# Lasguns the strangest weapon in warhammer.



## Prothor Ironfist (Sep 27, 2009)

This is something I have voiced to a few friends before and thought I would put it up for discussion. The lasgun according to most fluff is a standard issue weapon that fires a laser round or the shortened term "las" round. Though for some reason in the various novels of BL it seems to be effected strangely by things it shouldn't be.

Take for example the Gaunt's Ghosts novels there are sections where the sniper Larkin is aiming for a shot yet for some reason he adjusts for wind? Why adjust for wind when the weapon fires a bolt of super heated light or so you are lead to believe at least. 

I'd just like to know what people think about this there are other inconsistent facts in other books to which just make the mind baffle as well.

The other thing about lasguns I would like to discuss is the Hot shot rounds snipers use in BL novels as well. In certain books they seem to be an overcharged power cell for the weapon that fires one very powerful super heated shot yet in others it seems to be a slightly more powerful version of a standard power cell but can fire less shots? Again you would think if GW had thought this through they would have tried to make all the facts in their novels match when they were proof read it just seems like fairly shoddy work just like the amount of spelling mistakes that are quite easy to notice in the books.

So what do people think of the lasgun on Heresy? Personally i see it as a slightly more powerful torch but others opinions are always interesting. :victory:


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## Prince Endymion (Sep 19, 2009)

Snipers still need to adjust for windage becouse the sniper itself fires solid shell ammunition. There is no such thing as a las-sniper. 

The difference between a lasgun and a hot shot lasgun, is that a lasgun has an internal battery with a finite number of shots at a preset level of power.

Hot shot lasguns have external powercells that offer greater power, but fewwer shots, thus being external so that when the rounds are depleted, they can use a new powercell.


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## Fallen (Oct 7, 2008)

id try to say something but it would just seem pathetic after prince endymion's post

but ya fluff wise i find that they are basically a modernday rifle that shoots lasers


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## Atsuno11 (Jul 21, 2008)

> The difference between a lasgun and a hot shot lasgun, is that a lasgun has an internal battery with a finite number of shots at a preset level of power.


This is incorrect. In the Gaunt's Ghosts books the Snipers use modified Lasguns called "Long-Las" Rifles, which fire high pwoered and more accurate las rounds, and are different from hot shot rounds.


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## hailene (Aug 28, 2009)

Prince Endymion said:


> The difference between a lasgun and a hot shot lasgun, is that a lasgun has an internal battery with a finite number of shots at a preset level of power.
> 
> Hot shot lasguns have external powercells that offer greater power, but fewwer shots, thus being external so that when the rounds are depleted, they can use a new powercell.


...Close, but not quite. Many las guns have variable settings.

HELLguns are powered by backpack power units. 

Hotshot las guns use normal clips but have a single power setting--really, really high. They hold fewer shots per a clip.

And I'm not quite what you're trying to say in the last two clauses of your final sentence. I'm not sure if standard las guns use external clips (I don't see anything that looks like a clip sticking out), but whether a battery is external or internal can't you generally switch out either? So I'm not quite getting "thus being external so that when the rounds are deplated, they can use a new powercell." 

The new IG Codex offers some support for your statement, though. On page 46 it says:

Hotshot lasgun: The hot-shot las gun uses a more powerful, external energy cell. This allows the *hellgun* to project a much more powerful, and more penetrating, shot.

The codex doesn't mention hellguns anymore, so perhaps they merged the two concepts? Doesn't quite make sense, though. I'd chalk it up as a typo and stick with hell guns have the backpack battery and hotshots use standard shaped, overpowered, fewer shot clips.


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## shaantitus (Aug 3, 2009)

The op is right. There is something wrong here. In the GG series Larkin uses a customised sniper variant Long Las and he has a selection of customised power cells for different situstions. In one instance he has a cell that only lasts for a single shot.
With regards trhe physics of it. A laser beam is high intensity light. Just as the sun makes your hand warm, so does a laser(Just a little ) and a lascannon(rather more) and a Defence laser.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second (about 300,000 kilometres per second). Windage should not be an issue. 

Light is unaffected by wind. Try it sometime,shine a torch at a wall and turn on the fan......
Even if it was a sniper bullet travels at typical speeds of 8-900 m/s (Barrett M82A1)
so for similar windage effect you would need a crosswind of several thousand kilometers an hour to have a similar effect to the wind on a rifle bullet. 

However, Light is unaffected by wind. 

Mistake in book.
I feel a bit silly applying real world physics to a game but hey.......I'm at work.


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## hailene (Aug 28, 2009)

I did some reading up on lasers.

Well, in theory he could be compensating for, say, gravity. Though over such a small distance (mmm, no more than a couple miles), and the relatively weak gravity that we humans can survive on, I don't see it being an enormous problem.

Then again trying to hit someone's face from 2 miles away requires taking account for even the smallest of variables. So who knows?


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## cafel (Dec 21, 2008)

Could be that he wants to avoid areas with hotter air? It's been established that laser silo's lose efficency in tyranid invasions because the tyranid terraforming raises the temperature of the atmosphere and the hotter air increases the defraction of the ground to space lasers. Maybe he's trying to compensate for hotter gusts that would defract the las shot over long range? I could see using modified thermal vision to insure the most energy hits the target.

It could also be an author who doesn't live in a reality where the tech he's writing about actually exists and thus might have errors regarding it's usage.


