Fucking Bolters

Calm yer fuckin tits man.

>pull trigger
>bolt's primer is ignited, this shoots the bolt out of the barrel and accelerates it to supersonic speeds
>gyrojet activates after a certain distance, continues traveling at supersonic speeds
>bolt goes THUNK, then boom boom time.

Maybe Tyranids are picky

Contrary to popular belief, Tyranids in fact lack teeth. While they have what appears ot be pearly whites, this is an image conjured by the Hive Mind. Tyranids instead eat things by slowly breaking them down with the naked, toothless gums of their mouths until the biomass is chewed up enough that it can be absorbed by the Hive Fleet in spawning pools.

This is why you should not run from Tyranids, because in fact those hordes of Hormagaunts charging for you are harmless, toothless creatures who will at worst lick you to death like a puppy before you managing to slip out of their grasp and escape.

You can trust me, I once saw an Apothecary dissect an Hormagaunt from 100 meters away.

I am deeply sorry for my burst of rage and thank you 3 for your input on the workings of a Bolter I shall now move on to find a more detailed explanation for it. Praise The Emperor for your existence.

youtu.be/tnHyEhS1lSM

>i can't find a 100% thorough explanation of tech that won't exist for 28000 years
Who would have known?

The same way Ork weapons work. FAITH.

Isn't it all old tech that even the tech priests can barely operate because "they don't remember how anymore".

That's normal firearms user. Bolt rounds are non-percussive. They're rocket propelled.

They already existed user:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet

>This is why you should not run from Tyranids, because in fact those hordes of Hormagaunts charging for you are harmless, toothless creatures who will at worst lick you to death like a puppy before you managing to slip out of their grasp and escape.
>This is what the Uplifting Primer actually believes.

point shooty end towards xeno, squeeze trigger, my face is my shield

Side note, according to the 40k RPGs? That delayed-impact fuse is coated with an armor-piercing material has sufficient penetrative capability to punch right through the vast majority of standard-issue military-grade body armor.

Get shit on, Guardsmen.

Ummm, lexicanum should have it covered, so does practically every core rulebook.

The long and the shirt of is that bolters are gyrorocs. Gyro stabilised rocket propelled slugs are fired from the device. The warhead of the bolter varies in function from poisonous to explosive, to pretty much anything you would find on modern firearms.

But there's no big mystery. Miniature, baby fist sized rocket bullets.

Imagine if the Imperial Guard was armed with Bolters instead of Lazguns though

They'd run out of ammo before the first engagement was over.

I believe that Lasguns are perfectly serviceable weapons.

Against normal humans.

For bigger shit, you need a bolter. The vast majority of Guard regiments are perfectly sensible, well-equipped, trained, disciplined men and women who are perfectly fine for fighting HUMANS.

The vast majority of wars they fight are AGAINST HUMANS.

For the bigger shit, you need Space Marines. You need bolters. You need power armor (which is expressly NOT standard-issue military-grade stuff - that's reserved for the post-human shock troopers that make up the ranks of Space Marines - and the Sisters of Battle, even though they're not augmented).

If the Guard got bolters, it'd bankrupt the Imperium and for damn good reason.

But Bolters

16 thrones for one bolter shell, nevermind the initial buy-in cost of 150 thrones for the gun itself.

15 thrones for one lasgun charge pack.

75 for the lasgun.

Lasguns are faster, easier, cheaper, and simpler to build, maintain, and keep supplied. Charge packs can be tossed into a campfire, and if the fire doesn't cook it entirely, you suddenly have another 30-ish shots. Granted, it makes the gun more likely to jam, but we're talking about being far from supply lines or some kind of power generator if you have to resort to this. If you have a sufficient power source, you can just plug it in like a goddamn cell phone charger and boom, full charge pack within a few hours.

The lasgun is the objectively superior weapon for a protracted campaign, and works great against humans - especially if they lack any kind of body armor. Even if they had body armor, we're ballparking it at 60%-ish chance of being able to hurt them. Concentrated fire will put them down unless they turn out to be a total badass.

