Goddamn inferno pistols! Pretty much everyone in our group seems to have acquired one of these combat-destroying beasts. Nothing can withstand them. Even a chaos space marine (based on the one in Purge the Unclean) lasted no more than a couple of rounds.

Surely firing inferno pistols on a starship is a bad idea? If they can fire through space marine armour like a laser through butter, isn't there the risk of puncturing the hull, or at least some vital internal ships system? I don't want to take away the PCs' toys but would like there to be some combats that don't end as soon as someone manages to hit with their inferno pistol.

Also, these things are supposed to be so rare there are only a few in every sector but they're the same rarity as heavy bolters. Shouldn't they maybe be classed as Extremely Rare or even Near Unique?

Considering that the navy uses shotguns on statships to avoid damaging the hull, yes i would rule that there is a very real change to wreak havoc on board the ship.

You could say that every shot that miss have 10% chance of opening a hole out into space if they are near the exterior or simply fry some systems if the aren't or something like that.

And yes some of the items rarities are a little if not way off.

But then bear in mind that the Navy also seems to encourage the use of "Naval pistols," massive calibre revolvers or automatics, which presumably cause havoc to ship systems.

In the old Cyberpunk RPG there were very complete rules for spaceborne weapons, which included consideration about microgravity etc. Most of them were knives, gyrojet pistols and low-velocity flechette weapons. All of these would have caused havoc with humans in void-suits, without damaging the vessel or risking decompression.

In 40k, however, there are perhaps arguments for carrying a wider variety of weapons, even in compressed, sealed atmosphere environments, given the wider variety of hostiles. A flechette pistol isn't going to do much good against a dozen genestealers rampaging down a corridor towards you. A shotgun might not penetrate the hull, but there's a good chance it won't penetrate a chaos marine's power armour, either.

If I were a Rogue Trader captain, I'd have the rank and file equipped with relatively low velocity weapons, and a few much better armed teams, just to cover unusual events. (Perhaps this is why the officers in Naval vessels carry high calibre pistols.)

Also, I would think given the scale of Imperial vessles (kilometres long) decompression isn't the issue it might be on, say, a small space station. Presumably the average Imperial ship is divided up into hundreds of sealed sections behind heavy bulkheads. Decompression of one of these might be a problem for those inside the section, but not fatal for the ship as a whole.

I would say that Melta Weapons are not a totally silly idea aboard ship. In fact, they might actually make excellent boarding weapons, as one would imagine that in the event of crew being called to repel boarders, they would tend to seal and lock hatches and bulkheads behind them. A melta weapon would be an excellent way of cutting through the bulkheads in order to reach the bridge.

Melta's are unlikely to punch a hole through to the happiness of hard vacuum being ship armour is 20m thick, but Im thinking along the lines of 'Aliens' near the nuke reactor having to use shotties and flamers for very good reason that its gunna freem the crap out of whoever you shot, but also whatever they where standing behind... and possibly whatever is behind that. With a better than average chance its not just going to cinematically blow up some cans of beans and uncinematically hit something that in turn blows up killing the offending freemer in a really lame manner like filling up the room they're in with skin removing, radioactive steam.

I dont actually have much of a problem with Melta-Guns and their varients, you'd drag one along if you're going tank/daemon hunting and mean serious business, its big, heavy, hot, expensive and baddies can obviously see it coming miles away, 2nd of course to the heavy flamer for things NPC's dont want to be hit with. The pistol is just a bit 'too easy' to get away with, sure it doesn't have a lot of ammo, but it really doesn't have any drawbacks either, whatever you've shot with it, is probably going to be dead. So, I definately think it needs to be stuck up there in the 'unobtainium' availabilities for a while, or some kind of galaxywide shortage of melta gel...

MKX said:

I understand your point with the reactor, but according to Forsaken Bounty (found at http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=78&esem=4 ), anything over Pen 4 has a chance of penetrating the hull. RBasicall, the outer armour isn't sealed fully to keep out the vacuum, onlt the hull is, so there would likely be a gap between the inner hull and the outer armour, meaning that, yes, the armour is several metres thick, but the actual hull isn't, and so can be penetrated with high-power weapons.

Yeah, firing melta weapons is a horrifically bad idea in a space ship...

