Bolters and Power Armor

[The Emperor's Champion]

I think it's quite possible that you vastly underestimate the amount of technology that goes into the missiles that Marines rapid fire from their rifles.
Or maybe you don't.
 

Given that Marines can be neurally linked to their Bolters through their armor's autosenses (that's what some of the plugs on the arm armor are for), it's likely that they could feasibly just think at their gun to set the fuse, or the desired depth of penetration before detonation.

It's also possible that a bolt itself is sophisticated enough to work out how much resistance a target has put up to its travel. If it senses that it impacted hard against something solid and then began to pass through something soft but denser than air, it'd know to detonate.
It's also possible that bolts somehow relay this sort of data back to other bolts that have yet to reach their target along the same trajectory, and the bolts auto-correct each other an instant before they detonate.

Perhaps bolts have proximity sensors so that they can be set to simply explode inches from a target's face.

Unfortunately, we don't get a whole lot of time spent on describing the various types of ammo in immense detail.
We know the basics, but we don't know that Astartes bolter ammo isn't more complex. We know it's sometimes massively larger than human Bolter ammo. Maybe a regular bolt shell just goes pop and special ones are super complex.

It's possible that Bolt Pistol ammo, while technically the same specs, actually has the fuses all dialed in to be more effective at shorter ranges...

Who knows?

Edited May 1, 2013 by The Emperor's Champion

[Xin Ceithan]

I agree that the writers at GW and BL could use some guidelines on how this stuff is supposed to work. can't remember how many books I flipped over the combat scenes because they felt like Steven segall movies... I imagine 30 000 years in the future gives you enough excuse for "rule of cool" scenes without ignoring baseline physics :)

But I agree that even if we only consider the options available to us presently, bolsters and power armour are being underestiminated and under strength on the tabletop. Loved the movie marines optional rules back in the day. But I suppose it's bad for sales when a 5k points force is just two squads of astartes ;)

[mysteriousmaskedmystery]

i think it's funny that the bolter is so iconic, and so central to 40k, but it's function or abilities are almost an unknown beyond what it is in the game, which is way over simplified.  you get better ideas of what it is, what it does and how it does it from some of the IA books, the old inquisitor game and the death watch books, but they are still vague at best i suppose.

 

in the old Inquisition War books, good'ole Jaq states that bolters don't have significant recoil, and would be almost noiseless if they hadn't been designed to be specifically noisy so as to be more frightening.  but that whole series was sort of killed off by BL, wasn't it?  so i doubt it has any sort of canon credibility.

 

death watch states that astartes bolt guns (and weapons in general) are different and not designed for use by normal humans, who tend to use scaled down versions of astartes weapons. 

[Kurgan the Lurker]

*EDIT: On second thought, tired of being nice about this stuff. Thread purged. Warning issued. Anymore shenanigans and it will be regrettable what happens to the offenders. Edited May 10, 2013 by Kurgan the Lurker

[DarkByDesign]

 

I would pose a couple of questions to you.

How does ceramite take damage? Does it crack or craze, shatter, or is it malleable enough that the high speed projectile would move the armor out of the way like a finger through clay. I tend to think it would shatter and spall when hit.

How shall he know, ceramite is a ficticious sci-fi material, not something that really exists. So how it takes damage is up to the GW author who writes it.

 

And caliber is basically the diameter of a round, generally measured in inches (.50 caliber means the round is half an inch in diameter).

 

To the topic, it's often been described that Marines are capable of taking bolter rounds without going down.

 

In the Ultramarines movie many (Chaos) Marines drop dead after one shot to the torso, that is to be seen in the same light as the James Bond evil henchmen dropping dead on the spot after being shot randomly by 007 and his Walther pistol. It's a movie, not more, not less. How much a Marine can take before going down has been and will be always determined by the plot, not by scientific thought.

 

OMG - you mentioned the Ultramarines movie!!!!NOOooOo Chaos marines seemed like :cuss (are made out like it also!) and go down from and knife thrown at them. Come to think of it the Ultramarines seem like pansies also. Not a good movie to base anything off of really.