“Legends say this pattern predates the STC by millennia, making this a truly venerable design. Some even say that a few of these original guns are still in service out there.”
When you send the Stubber in for refurbishment, and the oldest scratch marks have ancient Terran on them like "Kasserine Pass, Omaha, Bastogne, Incheon, Khe Sahn, Saigon, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Mogadishu, Bosnia, Kandahar, Fallujah".
Truly a most wise and sanctified machine spirit.
For some reason it tends to be quite cantankerous when not in battle and around commissars, upper officers and ministorum priests. Commissar Cain was the only known commissar not to have a negligent discharge happen when in the weapon’s presence.
Rumour also has it, that it has an occasional habit of negligent discharge whenever in the general direction of Kriegers, Armageddon Steel, Valhallans and Tallarns, and whichever poor Guardsman has to continuously deny that it's their trigger discipline at fault.
Volkite is one of those things nobody outside Cawls guys can even make. Stub weapons can be made and maintained on any world above feudal level.
When you need to secretly equip nine whole legions in a setting where the tech level is regularly degrading sometimes you need to pick your battles. Cawls flagship is big but odds are he didn't personally have them machine out every weapon and this is something he could do that would make it work.
We have all kinds of crazy shit in lore, tabletop is never going to reflect canon otherwise every game would be won by the player with the most named characters.
It’s possible they don’t want to make more than necessary specifically so that other Imperial factions can’t get extras and reverse engineer them.
Remember the Imperium plays a political game even to the detriment of war efforts.
Magi will make amazing tools and not share them unless it’s good for promotion or just to spite the flesh bags. There’s a very real possibility several Forge Worlds are squatting on valuable STCs and not studying or using them just for politics. And if they think a lesser rival is coming up with something they’ll stop him dead in his tracks.
So Volkite- one of the most effective known forms of armaments in the setting- is naturally in the same category. I feel the only reason that Cawl managed to get away with the pistols he has is because Chapters are known to keep Volkite weapons as relics.
In the Novel *Volpone Glory* there's a very large amount of Skitarii armed with Volkite Weapons. Although they were escorting an Ordinatus that had a massive turret with like 6 Macro Cannons on it.
Those volkite weapons were probably solely produced to arm the skitarius unit pledged to watch over that sacred Ordinatus
depending on how many skitarii there were, each weapon might have been the personal work of a full magos
" oh shit, Gulliaman is about to complain about our heavy stubber fetish, what do we do?"
"Dont worry, I got this"
*Opens microsoft excel and make a basic spreadsheet before showing it to Lord Guilliman*
"Logistics"
Idk if you know, but one infamous bl author (cs goto) had space marines putting multilasers on land raiders. Same author guy in terminator armor performing backflips, eldar tank being destroyed by rockes hurled by fucking children, eldar stealing guard vechicles because they had "heavier armor", even thou eldar battle doctrine relies on speed, lelith hasperax worshiping slanesh amd having sex with daemonette amd other bullshit
I thought there was a distinction between psykers and sorcerers. And Khorne hates sorcerers. Like, sorcerers cast spells and weave magicky bullshit while psykers basically grab warp energy and hit people with it?
Ehh, with laz weapons on vehicles you can hook them up to the vehicle’s power source making power not an issue. At that point you can turn its power and fire rate settings way up.
I mean, once you install it, it's upkeep is pretty cheap, which is pretty huge for a faction like the Imperium. Only needs power for ammo which it can siphon from the main system so its not requiring bullets and it doesn't need much maintenance to boot. Which means you can use them as additional integrated automatic firepower per unit, without straining your supply of bolts and priests much, both of which the supply lines for might be unreliable due to warp travel vagaries.
Sure, in active combat munitions based fires has superior firepower per unit, but it's better to at least have a bad gun rather than no gun, because you either can't produce enough priests or bolts for every heavy stubber or bolter in your unit, or because warp travel means what they produce doesn't arrive on time.
Lascannons kill tanks (why a brutality has TWO) AND lasguns auto wound on 6s against infantry (so better than a bolter in the hands of a trained guardsmen :)
Obligatory copypasta:
>2066
>Stationed on mars to quell a rebellion
>Become side door gunner for atmospheric dropship.
