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johnpjones1775 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:
one of the dreadnought examples gaunt did attack the rear armor…and then the marine inside was boiled to death…

So you agree that an S4 AP0 flamer killed a vehicle then?

no, the flamers didn’t harm the vehicle.
The boiling water killed the vehicle.

oh, then the fire must have started on its own. a hell of a coincidence that someone happened to be using a harmless flamer at the same time

 JNAProductions wrote:
So do Sisters get a special rule letting their Bolters and Flamers kill vehicles?

Why would they?
They still get plenty of intermediate weapons, no reason for any special rules.

Miracles let small arms fire hurt armor, as per your words.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Miracles let small arms fire hurt armor, as per your words.

Why would you buff flamers? They just need to start bringing water bombs.

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:
one of the dreadnought examples gaunt did attack the rear armor…and then the marine inside was boiled to death…

So you agree that an S4 AP0 flamer killed a vehicle then?

no, the flamers didn’t harm the vehicle.
The boiling water killed the vehicle.

oh, then the fire must have started on its own. a hell of a coincidence that someone happened to be using a harmless flamer at the same time

John's obviously trolling, why do you guys keep engaging?

shortymcnostrill wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:
one of the dreadnought examples gaunt did attack the rear armor…and then the marine inside was boiled to death…

So you agree that an S4 AP0 flamer killed a vehicle then?

no, the flamers didn’t harm the vehicle.
The boiling water killed the vehicle.

oh, then the fire must have started on its own. a hell of a coincidence that someone happened to be using a harmless flamer at the same time

John's obviously trolling, why do you guys keep engaging?

Because enough people keep agreeing with them.

I think it just comes down to what you consider cinematic.

I don't really mind lasguns taking out tanks - because it creates (forges?) a narrative where the players potentially remember that time Guardsman Jenkins blew up a Land Raider. Or how a Grot shanked a Bloodthirster.

But I can see how for some people this produces "No no no. There's no way my Land Raider could have been killed by a mere lasgun. There's no way my Bloodthirster could be killed by lowly Gretchin. My immersion is destroyed." But I don't really agree with them.

Tyel wrote:
I think it just comes down to what you consider cinematic.

I don't really mind lasguns taking out tanks - because it creates (forges?) a narrative where the players potentially remember that time Guardsman Jenkins blew up a Land Raider. Or how a Grot shanked a Bloodthirster.

But I can see how for some people this produces "No no no. There's no way my Land Raider could have been killed by a mere lasgun. There's no way my Bloodthirster could be killed by lowly Gretchin. My immersion is destroyed." But I don't really agree with them.

I tend to think of it this way: I'm never going to fire a lasgun at a fully healthy Land Raider (unless I have literally no other targets, I guess). I may well fire lasguns at a Land Raider with one wound remaining because killing it is a huge benefit to me. That seems to represent the situation where a severely damaged vehicle is taken down by small arms pretty well. Statistically, when the wound was inflicted isn't relevant, but if the game rules work in such a way to massively favour one situation over another (shooting the tank with 1 wound left rather than wasting time when it has 16) that's fine by me.

Tyel wrote:
I think it just comes down to what you consider cinematic.

I don't really mind lasguns taking out tanks - because it creates (forges?) a narrative where the players potentially remember that time Guardsman Jenkins blew up a Land Raider. Or how a Grot shanked a Bloodthirster.

But I can see how for some people this produces "No no no. There's no way my Land Raider could have been killed by a mere lasgun. There's no way my Bloodthirster could be killed by lowly Gretchin. My immersion is destroyed." But I don't really agree with them.

"Cinematic" in an abstract game is bad. No one wants to pay a ton of money for an army, invest time to learn how to play it, often money too if coaching is needed and then lose important games on a roll. The person who did the "kill" is not going to forget, but the person who had the negative expiriance of an opponent rolling +5/+6 and then them failing a +2 sv potentialy can. Making people remember feels bad moments is not good.

