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Hecaton wrote:

 AtoMaki wrote:

The laser would boil your body, not burn it.

Either way it wouldn't be bleeding, though, right? Until it blisters and tissue starts falling off.

Not immediately, but as soon as you move the injury is going to tear open. You'll also begin blistering quite badly which will cause bleeding as well depending on how deep it is.

And depending on how quickly the affected area boils, it could indeed be quite explosive and thus cause large open bleeding wounds. However, grazing wounds could indeed just instantly cauterize and not much else.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Hecaton wrote:

 AtoMaki wrote:

The laser would boil your body, not burn it.

Either way it wouldn't be bleeding, though, right? Until it blisters and tissue starts falling off.

Not immediately, but as soon as you move the injury is going to tear open. You'll also begin blistering quite badly which will cause bleeding as well depending on how deep it is.

And depending on how quickly the affected area boils, it could indeed be quite explosive and thus cause large open bleeding wounds. However, grazing wounds could indeed just instantly cauterize and not much else.

Not that much, though. It'd be similar to a steam burn.

If a lad gun causes radiation wounds to affect the cells then it doesn’t sound verify survivable, in contrast to the game where lasgun wounds are very survivable.

Even if you survived the wound sound like your in for tumours and other horrid infections.

Question - we are talking about 'lasgun on skin'.

Right, fine...

But folks have armour. Or hide. Or carapace.

Can a lasgun 'boil' its way through armour? Ballistics weapons have kinetic energy that'll shatter armour, in theory, and will make an unbelievable mess in the soft tissue hiding behind said armour - modern hollowpoints make a catastrophic mess of your innards after all.

What would lasguns do, in theory? Would/could it be more effective ir have a different effect than a kinetics based solid slug? Interested as well in thoughts on 'if lasguns were real' as much as how they are actuslly described in thr lore.

mrFickle wrote:
If a lad gun causes radiation wounds to affect the cells then it doesn’t sound verify survivable, in contrast to the game where lasgun wounds are very survivable.

Even if you survived the wound sound like your in for tumours and other horrid infections.

In the game a lasgun is compared to a variety of hugely lethal weapons and is being used in battlefield conditions. Even so, in game rules, a hit has ~50% chance of killing an unarmoured human, which is not bad.

The FW Horus Heresy books has lore on the Imperial Army which states the supposed standard is to be equipped with lasguns equal to or better than a 70% chance of a kill from a shot to a human torso. It is not clear whether medical attention is provided following the shot, but being the Imperium this was probably tested on convicts or servitors exhaustively. I assume they also have such data for autoguns.

Tumours are a long-term effect of ionising radiation, not one that would affect battlefield troopers, even in a long war. It would take years, probably decades to develop. Tumours are also not infections. Acute radiation poisoning can obviously be deadly, but concentrated radiation beams are very survivable because they only hit a small area- this is the principle behind radiotherapy. Having said that, the only form of radiation lasguns emit in 40k lore is non-ionising radiation in visible or close to visible light spectrums.

What exactly is it that lasguns fire? Real world laser weapons fire a continuous beam that makes thing very hot very quickly.

Sci fi films tend to show laser weapons firing a laser bolt which I assume transfers a destructive amount of energy to the target upon impact.

Therefore armour can be used to absorb or distribute the energy for protection.

If the laser weapon was heating its target, to boiling point as stated above, then I see 2 problem with this

1. A continuous beam would be required which would be problematic in terms of cross fire when you have thousands of beams being fired at the same time during combat

2. Power armour, terminator armour, dreadnought armour and so on would be very good at reflecting and absorbing the heat and be invulnerable to all but the most powerful laser weapons.

Hecaton wrote:

 AtoMaki wrote:

A super-realistic lasgun would be a charged particle emitter with laser coupling. And the charged particle beam would be pretty darn nasty in the radiation department.

That's more like a plasma weapon or ion weapon, though.

The ion is a charged particle, so you would be technically right. And super-realistic plasma weapons would be railguns, I joke you not here.

mrFickle wrote:Real world laser weapons fire a continuous beam that makes thing very hot very quickly.

IRL laser weapons fire (very-very) rapid pulses that basically drill through the target with micro-explosions.

Hecaton wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

Hecaton wrote:

 AtoMaki wrote:

The laser would boil your body, not burn it.

Either way it wouldn't be bleeding, though, right? Until it blisters and tissue starts falling off.

Not immediately, but as soon as you move the injury is going to tear open. You'll also begin blistering quite badly which will cause bleeding as well depending on how deep it is.

And depending on how quickly the affected area boils, it could indeed be quite explosive and thus cause large open bleeding wounds. However, grazing wounds could indeed just instantly cauterize and not much else.

Not that much, though. It'd be similar to a steam burn.