>No miniguns or gatling cannons, just some metal brick with a pipe on one end.
>Get sent in to extract some wounded.
>Reach the evac zone and come under attack.
>Horde of rebels charging in with their new plasma guns and compact rocket launchers.
>Let loose a stream of bullets.
>The sounds of the rebel's screams are nearly drowned out by the heavy "Chunk chunk chunk chunk" of the machine gun.
>The wounded are loaded up and returned to base.
>Inspect MG afterwards.
>Thing was made in 1942
>Tunisia, Italy, and Germany are scratched onto the gun.
>Scratch "Mars" on with a knife.
The only thing I ever disliked about this green text is that it needed more on the list. Makes it seem like the gun went unused from 1945-2066. More like:
Tunisia, Italy, Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Arabia, Congo, Taiwan, Tranquility. Then add Mars.
Is there a in universe reason for volkite being phased out and not really being used anymore?
From my understanding volkite guns were pretty common during the Great Crusade.
Oh, Volkite was definitely alot better than Plasma.
It was just harder to produce aswell as being really expensive&difficult to maintain.
A Volkite Weapon will always outperform a Bolt Weapon of the same size.
Volkite is also alot safer to use than Plasma and more consistent.
Volkite Weapons are kind of like the *Prometheus Lens* Exotic Trace from Destiny 2. They shoot a concentrated beam of energy that makes whatever it touches burst into flames internally. Very, very effective against infantry(even against Astartes Terminator Armour), but the denser something is the less effective the Volkite will be. Although a Volkite Weapon like the ones mounted on Fellblade SuperHeavy Tanks&Titans would be powerful enough to easily destroy entire Armoured Columns, SuperHeavy Tanks and pose a significant threat to superheavy(as in EXTREMELY well fortified) Bunkers&even Titans.
They were common among the Legions during the earlier part of the GC, but consider that means 1-2 million total Space Marines. One single forge world could have produced that many Volkite weapons.
Lore-wise they could not be produced fast enough after the Heresy so Astartes phased them out, and the secret to their production was lost, so the forge worlds making them were probably nuked or something.
Lost due to FUCKING Kelbor Hal flooding all of Mars’s data storage with daemons, destroying the master STC repository in Olympus Mons and ruining any real chance to return to the Dark Age of Technology.
Fuck Kelbor Hal, all my homies hate KELBOR Hal
Entirely fair. I have a massive love/hate with the Dark Mechanicus that comes entirely from Vashtorr being introduced from nowhere and stealing their whole schtick for a rather unimpressive mini. Give me horrifying monstrosities of daemon flesh and cybernetics fused together in ways man was not meant to know, not shitty cyber angel with a hammer.
That's Phosphex. The super duper napalm that needs something like a hard vacuum to die out, contaminates whatever it touches and will *actively move towards movement*.
They are harder to make, maintain and the knowhow on how to make and maintain them is lost to most.
Not lost to everyone, but probably to every Forge World that isnt old as fuck( Forge worlds that are almost as powerfull, advanced and old as Mars itself, if even that).
Also, Volkite weapons are best against groups of infantry, hard to make and maintain, while Bolters and other weapons are more versatile and simpler to make and maintain.
Its simple logistics and logistics is THE way to win any war, No matter what war that is.
>Also, Volkite weapons are best against groups of infantry, hard to make and maintain, while Bolters and other weapons are more versatile and simpler to make and maintain.
Would probably work great against the Tyranids though.
Plasma was easier and cheaper to make than Volkite and filled the same battlefield roll. Volkite couldnt be supercharged either, or scaled up for titans and knights iirc.
Boils down to logistics as /u/Orsimer4life117 said. Why spend 10 hours making a gun that doesnt perform better than a gun that takes 9 hours to make?