And GW knows that. They know that armies which are more elite can just get hit by 40 dice with re-rolls and suddenly your super elite ancient custodes terminators die to stones being thrown by grots. So they add re-rolls, FnP and other rules , which then again makes some elite armies too resilient. So in order to kill them more MW, more attacks etc have to be add, which again makes the elite armies too easy to kill. And somehow with a circle style rule design like that, after 3 editions we start (counting re-rolls) to roll hundrads of dice per turn. When the problem could easily be fixed, keep the weapon profiles the same, make elite a bit more resilient (like GK power armour being +2sv).
But GW never fixes stuff like that, they are going to break a core rule set and make buckets of units not work etc instead of fixing a single rule that is the problem. Worse part is that they do it over and over again. I play since 8th ed, and each edition GW has to learn that mass indirect fire is bad. Each and every edition.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slipspace 814162 11682969 wrote:
I tend to think of it this way: I'm never going to fire a lasgun at a fully healthy Land Raider (unless I have literally no other targets, I guess). I may well fire lasguns at a Land Raider with one wound remaining because killing it is a huge benefit to me. That seems to represent the situation where a severely damaged vehicle is taken down by small arms pretty well. Statistically, when the wound was inflicted isn't relevant, but if the game rules work in such a way to massively favour one situation over another (shooting the tank with 1 wound left rather than wasting time when it has 16) that's fine by me.

The rules of the game don't represent anything other then the rules. They are not lore accurate, they don't make sense their own in game mechanic. Worse each time we get some sort of a "does X on a roll of +6" suddenly a unit of 20 nobodies becomes a problem. Plus the way stuff scales in game with a d6 being the mechanic that allows us to roll,in gam ,per point, a lasgun on a IG is often more efficient then a bolter or storm bolter.

shortymcnostrill wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:
one of the dreadnought examples gaunt did attack the rear armor…and then the marine inside was boiled to death…

So you agree that an S4 AP0 flamer killed a vehicle then?

no, the flamers didn’t harm the vehicle.
The boiling water killed the vehicle.

oh, then the fire must have started on its own. a hell of a coincidence that someone happened to be using a harmless flamer at the same time

John's obviously trolling, why do you guys keep engaging?

because i wanted to be funny

Something one would have to be aware though:

tanks become immune to small arms fire

everyone and their mother "must" include severe amount of anti tank in their list

pure infantry spam becomes worthwhile as anti tank lists can't really bring them down

Karol wrote:
"Cinematic" in an abstract game is bad. No one wants to pay a ton of money for an army, invest time to learn how to play it, often money too if coaching is needed and then lose important games on a roll. The person who did the "kill" is not going to forget, but the person who had the negative expiriance of an opponent rolling +5/+6 and then them failing a +2 sv potentialy can. Making people remember feels bad moments is not good.

And GW knows that.

I'm not sure GW do "know that". I'm not sure GW know all that much about how the game is played competitively and their caring about it is in constant flux.

For the most part GW want people playing to "have fun" - and that's inevitably subjective. I feel 10th's changes were due to people claiming 9th was too bloated/complicated. Which from my view is annoying, as I didn't think it was. But that's subjectivity for you.

I suspect GW know that having some degree of "bad luck prevention" is good for some players. Hence rerolls. I think some bad luck prevention is good. I'm sure we've all had games where you can't seem to roll anything above a 2 and vice versa where your opponent is getting nothing but 6.
And this isn't totally new. Blood Bowl arguably introduced the CP Reroll over thirty years ago. Blood Bowl is a brilliant game - but its entirely about the "cinema". If you care about winning, you will likely become incredibly frustrated. But the reroll gives you a little bit more control.

But you are sort of coming back to the original post (i.e. t"here should be no rerolls of 2+ rolls"). Taken to extremes, removing any "feels bad moments" removes any "feels good moments". Its why I can understand the "no rerolls" camp. Although I think that's a bit strict. In some ways I think a pool (ala Blood Bowl and CP) is better than blanket "don't take units that aren't rerolling everything all the time just cos". But I realise others hate that as abstract, like they hate all stratagems.

But I think there's a difference in "feels bad moments". I.E. "Gotcha stratagems" (I'm looking at you Overwatch - and there were worse in the past) potentially feels bad for the person who is "got" and good for the person who executes it. But you can feel this is "lame" because you are exploiting a lack of knowledge in the other player (unless they've willfully put them in a position where they may eat overwatch etc). They wouldn't have fallen into the trap (by for instance not bringing Heat Lance Scourge...).

But just rolling dice is always going to have a luck element. Unless we want to embrace "average/normal hammer" where you get rid of dice and just calculate damage based on probabiity tables, there's always going to be a difference between say making and failing 3 4+ invul saves.

