Laspistol

A completely accurate depiction of how useful this is.

The Laspistol is the pistol-sized variant of the Lasgun used by the Imperial Guard. It was primarily made as a sidearm for officers, as well as what few assault troops are present in the Guard. A laspistol can be made in many different ways, ranging from your standard factory-produced pistol for average squad sergeants to artisan-crafted pistols for for Rogue Traders or Imperial Governors that are just as much pieces of art as functional weapons.

Virtually all Imperial Guard officers (aside from Commissars, who generally prefer Bolt Pistols) and combat personnel, will be armed with this pistol (unless they can get access to shinier bits like plasma or bolt pistols) since it's fuckeasy to make, maintain, use, and die with. Especially the latter. The laspistol lacks the range of the lasgun but when in range it has the same effect as the lasgun. Basically, if the lasgun is a flash light, the laspistol is a pocket light.

Of course, real Imperial Guard assault troops, like Krieg combat engineers, prefer shotguns to laspistols, because they hold no illusions about their close combat capabilities, and because a boomstick is a fucking manly weapon, approved by Colonel "I kick Chaos Terminators in the balls for fun" Straken.

Of course, like the lasgun, a laspistol is generally described as being quite capable of shooting through a modern-day concrete wall, penetrating a civilian car's body in one shot, and dealing a similar amount of damage to a modern day high-caliber revolver/pistol or an SMG burst. At least it has the same stats as the Autopistol and Stub-pistol which are essentially the same as todays micro-Uzi (or equivalent) and Desert Eagle (or other heavy pistol) IN SPACE.

So remember, the pistol is actually quite powerful by our standards, it's just that it's in a setting where the standards are guns loaded with miniature rockets for ammunition, lightweight guns that fire super-heated bolts of energy capable of penetrating heavy armor as if it were wet tissue paper, guns capable of disintegrating anything that they're fired at, literally recoilless guns that are capable of sending out a flurry of jagged disks capable of severing limbs, or somewhere along those lines.

Of course, all of this depends on who's writing the fluff - different authors portray weapons differently.

See Also

• Commissar - The famous users of the laspistol Bolt pistol, which they use to motivate their troops.
• Lasgun - Laspistol's mommy.
• Multilaser- Laspistol's big bro.