So melta guns are basically death rays, right?

youtube.com/watch?v=5yCGRy_dR30

GW writers were in charge of Eternal Crusade

I was under the impression that melta guns were essentially just microwave guns.

So melta guns shoot beams and grav guns are like ?

looks like it just crushes them to me.

One of my mates puts it quite succinctly: "Meltas are just nuclear powered hairdriers"

meltaguns are beams/air of extreme heat

plasma guns fire a projectile

I always figured that Grav Guns shoot a sort of hard-sound energy blob that resonates with the mass of the target to simulate an increase in the force of gravity already acting on said target. No idea how that would work in space/zero-g.

I like Space Marine's depiction of Melta as energy shotguns, spraying a wide cone of Warhammer-Brand microwave radiation that melts entire vehicle facings to slag at regular range, or punctures the vehicle so hard at close range that it burns through the armor, then continues frying shit in the contained interior of the vehicle, obliterating control/drive systems, and cooking the crew.

From Rogue Trader

by this grav guns wouldn't work in zero g also grav=/=graviton

Super microwaves.

Wait, Grav Guns come from Rogue Trader?

I thought they were a new thing?

A meltagun is a hand-held fusion beam, occasionally called a Hellbore in other fiction. It's a stream of fusing hydrogen plasma and radiation focused by magnetic fields (and prayers to the omnissiah of course). Broadly speaking, it melts whatever's at the other end with radioactive heat.

A grav-gun fires a beam of gravitons. They adhere to the target and dramatically magnify the force of gravity upon it, effectively increasing the weight by a factor of ten. The more massive the target (eg, wearing bulky armour, a tank) the more atoms there are for the gravitons to adhere to, and the proportionally stronger the effect. The result is being crushed into the ground by your own armour/body mass, or for a vehicle the wheels/tracks collapsing under the strain.

Brutal.

So why does it affect heavier things more? Does that some how make them easier to crush?

No meltas are constant nuclear reactions contained by a shutter (like a camera), imagine a tiny sun in your gun.

Volkite guns are heat rays.

isn't that description more accurate for plasmas?

rushed rules to make money. they have wildly different rules now.

I should note, that in Eternal Crusade grav guns can slow vehicles and characters down to a crawl and it sucks so much.

Gravity affects heavy things more than light things.

>they have wildly different rules now
What did they do in 7e and what do they do now?

In 7e they wounded on the target's armour save. This meant that the heavier your armour was the more it effected you. It stopped making sense when a Skyscrapper sized Wraitknight felt his big toe get a little heavy and instantly get crushed under his own armour.

Now, they're strength 5 or something.

Many "new" things in 40k are actually old things reskinned.

"sun gun" is literally a term used in necromunda to describe heavy plasma guns, so yes.

dont listen to any of these guys, melta gun is a heat ray gun, grav gun is basically that gun from ratchet and clank that shoots out a mini black hole for a few seconds and crushes inwards whoever you shot it at

yeah. plasmas are the miniature sun guns but meltas are just air beams

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Graviton_gun
wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Melta_weapon

Meltaguns shoot a short ranged beam of hot.
Grav guns shoot a medium ranged beam that makes things heavy, sometimes so heavy that they crush themselves.

>it sucks so much
I agree. I signed up back in pre alpha, never been more disappointed with a games flop in my life.

Volkites are ZZZAP gay rays

In 8E they both do about the same which is nothing of value.

I thought melta guns were good this edition

But both are pretty fucking strong this edition.

We should ask the Squats.

...

>it sucks so much
Only if you're Eldar or melee. Their AP damage is laughable, bolter is way better.

Is a support weapon for mostly AV.

In the fluff melta weapons are described as either intense microwave weapons or directed fusion weapons, that is projecting the heat of a fusion reaction at short ranges. Tau melta and eldar melta weapons are referred to as fusion weapons.

Volkite seems like it would be a vacuum frequency ray weapon perhaps using extreme UV or even soft x-rays.

