This is a question that I've been thinking about for a while.

SP and primitive weapons are easy to figure out since there are plenty of ways to listen to the sound of a real one. The same goes for most rockets and grenades. Chain weapons are going to be very similar to a chainsaw.

Las weapons are a bit trickier. As the beam passes through the air it will cause it to suddenly heat, which should make a noise. Probably something similar to thunder if the laser has enough power, since the same mechanism is involved. Do they have that much power, and would there be any other source of sound ?

Then we get into the trickier weapons including power weapons, bolters, plasma guns and meltas. I'm not sure where to even start on them.

It doesn't help that there are some depictions that are just wrong, like Dawn of War making bolters look and sound like slug throwers. Nothing to even hint that the bolts explode.

Everyone knows that Lascannons do "FREEEEEEEEEM" and las guns go "PHEEEEW"

Maybe the following link helps a little.

Lasweapons are noted as making a loud 'snap' as they fire each 'round' and would you hear anything over the screams of your target when firing plasma weapons? ;¬)

You mean that unearthly laughter of your targets, when your not-quite-best-crafted plasmacannon goes 'POOF' and you it to the ground and run around it screaming like a little baby eldar?

Las Weapons: a small snap-crack like whip or other forms of small mini-thunder claps with a rapidly escalating electrical hum heard from the gun just before the shot is released. Basically a "wheeeEEE-crack".

Plasma Weapons and Meltas: these I imagine as bing similar in sound to a las weapon but with a more audible energy buildup in the gun reminiscent of a lose belt on an engine and more hissing and crackling coming from the discharged shot accompanying the snap-crack.

Bolters: the movie Damnatious did the sounds for these rather well in my opinion. Basically a thud-boom. A deep thudding bang as the shell is fired and a boom as it detonates in it's target. Thud-boom.

Power Weapons would have a slight electric whine when first engaged which would be rapidly drowned out by the popping and hissing sound (much like a bug zapper) of the field as it encounters and destroys dust bits, bugs, fingers, and what ever else is in the air hitting it.

Luthor Harkon said:

Which of the weapon depictions there seem accurate ?

I stopped watching it when I saw that it depicted laser weapons as firing some kind of projectile.

Graver, would the rocket inside the bolt make much of a noise ?

Bilateralrope said:

Some, yes. Have you ever heard a bottle rocket when it launches? But probably not enough for long enough of a time for it to matter. After all, for a Bolt to be effective and have it's hefty Pen 4, it's got to be traveling as fast as a bullet so any sound that a rocket might make would practically be over before it began and if you did hear it, you'd hear it after the shot already struck it's target and detonated unless it's at some kind of supper extreme range.

But beyond that, bolts are fired from the barrel by a charge like any SP weapon. The rocket propulsion doesn't kick in until a bit latter in the projectiles flight to assist it and give it the penetrating power it needs (it has a pen 4 after all). Without an explosive start, it wouldn't have any real stopping power right out of the barrel and it's penetration would be highly dependent on how far away from the gun the target is -the further, the better to a point.

The "official" sound effect for a bolter was described in the Inquisition War trilogy as, and I kid you not: RAARK-pop-SWOOSH-thud-KRUMP. Raark being the 'soft-launch' propellant charge, pop being the sound of the bolt leaving the barrel, the swoosh of the rocket stage, thud of impact, and a muffled krump as it explodes inside the target

Alasseo said:

seems like a LOT of varying sounds to exist and be distinguishable from one anouther in such a short span of time.

Oh, agreed. There's realistically no way you'd hear the "pop", for example, and at close ranges the RAARK and SWOOSH would probably be hard to separate. The "thud" would only be heard in those situations that you'd hear a bullet's impact, and would almost always be followed so closely by the bolt's explosion that it may as well not be there.

It does make it simpler if you're creating your own SFX with Audacity and the like though, and if you have to describe action in slow motion. In practical terms, however, a shotgun sound blurring into a bottle rocket is about right for a bolter.