Knights have Volkite in their FW range on the Mechanicus-heavy knights-
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Volkite_Chieorovile
Titans had them in HH, not 40K though-
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Volkite_Eradicator
So they fall under the “were around in HH but fell out of favour due to xyz” lore
And volkite weapons show their greatest strengths only when you have a bunch of them
Volkite can arc around and hit nearby enemies, so if you get a lot of them firing together they can mulch infantry
But now in 40K they are hard to find a place that makes and repairs them and expensive as hell
So they said fuck that it’s spending 20x the logistics for maybe 2x the fighting effectiveness
They were already expensive during the Great Crusade and the STC was more or less fully lost during the Schism of Mars, it only recently revealed out that Cawl had a small number of manufactora under his control capable of making them, and it’s slow going standing up production.
Bolter are far easier too produce. Like Volkite is EXTREMELY Expensive and the Civil War wracked Imperium and Mechanicus could not continue to produce it.
Volkites did suck in 9th too.
Mortals on 6 sure but no AP meant it was outclassed by most weapons of its class, with few exceptions such as the Contemptor Dreadnought which had Core for re-rolls and enough number of shots to drow something in mortals.
Yeah, but still. Smaller minigun is more efficient most of the time.
Stubber rounds are less complex to manufacture and take up less raw material. So for a given amount of bolter rounds you can make more stubber rounds, and as a result, you can supply more heavy stubbers for the same price as supplying a smaller amount of heavy bolters. Yes, it deals less effect on impact, but against most orc/rebel-human infantry it's still about adequate, which is enough given they're the most common enemy types in the galaxy, that it's a worthwhile tradeoff to consider. Read lasgun logistics if you really want the deep dive to why the Guard loves it's laser weapons so much \[tl:dr : logistics\]
Volkite was really hard to maintain iirc, sure they could change the lore and make them available everywhere, but it makes sense that only tanks from the heresy and a few pistols and guns here and there are all that exists, especially as the STC for them was destroyed iirc
I love how the heavy stubbers looks like M2 browning 50. Cals, which they are in my head cannon, a 41,000 year old weapon still in service because nothing better was made
Maybe he can ask the Dark Angels instead. Now that the Lion is awake again, they can finally do something with that massive stockpile of DAOT weapons that they've been sitting on.
Pretty in keeping for admech design to shove heavy stubbers wherever they can mount one. Magi love the damn things for some reason.
They're just like the US Military. Just stick'em on things. They kill real good.
Ma Deuces, Ma Deuces everywhere in the US Army.
Just call it a browning you nerd(not an insult we are all nerds here) dakka is dakka
Dakkadakkadakkadakka
They like the way it makes the vehicle vibrate...
They took Alucards advice to heart; Bitches love cannons
“Legends say this pattern predates the STC by millennia, making this a truly venerable design. Some even say that a few of these original guns are still in service out there.”
When you send the Stubber in for refurbishment, and the oldest scratch marks have ancient Terran on them like "Kasserine Pass, Omaha, Bastogne, Incheon, Khe Sahn, Saigon, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Mogadishu, Bosnia, Kandahar, Fallujah". Truly a most wise and sanctified machine spirit.
For some reason it tends to be quite cantankerous when not in battle and around commissars, upper officers and ministorum priests. Commissar Cain was the only known commissar not to have a negligent discharge happen when in the weapon’s presence.
Rumour also has it, that it has an occasional habit of negligent discharge whenever in the general direction of Kriegers, Armageddon Steel, Valhallans and Tallarns, and whichever poor Guardsman has to continuously deny that it's their trigger discipline at fault.
Happy Machine Spirit is reminded of MacArthur for some reason.
If your in a freedom state. I recommend shooting a machine gun. Lots of fun. You'd understand why admech insist on putting it everywhere.
Glorious 50.cal machine guns There is no improving on perfection
I'd be surprised if the admech do not worship the ancient tech priest known as Saint Moses Browning.
Volkite is one of those things nobody outside Cawls guys can even make. Stub weapons can be made and maintained on any world above feudal level. When you need to secretly equip nine whole legions in a setting where the tech level is regularly degrading sometimes you need to pick your battles. Cawls flagship is big but odds are he didn't personally have them machine out every weapon and this is something he could do that would make it work.
And even in the admech only the Dominus has a Volkite weapon, you'd think as the guys who make them we'd have wider access to it for the army.
We have all kinds of crazy shit in lore, tabletop is never going to reflect canon otherwise every game would be won by the player with the most named characters.