Those Naval Pistols do have consideration for the fact that they are fired inside what is essentially a can of air surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. A lot of them have the Tearing quality because they use frangible ammunition. Frangible ammunition is useful in that situation because it disintegrates on impact into metal powder, or at the largest, bird-shot-sized fragments. If it hits a person, all those fragments will expend their energy while traveling through the person, leading to some pretty horrific internal damage and almost zero chance of overpenetration. If it hits a hard surface, though, it just shatters into a puff of metal dust.

In First and Only , Abnett described the loads carried by the naval shotguns as not even having actual shot, but shards of glass and short twists of thin wire.

No ships captain would allow any Melta, Plasma or Bolt weaponry to be fired on board their ship except in the direst of need. The ships Tech Priest would have an even worse reaction to such an event happening on HIS ship under any circumstance.

Put it this way: back when BFG was released, one of the articles in White Dwarf claimed that only officers were allowed to carry energy weapons because they were a fire risk. Somewhat later, in Execution Hour , an IN fighter pilot filled a compartment with plasma from the enginarium when he fired a compact laspistol and hit a conduit. So yeah, if you like that ship, firing melta weapons aboard is something of a Bad Idea™.

That said, if you want to cause havoc (boarding parties, hit-and-run attacks), melta weapons are ideal (as has been mentioned). They also have the added bonus of probably frying electronics with their fringe effect (being a microwave death ray).

The enemies that the player characters keep going up against will dictate what sorts of weapons they'll try to acquire to some degree. If you are throwing small groups of relatively high value targets (like that Chaos Space Marine you mentioned) at the PCs all the time, perhaps it's no surprise that they all went and got something to deal with the sorts of threats they encounter most often, in this case, Inferno Pistols.

Some food for thought: in the Dark Heresy campaign I'm in, the PCs really haven't made much of an effort to acquire high damage/high penetration weapons. This is despite the fact that most of us are almost rank 5 and have an excellent service record, so we actually have a reasonably good chance of acquiring meltas, bolters, and the like. The reason? We keep getting swarmed by hordes of cultists. It just doesn't make sense to waste expensive ammo (bolt shells, melta canisters, etc.) on such low-value targets. Most of us are still using the lasguns and laspistols we started the game with (yes, the freebie stuff you got as a rank 1 character), though we did also acquire some frag grenades as the game progressed.

Anyway, if the players keep using those Inferno Pistols all the time, have them start rolling Upkeep Tests on all that hard-to-get melta ammo that they keep expending (see page 275 of the Rogue Trader core rulebook).

As for your original question, bear in mind that melta weapons were designed to defeat armor, and that industrial versions of meltas are used to cut and weld metal. A character on a starship would have to be very careful about where they point that melta, 'cause not only can it cause hull breaches and damage systems, it can also cause incidents of friendly fire. Let's also not forget that melta weapons fire an intensely hot heat beam and may very well start a shipboard fire. Really, if a melta is to be used at all on a starship (especially your own starship), it would most likely be during salvage/repair operations where its use will be controlled and very deliberate.

-Kirov

Also I'd like to point out standard flamers are a really bad idea. You are shooting out a bunch of flaming sticky liquid in an enclosed space. (Generally I rule that the flamer is required to fill it's max volume. If it can't fill it in the forward direction it back blasts in your face.) Given how nasty fire is on the ship's crit table. Fire on board ship is a huge danger that in many ways dwarfs that of the average boarding party. (The average boarding party is a danger for one round. The IH under the void section contains an example of a ship board flamer designed not to set your ship on fire.

MILLANDSON said:

Er... whether Forsaken Bounty says so or not, it dosn't seem right when you think about it. If any weapon with a pen of 4 or higher has a chance of puncturing the hull of a ship, then the hull is is about as durable as a cogitator bank or a simple stasis pod -a stone wall would be more ressiliant. This is bassed on the nifty table of cover AP's found on pg 246. Likewise, on that niftly little tableis an entry called "bulkhead' and, unless I miss my guess, that is the perfict way to describe any wall aboard a ship. Now, these bulkheads are listed as having an AP of 32. Now, hell the hell can you say that any weapon with a Pen > 3 would punch through something that offers an AP of 32? And, going a step further, Bulkheads usually used to reference internal walls, not the Hull which one would assume to be more durable then the internal walls of the ship. After all, it's not even always penetrated by salvos of fire from massive meter long cannons operated by scores of people.

