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Forgetting the fact that the game has to give lasguns a chance of beating power armour

How much damage do lasguns do in the lore of your mind?

In my mind astartes can walk through an anbsolute hail storm of laser gun fire without losing much more than paint, but humans with lasguns are plenty and astartes are few and difficult to miss. So does a human with a lasgun really have such little chance of breaking through the armour in which case what’s the point in taking the shot.

It also sets out a huge leap in firepower for weapons like plasma or a power swordsthat can, in a single shot, break power armour

The novel Nightbringer describes Lasgun fire pockmarking Uriel’s power armour.

Been a long time since I read it, so please don’t take my recollection as gospel. But it seems to flash melt the area where is strikes.

So whilst it seems a single, I assume standard yield Las bolt doesn’t have sufficient oomph to penetrate a Pauldron or Chestplate on its own? Multiple Lasbolts will eventually burn through.

But, if it hits the undersuit or an eye lens? Then you’re quite possibly looking at full penetration. Whether it would have sufficient energy left over to meaningfully wound the Marine underneath?

I have no specific source, but I think while the armorplates of powerarmor can indeed withstand quite a lot of lasbolts, you cannot really build a powerarmor just out of plates. There must be joints somewhere, breathers, sensors, lenses. And the "problem" with wading through a hail of lasfire from lets say 100 dudes firing lasguns on full auto is that that's a whole lot of potential lucky hits that might burn through such places. Doesn't even have to wound the marine, if it just feths up the hydraulics and electrics of the armor.

Something like that, walking on open ground against a platoon of Guardsmen (Ignoring the fact they would have far more weaponry than just Lasguns) will result in a quick death as the armor gets torn up under repeated fire/lucky hits go through less armored parts.

This sort of thing is immensely inconsistent in narrative material. I can produce a wealth of quotes, many of which significantly contradict each other.

The best you can really do is look at it from a general sense. A lasgun is not an armour-piercing weapon. It's had zero AP in every edition of the game I'm aware of, even as other weapons enjoy AP creep (hell even choppas are AP-1 now, and those are often just a blunt, badly made oversized knife).

As such, you can assume they will do little to power armour plating, and need to hit a weak point to do damage.

Even if you hit a weak point, you are far from guaranteed a kill. As Orks demonstrate, even without armour, something can take a terrifying amount of punishment before it goes down, and Marines are notorious for being able to sustain great wounds and keep fighting.

Beyond that, 40k doesn't really care for anything more precise. It's far from limited to lasguns. In some novels, power armour is immensely resilient (the Nightbringer novel Grotsnik mentions above has some good examples, with Uriel Ventris withstanding autocannon fire from aircraft without it breaching his armour, but many more examples exist). In other novels, power armour is so quickly chewn through it makes one wonder why they bothered to develop Banestrike and Vengeance rounds!

Lasguns are also oddly survivable weapons. Due to instant cauterisation? You’re not about to bleed out from a Lasgun wound. So, provided you’re not instantly killed (headshot, heart shot etc), and you don’t go into shock? You’ve a reasonable chance of surviving with even rudimentary medical attention compared to solid rounds.

Also, Lasguns had a -1 Save mod in 2nd Ed and Necromunda.

 Ashiraya wrote:
even as other weapons enjoy AP creep (hell even choppas are AP-1 now, and those are often just a blunt, badly made oversized knife).

If only that applied to Hotshot Lasguns as for Choppas, they used to limit your armor save to a 4+ in 3rd or 4th, so even back then they had some matter of AP in mind, even if it worked weird.

We can also look to Inquisitor

There, Marine Power Armour (I think specifically?) had an ablative layer. It could be chipped away at over the course of an engagement, but it meant you were really likely to survive most first strikes, as it would (in canon, not necessarily rules!) fully absorb the fit hit, leaving the underlayer untouched.

Which is how armour works in general, much of the time, but it tends to be beyond the scope of most games to properly simulate.

Even the TTRPGs don't tend to fuss with armour degradation unless it's something specifically designed around it.

I think it was a way to make Marines feel threatening, without being overwhelming.

But back to Lasguns. If memory serves, Nightbringer describes each impact leaving melted armour running down the remainder. So it’s clear Lasguns pack quite the punch. However the energy tranferal is of course strictly limited.

But. If you’re facing a disciplined firing line? You’re looking at facing down a veritable blizzard of energy bolts. If you catch a sustained amount? Your armour is going to get hotter, more malleable, and so easier to breach for each successive strike in the same rough area.

Power Armour of course has Ceramite as one of its component materials, and that is said to be really good at heat dissipation. So I will argue Power Armour specifically is going to be more resilient than say, Carapace, ‘Eavy Armour or Mega Armour, depending on the exact composition of the same.

None necessarily require Ceramite (being quite broad categories, describing more the level of protection rather than its actual construction) but there’s nothing stopping it being used. Especially Orky Stuff.

I bring everyone's favourite thing: a source!

Renegades: Harrowmaster, a fairly new novel.

CSM, when fighting Guard, basically consider single lasguns to be trivial (not even paying attention to being shot in the shoulder). A whole company of lasguns braced and ready, on the other hand, is enough of a danger to fight with actual tactics, even for a small squad's worth of CSM (5 men, I believe the novel implies), with one even being downed by the sheer weight of fire or a potential lucky hit.

Here: (Just click the last one and it'll right itself)

Goes to support my hypothesis that rapid, repeated Lasgun strikes will combine to melt through Power Armour, as the armour’s surface gets less of a chance to cool down between strikes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Wonder if we can work out the energy of a Lasgun shot?