Unless it’s the swarmlord
It’s possible they don’t want to make more than necessary specifically so that other Imperial factions can’t get extras and reverse engineer them. Remember the Imperium plays a political game even to the detriment of war efforts. Magi will make amazing tools and not share them unless it’s good for promotion or just to spite the flesh bags. There’s a very real possibility several Forge Worlds are squatting on valuable STCs and not studying or using them just for politics. And if they think a lesser rival is coming up with something they’ll stop him dead in his tracks. So Volkite- one of the most effective known forms of armaments in the setting- is naturally in the same category. I feel the only reason that Cawl managed to get away with the pistols he has is because Chapters are known to keep Volkite weapons as relics.
In the Novel *Volpone Glory* there's a very large amount of Skitarii armed with Volkite Weapons. Although they were escorting an Ordinatus that had a massive turret with like 6 Macro Cannons on it.
Those volkite weapons were probably solely produced to arm the skitarius unit pledged to watch over that sacred Ordinatus depending on how many skitarii there were, each weapon might have been the personal work of a full magos
" oh shit, Gulliaman is about to complain about our heavy stubber fetish, what do we do?" "Dont worry, I got this" *Opens microsoft excel and make a basic spreadsheet before showing it to Lord Guilliman* "Logistics"
Hey it could be worse. They could have bolters. At least a stubber has volume fire.
Could have laz, which has almost no redeeming value!
**Solar Auxilia:** "You talking shit about our Multilasers?" *Slaps a Multilaser on both the hull and pintle mounts*
Idk if you know, but one infamous bl author (cs goto) had space marines putting multilasers on land raiders. Same author guy in terminator armor performing backflips, eldar tank being destroyed by rockes hurled by fucking children, eldar stealing guard vechicles because they had "heavier armor", even thou eldar battle doctrine relies on speed, lelith hasperax worshiping slanesh amd having sex with daemonette amd other bullshit
Dont forget the infamous Khornate Librarian turned Psychic Demon Prince of Khorne. You know.. the God that hates psykers more than Black Templars?
I thought there was a distinction between psykers and sorcerers. And Khorne hates sorcerers. Like, sorcerers cast spells and weave magicky bullshit while psykers basically grab warp energy and hit people with it?
The only terminators I could accept doing backflips are Tyberos and Asterion Moloc. I’m pretty sure gravity would be too scared to tell them no.
And Gabriel Angelos cause of Psyker Gf.
Gabriel is the one who did the back flip in terminator armor.
And Grimnar
And Jubal, but only for the rizz .
I'm pretty sure the only canon depiction of an Astartes jumping in Terminator armour is Logan Grimnar
*Lancer Laser Destroyer has entered the chat* *Heavy Laser Destroyer has entered the chat* *Godhammer Lascannon has entered the chat*
LasGUNS no. Lascannons are great. It's like Pulse Rifles if there was no pulse blaster.
Ehh, with laz weapons on vehicles you can hook them up to the vehicle’s power source making power not an issue. At that point you can turn its power and fire rate settings way up.
I mean, once you install it, it's upkeep is pretty cheap, which is pretty huge for a faction like the Imperium. Only needs power for ammo which it can siphon from the main system so its not requiring bullets and it doesn't need much maintenance to boot. Which means you can use them as additional integrated automatic firepower per unit, without straining your supply of bolts and priests much, both of which the supply lines for might be unreliable due to warp travel vagaries. Sure, in active combat munitions based fires has superior firepower per unit, but it's better to at least have a bad gun rather than no gun, because you either can't produce enough priests or bolts for every heavy stubber or bolter in your unit, or because warp travel means what they produce doesn't arrive on time.
Lascannons kill tanks (why a brutality has TWO) AND lasguns auto wound on 6s against infantry (so better than a bolter in the hands of a trained guardsmen :)
Cawl recognizes that the M2 browning is still the best option in m41
The true Omnissiah is John Mosses Browning.