No, it absolutely could explode the chunk of vaporized flesh if it happens in a few microseconds. Water has rather impressive expansion ratio of 1600 from liquid to gas. This is more than twice that of smokeless and black powder. The reason water isn't used as an explosive is because it doesn't do this with its own stored chemical energy when ignited, but if you had a method to apply the necessary energy to liquid water to instantly turn it into steam, it would be extremely powerful as an explosive.

I do not get the premise of this thread. What is good and bad is relative.

The Necrons have guns that strip the automs of things they shoot at. Autocannons make the real life minigun look like a bad weapon. The imperium has plasma cannons, melta guns and lascannons so big you can't carry them around. Eldar Wraight cannons opens up portal to other places in space.

With the above as the baseline for good I am not suppriced that the autogun is not that impressive. Even from a gameplay perspective the bolter (who is better then the autogun) is not very impressive.

 Niiai wrote:
I do not get the premise of this thread. What is good and bad is relative.

The Necrons have guns that strip the automs of things they shoot at. Autocannons make the real life minigun look like a bad weapon. The imperium has plasma cannons, melta guns and lascannons so big you can't carry them around. Eldar Wraight cannons opens up portal to other places in space.

With the above as the baseline for good I am not suppriced that the autogun is not that impressive. Even from a gameplay perspective the bolter (who is better then the autogun) is not very impressive.

yeah but they look like they are made out of scrap metal. they look less sophisticated than an automatic rifle invented in the 1970's. its not about the fact that they are weaker than other weapons, but that they tend to look like something from a scrap heap when I think it would be fairly easy, in 40k millenium, for armies to make guns that are at least as sophisticated as what is manufactured today

If I understand it correctly a laser can cut through something fairly dry like MDC wood, but if that heat hits a bag of water, like say a cell, the bag boils and explodes.

(Not sure how lasik surgery works then without exploding your eyes, maybe low, low energy?)

So a laser weapon could cut through armor given time, but would explode exposed flesh.

I always thought the multilaser with high strength, no AP and multiple shots worked the most like a laser would.

I runn autoguns on 40 of my GSC Neophytes. I really love how they look on them. The Neophytes are very ragtagged crazy cultists with alien DNA in their veins. They are truly doomed and if they achieve their goal they will be eaten. They might be the worst people off in the universe (Although eldar are not looking to hot either.) Even the chaos cultists might end up becoming a demon one day. Arguably better then beeing eaten. (Depending on where you stand on the soul thing.)

Anyway back to the autoguns. I really like that they are not in a uniformed look on the GSC models. Some on them are less human then others. It really lends to the look. I guess it is a suspension of disbelief to buy into the narrative. 40k makes no sence what so ever. The autocannons is not the hill I will die on.

I attached a picture of autocannons on sprue. Who else runs autocannons in the lore? GSC is like a love letter to 2nd edition weapon design.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
If I understand it correctly a laser can cut through something fairly dry like MDC wood, but if that heat hits a bag of water, like say a cell, the bag boils and explodes.

(Not sure how lasik surgery works then without exploding your eyes, maybe low, low energy?)

So a laser weapon could cut through armor given time, but would explode exposed flesh.

I always thought the multilaser with high strength, no AP and multiple shots worked the most like a laser would.

I tired reading up on how lasers work and all I can tell you is that there are different types of lasers that work in different ways. And damage a target using different methods. So its reasonable to assume that in the 40k millennium they have invented new kinds of lasers

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
If I understand it correctly a laser can cut through something fairly dry like MDC wood, but if that heat hits a bag of water, like say a cell, the bag boils and explodes.

(Not sure how lasik surgery works then without exploding your eyes, maybe low, low energy?)

So a laser weapon could cut through armor given time, but would explode exposed flesh.

I always thought the multilaser with high strength, no AP and multiple shots worked the most like a laser would.

I can’t say how LASIK doesn’t blow up your eyes, but I can tell you…

1. The laser firing sounds like the ignition on a gas cooker
2. It causes a very faint smell of cooked bacon
3. It works by evening out the cornea

Yes I was once trained on selling it. But left the job before I ever had a customer.

Back on the topic of VERY REALISTIC logistics for an interstellar Empire 40,000 years in the future...

The biggest fear in the Imperium is not alien invaders or chaos, but internal rebellion.

So it would make sense that planetary governors would want their forces to have weapons that can be made locally and depend on local supplies. This means they can supply their armies even if cut off from the Imperium AND they can cut off their own forces if they rebel.

Similarly the Imperium wants their forces to be able to sustain themselves even if cut off from the rest of the Empire or local sources. Most IG are garrison forces to protect Imperial interests and keep the locals in line.

And it explains why Marines use hard-to-make bolter rounds rather than just wire lasers to their backpack atomic piles. The Imperium wants Marines to be dependent on them for logistics.

From memory I thought that part of the kit on strike cruisers and battlebarges was ammo manufacturing equipment so the chapter can supply themselves. Raw materials are needed, but that’s what chapter serfs are for