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## Crude (Mar 15, 2009)

it wouldnt be the first time a sci-fi writers missed the point. a number of writers have described space battles in which there is fire and sound... :S


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## Prothor Ironfist (Sep 27, 2009)

I thought this had to be brought up due to the fact that there are so many inconsistent facts in BL novels. I love them i have read most of the books that have been released but in these books i get slightly annoyed at the fact i have paid £6-7 a book for something riddled with mistakes. Before BL reprinted the novels (which still have mistakes :laugh there were even more some of them really quite stupid such as in one of the original copies of a GG book (can't remember which one) in one chapter it says Gaunt has blonde hair as normal but then a couple chapters later it says something about him having black hair which just seems quite bad writing from very good authors usually. 

Also as Crude said there are writers who write about there being sound and fire in space which you would think if they were writing about something like a space battle they would do some research into to see what would be realistic or not? 

Though I guess I am just being picky about a fantasy world which i should just enjoy (which I do by the way ) rather than just picking holes in it's back story and strange new laws of physics. :blush:


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## Inquisitor Einar (Mar 6, 2009)

Nuff said..


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## Giant Fossil Penguin (Apr 11, 2009)

For a bolt of coherent light to be fired out of a weapon and for it to, then, be able to go and kill someone, I imagine there is stuff going on that we don't know about. Whilst we do have modern-day lasers, I can well imagine that the lasguns of the future might be different in a number of ways; if they aren't, then the military applications of them might have shown that, for all it's unexpected, the las-bolts might act much like 'real' bullets.
Larkin correcting for wind does make a little sense. Okay, so going on about wave/particle duality is not going to make for a thread that anyone wants to read, but, a las-bolt will have mass (the fact that light bends in a gravitational field shows it has mass) and so, over distance, there may be the possibility that it can be affected by wind. 
We know the sniper corrects his aim. We know that Larkin is off his chump, but that he takes incredible care in his 'art'. It may be that other snipers wouldn't bother to correct for wind because it has minimal effect on a bullet of coherent light. It could be that Larkin is just so anal that he wants to take into account any, and all, variables possible. So, there's two reasons why he might want to be correct for wind when using a long-las. Although that's not to say I'm right, natch.

GFP


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## hailene (Aug 28, 2009)

Oh, I just thought of another possible answer.

He is MAD Larks for a reason. Maybe he was compensating for wind, the gravity, and the boogie monster that lived in his rifle ?


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## shaantitus (Aug 3, 2009)

GFP, I nearly brought up the wave/particle properties of light but thought it could be a little much also.
........Sorry catgirls.


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## cafel (Dec 21, 2008)

Crude said:


> it wouldnt be the first time a sci-fi writers missed the point. a number of writers have described space battles in which there is fire and sound... :S


Actually the fire could be from the escaping atmosphere of the ships. It'd be weak and quick to go out, but certainly possible. Sound is usually handwaved as sensor data being converted into sound for the pilots to have a better grasp of the situation without looking directly at their readouts.


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## Skye (Oct 22, 2008)

As it was explained to me, the lasgun is designed to burn a hole intoflesh and instantly cauterize (spelled?) the wound, making the wound unable to close and heal. It is only really affective against orks because they wear no armour.


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## Giant Fossil Penguin (Apr 11, 2009)

Despite what we see TT-wise, the lasgun, in the 40k-verse, must be fairly effective against a wide range of foes, otherwise it wouldn't be so ubiquitous in the armies of humanity.
Reading the small book, 'Imperial Munitorum Manual,' it describes the lasgun as trading some of the stopping-power of projectile weapons (autoguns) for increased ruggedness, ease of use, ease of standardised production, large amount of shots/magazine and ease of recharging those magazines (charging units/exposure to light/putting them in a fire). I would imagine that it is easier (in terms of energy efficiency, use of raw materials, distribution of ammo) to make a cartridge that contains just energy instead of multi-part metal bullets.
There is also the fact that, at least as far as the Guard is concerned, there won't be just one lasgun firing at the enemy, but hundreds, if not thousands. Each magazine will also be lighter, allowing more to be carried, and probably less affected by water when firing, though I could well be wrong on that last point. For me the lasgun is the weapon of choice for the Imperium for more reasons than just damage potential.

GFP


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## Skye (Oct 22, 2008)

I wonder if you can charge a lasgun by shooting at it with a lasgun (exposure to light?):laugh:


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## Bubblematrix (Jun 4, 2009)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon

It could be the effect of Blooming causing issue, so "adjusting for wind" could really be shortening the pulse to account for dust etc picked up by wind.

Or if the weapon is actually a particle beam weapon then the wind would bend the particle beam slightly, so for really fas tmoving targets and high energy requirements adjustement would be needed.

That said I think its more likely the author has got wrapped up in the story and neglected to remember the weapon they are writing about.


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## Brother Boozekitty (Sep 29, 2009)

I'm probably reaching here, but there is also the coriolis effect. Given that the worlds in WH40K rotate around one or more suns, and obviously have gravity in most every case, a sniper aiming across any great distance would have to compensate for the inherent planetary rotation of said world. Why this would apply to a solid beam of light, I'm not exactly sure as the speed of the "projectile" (in the loosest terms of the word) is near-instantaneous. 

In my head, when reading the GG series, I see the lasgun firing condensed energy particles that manifest in the bright blue colour spectrum. (They are blue aren't they? Las_cannons_ are blue, but in the DoW games las_guns_ are red. So I dunno.) This would mean (perhaps) that the las-bolt requires a gaseous charge to keep the light coherent. So in effect, you're flinging a tiny gas ball charged with energy. Similar to Star Wars blaster rifles, only without the stupidity. 

That said, if what I am _assuming_ is at all "true", wouldn't you have to adjust for a slight corilois effect, and wind/elevation? It makes more sense to me than the flashlight theory, given the circumstances.


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