/k/ cross over

Kevlar probably not, but stuff like the ceramic body plates that soldiers wear would stop it. They'd probably heat up like a motherfucker though.

It depends whose lore/fluff you prefer and what variant of lasgun they're using. They vary in fluff from weapons that will destroy a golf ball size chunk of what they hit to a gold ball sized hole punched through what they hit to a weapon that will blow limbs clean off. Most of this actually relates to how the writer is trying to depict them. A force fighting insurmountable odds until the space marines turn up will have crappy useless las rifles, in books that centre around the guard they are formidable weapons easily modified and retrofitted to make better carbine and sniper variants.

In most fluff lasguns are equivalent to assault rifles with much less reliance on ammo supplies. But they're also in most lore highly visible, muzzle flash can be missed, a beam or glowing projectile (this also varies) is going to let the target know if they survive exactly where the shot came from.

Boltguns are even worse in the lore. In some books the recoil of them would break the arms of anyone who is not an astartes or in power armour, in other books the awesome thing about bolters is the lack of recoil for the amount of lead down range they produce and that they are meant to be totally viable in zero g and vacuum environs.

And if you ask me plasma weapons are even wackier.

Except that the lasguns do nothing to the Russ's 3+ armor save, implying that they are quite effectively stopped by its armor. Killing a Russ with lasguns involves drowning it in, on average, about 432 lasgun shots from guardsmen. This isn't you punching through it with the shots, it's you battering and wearing it down, lucky shots catching vulnerable spots and such.

Lasgun can kill tanks now, 8th edition is one hell of a ride.

They're still shit at it, though.

>las cannons function as anti air?
Anti-air lascannons exist, certainly.
Any random infantry fucker is going to have a bad time trying to use a lascannon like the one you posted as AA though, because hitting planes ain't easy.

Also, you know we have laser AA in development/deployment stages now right?
They've taken out drones and things.

The better question is how would Melta and Plasma guns fair in the modern day?

Wouldn't the proper term be "You and those 431 other guardsmen are melting it under your concentrated las-fire"?

Yea I know, some real metal gear shit.

Plasmas would be branded as to unreliable I think but meltas would be very effective in close quarters.

That would be a workable explanation as well.

Melta would do poorly - it's too awkward to deploy, and it would be overkill against any armour you could find today.
Might be a good weapon for an insurgency though.

Plasma is a mixed bag, depending on how much the unreliability was an issue, but it'd be pretty strong - again it suffers from a lack of over-armoured targets, but it's capable of taking out pretty much any vehicle we have reliably, at decent range and with minimal weight/ammo (I think even modern MBTs would struggle with direct hits)

Well, in a modern setting the killing power is awesome, because they hit like a 20mm.

Las rifles are well - lasers. Instant hit, no bullet drop, no deviation, recoil nonexstent. Modern armor with the exception of ceramic plates will offer no protection unless its really thick

Actually, lasguns have recoil apparently. I forget the explanation though.

Isn't it simulated by some mechanism in the lasrifle deliberately? Something to do with tactile feed-back for the gunner?

I don't think our modern day forces would field plasma weapons as man-portable weapons. More likely, they'd be either vehicle mounted or stationary defenses. That way, you could have a person use them without being directly in harm's way.

Not much. Ammunition seldom seems to be an issue for either ISIS or counter ISIS forces. It does make spotting the shooter easier though. It may be more effective in situations that don't require the shooter to be hidden, so ISIS wouldn't use it much except in close quarters.

>Can lasriflers penetrate modern kevlar?
Depends. On the mandated power setting that most Guardsmen use? Probably not the first shot. Or the second. It might eventually but it's going to require a lot of lasfire.

At full power? Oh yeah.

>Would las cannons function as anti air?
Yes, if you can hit the target. That's the hard part.

>Plasma
Too unreliable. Until the 'exploding' part gets ironed out, no one would be willing to field it.

>melta
ISIS may like it, but national forces less so as it puts the soldier and the weapon in a dangerous position.

I think lasguns shoot microsecond pulses instead of continuous beams, so:
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php#id--Lasers--Blaster
>I'm assuming a weapon designed to penetrate ~30cm in soft body tissue. This gives about 15cm in bone or plastic, 5cm in brick or concrete, or 2.5cm in steel or most ceramics. Synthetics won't be very good at stopping energy weapons, even tough ones like kevlar, but you might be able to find a ceramic that could stop a laser beam with a centimeter's thickness or so.

>I also mentioned earlier that lasers would likely have to have pulse energy and frequency tuned to the specific material being targeted. It might be possible to do this automatically, based on crude spectoanalysis of the material vaporized in each pulse, but if not expect penetration to be roughly halved if a laser weapon is fired at a target it has not been optimized for.