Moreover - models have to die for the game to work. I guess I'll never understand why "my brand new very expensive Tank got nuked from orbit on the first turn by 3 mega-marine-melta nukes before I could do anything" is fine, but "my tank on one wound got chipped down by a lasgun" produces so much angst. The former has been far more common throughout my years of playing.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

catbarf wrote:I apologize if I've missed it, but has anyone posted examples of this happening in the lore, rather than just thought experiments?

I've read a decent amount of 40K fiction at this point, and I can't think of any examples of characters going full cyclic with lasguns to knock out optics on Land Raiders or finish off a Leman Russ already damaged from a meltagun or whatever.

Those explanations strike me as an attempt to rationalize an unintuitive mechanic, rather than something that actually reflects the setting.

Two examples from Gaunt's Ghosts:

Mkoll kills a dreadnought in single combat, with nothing but a lasgun and the local environment. He overloads his lasgun power pack, and uses it to blow open the Dreadnought's sarcophagus. This, notably, does not kill it. The Dreadnought is *actually* killed by needles fired by nearby plants at the sound of the noise. A Dreadnought is killed by needles. Not dedicated anti-tank (evidently seen by how, as the Dreadnought is walking around, the needles are just bouncing off of its armour). A perfect example of a wounded vehicle being crippled and exposed, and its weakness being an opening for a non-AT weapon to finish the job.

Also GG, Gaunt and a trooper with a flamer kill another Dreadnought. Gaunt cuts some slashes into the dreadnought sarcophagus with a power sword (at the time, S4 in melee, which should not be able to affect a Dreadnought in melee), and then another trooper uses a flamer to boil the water around the Dreadnought, boiling it alive with the water vapour and promethium. Again, a S4 weapon.

I appreciate you taking the time to type these up, but neither match what I was asking for- examples of infantry deliberately shooting tanks with small arms because it's a credible means of either damaging a fresh tank or finishing off a damaged one.

Both of those examples strike me as illustrative cases for why a generic 'close assault' mechanic, not tied to a specific anti-tank weapon capability, would be appropriate for the game. But they're not about engaging tanks with massed lasguns.

 catbarf wrote:

I appreciate you taking the time to type these up, but neither match what I was asking for- examples of infantry deliberately shooting tanks with small arms because it's a credible means of either damaging a fresh tank or finishing off a damaged one.

Both of those examples strike me as illustrative cases for why a generic 'close assault' mechanic, not tied to a specific anti-tank weapon capability, would be appropriate for the game. But they're not about engaging tanks with massed lasguns.

nobody is bringing down full health tanks with lasguns tho.... Thats why these comparisons are valid, they show a case where small arms managed to finish off a vehicle that was previously wounded and had weakspots exposed from weapons that are better at penetrating armor

I don't need an example to tell me that I can ignite and destroy a vehicle whose fuel supply is already ruptured and leaking with a lasgun.

Or a Zippo. Or a match. Or a fething magnifying glass.

Also, it's known that an engine shot with a flamethrower will kill armor fairly reliably.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
Something one would have to be aware though:

tanks become immune to small arms fire

everyone and their mother "must" include severe amount of anti tank in their list

pure infantry spam becomes worthwhile as anti tank lists can't really bring them down

Sure, but in this context it's probably not a good thing. The skew lists (armor and infantry) both make vanilla lists into a bad idea because you either need to be spamming anti-tank or anti-horde to deal with them. AT-spam lists will auto-win against vehicles and auto-lose against hordes. Hordes *might* be able to have a good match against armor skew if the horde has lots of anti-tank or sufficient numbers to swamp the tanks and/or if the tanks have enough anti-horde to make a game of it, but they're both mostly just stat-checking eachother.

So you end up with a lot of matchups where the game is decided before deployment, and the most consistently "bad" lists are the well-rounded vanilla ones.

So I appreciate all the "lore" examples, but can we please not cite "Gaunts Ghosts" as a credible example of a thing that can happen? Those books are so badly written in terms of plot armor and deus ex machina, that if we based games off them, it would be pure chaos.

Anything including Mkoll, Kaff, Larkin, Rawne, or Brostin, can effectively be written off as not Table worthy.

Otherwise we'd have entire units of Little Sly Marbos running around, and no one wants that.

