It says in the tau section that their pulse rifles are more damaging than an astartes bolter, but the actual rules for the weapon give it less damage and less penetration...

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Previous threads about 'why are these boltguns better' kind of talked about this. Basically out of the discussion two main lines of though appeared. The first was that you can adjust the boltgun slightly down, and the pulse rifle slightly up (swap their bonuses) to reflect it.

The second line of thought was that the stat lines that they provide show that the Tau pulse rifle IS better than the boltgun because the pulse rifle is the size of a standard lasgun and does almost as much damage as a full sized astartes bolter.

If it had just said that tau weaponry was technologically superior there wouldn't be much of an issue. however they explicitly say that the pulse rifle does more damage than an astartes weapon, which it doesn't.

IMO the astartes prefix is stupid anyway and should never have been retconned into the background. The bolter was supposed to be a rare and powerful weapon, hence the marines having ubiquitous access to it, not a rare weapon with an even rarer and soopadooperer version of it. Considering the astartes bolter does more damage than a 'normal' heavy bolter, one wonders why the guard ever carry normal heavy bolters when the smaller and lighter astartes bolter is better. The guard heavy bolter is also used to take out light tanks, but apparently the space marine bolter can do that better.

Astartes flamers and astartes plasma guns are equally as stupid, if not moreso. They fire more plasma, or burnier promethium? Not only that but they ensure that a guardsman with a plasma gun can't actually use it for its intended purpose - destroying light tanks. Because they scale the armour of the vehicle to these higher end weapons and suddenly a plasma gun is a peashooter in the hands of a human, but can actually destroy tanks in the hands of a space marine.

Anyway, that's by the by. It just struck me as very odd that the description would say the pulse rifle did more damage and then the rules show the opposite.

EDIT: Marine equipment would obviously be heavily armoured like themselves and of best quality, which adds +1 Damage iirc. IMO an astartes weapon would simply be a best quality version of an existing weapon that had 8 AP, can be used as a club and has enlarged grip and trigger for their hands.

Hellebore

Well, the description is in the fluff text of the Tau themselves, not in the weapon description. And we all know what happens when a book has more than one author

They have pseudo-valid reasons for making the Astartes weapons beefier than their civilian counterparts (I say pseudo because it depends on your point of view- I agree with some but not all of the astartes weapon rules), but the astartes prefix has been retconned in the RPG since Dark Heresy. At first I was totally puzzled by it, even irritated by it- you can see a lot of people felt the same way if you look back into the forum's history.

But I think during actual play many people found that it doesn't feel all that bad, and does drive at the themes presented in the fluff, that the Space Marines are viewed as gods by the 'regular' folk. It's hard to look or feel like a god when your average shot with a boltgun can't kill your basic guardsman, ork, or tyrannid. Then at the same time with the weaker weapons you would then have to do something about the marines high survivability in order to prevent regular fights to turn into slap fights (even with pen 8 or 10, 10 damage on average will scratch most marines). Then if you tune down their toughness, etc., then you make them vulnerable to characters with over 10,000 fewer xp. While a certain random death element does fit within 40k, you really don't feel like a badass if you have to duck every time you see a peasant with a lasgun. As for vehicles, no new vehicle rules have been released for DW yet, so we can't really say we know what the armor values are going to look at. Now admittedly this doesn't fit perfectly with say TT stats but they're also operating on a different scale.

I think I hear what you're saying though, It took me a while to get over the hump too, but once I accepted that a starting DW character was an Epic level character, I realized epic level characters need bigger guns and better abilities. If you didn't do this with the basic boltgun, the standard issue weapon, then every starting DW character would have to have some sort of amazing starting talents or customized exotic weapon like the Vindicare has, which doesn't, to me, feel right.

P.S. In Dark Heresy (RT may be different), Master Crafted ranged weapons ignore jams (count them as misses). Best quality armor reduces the weight by half and adds 1 to the AP. Best quality melee weapons get +10 to hit and +1 to their damage profile.