Man, I miss BC with its Warp Weapons. Made dealing with vehicles way easier.

But yeah, Lascannons or Meltaguns are kind of required.

I think that's fair enough. The front armour of a Leman Russ is the heaviest armour most will ever encounter and it requires dedicated anti-tank weapons. Las cannons or better. Missile launchers are more flexible weapn but suffer against heavy armour for it.

Yeah, but even at max damage, with a krak missile you're only dealing 14 points of damage to its side armour, or 16 to the front of a Chimera. With average damage, you'll deal 1 point to a chimera's front and 0 to a Leman Russ' side.

So unless you get behind any of the armored vehicles, you're not gonna take them down.

And even if you do get behind Leman Russ you need an absurdly large amount of missiles - you don't hit every time you shoot, tank can jinx out of harms way and sheer amount of integrity will keep the tank in good shape, especially if you deal average, not maximal damage every hit.

Tank will make a turn and evaporate the tank hunter many times over before taking serious damage even when shoot from above or behind with krak missiles. It doesnt force tank hunters to be intelligent. It forces them to die pointlessly.

Lascannon is actually a good antitank weapon, but it is large, heavy, has little options for maneuver once braced, operated by a crew of 2 and you got to be extremely sneaky to camouflage your position allowing you to be the first to open fire even having inferior range and extremely lucky to survive return fire.

Meltagun is used at ranges where attaching a metabomb directly to the tank armor is more of an effective tactics, and that doesnt happen much outside urban warfare. Tanks fighting in cohesion with infantry (like in real life) make the use of melta weapons outright suicidal.

Man, I miss BC with its Warp Weapons. Made dealing with vehicles way easier.

But yeah, Lascannons or Meltaguns are kind of required.

What could possibly go wrong?

How many of you have considered flamers for anti tank use?

That also deals with the supporting infantry.

Low range, low pen and damage, pilot gets bonus equal to his armor to avoid being set aflame - huge bonus if we are talking about tanks. Still somewhat ok as last resort kind of weapon.

How many of you have considered flamers for anti tank use?

That also deals with the supporting infantry.

Now, as a GM, I would consider flame weapons - depending on type - incredibly useful against certain vehicles (or rather, the crew within), but that's just me, it doesn't mean that it's RAW.

Low range, low pen and damage, pilot gets bonus equal to his armor to avoid being set aflame - huge bonus if we are talking about tanks. Still somewhat ok as last resort kind of weapon.

Setting a tank on fire would be (should be?) extremely disruptive to it's performance, from making it hard (or impossible) to aim properly, to actually setting fire to the insides of the vehicle, making the operators panic, be forced to put the fire out, or pretty much setting them on fire.

It is pretty nasty. A tank on fire has a 10% chance, which increases by 10 percentage points (that is to 20%, then 30% etc) every round, of suffering 8 critical damage!
Putting the fire out is a full round, -20 Ag Test for one of the crew. Until the fire is out, any action the crew takes suffers a -20 too and once it has been on fire, the vehicle is Fire-Damaged, giving a -10 on Operate.

However, given that avoiding being On Fire is an Operate test with a bonus equal to the armour on the attacked facing, that is +20 - +40 on the vehicles we're talking about, it's pretty hard to set a tank on fire.

Even so, I like those odds better than any others I can see so far...
Turns out, my sergeants Exterminator cartridge might be our best AT weapon!

In World War I and II, setting enemy tanks aflame was a legitimate strategy to deal with them. It would overheat the engines, make the inside of the tank unbearable, or filter into the tank and catch the crew on fire as well. I seem to recall that being the primary uses for Molotov cocktails.

So, the IG being based off of WWII armies, flamers should have an affect on the tanks. Especially since they are more powerful, have better range, and are more consistent than Molotov cocktails.

It is pretty nasty. A tank on fire has a 10% chance, which increases by 10 percentage points (that is to 20%, then 30% etc) every round, of suffering 8 critical damage!

Putting the fire out is a full round, -20 Ag Test for one of the crew. Until the fire is out, any action the crew takes suffers a -20 too and once it has been on fire, the vehicle is Fire-Damaged, giving a -10 on Operate.

However, given that avoiding being On Fire is an Operate test with a bonus equal to the armour on the attacked facing, that is +20 - +40 on the vehicles we're talking about, it's pretty hard to set a tank on fire.

Even so, I like those odds better than any others I can see so far...

Turns out, my sergeants Exterminator cartridge might be our best AT weapon!