That said, a melta gun will still be a bit expensive if fired aboard a ship (or anywhere that has stuff that folks don't want destroyed) as, if it strikes the Hull dead on, it has roughly a 50% chance of penetrating. Still, even when it dose such, the hole will be small enough to enable a quick patch for latter repairs without things going catastrophically bad. pretty much the same concerns would need to be taken with a melta on a ship as most anywhere else because, no matter where the **** thing is fired, there will be collateral damage. While it can be expensive in that it will cause repairs that need to be made, one or 20 on a ship is no threat to the ship. Now, to the crew of said ship, that's anouther matter entirely, and if the crew have the damned things, it could be very dangerous to the officers, but not the ship.

I'd also go out on a limb and say accidental crucial component destruction isn't that big of a concern either. After all, Imperial technology isn't exactly delicate and most functions of a ship are preformed not by complex machines and components, but by scores of men. If they get destroyed, it's painfully easy to make more and they're incredibly cheap to boot.

I know there's a lot of lore and mentionings of ship crews using low penetration weapons to minimize damage to the ship and her hull, but when you stop and think about it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the end. After all, if a few score of small arms fire could damage a ship, then why do they bother arming ships with massive batteries of insanely large cannons. That seems like it would be overkill, except that it obviously isn't and, sometimes, even bigger guns are needed...

EDIT: Oh, and hull breaching concerns would only be a concern when/if said weapon was fired within the ship right next to the hull. Given the size of Imperial ships, the vast majority of walls encountered will be of the interior verity with very few actually being the hull of the ship it's self. Again, concerns of a hull breach from a melta weapon would be bottom of the barrel of concerns regarding such a weapon. Mass crew death due to the thing shooting through the enemy, the door, then those 5 crewmen would be a more immediate concern. ;-)

MILLANDSON said:

That was only to breach the vista panels. Any kind of window would be less armoured than the hull if you want to use it as a window.

I imagine they cover those windows with armour during combat.

Bilateralrope said:

Fair enough, it just seemed to repeat the Pen 4 thing a few times, so it seemed as though it meant it all the time. I guess that works better, however. I'd still say that you wouldn't use high Pen weapons because of the damage it could do to piping, cables, and other important systems, however.

Dalnor Surloc said:

Also with shooting flamers aboard a ship would come the real risk of using up all the available oxygen in a compartment (better hope you can open up those bulkheads quick!)

MattKimber said:

Though, if you're boarding a ship and are relying on your own voidsuit air supplies, that might be exactly the point.

I'd say Graver hit the point. Starships in Warhammer 40k are VERY massive structures, that are build to survive tens of thousands of years. They are not really comparable to airplanes of our world today, which are build as light as possible and thus are very vulnerable to weaponfire. Of course, firefights in vital areas of a starship, like ammonition-depots, generators and the like are still critical, but I don't really see any danger from penetrating the hull with mere hand-weapons, whatever penetrationfactor they might have.

Graver said:

Well, given that RT Righteous Fury's allow you to take the modifiers for your BS into account on the RF roll, and you roll the whole damage of the weapon again, not just 1d10, a decent Melta weapon shot to a bulkhead/hull could fairly easily penetrate it. It might not be catastrophic, but if you check the damage every time you miss (because it'll be hitting something ), it quickly becomes a bad idea. All it takes is one unlucky shot, and the blast doors slam down, trapping you in a quickly depressurising compartment.

With that sort of risk, I know I wouldn't take a metla with me on a ship.

MILLANDSON said:

true, even without RF, there's still about a 50% chance of penetration... but as i said, there's a high chance of destroying/blowing all kinds of things up you don't want to when using one of those anywhere. You could punch a hole in an exterior wall of a hive letting in poisoned gas, hit a sewage duct or gas main and cause massive explosions. You could start a flash forest fire, a wild brush fire that gets out of control burning acres of crops and your self, you could explode a fuel dump in that building across the field near the barracks when trying to fight off invading troops getting into the fort, and so forth and so on. They're dangerous anywhere you fire the damned things, but they still get fired. If you do penetrate the hull of a warpship with one, i still can't see it bing a major and immediate concern.

The warp ships are massive things and the compartments inside likewise seem to be built on the same massive scale. Sure, some underdeck access passages will be cramped, but the area they occupy will still be expansive. This means that in any given area, there will be a LOT of atmosphere. The hole a Melta would make in the hull wouldn't be large enough for explosive decompression in such massive chambers, just a slow leak that wouldn't be too hard to find and apply a hast patch; just fallow the wind. And all of this, again, assumes you fire the thing at an exterior hull wall as opposed to one of the thousands of km's of interior bulkheads that make up the ships.

