mentioned in some of the lore that they aren't good against it. Marines were never meant to fight other marines. That's why bolters have always been worth feth all against space marine armour saves.

In all fairness, they're extremely inconsistent about that. Bolters seem to be about as effective as whatever any particular author needs them to be

We have bolters that often seem to effortlessly sycthe down marines in many HH books, practically every bolter in the Ultramarines movie ignored armor, etc

But do we really want to use that movie as an example of anything? And bad writing is bad writing, whether it's in the HH or anything else.

I don't think you need a really sophisticated system to detonate the bolt after penetration. If you know the normal velocity of a bolt and how far you want it to penetrate, all you have to do is have a timed fuse exploding the corresponding time later. It won't be always perfectly accurate, but that should be good enough.

In 2012 there was apparently a 6 axis accelerometer in a 3 x 3 x 0.9mm package. Looks like there are packages down to 2 x 2 x 1mm or less now.

Such a thing is not going to affect payload of a 20mm round that much. Add between 10,000 and 20,000 years of progress, and a true mass reactive detonator doesnt seem too far fetched.

Yeah, you could design something very "simple" considering future tech : when the accelerometer measures the acceleration of the bolt being shot, it arms the charge. When it measures the deceleration of the bolt hitting something, it detonates the charge after 0.01 second, or whatever time is needed to travel an inch or so into the target. It doesn't take complicated electronics to do that. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if something like that could be done with current technology. Which makes me think that a weapon as brutal as a bolter would probably break all kinds of international conventions.

 Vaktathi wrote:
With regards to shaped charges penetrating SM armor, in general, I'd think anything in Bolter realm size would be too small to reliably manage a meaningful Munroe effect to form a sufficient penetrator. I don't ever think I've seen a shaped charge of any sort below a certain size threshold, though I make no claims to being such an expert.

 Flinty wrote:
A shockwave powerful.enough to spall chunks off the inside of armour plate is likely to.do.relatively unpleasant things to internal organs.

This was something that always struck me as odd with the old AP system. Yeah, CaptainHeroHammer's armor might no be physically breached by an explosive rocket or massive crushing claw or impact hammer slam, but his ribcage and organs probably aren't as intact as the armor

There are some pretty small shaped charges that I've seen go through many inches. In our display stuff we had a block of steel plates each about half an inch thick, about 7 or 8 stacked together, and cut away to show the path the molten jet made through them, and that was from a disk about an inch in diameter or so.





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Gadzilla666 wrote:
Um, guys, bolters aren't designed to be good against space marine armour. It's actually mentioned in some of the lore that they aren't good against it. Marines were never meant to fight other marines. That's why bolters have always been worth feth all against space marine armour saves.

Which is dumb.. Yeah heresy bolters you can understand, but you'd think in 10k years they'd design something to pierce SM armour, for all those chaos dudes knocking about...

Well if a bolter ain't supposed to be good against heavy infantry like marines, I'm failing to see the value in the system at all. It needs to offer something. And surely you'd just manufacture better AP ammo.

Close in air defence platforms can program munitions to burst at the right distance, to say hit an incoming missile with flack blast, so I guess in the future that tech could be adapted to infantry weapons

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

Gadzilla666 wrote:
Um, guys, bolters aren't designed to be good against space marine armour. It's actually mentioned in some of the lore that they aren't good against it. Marines were never meant to fight other marines. That's why bolters have always been worth feth all against space marine armour saves.

Which is dumb.. Yeah heresy bolters you can understand, but you'd think in 10k years they'd design something to pierce SM armour, for all those chaos dudes knocking about...

The lack of innovation and creativity is part of the setting. Besides, that's what plasma, melta, and heavy projectile weapons like auto-cannons are for.


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 OldMate wrote:
Well if a bolter ain't supposed to be good against heavy infantry like marines, I'm failing to see the value in the system at all. It needs to offer something. And surely you'd just manufacture better AP ammo.

Close in air defence platforms can program munitions to burst at the right distance, to say hit an incoming missile with flack blast, so I guess in the future that tech could be adapted to infantry weapons

It's a weapon designed for shock troops to be used on inferiorly armored opponents, just like chain weapons. For use against heavy infantry see above.

I presumed the Bolter was originally designed for use against Orks.

Tygre wrote:
I presumed the Bolter was originally designed for use against Orks.