@ Wyldhunt: in case I came across wrong: I also see that as a problem. What I wanted to imply: as long as small arms still can interact meaningful with armor (meaningful in a sense that chipping of the last odd wound of a seriously damaged vehicle), loading up on anti tank is not a "must". It is wise to have enough of it, but it is less of a "take all you can get or else you can't interact with your enemies armor!".

I am a bit reserved that if tanks become invulnerable to small arms fire (again: I'm talking about chipping of the last one or two wounds), this would lead to a higher percentage of armies taking all opportunities to get their hands on anti-tank weaponry to avoid vehicle skew lists, which in turn might make pure infantry (still loaded up on anti tank) a bit oppressive. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong but looking at for example a guard army with 6 x 20 Infantry blobs with 2 Lascannons each + Command/Platoon command Squads with a third lascannon inside (which all together might not even be 1000 points) might then suddenly be quite anti meta.


______________________________


Regardless of that and more focussing on the question "are there real world examples of small arms fire being purposely pointed at tanks":
One would have to keep in mind that WH40k "small arms" is much heavier than Nato 7.62 or 5,56. Lasguns are described to explode/evaporate/melt/fuse flesh and chitin, puncture metal slates and concrete etc. And bolter rounds are rocket propelled, sometimes diamond tipped projectiles with roughle 19mm caliber as far as I found it. They are just consideres small arms because they are very weak in comparison to other weapons of the universe.
Therefore a more fitting real world example (in my opinion) would be 14,5 -25mm heavy machine guns and Autocannons. And that would bring us to the Bradleys sometimes succesfully engaging tanks in Ukraine and various examples of heavy sniper rifles or Anti-Tank rifles being used to damage radio and visual equipment in WWII and the Yugoslavian wars at least.

And as others have pointed out: up close tanks are still often vulnerable to burning things getting into the air vents of their engines in the back.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Those books are so badly written in terms of plot armor and deus ex machina, that if we based games off them, it would be pure chaos.

The same could apply to *any* 40k book, because the entire setting relies on plot armour and deus ex machina to run.

Ultimately, 40k exists for fun. Some people find that tanks being able to be finished off by a lucky shot is fun. Others think that it's not fun if their tank is damaged by a lucky shot. Some people find it fun that their tanks are impervious to all but the strongest damage. Others think that it's not very fun that elements of the game becomes inaccessible.

Arguments from realism tend to ignore that tanks should be much more vulnerable to anti-tank weaponry.
Arguments from the lore are inconsistent, because the lore is inconsistent.
Arguments from game design are flawed on both ends because nearly every suggestion comes with a whole range of additional context (ie, adding new rules, changing others, what should armies look like, etc).

So, what measurement can you use? Fun? A subjective term.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
@ Wyldhunt: in case I came across wrong: I also see that as a problem. What I wanted to imply: as long as small arms still can interact meaningful with armor (meaningful in a sense that chipping of the last odd wound of a seriously damaged vehicle), loading up on anti tank is not a "must". It is wise to have enough of it, but it is less of a "take all you can get or else you can't interact with your enemies armor!".

I am a bit reserved that if tanks become invulnerable to small arms fire (again: I'm talking about chipping of the last one or two wounds), this would lead to a higher percentage of armies taking all opportunities to get their hands on anti-tank weaponry to avoid vehicle skew lists, which in turn might make pure infantry (still loaded up on anti tank) a bit oppressive. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong but looking at for example a guard army with 6 x 20 Infantry blobs with 2 Lascannons each + Command/Platoon command Squads with a third lascannon inside (which all together might not even be 1000 points) might then suddenly be quite anti meta.

Ah. Gotcha. I misunderstood.

Generally, it sounds like most people can agree that making vehicles immune to small arms in a vacuum is probably a bad idea, right? Can we all agree that if you were to make tanks immune to S4 and less, you'd need to add something to the game to compensate? Be that the proliferation of krak grenades and bespoke anti-vehicle attacks, universal bonuses for engaging tanks at close quarters, or whatever else?

As I stated previously, I just don't want to end up in a position where half my army isn't allowed to play the game because my opponent brought an armored company. I'm not too picky about how we go about avoiding that.

Tyel wrote:
I think it just comes down to what you consider cinematic.

I don't really mind lasguns taking out tanks - because it creates (forges?) a narrative where the players potentially remember that time Guardsman Jenkins blew up a Land Raider. Or how a Grot shanked a Bloodthirster.