Obligatory copypasta: >2066 >Stationed on mars to quell a rebellion >Become side door gunner for atmospheric dropship. >No miniguns or gatling cannons, just some metal brick with a pipe on one end. >Get sent in to extract some wounded. >Reach the evac zone and come under attack. >Horde of rebels charging in with their new plasma guns and compact rocket launchers. >Let loose a stream of bullets. >The sounds of the rebel's screams are nearly drowned out by the heavy "Chunk chunk chunk chunk" of the machine gun. >The wounded are loaded up and returned to base. >Inspect MG afterwards. >Thing was made in 1942 >Tunisia, Italy, and Germany are scratched onto the gun. >Scratch "Mars" on with a knife.
The only thing I ever disliked about this green text is that it needed more on the list. Makes it seem like the gun went unused from 1945-2066. More like: Tunisia, Italy, Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Arabia, Congo, Taiwan, Tranquility. Then add Mars.
Love how you sneaked a war in the moon there >Tranquility
Hey wait this is badass
Knowing AdMech I bet they still have to fucking do headspace and timing. In the grim darkness of the far future marines still gotta do marine shit.
That one chapter of the Astartes that refuses to eat corpse starch and are instead fed the ancient warrior diet of "Krayolars"
Kind of want to see someone build a USMC themed chapter. Kitbash some astartes sized porta shitters.
I guarantee that there are M2s that served in WWII still serving in the 42nd millennium.
I mean...I got some Necron Gauss rifles...
Ah yes The tinnitus machine
Is there a in universe reason for volkite being phased out and not really being used anymore? From my understanding volkite guns were pretty common during the Great Crusade.
I think it was a mix of being prohibitively expensive and not that much better than the newer plasma guns
Oh, Volkite was definitely alot better than Plasma. It was just harder to produce aswell as being really expensive&difficult to maintain. A Volkite Weapon will always outperform a Bolt Weapon of the same size. Volkite is also alot safer to use than Plasma and more consistent. Volkite Weapons are kind of like the *Prometheus Lens* Exotic Trace from Destiny 2. They shoot a concentrated beam of energy that makes whatever it touches burst into flames internally. Very, very effective against infantry(even against Astartes Terminator Armour), but the denser something is the less effective the Volkite will be. Although a Volkite Weapon like the ones mounted on Fellblade SuperHeavy Tanks&Titans would be powerful enough to easily destroy entire Armoured Columns, SuperHeavy Tanks and pose a significant threat to superheavy(as in EXTREMELY well fortified) Bunkers&even Titans.
Destiny mention! But also yes that's correct, I honestly hadn't read up on volkite in a while so that was just me misremembering the lore
They were common among the Legions during the earlier part of the GC, but consider that means 1-2 million total Space Marines. One single forge world could have produced that many Volkite weapons. Lore-wise they could not be produced fast enough after the Heresy so Astartes phased them out, and the secret to their production was lost, so the forge worlds making them were probably nuked or something.
Lost due to FUCKING Kelbor Hal flooding all of Mars’s data storage with daemons, destroying the master STC repository in Olympus Mons and ruining any real chance to return to the Dark Age of Technology. Fuck Kelbor Hal, all my homies hate KELBOR Hal
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home and have horrifying fates exploring the Noctis Labyrinth.
Entirely fair. I have a massive love/hate with the Dark Mechanicus that comes entirely from Vashtorr being introduced from nowhere and stealing their whole schtick for a rather unimpressive mini. Give me horrifying monstrosities of daemon flesh and cybernetics fused together in ways man was not meant to know, not shitty cyber angel with a hammer.
The creator died (exicuted) and the mechanicus's tendency to not teach people how to build or fix tech.
That's Phosphex. The super duper napalm that needs something like a hard vacuum to die out, contaminates whatever it touches and will *actively move towards movement*.
Oh right,
They are harder to make, maintain and the knowhow on how to make and maintain them is lost to most. Not lost to everyone, but probably to every Forge World that isnt old as fuck( Forge worlds that are almost as powerfull, advanced and old as Mars itself, if even that). Also, Volkite weapons are best against groups of infantry, hard to make and maintain, while Bolters and other weapons are more versatile and simpler to make and maintain. Its simple logistics and logistics is THE way to win any war, No matter what war that is.