It's pretty clear that marines were built mostly to wade through the absolute deluge of Orks that errupted after the Eldar fall destroyed the automaton armies that kept them at bay. Orks are far and away the most common alien species encountered in the galaxy.

Chainswords, exploding bolts, heavy bolters, missile launchers etc are all very effectively designed to counter the highly resilient Ork physiology.

When what you need dead is a hardy & tough as an Ork, a bolter makes perfect sense.

Plasma and auto cannons are not rapid fire service weapons. The heavy bolter is more analogous to a machinegun(especially in the hands of devistators) and the bolter a service rifle. The plasma gun and auto cannon have never been depicted as putting sheets of fire down range, which is actually proven to be what you need when faced by a determined enemy, while the bolter has.

You'd want a rapid fire service/suppression weapon which can be employed more often(and orks do classify as being heavy infantry as well considering they are generally as big as a marine and about as strong and sometimes come in more armoured varieties) plasma weapons are also quite dangerous and much more expensive. So a more suitable service weapon, even when combating marines would be a bolter/heavy bolter for general purpose and suppression.



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If a bolter is not designed to puncture armour, why not use a grenade launcher or grenade machinegun? It'd make more sense than trying to close with the beasts.

The vast majority of orks have poor armour. Bolters are designed to cause massive physical trauma to poorly armoured troops, which is what you want against a creature as capable of surviving physical damage as an ork. A service rifle or machine gun is meant to be used against enemy troops. For more armoured targets specialized weapons would be used. So a bolter is an excellent service rifle for use against orks.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
but you'd think in 10k years they'd design something to pierce SM armour, for all those chaos dudes knocking about...

They have. They're called Vengeance rounds.

They're hardly standard issue.

Neither are heretic astartes. Standard bolt rounds work fine for what marines would see the most of: human heretics and xenos scum.

They could have fooled me with renegades being an index and chaos cultists being a unit and not faction... I agree. But I'd still think the bolter would be better at puncturing armour. Perhaps it breaches the marine armour, but the armour protects key area ie head chest, and shoulders(because PAULDRONS!!! and you're combat ineffective when your arms get blown off I guess...)

Slayer6 wrote:
This coming at the time when the LRBT was determined to have a 120mm cannon - the barrel muzzle is significantly bigger than a Guardsman's whole head...

Let's all repeat the mantra here:

Science Fiction Authors Have No Sense Of Scale. This is no less true of small scale things than it is of large scale things.

Also, if it's as round as a guardsman's head you can't possibly accidentally break it.




Next minute...

 OldMate wrote:
They could have fooled me with renegades being an index and chaos cultists being a unit and not faction... I agree. But I'd still think the bolter would be better at puncturing armour. Perhaps it breaches the marine armour, but the armour protects key area ie head chest, and shoulders(because PAULDRONS!!! and you're combat ineffective when your arms get blown off I guess...)

Well the pauldrons used to be replaceable. If your advancing, which is a marines want. Your giant shoulder pad is gonna be first.
They call them pauldrons. But theyre more portable shoulder bastions really.

The bolter was designed to smash the ork. No one else was floating around the time.

If the bolter was desinged to kill the orc and not really armoured foes it does not need to be rocket powered (especially as an assault weapon) The rocket only adds velocity, which is not really needed against a lightly armoured foe like the orc. sure they have tough skin, but you can kill them with bayonets, so that says enough already. A bullet should have no issues.

I know it is much more mundane but it would make sense for it to just be a big ballistic weapon, packing payload ammo.

If I wanted to kill power armoured astares at long and close ranges on the other hand a hybrid conventional ballistic and rocket projectile with AP payload ammo. Which is what I mistook the bolter for.

Bigger weapons have bigger recoil. Especially if you want follow up shots. A 0.5 cal MG like the Browning is not really "single person usable" and 0.75 is 50% bigger. A rocket allows it to have a lower usable recoil and still have an effective combat range.

Of course astartes were only considered potential targets when the Heresy started and bolters were designed long beforehand.

firing 7.62x51mm in full auto is a handful for me (2m tall 115kg), a ma deuce would be similarly uncontrollable for anyone not astartes/ogryn. especially being combat effective. the rocket assist would definately help w maintaining target lock on something moving(i.e.ork, gaunt, spawn, etc) or dumbass cultists. Having the autosenses linked to the projectile would help with killing stuff. Black carapace integration would be even more effective.