I imagine grav guns shoot gravitons. Gravitons being gravity bosons, while photons are electromagnetic bosons for example. So if gravitons existed and you could create an intense laser or beam of gravitons, gravity would perhaps be extremely distorted immediately around /within the beam. So perhaps the beam gravitically lenses material around it, giving it great armor penetration. I wouldn't want my armor gravitixally lensed apart and my flesh beneath lensed apart all for the beam to stop within a a few ten thousandths of a second to leave a gaping wound. That's how I imagine grav weapons to work. By lensing armor and flesh around a beam of graviton bosons.

>But what about grav weapons?
>How the fuck do they work? What do they actually do?
We talking handheld, or space-based?
Because back in the WAAAGH! of the Beast, the Ork Meks created the fuck-off huge Ork grav weaponry for the Ork Deff Stars/Attack Moons, that basically operated similar to how describes grav guns, if memory serves correctly.

These weapons seem rather recent.

These essentially seem like crude DAOT equivalents to Necron Gauss Flayers

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Disintegration_Weapon

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Adrathic_Weapon

DAOT era civilization was quite advanced indedl

Wonder how much of this advancement was made by the AI.

>Many "new" things in 40k are actually old things reskinned.
The Adeptus Mechanicus approves of this post

Seems like DOAT human weaponry was approaching or exceeding eldar tech and approaching necron tech in capability if not elegance of design or simplicity of method. 30k custode laser weaponry on vehicles behave like souped up eldar lance weaponry... daot terra-only tier weaponry. Ordo sinister psychic powered weaponry on psi titans too. Again terra-only imperial household-only daot weapons. Or ark mechanicus tachyon based chrono weapons to reposition an eldar ship so it can't dodge the shot that it just dodged... daot weaponry.

Fusion reaction is simply a method of creating heat, essentially. Two hydrogen atoms go in, one helium comes out, mass differential is released as energy and some energetic particles. Not super exciting. However to get hydrogen up to the requisite temperature and pressure for the activation energy threshold for fusion to be met means we turn it into a plasma first. Plasma is a state of matter, essentially a charged particle fluid or gas. So melta and plasma could both, from description I've read, be a weapon which creates a plasma of super heated particles and then projects them at a target. It'd be very hot and damage the target. This is a technology we could actually build right now, but the weapon would need to be very large and have a power source the size of a city block.
Gravity weapons are less grounded in reality. The idea, though we lack any ability currently to do this, is that they create or project a gravitational source at a target. It's not clear how this works because it's fantasy, but the logic goes that heavier things have more mass and thus feel a stronger attraction to gravity. Armor is heavy usually so it is pulled in harder.

Gravitational lensing is a totally different phenomenon whereby we can observe light rays curve around a gravity source. Light is affected by gravity (hence why black holes are black), so a dense object like a neutron star or black hole will curve light around it. Pointing a telescope at these objects reveals the distorted view caused by light being bent around the object similar to how a glass lense bends light rays in a camera, telescope, magnifying glass, etc.

Yeah, they're a recycled RT idea. Just like some other stuff that's returned in the last ~10 years, like conversion beamers, RT/2nd edition patterns of Space Marine vehicles, and Thousand Sons and Death Guard wearing old armour Marks like they were originally intended to.

It turns the target's armor in on itself, causing it to implode under its own weight.

It really depends on what source your info is from.
The Eldar versions are essentially high pressure fusion burst guns. So a bit like plasma, only shorter ranged and more focused.

Imperial melta weapons tend more towards concentrated blasts of over-pressurized sub-atomic particles that rip apart materials at the molecular level (essentially melting it all to slag instantly).
This tends to also release a great deal of heat. Why the damn things use Promethium as fuel is a mystery to me, as I imagine any gas in the right circumstances could generate the particles needed.

I'm sure the peak tech was high, but at the same time there were a lot of colonies that seemed to use Rhinos and Predators.

If you want a glimpse of what true Dark Age of Technology stuff is capable of, try reading Daemon World by Ben Counter.
I won't spoil it, but suffice to say that it's quite overpowered compared to the stuff that the normal entities in the 40k universe have access to.