Yes, those moments do create memories for me. Unfortunately they are often negative memories....

Tyel wrote:
But I can see how for some people this produces "No no no. There's no way my Land Raider could have been killed by a mere lasgun. There's no way my Bloodthirster could be killed by lowly Gretchin. My immersion is destroyed." But I don't really agree with them.

You disagree that their immersion was destroyed?

Me? I have those opinions when MY lasguns destroy a Land Raider etc. Or in a recent game where my WE Jackles took down Canis Rex using nothing but volumes & volumes of dice.
Now will I roll those hits & wounds against your LR or whatever? Even though I 100% feel that attacks of x strength or less shouldn't even be allowed to wound even on a 6? That the odds are against getting any result other than just wasted time rolling dice? Yes, yes I will. Because barring some house rule, these are the stupid rules of this edition of the game.
Now if I run into enough of these kind of stupid rules? Then I'll just play a different game. But 40k 10e has not met that threshold yet for me.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

I appreciate you taking the time to type these up, but neither match what I was asking for- examples of infantry deliberately shooting tanks with small arms because it's a credible means of either damaging a fresh tank or finishing off a damaged one.

Both of those examples strike me as illustrative cases for why a generic 'close assault' mechanic, not tied to a specific anti-tank weapon capability, would be appropriate for the game. But they're not about engaging tanks with massed lasguns.

nobody is bringing down full health tanks with lasguns tho....

I never mentioned destroying a tank from full health with just lasguns. That's a straw man. What I asked for is lore examples of massed small arms fire being used to deliberately engage armor, either to damage sensitive components or to finish off damaged tanks, which are the two rationalizations I've seen given in this thread. If having full squads rapid firing lasguns at tanks is effective enough to be worth doing, where is it in the fluff?

Tanks being at risk from small arms is a mechanic that does not track with my impression of how tanks operate within this fictional universe, does not track with how tanks work IRL, and was not present for the majority of this game's history. 'Anything can hurt anything' is a crude attempt to smooth over a more fundamental game design problem, and the post-hoc rationalizations seem more like thought experiments than anything based on lore, verisimilitude, or gameplay precedent. If the lore has evolved and I'm just out of date then I'm all ears, but given that so far the responses have been at best tangentially related to my simple request, I don't think it has.

In other words, it feels bad because it's a blatant band-aid fix that takes me out of the game when it produces unintuitive outcomes.

The best you can say about it is that it's rarely relevant, just a wound here and there, at which point I question what purpose is being served by having you roll dozens upon dozens upon dozens of dice to usually accomplish nothing. As I've said before, I'd rather see more natural and tactically-rewarding ways for infantry to participate in a tank fight.

Alternating Activations

 catbarf wrote:

I never mentioned destroying a tank from full health with just lasguns. That's a straw man. What I asked for is lore examples of massed small arms fire being used to deliberately engage armor, either to damage sensitive components or to finish off damaged tanks, which are the two rationalizations I've seen given in this thread. If having full squads rapid firing lasguns at tanks is effective enough to be worth doing, where is it in the fluff?

Tanks being at risk from small arms is a mechanic that does not track with my impression of how tanks operate within this fictional universe, does not track with how tanks work IRL, and was not present for the majority of this game's history. 'Anything can hurt anything' is a crude attempt to smooth over a more fundamental game design problem, and the post-hoc rationalizations seem more like thought experiments than anything based on lore, verisimilitude, or gameplay precedent. If the lore has evolved and I'm just out of date then I'm all ears, but given that so far the responses have been at best tangentially related to my simple request, I don't think it has.

In other words, it feels bad because it's a blatant band-aid fix that takes me out of the game when it produces unintuitive outcomes.

The best you can say about it is that it's rarely relevant, just a wound here and there, at which point I question what purpose is being served by having you roll dozens upon dozens upon dozens of dice to usually accomplish nothing. As I've said before, I'd rather see more natural and tactically-rewarding ways for infantry to participate in a tank fight.

I'm not going to argue the root cause, because you're pretty much spot on I think, there is an underlying hole there in the core rules.

That said, what does a melta gun in your opinion? What damage do you feel a lascannon will do? Or a vanquisher shell? Do you feel these weapons hit, wound, pierce armour and damage components without exposing any innards or vital components?

