So here is a piece of wargear I plan on introducing into my hopefully upcoming campaign.

Auto Loader (working name for it, open to more sexy name suggestions)

Many Space Marines, particuarly Assault Marines, will take to the field of battle with a pistol in one hand, and a melee weapon in the other. While this gives them much versatility in combat, this has one obvious draw back.

No free hand to reload their pistol.

Rather than taking the time to sheath their chainsword or power sword, or fumble a magazine with an oversized powerfist, this device will reload the weapon for the Marine.

The Auto Loader is worn on the belt, and will hold up to nine bolt pistol magazines or plasma pistol, hand flamer, or inferno pistol fuel tanks. When the Battle Brother runs low on ammo or fuel, he simple lowers his weapon to his belt and presses the activation rune on the Auto Loader. A small mechanical arm will grab the used magazine or tank from the weapon, while a second one removes a fresh one from the Auto Loader and loads it into the weapon. The remaining magazines or tanks in the Loader are moved up while the first arm places the spent magazine or tank at the end.

This device operates in one, fluid motion, so a Battle Brother making use of this cannot benifit from the Rapid Reload talent or anything else that would allow him to reload faster.. The reload time will be the standard time listed in the Deathwatch rulebook for that weapon.

Baradiel said:

See Lara Croft 2 and there you will see it can be much easy.

DW Space Marine, it looked good, but in all reality, you need a spare hand.

I dunno. I'm really underwhelmed. A regular bolt pistol can have a shot selector, giving it 42 shots. Given how potent Plasma and Inferno Pistols are, I'm not sure that they SHOULD have more shots in a single combat. Reloading seems to be one of their intended limitations. The distinguishing feature of Hand Flamers is a small number of shots (plus, you should be hitting several people with each shot from any flamer).

If someone is really cracking off this many shots in one combat (and has no time for any pauses) I think they would be better served to have an additional weapon and a dipole maglock or two. Alternatively, they might want to just use a Bolter one-handed. With the shot selector, that would give them 84 shots, right? Admittedly, they can't use it in melee combat, but if they are shooting a 42 shot bolt pistol in melee with no breaks whatsoever, that's 14 rounds of melee combat even on Semi-automatic.

More shots than that and someone might just want to invest in an Arm(or Shoulder) Mounted Storm Bolter.

Speaking personally as a GM, I would not want combats (especially melee ones) to go on for dozens of rounds with no interruption of activity. If a combat is just shooting and shooting and shooting for 12+ turns, I'm losing interest. I would want the drama of empty cylinders, and I would also want the pacing and timing of first waves, brief respites, and second waves. I would want the Battle Brothers to have a few moments to inspire the troops, tend the wounded, or taunt the xenos/heretic scum, rather than incessant rounds of shooting.

Brother-Sergeant Cloten said:

But when you take into account fireing on burst, magazines go empty pretty quickly. Then throw in hordes.

I personally am not using the shot selector as written anyway, as even pictures of the Deathwatch bolters don't have multiple mags sticking out of them. They have one mag with four buttons on the side. The way I am using them is that each of those buttons has a round loaded in it, and the Marine presses the button, which unchambers the current round and chambers the round loaded in that button.

You could just include that in the Full-5Full Turn reload, that the character takes whatever action is needed to reload the clip- freeing up a hand or having the ammo available to simply reload it lara croft style. A simple wrist strap akin to the black templar's devotion chain would work aswell.

Thing about the Laura Croft bit is...no magazine retention.

Plus, this lets the Marine keep his melee weapon at the ready.

Hmm- isn't another possibility is that there is the magnet upgrade somewhere, maybe on his wrists or hand to aid in reloading aswell?

Baradiel said:

Well, if you aren't using the Shot Selector as written, then of course your Marines are going to go through ammo a lot quicker than normal. I'm not sure how we are supposed to know that you've changed other rules unless you tell us when you post. Altering something else in the mix is going to create a different balance anyway, making a lot of commentary pointless. If you create a situation where the Marines run out of ammo a lot faster than in the rules, then there's going to be a lot more need to reload faster. If the excessive reloading then becomes a game concern, why not use the original rules, which would require less reloading? I'm not being cranky there (at least I'm trying not to be), but I don't see any particular benefit from your system, and it introduces a problem which then requires another rule change to address.

So let me make sure that I understand how your bolter works.

A marine has a magazine of one type of ammunition (say standard bolter rounds). This magazine is what the bolter normally fires.

A marine has other types of ammunition requisitioned. He gets a clip worth of each specialty ammo he has required, but he can have 4 rounds of ALL of those ammo clips available, in total (not each). They are removed from the magazine and individually placed in the four buttons on the bolter.

The bolter fires rounds from the magazine, except when you press the button and it then fires the one round from that button.

How does the bolter work on full auto, or semi auto?

Does it fire the one round from the button you pushed, and stop?

Does it fire the one round from the button you pushed, and then go back to the magazine ammo for the rest of the shots?

Can the marine rapidly push all four buttons to allow 4 specialty rounds to be fired in full auto?

How does the Marine normally reload the single bullets in each of the button selectors?

How many shots does he waste when a jam is rolled when firing a bullet from one of the button selectors?

It seems confusing and ineffective to use the shot selector in this case.