>You also need to focus the energy on the target, with a spot size of a millimeter or less. With a laser, that gets kind of tricky. A 5-centimeter mirror, about the largest you can really imagine on a pistol, gives an effective range of perhaps sixty meters, beyond which the weapon starts losing penetration quite rapidly.

Otherwise, ray beams seem the closest real system:
>Ray beams are lasers that emit needle-thin beams that produce a white-hot plasma along their path and easily burn deep holes into their targets. The main difference between ray beams and blasters/heat-rays is that ray beams use vacuum frequencies.

Thing is, those are scientific estimates, and nothing is more abused than the laws of science in WH40K.

>Plasmas would be branded as to unreliable
They're unreliable only when used at full power, and even then you can offset that by making them better than average, which would fit our quality over quality mindset

Any regular body armor will get fucked up and so will the body beneath it. Ceramic plates might do something if you are lucky.

A laser destroys by heat transfer. Basically same as applying a welding torch to your body, but even worse. You'd get serious tissue damage and burns even from a near miss or a grazing shot. A soldier that is hit will get cooked from the inside out. They will make decent AA platforms too. Instant hit, no bullet drop remember? Just point and shot.

>They're unreliable only when used at full power
So useless by most military standards. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't, send it back to the eggheads until it does work.

Yeah but see that's also a problem. Instant cauterizing. No chance of infection, not chance of bleedout, half the medic's job is done.

>A soldier that is hit will get cooked from the inside out.
We're operating under the assumption lasguns will work like they do in 40k. As in, make a bright light, burn a hole and do nothing else.

Thats how they work in 40k too. Thats why it says lasguns can remove limbs. Instant heat transfer means the liquid in the body gets to the boiling point so there's a ton of ruptured...well everything, around the the wound. What you won't have to deal with for certain - is bone fragments and fractures.

That's where the other part of my post comes in. You fit your forces with higher quality plasmaguns.

>major issues with penetration, even with light vegetation
>issues with shooting through smoke and other obscurants
It would have niche uses but as infantry ammo logistics are not really an issue right now most nations would probably keep using their old sluggers.

>dont have radar to see
Daily reminder that toothless serb farmers managed to shoot down B-25s with outdated equipment.

>Thats how they work in 40k too
I thought it just flash fried the area it hit so there'd be a charred stump.

That sounds less like a laser and more like a microwave.

So? Having a big ass vehicle doesn't make it totally impervious to everything ever. You can still bring down a bomber with dumb luck and a few guns that aren't jammed. It'll be hard but it's not impossible.

The Las rifles have "kick" because the air around the laser instantly combusts causing recoil

>Melta
Anti building weapon with several kilometers of range. Replaces most conventional artillery for the more primitive military forces

>Plasma
More of the same as melta, except it behaves more like conventional acid liquid on steroids.

You are a man of little vision and no faith.
You think 1:1 usage of overkill weapons is reasonable. When they should just be used as anti infrastructure/building/bunker weapons.

This is assuming the defender of the building wants to destroy everything, including the building supports with a single shot

>Strategically deny enemy cover, killing them with their own fortifications
>But you have to destroy everything to do that!
Pick one

The original fluff art for the stub pistol was a good old 1911, so slugthrowers still have a place even in forty kay.

What are you talking about? meltas are short ranged weapons.

...do it with a B-52 and I might be impressed.

A multimelta has at least assault rifle range, not that short. Not even close to kilometers, granted.

fucking kraut space magic

Meltas are short range weapon, in TABLETOP, against MEGA DEATH ALIEN TANKS.
Outside of that setting, like against shitty metal & glass skyscrapers, what would you assume the range is? 10km? A horizon?

It's a melta gun user, it doesn't discriminate, it vaporizes everything. It picks both.

As in they lose effectiveness against human targets somewhere between 60-100 meters, so still relatively short ranged.

>useless

You're getting the same old plasma gun, just without Gets Hot! All the stronger setting does is give it +1 Str. and +1 Dmg.

>assault rifle range

Think you mean pistol range. At tops. Effective range is even closer. Think late war panzerfausts had longer ranges.

Still, good for demolition work, but not for actual, dedicated tank hunting.

That's not what you sold to the General when he gave you funding for this project MISTER SCIENTIST. Get back in your lab and get it right!

It has the same range as an assault rifle, that's the fluff and crunch, the rest is in your head. It already works against tanks, granted it gets the full blast going at half that.

Isn't the rules basically
>If you only fire half your range, you get a a dice bonus to do more damage
But this is 40k. 24" tabletop could be 40 kilometers. or 24.