Bolters are Badass, we know. But they're comparatively expensive and difficult to manufacture, for every one Bolter some techno-artisan spends a month building you can have a bunch of tech priests create a couple hundred lasguns. Not to mention you need to then keep that bolter constantly supplied with similarly handcrafted ammo. That's why the aimboting Space Marines get them, they'll ensure every bolt goes right into some xeno, heretic, or traitor's skull.

>The vast majority of wars they fight are AGAINST HUMANS
Well, humans and orks, probably, considering how widespread those are, but the lasgun is perfectly serviceable against orks. Not as good as a bolter, since the ork can shrug off a lasgun wound while the bolter will probably blow off a limb or leave a huge gaping wound, but you can probably get 50 lasguns for the cost of one bolter and its ammunition, and enough lasgun wounds will down the ork. Lasguns only start being inadequate when facing heavily armored opponents, since unlike bolters they lack armor penetrating capability (bolter shells are designed to penetrate armor and then explode).

>150 thrones

I derped, the price is 500 thrones per gun.

And then 16 thrones per shell.

The price for a single full magazine of bolter ammo comes out to 384 thrones.

884 thrones - for a single bolter and a magazine of ammunition. That is downright criminal, and these aren't even the Space Marine-sized articles. These are the shitty human-sized ones. I'd imagine the Space Marine-sized boltguns are much pricier.

Not sure if the aimbotting part is true - Space Marines use Heavy Bolters as suppression weapons just as much as the Guard do. You can smell the money burning when you do it, but Space Marines will pour the ammo on if they need it.

Doing the math, my home-slice bread-slice dawg, that is a bit outside what would be feasible.

Seeing the above price-tag for 884 Thrones, we're talking maybe a dozen lasguns and enough money for a handful of charge packs between them - each of which guarantees 60 shots.

That's enough to arm maybe one squad's worth of shit-eating Imperial peasants, but that's enough zotzot to kill a few motherfuckers.

W͙̗͙͉̟̳͟e̞͡ ͚͉̞͓̌ͯͩ͂͋ͤ̎D̻̰̥̯̖̗̔̽͗O̲͊̒́ͦ̋̊͡ ̍̑ͦ҉̰͙͖̞̬̹̻e̗̍a̘̤̜̜̫̭̜ͣ̀ͬ͑ͨͩ͒t̪̤̘͈̀͗͒̊͒̚ ̠͙̝͕̂̍ͦ̋b͚͙̯̞̻̓̎o̱n͓̥̦ͨ̿̐̀͗̕e͚̪̓̐ͅs̩̙͒̏ͮ

>Trying to explain 40k tech

They're both, actually.

Otherwise you'd have the same problem as real life rocket small arms where they had shit penetration at point blank range.

Most 'nids don't actually eat anything. They're living weapons, designed purely for fighting, so giving them a proper digestive system would be a waste of energy and space. Most nids are born with enough storet nutriends in their bodies to survive whatever amount of time the Hive Mind had concluded is the average time they should be able to survive in battle, and after that they starve to death. Only the vanguard organisms designed to operate long amounts of time away from the main swarm, such as genestealers, lictors, and hormagaunts, are actually able to eat and digest food, because their operational lifespan is supposed to be weeks, months, or years, rather than a few hours.

So most likely those skeletons haven't had their flesh eaten, but got sprayed with some bio-acid gun or something that dissolved their flesh but left the bones.

There is no deeper explanation for it. That's it.
It's a three staged weapon.
Standard ballistic initial acceleration of the cartridge, followed by a gyrojet like boosted acceleration after the round has left the muzzle, finished off with a delayed explosion a split-second after impact.

1d4chan.org/wiki/Bolter

Dessert for after they have finished all their resisting biomass.

>Warhammer is an accurate portrayal of how science would look like 28 000 years from now

>he doesn't know that GeeDubs are actually timetravellers trying to warn us

Bolter ammo is large and expensive.