>Also, Volkite weapons are best against groups of infantry, hard to make and maintain, while Bolters and other weapons are more versatile and simpler to make and maintain. Would probably work great against the Tyranids though.
Plasma was easier and cheaper to make than Volkite and filled the same battlefield roll. Volkite couldnt be supercharged either, or scaled up for titans and knights iirc. Boils down to logistics as /u/Orsimer4life117 said. Why spend 10 hours making a gun that doesnt perform better than a gun that takes 9 hours to make?
Knights have Volkite in their FW range on the Mechanicus-heavy knights- https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Volkite_Chieorovile Titans had them in HH, not 40K though- https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Volkite_Eradicator So they fall under the “were around in HH but fell out of favour due to xyz” lore
And volkite weapons show their greatest strengths only when you have a bunch of them Volkite can arc around and hit nearby enemies, so if you get a lot of them firing together they can mulch infantry But now in 40K they are hard to find a place that makes and repairs them and expensive as hell So they said fuck that it’s spending 20x the logistics for maybe 2x the fighting effectiveness
Hilariously expensive and hard to make, plus Bolters were just cheaper.
They were already expensive during the Great Crusade and the STC was more or less fully lost during the Schism of Mars, it only recently revealed out that Cawl had a small number of manufactora under his control capable of making them, and it’s slow going standing up production.
Bolter are far easier too produce. Like Volkite is EXTREMELY Expensive and the Civil War wracked Imperium and Mechanicus could not continue to produce it.
40k Volkites suck ass tho so Cawl is right.
That's just a 10e balancing issue, if they were more common gw would probably care about making them good
Volkites did suck in 9th too. Mortals on 6 sure but no AP meant it was outclassed by most weapons of its class, with few exceptions such as the Contemptor Dreadnought which had Core for re-rolls and enough number of shots to drow something in mortals.
Can someone explain why we have 50cals and not heavy bolters?
Because someone on GW’s design team had a hard on for them.
Less bullet for your bullet means you can have more bullets with the spare bullet stuff.
Is that not what the mini gun is for?
In the grim darkness of the future, there is only the Mah Duce
“Why Heavy Stubbers though?” “Cost mostly. You know how much Volkite costs to produce and arm? Much cheaper to just use existing lines and modify it.”
Hellblasters and melta carbines are a nice consolidation to the heavy stubbers.
”Now if you don’t mind me, I’m going to awaken a C’tan” - Cawl (probably)
Bring back sicarans! Guilliman literally worked on it!
How big would a primarch size cigarette be?
Probaly size of Pringles packing
Ave Ma Deuce Ave Omnissiah
Volkite was really hard to maintain iirc, sure they could change the lore and make them available everywhere, but it makes sense that only tanks from the heresy and a few pistols and guns here and there are all that exists, especially as the STC for them was destroyed iirc
I love how the heavy stubbers looks like M2 browning 50. Cals, which they are in my head cannon, a 41,000 year old weapon still in service because nothing better was made
That probably happens so much it's uncountable. Guiliman thinks of a good thing. They don't have it any more.
*"Happiness is a Belt-Fed weapon"* Cawl, reciting an ancient Terran Warrior's proverb
Cawl picked up a book on US armored doctrine and realized HMGs on everything and with as many as you can fit is the best way to go
This actually a good meme, bravo
Looks like they found the Browning STC.
Maybe he can ask the Dark Angels instead. Now that the Lion is awake again, they can finally do something with that massive stockpile of DAOT weapons that they've been sitting on.
Dying by a thousand cuts is still dying.
He’s gotta dump inventory so he can start working on volkites
radical prediction - we will get Volkite Intercessors in 12th edition
Volkite weapons are still my all-time favourite tank armament.
Fucking love stubbers, don’t get the hate
Why stubbers? Bro doesn't even have Bolters anymore?
Volkites were so op in the lore. From one shotting marines to even possibly killing primarchs
*WALL OF LEAD*
Heavy stubbers are fucking cool! Change my mind
When you have a million naked raving lunatics charging your position. I'll take BVVVVVRRRRRPPP over a laser coring device any day.
Didn’t Volkite have a habit of giving even space marines mega cancer?