To fall back on a real world example, here's a damaged tank, which I feel you could clearly state small arms could damage further, the vehicle is admittedly a ww2 relic but it's records state it was driven back, hence damaged, not destroyed:


I've also not seen fluff where 9 guys stand on a circle waiting to be shot and shielding the one melta gunner as they stand stupefied unable to do anything else to be fair.

Regarding the while "realism of infantry vs. tank combat" I would also like to point out that not only do Melta Gunners standing 3 meters from the fuel tank of a Malcador infernus that is about three times as big as them and has unarmored tubing still only hit it half the times and then only do anything to it 1/3 of the hits, they also miraculously forget how to shoot when they approach to 1 meter or even climb on top of it.


Apart from that regarding Catbarf: as mentioned before, WH40k small arms fire is in lore much heavier then current personell weapons. Bolters are ~20mm and lasguns explode flesh, chitin and metal.
So (as mentioned before) 14.5 to 25mm ammo is the more relevant comparison and those have been/ are used to engage tanks. Not primary, but in a pinch/to disable them

Dudeface wrote:
That said, what does a melta gun in your opinion? What damage do you feel a lascannon will do? Or a vanquisher shell? Do you feel these weapons hit, wound, pierce armour and damage components without exposing any innards or vital components?

I dunno, do they? Real-world tank shells often leave nothing more than nice little entrance holes when they penetrate armor, but a penetrating hit is also typically at least a mission kill and the vehicle is out of commission. When we're talking fantasy laser guns and magic heat rays, who knows? Does armor in 40K work like Battletech where it's purely ablative, and enough hits just shred it off? Do those weapons degrade armor to where small arms can credibly damage it? Does the Horus Heresy ruleset, where a Rhino is immune to lasguns regardless of level of damage, reflect a totally different technological base, or is that ruleset the one that's inaccurate to the fluff?

Are there answers to any of these questions provided in the lore, or are we inventing explanations to rationalize away feels-bad moments caused by a relatively recent rules change?

As for what the rest of the squad is doing- again, if the only thing infantry can do without dedicated anti-tank weapons is 'sit there and be useless', then something's missing from the rules. They ought to be engaging enemy infantry in close support, and the enemy is foolish enough to deploy armor without support, the squad ought to be getting up to the tank to inflict all sorts of nastiness in close quarters. Or working on the objective, or coordinating support assets to engage the tank, or recovering lost AT weapons that might be usable, et cetera.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
Apart from that regarding Catbarf: as mentioned before, WH40k small arms fire is in lore much heavier then current personell weapons. Bolters are ~20mm and lasguns explode flesh, chitin and metal.
So (as mentioned before) 14.5 to 25mm ammo is the more relevant comparison and those have been/ are used to engage tanks. Not primary, but in a pinch/to disable them

If lasguns are actually comparable to modern anti-materiel weapons (something I think is more memes than lore, as there are lots of examples of normal humans surviving lasgun hits, and stub-guns and autoguns have equivalent stats despite being analogous to modern-day small arms) then we should see them being used like anti-materiel weapons, but as far as I can tell we don't. Maybe the basic lasgun really is a superweapon, but every tank is made from magicplasteeltainium that isn't harmed by it, so they aren't used to engage tanks because they aren't effective. My dad can beat up your dad.

I don't put much stock in this sort of real-world hypothesizing about fictional capabilities; it puts far more effort into extrapolating the significance of throwaway lines than the authors put into them. I go by feel and theme, and most of what I see in 40K war fiction is basically WW2 in space. My expectations are informed by that characterization and the media I've consumed, and nothing I've seen or read in 40K makes infantry shooting at tanks with lasguns as Plan A feel appropriate. YMMV.

Tbf, I don't think anyone is proposing that shooting lasguns at tanks is ever plan A. The question is whether it's a viable plan C behind actual anti-tank weapons and mid-strength generalist weapons like heavy bolters.

And at this point in the conversation, specifically whether a lasgun can reasonably be the coup de grace for a vehicle that has already taken significant damage.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, catbarf, but I also think that in a rule-of-cool setting like 40k, having a lasgun hit some leaking fuel lines or exposed electronics or crew is plausible.