And yet, like that other user said, melta guns are explicitly stated to be short range weapons in the fluff. Multi-meltas have a better range, but compared to something like a heavy bolter or plasma cannon, they're still very short ranged.
And if you think that there is a 1:1 scaling in the TT, you are woefully retarded.

No, according to 40k rpgs meltas have the optimal range of 20 meters as opposed to 100 meters of the lasgun. Maximum ranges of the weapons are 4 times their standart ranges so 400 meters for lasguns and 80 meters for melta guns max. At short ranges (10 meters) meltas are more effective than vanquisher cannons ( which has 16 pen as opposed to 12*2=24 pen)

US would still use AR platform

5.56

And we'd still be forced to use those shit IOTV's, side plates and all

"Las Weapon Ban"

Las thread?

Las thread.

eh dude?
you mean a F-117
B-25s are WW2 air craft
and it was with a pretty advanced missile, S-200 i think

Meltagun has 12" range, same as an autopistol. Autoguns have a range of 24". How is that in my head?

>It already works against tanks

Yeah, at 12" range. 6" if you want it to be proper effective. That's quarter of an autogun's range. How many anti-tank weapons do you see with effective ranges a quarter of a rifle's range?

my bad its a SA-3 goa

would las weapons be considered incendary weapons?

>cheap
We have no idea how 'cheap' they are compared to autoguns or other more primitive weapons. We do know that the Munitorium has systems in place to mass produce them. If they're anything like our modern military then it's probably the most expensive and least efficient model available.

>require no ammunition
Power packs are ammunition.

>little maintenance
This we can agree on solely because in the setting lore anything beyond the most basic maintenance requires seminary training in addition to field ops.

>It wouldn't single-handedly decide a war
No single weapon ever has.

>No single weapon ever has.
Remind me, what made Japan surrender at WW2?

Inevitability. The war in the pacific was over after Midway, it was just a matter of how much the Allies wanted to spend unseating the military junta in charge of Japan. If you're trying to say the A-bomb won it, you're a moron who gets his facts from the History Channel. The firebombings killed more people than the atom bombs did, the a-bomb was just quick and new.

Soviet Union declaring war on them and starting to mop up their forces in China.

as a general rule lasguns won't change much, that said you can be your bottom dollar that 1. they will be made fully automatic (they have fuck all recoil) and 2. the heavier versions would have a lot of impact, missile defense would be pretty much inpenetrable without some form of cover/stealth for the missile and that Railguns would replace lasers in small arms and artillery for 3 reasons. 1. railguns are moire effective a dissipating their energy into a target 2. railguns are more energy efficient and 3. Railguns out range lasguns. Until we get to impirium level logistics lasguns as a small are are pointless

More than just a bomb.

american education fails to mention the firebombing of Tokyo and Russia killing 250k Jap troops in a few days

Doing some quick math here. I ain't one'na that them there science-folk so take this all with a grain of salt.

Now that said, a lasgun's power pack has a 19 megathule range. If we assume a megathule is the same thing as our megajoule, that gives us an upper limit of 1.9e+7 joules of energy in each power pack. Now, keeping in mind a lasgun gets 150 shots per pack, this means that, if no power is wasted over the course of the magazine's life, you'd have exactly 1.266 (repeating) trillion joules per shot. Compare this number to the amount of muzzle energy of, say, a .50 caliber BMG round (which has only ~15 thousand joules) and the power of the lasgun becomes clear.

They will fuck you up full stop.
The 16" guns on the fucking Iowa-class battleships only have 411.7 thousand joules of muzzle energy, not even a third that of the basic lasgun shot. This isn't a question of "Will kevlar stop a lasgun shot?" It's a question of "How the fuck are the IG losing battles when each of their soldiers is equipped with a fucking lasgun?"

GW and numbers... not even once.

>Take it with a mound of salt since GW can't into numbers
>Might not to be too reliable as this is taken from "The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer, Damocles Gulf Edition"
>HUGE fucking supposition
>Imperial Munitorum Manual

>Our system thinks your post is spam. Please reformat and try again.
Fuck you gookmoot. I've reformated 20 times already. Just let me post you candy ass roody poo.

Totally meaningless. Infantry rifle are basically for cleanup duty in modern warfare, air support and artillery determine the victor.

A combination of a strategic bombing campaign (incendiary, HE and atomic), the entry of the Soviet Union into the war as well as a aerial mining campaign and submarine blockade.

