Search results for query: *

Most human armor is kevlar, with rifle-rated plates being ceramic, steel, titanium, or even polymers in some instances.

OP is basically "Bolter but what if real?", and currently steel is about the most common armor material on the planet. Yeah sure you get exotic stuff like titanium, NERA, ceramics, ERA, and crazy stuff. But despite all of this most stuff is made of good old steel of which is only marginally...

Looks like Metal-Storm rounds use pre-etched fragmentation sleeve, similar to some WW2 hand grenades and other modern munitions.

In hindsight now I am wondering if fin stabilized bolts are a good choice or not. Gyrojets can be hard to make because the stabilizing rocket holes are to put it bluntly, a pain in the ass. Fins are less accurate but also way, way easier to make, and allow for a longer projectile. AKA, more...

Las weapons are commonly regarded as being weaker than bolters, even hot-shot lasguns aren't ideal against the bigger beasties. I'm not sure if the imperium can even make handheld railguns, they're intentionally incompetent for story purposes.

So the ideal would be AHEAD style munitions, bursts in front of target releasing pre-made fragments/spheres, automatically fuzed based on laser/technobabble mounted to the gun. Not going to lie that'd be pretty horrifying, 30 round magazine weapon slinging 20mm shotgun shells which explode a...

But...Those targets will die to practically anything in 40k. Instead of fragmentation rounds why not just load 20mm cannister/shot-shells?

But the targets in 40k are going to be relatively tougher, which certainly will counteract advanced materials/explosives. A lot of targets require APHE (or even nastier) 20mm bolts to the torso to kill in 40k.

Bolter would have significantly greater range due to ballistic coefficients, and you'd be able to carry way, way more ammunition. Think M14 vs M16. Edit: Also there are no 40mm grenades with 100mm of penetration, the HE-DP get about 40-50mm of penetration IIRC.

It's a little exaggerated, a bolter is at most a handheld 20mm autocannon. Penetration can't be much more than 80-100mm while even the most petite of rocket launchers exceeds 200mm.

Because AP poke lil hole in stuff, HE impact fuze causes beeg hole and launches fragments to a localized area, but only localized! Because when you're producing a 20mm AA weapon already it's pretty logistically simple to shove it into a tank or armored car, give it some AP rounds, and enjoy...

WW2 20mm HE rounds still relied upon direct hits to cause damage, yeah in theory their fragments could kill a nearby person but this class of weapon was still about hitting exceptionally close if not directly hitting people. Germany made great use of these weapons in various forms including a...

There's only so much you can stretch things with sci-fi materials. And if we assume they do have wunder-materials, wouldn't the armor be made of equally tough stuff, so you're back to square one? In a nutshell if you want an explosive payload to survive the impact of going through armor, you...

I know there's all sorts of bolts, but because sci-fi writers are silly people (and I seriously don't mind silly sci-fi at all, it just makes it very hard to translate to 'reality') they have no clue how most weapons actually work. Lets look at bolt design. The main principle of the standard...

They are supposed to be useful against masses of mooks but given the specifications of such a bolt I just don't believe they would be as useful as the universe claims they are. Ultimately yes, they are exceedingly useful bolts because 40k says so, but there's far, far better weapons to use...

Mine Shells were a bit of an oddball where they were designed to penetrate the skin of an aircraft and explode when about halfway in or all the way in. In effect their massive HE payload turned parts of the airplane itself into fragments which could cause further damage. Their actual fragmenting...

I'm not even convinced a shrapnell bolt round would be too effective against those targets. Even something as pathetic as a Gaunt is basically a target covered in kevlar with lessened pain receptors and other biological advantages over a human, Boyz are superhumanly durable and cultists might...

I mean there's only so much explosive (And fragmenting casing) you can fit in a 75 caliber bolt, even a relatively speaking 'petite' 40mm grenade for a Space Marine would be outputting much more oomth in a single shot. That Warrior Prime might not care too much about bolter shrapnel smacking...

Bolters don't have grenade launchers unless they're combi-weapons, which are relatively rare, although a lot of bolter ejection ports do line up with the smaller barrel instead of the larger one.

Found a hilarious picture which uses the official bolt-shell pictures to calc how big a bolter is. They aren't much bigger than a stockless MP5 which is...Hilarious. Basically in a nutshell a 'canonical' bolter looks nothing like the depictions in any of the artworks. Not a surprise but I didn't...