I like they have rules for burning tanks out. Even scoffing at primitive WWII tanks that have could be disabled by throwing a Molotov on the engine block, there are cases of tanks being burned out by napalm bombs long after the war. With enough, hot enough fuel you can burn any tank and there flame based weapons in the 40K universe can be staggeringly devastating.

Lets face it, killing a tank should not be a simple task and if a well supported tank is nearly impossible to destroy with the weapons at hand for just the PC's on foot... so be it. It is that difficult. Anti tank crews in every engagement have to face this exact problem. If the tank notices you before you can take it out you are in real trouble.

Where's your supporting infantry? Where are you going to lay that ambush to get within melta gun / melta bomb range? How deep are you going to dig in your anti tank weapons and how many of them do you have? Where did you put the anti tank mines?

In Afganistan they tank killing teams of 15 rpg-7s. I don't think stuff like that is crazy between the NPC's and PC's if missile launchers is all they have. It's still less than a tank. The tank crew jinking isn't going to be eaten up by a random PC (as are the tank shells hopefully) but leave it to the PC's to get the best positions.

Plus Leman Russ's are actual good tanks. As much as the Guard has a lot of them they have a lot of support and even Astartes tanks have lighter armour let alone most Ork and rebel tanks.

I'd like to see a source on those tank-killing teams, if you're saying it takes 15 hits to destroy the tank.
If you're saying they do it by having 15 guys with RPG-7s and hoping that one of them gets the lucky hit, then I'd also like to see the source, because either way it would be interesting

Seriously though: I'm pretty sure it doesn't take 15 hits from RPG-7s to destroy a tank. From what I know, it takes one direct, full hit in the right spot and that's it.
However, with good armor, many hits don't deal much damage at all. Slat armor, for example can deflect RPGs (and bigger stuff!) ~50% of the time.

So, how to model this in-game?
I'd try to calculate AT-weapon strength and tank armor so that a max-damage hit will destroy the tank, with an average shot already damaging some systems (depending on tank and weapon used: The heaviest, the las-cannon, will do this to a LR, while it will still wreck a bike; the lightest, a melta-gun, will do this to a chimera, but not an LR etc.) and with weak shots doing nothing at all.
So similar chances at penetrating armour (perhaps toning the Las-Cannon down), but massively reduced Structural Integrity.

Man, I miss BC with its Warp Weapons. Made dealing with vehicles way easier.

But yeah, Lascannons or Meltaguns are kind of required.

Be a Sanctioned Psyker and do some BC rituals to bind a daemon to your Plasma Pistol or Force Staff.

What could possibly go wrong?

Technically you don't even need to be a psyker to do that. If the Ogryn in my group took Forbidden Lore (Demonology) he could probably pull it off.

Thanks to recent conflict in Syria we have plenty of material to work with - tanks seldom survive a missile to the side but could possibly fare well with a missile to the front armor - feel free to google those footages. Maybe this indeed could be represented by making vehicle integrity lower to make the pen value more relevant (as with real tanks who tend to go kaboom once hit into weak spot)

Maybe I'm thinking to hard about this, but 40k is often filled with massive armies literally slugging it out, face to face, for years, or more, at a time. In our world, those days are mostly gone. My point with that is, if a single lascannon could core a LR in a single hit, or two, the hordes of tanks that the Imperium prosecutes its wars with would not long survive the battlefield. While it makes infantry having to engage tanks annoying, and let's be honest, this game, at least to me, has always been a little wonky between troops and troops with tanks, those tanks need to survive decades of combat, whether it be against brightlances, darklances, rokkits, or multi-meltas. I find it hard to imagine that the only difference between my play group taking out a tank, and one making it through a long engagement against a whole army, bristling with heavy weapons, is the PC shirt that gives better BS skill, but those tanks will survive the onslaught of whole Waaghs! Sucks to be a lone group having to engage a LR.

Well, whenever they are slugging it out like this, they are presenting their front armour... And particularly lance weaponry seems to destroy them fairly easily! It is very rare though that they are slugging it out with the Eldar, afaict. The big, long tank battles seem to happen between the IG, orks, Chaos and possibly the Tau. The fluff that I know involves heavy losses against Tau and Chaos, at times. Orky weapons are often not that good, so they're more survivable.

Plus, I'd rather twist the fluff a bit to make tanks actually beatable by infantry, rather than have them as plot set pieces only.