The problem with lasgun power is that it varies so much depending on who's writing about them. Some novels have them being pretty powerful, punching through light (as in infantry grade) armor easily and blowing out chunks of flesh or even limbs if hit in the right spot. Others have them just like tiny pin pricks but being massed so heavily they can bring stuff down.

The one thing that seems common across the board is they don't have quite the range of modern solid projectile weapons.

Yeah, BL and GW have a terrible habit of having things be grossly inconsistent.

Sometimes Space Marines can survive getting shot with tank rounds or falling out of space. Other times they get brought down by auto-gun wielding cultists.

Aren't laser guns semi-explosive in 40k (turns blood to steam and erupts making messy wounds)

Well, your maths could be easily debunked by the Fact we don't know what a Megathule is.

However, all the people saying that a Lasgun is outmatched by modern day firearms are wrong. Lasguns are vastly more powerful than modern firearms, and would easily cut through modern body armour.

The problem is (and where the whole "flashlight" thing comes from" is some of the absurdly powerful weapons and absurdly strong Body armour Materials/ walking hulks of muscle/ Chaos Infused Demon skin. Compared to those, the Lasgun is incredibly weak.

but make no mistake, (for the most part) a lasgun would burn through Kevlar with no effort whatsoever. It really is what said, most of it comes down to how much the writer wants to Plot Armour the enemy / Shit on the Imperial Guard.

Also, the cauterisation is bullshit as well, at the sort of temperatures we're dealing with here, the water in your blood would boil to steam almost instantaneously. That rapid change in pressure would burst your skin, leaving massive fucking wounds for blood to spill out of, not a neat little pencil-wide dot. This also goes for Lightsabers and Blasters in Star Wars btw.

throw a bag of salad in a volcano and you will see what he means.

i think op is asking if the 40k lasgun would be useful

This is literally meaningless.

>cornered, barely trained third-world bandits with flashlights

Yeah western civilization is really shaking in its boots now.

In other news, DARPA captures and reverse-engineers them, getting a 10-hour erection from all the stuff they could do with the technology.

>isis being afraid of exploding

Ehh

O-2 Hooah here,

The advantages of the Lasrifle as mentioned are its ubiquitous nature, ability to charge ammunition, and ease of mantainance.

In lore it is mentioned as being of varying strength but always roughly between a 5.56 and 7.62.

It would be a flat improvement over at least our standard issue M4s (if the sights of a las rifle are comparable) but it wouldn't be some sort of super weapon.

>So expect a single pulse of a lasgun to do as much damage as a round from an assault rifle

I don't even have enough time this century to explain to you how this sentence doesn't even make sense

a weapon with no drop and the ability to reduce the weight of a soldiers load without compromising effectiveness. Plus this weapon makes people fucking explode and you got to think about how most armor is designed around stopping kinetic energy it will most likely start an armor arms race.

I suppose in today's wars its true potential cant be used but think of a conventional war like say ww2.

It only makes people explode when some people are writing it.

the weapon works through heat transfer right?
the only way it could work would produce this effect just because some writers are inconsistent doesn't mean it should affect how thermodynamics works.

the problem with this thread is we don't have a standard of how lasweapons work here.

But you can just write a law banning lasgun power cells. California banned all magazines containing more than 10 rounds and has ordered gun owners to turn them all in for destruction.

I don't know...Hadjis are nothing if not inventive.

Lets add the fact that you can make lasgun batteries into an IED - pretty powerful one too.

It's because there isn't one. Like virtually everything else in 40k that isn't directly stated.

Hell, some things are directly stated and still contradicted. Like Meltaguns.

>If 40k laser weapons was invented all of a sudden, how would they change modern warfare?
it would free up pack space for more food and less ammo. as a result patrols last longer. infantry spend even less time than they used to outside the wire. countries that can afford lasguns have a massive logistical advantage over those that can't.

they would shred our vehicles. warfare would probably focus a lot more on infantry as a result.

>lightsabers make bodies explode

Metal

*edit. i meant more time outside the wire. not less.

infantry casualties will increase too. Not back to WW2 levels, but at least Vietnam. Deadlier accurate weapons and no working armor remember?

also the type of wounds lasweapons produce can be extremely hard to produce.
at least soldiers wont have to wear body armor for a little.

The U.S. Army wouldn't like a standard issue rifle that is that lethal. We like 5.56s because people often survive being dropped by them. Makes us look good to NATO and you can't ask a dead man questions. In all other aspects it is superior to the M4

I believe it would start a balancing between ballistics armor, refractive armor.
Kevlar protects you from some kinetic energy and you can put any kind of Camo over it. Refractive armor would disperse las weapons but you can bet it would light you up like a fucking beacon

No because their purpose is not by design to start fires

torching 60 of their cities first?