I can see one being a major problem on a small system ship, lighters, fighters, etc, but not on a proper void ship. The scale of those things and anything related to them is off the chart. It would take more then a crazy handgun to seriously jeopardize a section of it... though, still, I'd hope that someone who totes one of these guns around would know how and when to use the damned thing.

I've always likened 40k starships to modern high-capacity nautical ships. You can shoot anything from pistols, to large-caliber machineguns and throw grenades on board and the worst thing you get is some interior damage. However, fire on ship, be it flamer, plasma or melta-induced is *deadly*.

First of all, flame uses oxygen which can lead to significant suffocation hazard.

Secondly, burning interior infrastructure produce poisonous smoke which can't get anywhere in enclosed spaces.

Thirdly, fire burns out electricity wiring, leading to instant darkness and problems with all electric doors.

Fourthly, fire burning in enclosed space is subject to unpredictable flashing and backdrafts when doors are opened and pressure changes.

Simply said, putting a flamer, melta or plasmagun into use aboard spaceship will turn the affected compartment into unsurvivable, unpredictable piece of flaming hell and you will soon *hope* the hull will be ruptured so that vacuum would snuff out the fires.

I'd wager firing melta weapons onboard is potential trouble. But what I'm getting from your problem is how to deal with them in combat. Inferno pistols are extremely specialised guns, very short range, low RoF, low clip size, massive damage. What you need to do to create a challenging combat is oppose the players with enemies which negate ts bonuses and play up their weaknesses. This was mentioned before, but I thoug I'd say it again. having combat not on a ship would be agood start, where an enemy force and bring to bear their numbers ad support weapons like stubbers (pinning!) and sniper riles (don't forget the massive bonuses for aiming with accurate weapons) if the combat is still on the ship then still use numbers, autopistols (moar pinning) flamers and a few heavies with high damage weapons to scare the PC's.

I've ruled that any missed shot on a ship hits something, as does ridiculously high damage. After all, a melta gun has enough penetration and damage to go through two lots of armour and a torso. In those situations, the penetration is reduced for consequences.

Unless you're firing point-blank, no man-portable weapon can get through a ship's armoured outer hull. The inner walls are another matter entirely though, and the other side of the wall could be a crewman, critical machinery or the Rogue Trader's bedroom. When fighting on an already damaged spaceship, or a sustained boarding attempt, the other side could very easily be filled with hard vacuum, fire, unstable gases or a swarm of Burnscour Bees that escaped from the menagerie.

The sample armour of cover gives Thick Iron as 16 and Plasteel as 32. I feel on a RT ship, if the wall isn't load-bearing or high-security it's more likely to be balsa wood. Either way, melta weapons go through them quite easily.

Just stepping back to the original poster's question, the answer is set out in the the RT corebook under the entry for Meltaguns. It seems they are actually very popular with corsairs and boarding parties, because they can cut through bulkheads and hatches.

So the pros seems to be:-

• Can cut through bulkheads and hatches
• Very powerful
• more reliable than plasma guns
• good against heavily armoured troops

And the cons seem to be:-

• Cause immense damage to the ship
• starts fires
• may cause depressurisation of the ship.
• Short ranged
• May interfere with the electronic operation of the ship through microwave radiation

All this suggests to me that the meltagun may be a better weapon for attackers/boarders than defenders. Attackers presumably are wearing void suits anyway, so depressurisation is not such a worry for them. As for fires/damage, well, they'll worry about them when they've captured the ship. And the short range isn't too much of a worry. Although there are likely large open areas on board a ship, one would imagine that in fact most of the ship is a warren of short corridors divided up by closed hatches - like in the GW game Space Hulk. A melta would help you burn through these in short order, driving the defenders into smaller and smaller pockets of resistance.

Decompression from hand held melta weapons isn't a reasonable danger on a 40K ship. They're simply too big for them to lose much atmosphere except over a very long period of time from a melta gun hit. It's the valuable stuff inside the ship that is at risk. Fuel lines, power cables, capacitors, data lines, ammunition, etcetera. For example, being on the other side of a wall and in a reinforced conduit won't stop an unlucky stray melta shot from causing a nasty explosions and subsequent fire when it hurts a maneuvering thruster fuel line. In general, they're definitely more useful to an attacker than the defender, but if there's Orks in heavy armour you're really going to want a few around. Their limitations make them specialist weapons that should be selectively employed. Players who are excessively attached to them should encounter situations when their drawbacks (low ammo, slow rate of fire, crappy range, collateral damage to even hardened targets with missed shots) make using other weapons preferable. In other words, mix it up a little.

voidstate said:

To give discussion a different direction:

Is your problem really about "damages the ship or not" or are you simply looking for a way of making "lemons" for your melta-pistole-players? Since you started out with complaining about the little beasts, I guess the second one. Please confirm (since otherwise, I would simply sullen your topic with "off-al" )

Well...