Lasguns can get ammo directly from the sun if need be. They theoretically have infinite ammo, so long as you allow it time to recharge.

>Not sure if the aimbotting part is true - Space Marines use Heavy Bolters as suppression weapons just as much as the Guard do. You can smell the money burning when you do it, but Space Marines will pour the ammo on if they need it.

The point of suppression isn't to hit the target, it's to suppress them and keep them in place (hence the name), primarily so infantry can flank them or artillery can blow them up. Killing enemies when you do this is just an added bonus.

Space Marine HUDs have targeting reticles that are very effective (even classifying targets as they appear) and even without helmets their marksmanship at short-medium range is still ridiculously good. Furthermore, due to incredible combat training, Space Marines know when it is appropriate to use bolters as single-shot, precision weapons and when to use them as full-auto 25mm grenade launchers at point-blank range. Your average Guardsman does not (And that's fine, given how easy it is to replenish Las-packs), therefore he may waste its abilities unnecessarily.

>Most 'nids don't actually eat anything.

They eat it, but don't digest it. They chew it up into a nutrient-paste and then shit it out.

>AP 5
>Can punch through 5+ armour
Sounds about right.

>bio-acid gun or something that dissolved their flesh but left the bones.

But wouldn't that be counter productive since their whole goal is to harvest bio mass?

Probably reduces the flesh into a slurry that can easily be sucked up by appropriate harvester-bioforms.

...

No, they don't. They have no excretion system. Only Rippers eat things and then puke up the paste.

How exactly is that counter-productive? The biomass isn't going anywhere, it's just changing form.

There's no canon official explanation. In fluff, it's a big gun that shoots a rocket-assisted exploding bolt.

Fans have made lots of "technical" explanations.

Symbionts and Lictors can excrete.

Rippers don not puke eaten stuff out. They eat until they almost burst, then they throw themselves into digestion pools.
A Ripper is basically a one way murrican.

That's the rippers job

It's a gyrojet, this can be gleamed from literally 2 seconds on google. You didn't even fucking try

Gryojets are pretty shit

how many rounds do they typically hold?
cause it looks like 5-6 there

I don't think it's fully understood. What we know is that a Bolt round is 3 staged; ignition primer, gyrojet propulsion and a delayed impact fuse.
Since it can be fired in space, the primer is not oxygen-based. It could be magnetic, but we will probably never know.

A Bolter holds 30.
A pistol holds 10.

Shouldn't use bad fanart as your guide. Those casings don't even fit through the ejection port.

According to 3e rulebook, .75 caliber bolter hold 20-30 in box magazines and 40-50 in drums. Pistols hold 6-12.

The one in op's pic certainly doesn't look like that's physically possible, which leads me to conclude that clearly the Imperium relies on the Angry Marines to force them to fit even when the AdMech can't figure out a solution.

This guy has it.
Also, even if the stuff melts away and soaks into the ground, it doesn't really matter. The Tyranids are going to eat the dirt too.

They are shit, which is why, like half the fucking thread was saying, it's a 2-stage weapon that uses a conventional charge to get the bolt up to speed and then the gyrojet makes it go much faster.

>The one in op's pic certainly doesn't look like that's physically possible

Blame the artist.

It's possible that they are caseless as that has never been really established in the fluff I think. Seriously doubt the author had that in mind though.

Just handwave it that they are quad stacked or something.

Larger organisms can "eat" things, but they don't actually digest it themselves. They'lk carry it back to the nearest digestion pool and puke it back up. That's what I garner from that short story about the Red Terror, at least, and it'd make sense for creatures like Carnifexes, Raveners, etc. It's also how they break down entire forests and turn it into biomass. They fucking eat trees to death.

>It's possible that they are caseless as that has never been really established in the fluff I think.

They aren't. They have almost always been described as firing cased ammunition, and all bolters have ejection ports.

Autoguns can sometimes fire caseless ammunition, but the quality of them varies by make and model. Some are more high-tech than Lasguns, and some are little more than AK-47's that have been drug through a Middle Eastern war.