For melta weapons I think a hissing noise similar to a bunsen burner (those little flames used in a lab), only on a much larger scale. Plasma Weapons would perhaps have a significant crack-whoosh type noise, followed by a boom for cannons.

The sound effects from fire warrior were awful.

I've always described the weapons thusly

Bolters, as mentioned, have a thud-boom sound, both quite deep.

Las weapons have very brief whine then a crack (this is described in several novels)

Meltas are themselves nearly silent, perhaps a slight electrical whine but the noise the air/flesh/anything makes as it is vaporized is a deep roar, like a kettle being boiled but massively more so.

Plasma, never really got this in my head, always assumed it would be a "fwump" type sound as the magnetically contained plasma left the barrel

Chainweapons = chainsaw

Power weapons, crackle like a deadly unhealthy powr supply and when they strike the discharge noise is like an electrical explosion, almost a lightning crack.

Basically a weapon can make whatever sound you find reasonable for it. As we can see in this thread, there are as many possible versions of a bolter- or las-gun-sound as there are people thinking about it. It's like finding a definition about what role playing is and is about and how it should be done. Some like this way, some the other and the next one that way. That's what makes role playing so thrilling.

So come up with even more sound-describtions. I wonder how would firing up Warp drives sound like... or those gellerfields, when someone bad hits them while traveling throug the warp.

And of course the classic: What sound does a falling tree does, being hit by some eldar shuriken, when there is no orc to hear it?

You could just play Dawn of War and get your sound references from how they sound in it...

Just one point about the sound bolters make: everyone seems to be imagining what the bolters would sound like if they MISS.

Bolter shells are designed to explode inside a target. If a major firefight erupts where, for example, the Astartes are involved, the majority of bolt shells are going to actually be hitting the enemy, usually with fatal results every time.

There's a section in Dan Abnett 's Horus Rising book where he describes an attack on a human civilisation by the Lunar Wolves. I seem to remember something about a series of "sickening pops" as the bolt rounds exploded inside each human target.

So after the thud-whoosh of the boltgun firing you can probably reckon on a nastily organic noise - part knuckle crack, part snapping bone, part squish, part muffled ka-booom......nice!

i read somewhere that bolters do a sort of double thud, once for being fired and then again for when the ramjet kicks in. could be wrong though so it would be something like. Thud-Thud-BOOM (screams)

Lightbringer, even trained soldiers in modern times only hit the target once in ever (large number) rounds fired. Space marines are better than the modern best, but they have never been depicted as one shot one kill (even in DH where agamorr's BS wasn't that awesome). So I think there would be quite a few missed shots, but marines are used to assault heavily defended positions so they would probably hit someone else by accident (by dint of target saturation).

Meltaguns were described in the 2nd ed wargear section as making no noise when fired but producing a hissing sound as the beam passed through the air that escalated into a roaring blast as the target was hit and vapourised.

The same book says that plasma destroys the target in an almighty explosion as their body is instantly energised into plasma.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

I guess it depends which "version" of the space marines you regard as correct: the tabletop/RPG marines which (by operation of the game mechanics) logically must miss at least SOME the time, or the marines of the fictionverse which routinely kill hundreds of Orcs in hand to hand combat!

Given that marines are shock troops, I reckon most marine operations take place at pretty short range (less than 100 feet), and at extremely high speed. Room to room clearance, ship boarding duties, urban combat etc. I reckon that as marines carry relatively small amounts of ammunition (there's a forge world book which suggests that they only carry 5 clips of 20 shots) then they're probably not too profligate in their shooting style. They probably don't go in for typical infantry tactics (suppressing fire, flanking manouvres etc) but would probably just rely on brutally direct attacks, speed, aggression, surprise and their own heavy armour to protect them. At those close ranges, given their skill, I think missed/wasted shots would be relatively rare.

Modern infantry ~= IG, Space Marines seem much more the way Lightbringer suggests, to me.