I mean, we’ve descritpions of it melting a material at least as hard as steel. Not all the way through, no. But deeply enough to leave a visible pockmarking. And in a split second too.

That suggests quite a lot of energy in each shot.

Not this time, Doc. I'm all physiced out from the bolter recoil thread.

Besides which we don't even really know what lasbolts are. They're some kind of explosive high energy plasma BS that varies in ability and yield by pattern and description. Far, far too many variables to even ballpark the energy

In my head a lasgun shot that hits a marine has a 1 in 9 chance of scoring a disabling wound on said marine. Probably a significantly lower chance of actually killing them, but 1 in 9 chance of putting them out of the fight.

Lasguns are designed to solve a logistical problem more than a tactical one, and I think that's my favourite thing about them.

1 in 9? Suspiciously specific.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


So whilst it seems a single, I assume standard yield Las bolt doesn’t have sufficient oomph to penetrate a Pauldron or Chestplate on its own? Multiple Lasbolts will eventually burn through.

But, if it hits the undersuit or an eye lens? Then you’re quite possibly looking at full penetration. Whether it would have sufficient energy left over to meaningfully wound the Marine underneath?

Yep, pretty much this. Marines can pretty safely expose themselves to a few lasbolts, but leisurely prancing over no man's land on a warzone where lasfire can be concentrated on them is still a bad idea.

 Ashiraya wrote:
1 in 9? Suspiciously specific.

1/3 to wound, 2/3 to save (so 1/3 to fail save), Marine with 1W...

Aye, my ideas of how Marines work were formed by playing the game during 2e-7e.

 Da Boss wrote:
In my head a lasgun shot that hits a marine has a 1 in 9 chance of scoring a disabling wound on said marine. Probably a significantly lower chance of actually killing them, but 1 in 9 chance of putting them out of the fight.

I don't think dice are so 1-1 for shots like that though. I would consider each dice we roll to be a volley, the size of which will vary from weapon to weapon.
If we take a dice to mean say a 3-5 round burst I think that would be more appropriate.

Then again, the several of casualties sustained in the time period a 40k battle is meant to be is just absurdly high. Which can suggest we should take a turn to be several minutes if not even hours of action, resulting in a single "dice" representing something more like an idea magazine or extended firing period

Charax wrote:
Not this time, Doc. I'm all physiced out from the bolter recoil thread.

Besides which we don't even really know what lasbolts are. They're some kind of explosive high energy plasma BS that varies in ability and yield by pattern and description. Far, far too many variables to even ballpark the energy

You’re no fun anymore

But entirely fair enough. Doesn’t help we don’t have particularly consistent descriptions either. Sometimes they’re described as a brief but continuous beam, others Star Wars style bolts. And I think I even found one describing them as a form of particle weapon in some instances!

Lasguns definitely would have to have a LOT of energy in each shot to do this if they are indeed lasers. Maybe a little less if they are pulsed plasma or some other type of shot which has a physical component and isn't just light. Enough to flash heat/melt an area 1/2 inch or so across.

Individually this is entirely inconsequential. A single spot would rapidly cool and resolidify. But over time a lot of lasbolts could eventually lead to deformation and compromised structure of the armor itself. Maybe even more if the armor is also struck by other objects while it is slightly melty. A lot of lasgun strikes in a short time would also just generally raise the temperature of the armor which could cause issues with the armor's systems as well as injuring the wearer.

Joints are obviously where any real instantaneous damage would be expected. Damaging components of the armor as well as the wearer. The real point of power armor isn't going to be slowly walking towards the hail of lasfire and come out unscathed(thats for Terminator Armor), its going to be still using cover and concealment to advance, but you are relatively safe even during the times you are exposed. During which you will be moving fast to minimize the chance for the enemy to hit your few weak spots.

Aha! Proof I’m not completely mad! Lasgun description from the 2nd Ed Wargear Book.

I think this was the last time I tried mathsifying lasgun effectiveness

No guarantees that any of my assumptions are even vaguely correct.

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/90/539592.page#5854899


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hah, and this same topic from 2 years ago

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/814866.page

 Da Boss wrote:
Aye, my ideas of how Marines work were formed by playing the game during 2e-7e.

Ngl, the moment I saw that a Guardsman could suddenly take three times as many Heavy Bolter shells to the dome and truck on as before simply because he was promoted to Captain rank, the game broke that illusion for me.

Like don't get me wrong, the game has a lot of uses even in lore discussions. We can probably pretty safely conclude that an autocannon is better against armour than a multi-laser, since the former has typically had at least one point of AP, and the latter has not done in any edition I've seen.

But taking it into mathhammer would be pushing it for me. Could you imagine if the 8th edition Iron Hands Leviathan Dreadnought that could facetank a Warlord Titan's worth of volcano cannon fire and survive was canon?

 Ashiraya wrote:

Ngl, the moment I saw that a Guardsman could suddenly take three times as many Heavy Bolter shells to the dome and truck on as before simply because he was promoted to Captain rank, the game broke that illusion for me.

It makes sense, as the promotion comes with the named character status. When a nameless mook gets shot, they drop and we never hear of them again, but when Colonel Sharpe gets shot he is just wounded and presses on.

Why doesn't the Guard promote everyone to Captain and swarm the Eye of Terror with their new ubermensch army? Are they stupid?

Syndrome's tried it, we all saw how it went.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Why doesn't the Guard promote everyone to Captain and swarm the Eye of Terror with their new ubermensch army? Are they stupid?

There unfortunately is not a sufficient supply of plucky main character energy for such promotions.

In 2e a Heavy Bolter did d4 wounds, d6 if you used a Hellfire shell, so the Captain would be in quite a lot of trouble if they got hit!