In fluff we have vehicles and pieces of gear with millenia of combat service not because tanks are hard to blow up and space marines never get their armor and weapons torn to shreds. It is because in M41, when production capabilities for most weapon system patterns are either lost outright, preserved only on constantly decreasing number of forges or simply never exceeding requirements for all-out war. There is a reason why guardsmen are more expendable than their flak vests and lasguns, and it's the same reason everything is being repaired even from molten pieces rather than replaced by new.

I might point out a few things:

Molotovs had very little effect on tanks. The Finns were the big champtions of them, and they worked fairly well against the T-28, usually by suffocating the engine or igniting the fuel, but British testing found that pretty much anything made past 1940 was immune.

This would not work against anything but ork tanks in setting, imho.

I'd hope to ask someone who knows for sure, so I'm thinking a developer. But on page 33 of Shield of Humanity (only war) book there is a section for Trainng Doctrines.

Go Down to " Defenders of the Omnissiah " and it

cost:3 and has

starting Aptitude : Tech

For 3 points Starting aptitude: tech?!?! this is it? No Characteristics modifiyer, no Starting Talents, No Standard Regimental kit, No starting skills, ONLY Aptitude : tech Is this intentional? is this really all there is to it? I hope someone knows fo sure what is up with this Training Doctrine & if this was intentional or just a Type and printing error.

Thanks

S

I'd hope to ask someone who knows for sure, so I'm thinking a developer. But on page 33 of Shield of Humanity (only war) book there is a section for Trainng Doctrines.

Go Down to " Defenders of the Omnissiah " and it

cost:3 and has

starting Aptitude : Tech

For 3 points Starting aptitude: tech?!?! this is it? No Characteristics modifiyer, no Starting Talents, No Standard Regimental kit, No starting skills, ONLY Aptitude : tech Is this intentional? is this really all there is to it? I hope someone knows fo sure what is up with this Training Doctrine & if this was intentional or just a Type and printing error.

Thanks

S

Yeah, it's intentional. IMHO it's quite overpowered. (This is the only non-characteristic aptitude you can get from regiment creation.)

Iron Discipline & Die Hards are the same cost and also only offer one aptitude. I'm not sure why the seeming outrage.

Iron Discipline & Die Hards are the same cost and also only offer one aptitude. I'm not sure why the seeming outrage.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "Outrage" however there is all this hype over the Omnissiah & or the god king. Some groups get vehicels, tech, equipment and very steady bonuses... While something so grand sounding as "Defenders of the Omnissiah" just makes me scratch my head. Think of it more like first curiosity, then questioning as I flip back and forth reading it, lastly dumbfounded. All I could say was huh. ok. seems more like supporters of the Omnissiah, or hand of the Omnissiah. My friends and I are learning what we can about the system and try to run some fun game sessions. There are just areas that are exeedingly vague and very rarely explain something I would think is important. So there is some frustration in following all the nuances this system has. There seems to be a lot of potential, but also everything seems to bread conflict with everything else. /shrug Just a lot of questions with it.

Iron Discipline & Die Hards are the same cost and also only offer one aptitude. I'm not sure why the seeming outrage.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "Outrage" however there is all this hype over the Omnissiah & or the god king. Some groups get vehicels, tech, equipment and very steady bonuses... While something so grand sounding as "Defenders of the Omnissiah" just makes me scratch my head. Think of it more like first curiosity, then questioning as I flip back and forth reading it, lastly dumbfounded. All I could say was huh. ok. seems more like supporters of the Omnissiah, or hand of the Omnissiah. My friends and I are learning what we can about the system and try to run some fun game sessions. There are just areas that are exeedingly vague and very rarely explain something I would think is important. So there is some frustration in following all the nuances this system has. There seems to be a lot of potential, but also everything seems to bread conflict with everything else. /shrug Just a lot of questions with it.

Okay, so maybe the name is something you don't agree with. Though looking at the lore, understanding of most technology is reserved for only those who absolutely need to understand it (i.e. Tech Priests). Operators get the "Tech" aptitude because they are trained and expected to use Imperial technology that the average guardsman wouldn't. This Training Doctrine is essentially saying that the ENTIRE regiment is given this very same training, with the responsibility of proper care and handling of the technology used. Essentially, this makes every character much more capable of taking talents and skills that involve some sort of technological know-how.

Once you play a few sessions you will understand how crucial Tech-Use and Security can be as skills, not to mention the lowered costs for useful talents such as Technical Knock, Armor Monger, and Weapons Tech.

I don't know, dude. When I see multiple question marks and periods, my first thought is often Now this person is outraged. Three question marks AND an exclamation point... phew... they ain't leavin' until they get answers.

That was my not-helpful-in-any-way two cents for the day.

Cheers.