Editing Nobledark Imperium Imperial Forces (section)

=== Bolters ===

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All modern varieties of bolter, from the humble workhorse that is the mainstay of the Space Marine legions to the bolt pistol used by baseline humans, are at least partially influenced by a design created by the Emperor of Mankind himself. Believe it or not, bolters were originally not that important a part of ancient humanity’s arsenal. This can be seen in the nature of warfare in the 41st millennium, as warfare in the 41st millennium almost resembles that of pre-gunpowder humanity, with a heavy focus on armor and the viability of melee combat. Humanity’s weapons of choice during the Dark Age of Technology were Volkite guns and Adrathic disintegrators, neither of which armor offered much protection against. Military tactics during this period would have been more familiar to older groups of humans (potentially as far back as M2) than their descendants, with a greater emphasis on utilizing cover and avoiding fire than melee combat. Knowledge of how to make advanced armor survived the Age of Strife better than similar knowledge of weaponry, shifting the advantage to armor over arms and making melee combat viable again. Bolters only entered into the military sphere much later in the Dark Age of Technology, believed to have been a weaponized version of a power tool, after it was noticed how well they performed against Orks, other high-durability xenos, and rogue Men of Iron and other Silica Animus.

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The Emperor had contributed to the reinvention of the bolter back before he was the Emperor, before he was the Steward, even before he was the Warlord, but when he was merely Oscar of the Terrawatt Clan. The Terrawatt Clan was a technocracy, with societal standing and authority being based on one’s inventiveness and research productivity, and if one could not prove their mental ability there was no way for them to advance in status. Embarking on a project that advanced Terrawatt’s sum of knowledge in some way was a common coming of age ritual in the country, and although he saw himself as artificial and a shadow of humanity, Oscar wanted to be viewed slightly less as Malcador's trophy taken from the ruins of Chthonia and slightly more as a person. 

Oscar chose as his project the reverse-engineering of an old ballistics weapon that had been uncovered some centuries before by expeditions from Terrawatt into the deserts of the former Tharkian Empire (specifically, the province of Anatolia). The weapon’s systems had been fouled by sand and half of its components were missing, but Oscar managed to piece together enough of its workings to construct a working replica sized to his frame, or at least fill in enough of the missing pieces to construct a model that actually worked. This would be the precursor of the Astartes pattern boltgun, and explains - among other things - why the prototype bolter was already built for someone of an Astartes’ size.

The Theologiteks were impressed, and Oscar was proud of his creation (not to mention happy to have a weapon that didn’t feel like a child’s toy in his hands), eventually taking the prototype as his sidearm when he embarked to reunify Old Earth. The gun faithfully served as his sidearm for many years, before finally failing some two hundred years after the Battle of Terra in about 700.M31. Oscar was saddened by the loss, seemingly one more aspect of his life that seemed to be eroding away, but the remains of the so-called ‘father of bolters’ survived and remains enshrined to this day in the museum in the Imperial Palace.


Originally, the Warlord’s armies of Thunder Warriors were armed with Volkite weaponry and autoguns, but as the numbers of augmented warriors grew and Volkite weapons were gradually lost to attrition, three-quarters of the Warlord’s soldiers were armed with bolters about the time the Thunder Legions were being phased out in favor of the Legio Astartes. Volkite weaponry may have been more powerful and autoguns were cheap, but bolters were reliable, relatively powerful (unlike autoguns), and more importantly their workings were well-understood and could be easily replicated (unlike Volkite weapons).

The Warlord was not the only individual to reverse engineer the secrets of the bolter. Other human nations during the Age of Strife had come to the same conclusion regarding the bolter’s reliability and ease of production, and the Imperium encountered other models of bolters on places like Mars, the Hubworld League, and the Auretian Technocracy, several of which were based on actual STC designs. Information from these designs was assimilated by the Imperium to create a syncretic design that improved upon the initial Astartes pattern (Oscar, to his embarrassment, [[fail|had gotten some of his assumptions wrong and had replaced several missing systems with slightly more inefficient versions he had created from scratch]]). However, not all bolter designs were equally optimal in all situations, with some performing better at certain tasks than others. Eventually, a wide array of bolter types proliferated throughout the Imperium, ranging from the numerous variants of the Astartes pattern, in which the initial kick from the propellant recoil is enough to break an unaugmented human’s arm, to the smaller bolt pistol commonly used by commissars, which trades caliber size and rate of fire for recoil to the point that it can be used by normal humans.


By approximately early M34, enough principles of miniaturization had been rediscovered to downsize the traditional full-size Astartes bolter to the Godwin-De’az Pattern. Nevertheless, despite this miniaturization the recoil still made it almost impossible for normal humans to use unless you were genetically enhanced, were wearing powered armor, or from Catachan or the Hubworld League. For many years the Godwin-De’az pattern occupied an awkward position for many years, being too large to be used by most Guardsmen yet too small in caliber to be an efficient weapon for Astartes. However, this all changed after the founding of the Adeptus Securitas and the Sisters of Battle in M36, who, with their enhanced strength, found this intermediate-sized bolter almost perfect for their needs. Indeed, the name Godwin-De'az came about as a reference to Sister De'az, the Nocturnean Sister who was the first successful recipient of the augmentations used by the Sisters of Battle. Before that, they were merely referred to as "miniaturized Bolters" due to their scarcity. Godwin-De'az bolters are much more common in the Imperium now, mostly due to their use by the Securitas.

The invention of the precursor to the modern bolter is perhaps one of the achievements the Emperor is most proud of. It was not something created by Oscar, the Man of Gold, nor Oscar, the Warlord of Earth, but by Oscar, the person, in the name of the betterment of his species.

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