But again, I don't mind if we make tanks immune to lasguns as long as we give units without AT guns some way of going after tanks. Maybe that's some sort of blanket melee rule where anyone can do decent damage to vehicles in close combat. Maybe that's handing out krak grenades to half the units in the game and write bespoke tank killing rules for the other half.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Tbf, I don't think anyone is proposing that shooting lasguns at tanks is ever plan A. The question is whether it's a viable plan C behind actual anti-tank weapons and mid-strength generalist weapons like heavy bolters.

And at this point in the conversation, specifically whether a lasgun can reasonably be the coup de grace for a vehicle that has already taken significant damage.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, catbarf, but I also think that in a rule-of-cool setting like 40k, having a lasgun hit some leaking fuel lines or exposed electronics or crew is plausible.

But again, I don't mind if we make tanks immune to lasguns as long as we give units without AT guns some way of going after tanks. Maybe that's some sort of blanket melee rule where anyone can do decent damage to vehicles in close combat. Maybe that's handing out krak grenades to half the units in the game and write bespoke tank killing rules for the other half.

Agreed on all fronts.

Is it plausible that an already damaged vehicle could be finally put down by a lucky rifle round? Yes, I think so.

But if that's such a FeelsBad moment for people, then, to compensate for infantry being unable to harm tanks with their rifles, we should implement another way by which infantry can disable a vehicle (more access to grenades, melee effects, etc).

Which one would folks prefer? If implemented well, and in an ideal world, the latter could be fun.

(Of course, it all get a bit skewy when we're also then dealing with things that don't quite fit the bill of "tank", or on things that blur the line between "monster" and "vehicle", but that's another matter)

 catbarf wrote:


I dunno, do they? Real-world tank shells often leave nothing more than nice little entrance holes when they penetrate armor, but a penetrating hit is also typically at least a mission kill and the vehicle is out of commission. When we're talking fantasy laser guns and magic heat rays, who knows? Does armor in 40K work like Battletech where it's purely ablative, and enough hits just shred it off? Do those weapons degrade armor to where small arms can credibly damage it? Does the Horus Heresy ruleset, where a Rhino is immune to lasguns regardless of level of damage, reflect a totally different technological base, or is that ruleset the one that's inaccurate to the fluff?

Are there answers to any of these questions provided in the lore, or are we inventing explanations to rationalize away feels-bad moments caused by a relatively recent rules change?

As for what the rest of the squad is doing- again, if the only thing infantry can do without dedicated anti-tank weapons is 'sit there and be useless', then something's missing from the rules. They ought to be engaging enemy infantry in close support, and the enemy is foolish enough to deploy armor without support, the squad ought to be getting up to the tank to inflict all sorts of nastiness in close quarters. Or working on the objective, or coordinating support assets to engage the tank, or recovering lost AT weapons that might be usable, et cetera.

There's consistent mention of weapons from all factions across the game rending vehicles open, leaving hopes and broken components. Melta is often described as turning armour into molten slag and opening holes in things.

There are some answers to some of those things in the lore but nobody has encyclopedic knowledge of black library battle scenes enough to pluck them from memory. Likewise I doubt you could pull an example of the opposite from memory - a fluff example of a unit firing at a vehicle and doing literally nothing and knowing it will do nothing.

Regards "getting in close and doing nastiness" what nastiness do you mean, given we've established they're not equipped to actually damage the thing?

That said, if GW wrote in plain English "this interaction exists to represent XYZ" would that be enough?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:


But if that's such a FeelsBad moment for people, then, to compensate for infantry being unable to harm tanks with their rifles, we should implement another way by which infantry can disable a vehicle (more access to grenades, melee effects, etc).

Which one would folks prefer? If implemented well, and in an ideal world, the latter could be fun.

(Of course, it all get a bit skewy when we're also then dealing with things that don't quite fit the bill of "tank", or on things that blur the line between "monster" and "vehicle", but that's another matter)

Grenades are in essence a different gun, they also have the issue of being applicable to other targets and possibly creating further balance or logic issues. In the context of 40ks known framework, a krak grenade is a short range s6 ap-1 d2(?) Heavy 1 weapon maybe? In which case, there's arguments for using those instead of lasguns a lot of the time maybe when possible. If you limit the number of grenade throws per unit, that also seems weird.

Melee stuff - what can a guardsman with a bayonette and a shovel manage in melee that they couldn't from further afield with a laser rifle?

The current game core would need shredding to facilitate base humans having any meaningful effect on vehicles without being literal cannon fodder.