Excuse me people, if this question is as dumb as any question can be, but...

When a player character (read: marine) in the game chooses to let off a
"Full Auto Burst" in a round with his bolter, exactly how many bullets gets
expended from the clip? I cannot find a reference in the rulebook on it.

Thanks for any and all answers.

As many as are listed in the third column of the 'rate of fire' in the weapon statistics.

ie:

Heavy bolter: 10

Bolter: 4

As above, and a few other notes:

The extra damage rolls from RF are not "shots," once again, the base RoF is used.

Its the same amount each time, its not ah, I hit twice, so I only fired two.

There are talents that modify RoF, like bolter drill, which does mean that it fires more rounds.

Siranui said:

Siranui said:

Many thanks for the answer! Ok, but that means that when the text that describes Full Auto Burst
talks about getting up to a max of four hits (from four degrees of success), then that's all the
bullets a pc can get out of the weapon in one round because of that?

And also, when a pc attacks a horde with a bolter (X ammo) he gets an additional hit from
that weapon quality. That means 5 hits max from a 4-bullet burst. But that's not strange since an
explosion can reach many targets. Logical.

KommissarK said:

Yes, I see. I did understand that degrees of success (i.e. shots that actually hit) from Full Auto
is not the total amount of shots fired - all the time. But they could be..? Or? Since if you shoot
a total of 4 bullets per Full Auto, max, and you can get up to four hits max - then that means the
results can be parallel?

Also one bolter round can kill more than one member of a horde. i.e straight through the head of the first, into the chest of the second, explodes and the bone fragments kill the third...

dracopticon said:

Yes, you can only get a number of rounds out of a weapon as indicated by the ROF of the weapon without using a special ability such as bolter drill. Anything that allows you to shoot more rounds (such as bolter drill, the storm quality) will discuss what that does to the number of shots fired, the number of hits you inflict, etc.

As an example, the bolter using explosive ammo inflicts an additinal hit on the horde due to the fact that you're fragmenting their friends, inflicting morale damage as they watch their companions turn to mist, etc. The storm quality takes the number of hits you do based on DoS and doubles them due to the amount of rounds you're firing (this quality also means you consume 2x the ammunition). Bolter drill represents you being so well trained with your boltgun you can squeeze off an additional round during autofire, which allows you to add +1 to the ROF of the boltgun when firing semi or full auto bursts.

And of course the 'four shots five kills' thing is fine, because horde magnitudes are not strictly speaking the number of people in them. Taking five off a magnitude might be killing five people... or it might be killing six, or three... or maybe just killing one in such a horrible manner that a couple of his friends decide to hide at the bottom of their foxhole for the rest of the fight.

Excellent answers all. Thanks goes out to everyone who's written here.