I'm not sure why so many people feel that a bolter would have to have 3 magazines sticking out of it for there to be three clips of ammunition in the bolter. I had just assumed that a normal bolter had a relatively small magazine which held 28 rounds in a compact packing. I assumed that the shot selector meant that the bolter was modified to have a larger magazine which would hold 3 clips worth of ammo, and which could keep those clips separate. You could have all of them filled with the same ammo, if you wanted. For example, a sickle shaped magazine might hold 28 rounds of ammo in a single curved stack, with two other, separate stacks of 28 rounds on either side of it. The "magazine" would only have to be the width of 3 bullets, and the shot selector would allow the bolter to feed ammo from any of those three stacks. Given the massive bulky size of the Asartes bolter, 3 bullets doesn't seem like an implausibly wide magazine. A drum style magazine, found on some of the miniatures, could have three circular hoppers of ammo, each only containing a "disk" of 28 rounds, and a selector which fed from any of the three "disks". Some of the Marine miniatures show Marines (often veterans) using weapons with larger ammo magazines (sometimes a box, sometimes a drum, sometimes even a belt of ammo), but none of them show a Marine with three separate clips sticking out in different directions, so I am confused as to why so many people assume that is how it would work.

Hadn't thought about the burst.

I had this in mind for pistols only really. The pictures of the bolters just show one magazine, that is why I really don't think the shot selector rules really go with the fluff.

I also want to make sure there is some realism injected, as much as possible at least. You don't just mags as they run dry. You retain them.

Honestly, I'd say; so be it! If a marine has both his hands occupied to reload, tough luck. i really don't see c&c marines to run around with mechanical limbs to reload their pistols for them while they're fighting. that seems like something only a Techmarine should be able to pull off using his mechadendrites, if he has them. For a normal marine; either go purely for the game system and have the gun reload at it's normal reload speed, period. If you want to keep it a bit more realistic and encourage the marines to retain their clips, so they can refill them later with bolts from an ammo crate, give them a half-action reload penalty, if you want to reload a pistol with both hands full, give him a full round penalty.

Keep in mind that most marines will have Rapid Reload, effectively allowing them a: either stow away their sword 'freely', reload and re-arm their sword. or b: allow some leeway and say the marine is trained and practiced enough to take a new clip using his sword arm to reload. just imagine yourself holding a hammer in your hand, you still have some dexterity with your fingers, you can pick up a lighter or an apple using just a few fingers and still holding on to that hammer, in this case you could still give them a half action penalty, or not.

Tell the PC Marine to purchase the Quickdraw talent, then purchase Di-pole Maglocks. With Quickdraw it allows you to sheath/unsheathe your melee weapon or firearm as a free action, IE: you may be reloading your pistol, and an enemy closes with you and attacks, you have finished reloading your pistol but still have melee weapon sheathed. As per the wording on the Di-pole Maglocks, you may instantaneously withdraw your melee weapon to parry in the blink of an eye, as it is simply stuck on your armor somewhere, magnetized, most likely to your belt or leg area. Cheers.

Baradiel said:

Most of the pictures don't show the fre selectors. Many of us simply invision them as being a larger box mag, much like you see on a modern SAW or on the 40k Storm Bolters. You can see images of what *apepars* to be these expanded mags in Achillus Assault.

I also wouldn't use this, personally. The pistols have plenty of ammo in them for 'normal' fight lengths, and if you're using them in hand to hand you're not firing bursts with them anyway (unless it's been HRd), which extends their life quite a bit.

@Cloten; the only issue some people have had with the extra mags sticking out is that a standard boltgun is a .75 caliber weapon, and the thought that you could fit 72 of thos rounds them in a single 'enlarged' mag seemed off to us, plus the concept of being able to switch contents, which would mean each mag would have to hold their discrete 24 rounds.

Stannis Ravensight said:

If I'm not wrong, all marines start off with Quickdraw already. Its listed as a starting talent (refer to the C Sheet). U just need the Di-Pole Maglocks. That you have to buy.

Deepstriker said:

You're right Di-Pole Maglocks are only useful on meele weapons and then only when you got the Counter Attack Talent.

While I vaguely agree with some of the previous posts made here, that's not what you've asked for - which is general feedback for a piece of wargear that is fairly useful given the house rules you've implemented for your game.

Given what you've done with shot selectors, I'd probably run this piece of equipment, mechanically, like a shot selector is described RAW -it's a relatively simple system. You can up it from three to nine clips if you'd like, but the requisition on that is going to be crazy, especially when someone inevitably asks about filling that bad boy with specialist ammunition. *grins* I give your players approximately fifteen minutes before someone tries to scam filling all nine clips with specialist ammunition using the Backpack rules, rather than paying for individual clips

Kain McDogal said:

Not so. The Di-Pole Maglocks allow you to draw your weapon as part of a Parry action. Otherwise, you have to already have the weapon in hand in order to parry.

Baradiel said:

If you look at the art and the tabletop stuff, there's not 3 mags sticking out of anything. Not even on the Tacmarine pics where you might expect it since they get a fire selector on their bolter as standard.. Yet if you're trying to hew close to representations from the wargame, fire selector technology isn't unknown in the tabletop - the Blood Angels and I think vanilla SMs can switch between normal and various special rounds each shooting phase (which implies some kind of shot selector technology being present), and the models don't look like anything weird is attached to their bolters. I think the below is a great way to model shot selectors:

Brother-Sergeant Cloten said:

I'm totally using this description from now on.

Kain McDogal said:

that couldnt be more incorrect. Mag-locks are usefull for carrying around all kinds of weapons and the counter attack talent isnt needed to pull a sword/axe/knife and stop incomming damage, its just nice to be able to punish someone for daring to strike at a marine.