The OP's real issue is that he seems to feel he has given them equipment he wishes they didn't have or that he feels they shouldn't really have been granted. This an age-old generic GM problem, commonly nick-named "Monty Haul GM" where the person running the game is overgenerous with either the amount of loot and character equipment and / or the power of the loot and character equipment. After that, stop being so generous.

The are only a couple of ways to deal with the immediate problem, then, either take it away or step up the challenge to the point where the ueber-gear is not sufficient to turn your challenges into walkovers. Also, bear in mind that experience assumes something is, in fact, a challenge, if the characters are walking encounters with Chaos Space Marines because they have overmatched equipment, then those opponents are not worth anywhere near as much experience as might have been assumed.

Taking gear away can lead to bad feelings but there are ways to do it sensitively and with plot logic, discuss the problem with the players beforehand though, so they understand and can co-operate. Alternatively, don't outright take it away, make it hard or impossible to use or better yet, useless in a given situation (e.g. "You can't fire those here, they'd ignite the atmosphere which is heavily laden with organic solvent fumes...")

Anyway, talking directly about this situation and in the context of Rogue Trader; the rarity is fine, a Rogue Trader and anyone in his retinue are supremely personally powerful and wealthy, to the point where rarity values below 'unique' pretty much just determine whether he will have to wait long for an item and how much extra he will need to pay. Unique means he will have to kill someone first. If all the players are packing Hell-pistols then they probably like the idea (they are kind of cool, I suppose) and / or have discovered that they are very effective in your game, probably both. This means you need to play up the downsides and the very first one is easily overlooked - they require expensive, specialized and relatively rare ammunition, so make them find it and then pay through the nose for it, or rely on a crewmember with his own agenda for making it and don't forget that there is never going to be very much of it, so they might not be able to buy as much as they like and probably cannot easily stock it up, certainly not if they are using it every combat. This same problem applies to any specialized guns, bolters, flamers, melta and even hand cannons. Routine weaponry for humanity has long been lasguns with only elites really using bolters, plasma weapons and so on. Solid projectile is nothing special but hand cannons use specialized and expensive versions of solid projectile ammunition, in a Dark Heresy game some PCs might have trouble buying it without some official backup, just as you and I cannot easily acquire military weapons and ammunition, for personal use. The next downside is their range, or rather the lack of it, so have them engaged from afar by opponents who are not so disadvantaged, preferably with high-ROF weapons, to boot, to underline another disadvantage. Then, when they empty the clip and need to reload, have them pinned and rushed by assault equipped opponents, to finally bring home that Hellpistols are no "Swiss Army Knife" weapon. ;¬)

With regards to firing weapons onboard space vessels... the big ones are not going to notice any hole that man-portable weaponry can make, even if the crew in that immediate area are somewhat more incommoded. The issue of oxygen is real enough for anyone not in a voidsuit but for the entire ship, trivial. Damage to vital components is certainly possible in some locations but anywhere else you could indeed do damage but nothing that wouldn't be within the ability of the crew to repair, although it could cause some unfortunate malfunctions - "Foom! You miss the Ork boss and hit the bulkhead and machinery behind him, slagging it, oh well... meanwhile on the bridge..." "You give the order to fire on the Freebooter vessel but the voidmaster apologetically informs you that the starboard batteries have just gone offline...". Small vessels, however, could become expensive wrecks in just a few shots as they lack the mass to soak up a shot and they have much less redundancy (no spare volume), they could even become airless wrecks as it would be fairly easy to punch hole through the hull and they have a lot less atmosphere to start with and fewer bulkheads to try and retain it. Just remember that the bulkhead you can see from inside the vessel is not going to be the actual barrier between you and vacuum in anything but the very smallest of vessels, it will be the interior bulkhead, beyond which is likely to be wiring, piping, pumps and so on, then probably another bulkhead before the inside face of the hull and any armour.

In short, I wouldn't worry about the pistols, myself but you do want to watch any tendency to hand out equipment that you're not really happy for the PCs to have and especially equipment where you've not thought through the ramifications (didn't want them to slag Chaos Marines and step over the corpse? Don't hand out high penetration weaponry).