Editing Bolter (section)

==How It Works==
[[image:Gyrojet.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Gyrojet MkI – a real life weapon, but is to a Bolter as a flintlock pistol is to an M2 Browning.]]
{{topquote|PLUS, we fire the WHOLE bullet. That's 65% more bullet per bullet.|Cave Johnson, CEO Apeture Science}}
In all seriousness, a Bolter is a powerful anti-personnel weapon that fires miniaturized armor-piercing rockets (called "bolts") that have a delayed impact fuse. The bolt undergoes multiple stages when firing; the first employs solid explosive propellant in order to project the round from the barrel of the weapon in a similar manner to a conventional gun, and then the rocket propellant kicks in, giving it an even greater range in the same fashion as modern rockets. The projectiles themselves are designed to punch through armor and ''then'' explode, causing considerable, if not immediately fatal damage to whatever the payload hits, since whatever is hit is usually blown the hell apart. More recent fluff has shown that a Space Marine can readily alter the fuse timing to account for different enemies. Bolts are quite large (''.75 Caliber, or 19.05mm to use another metric, other bolters are .998 caliber so about 25.35mm''), making the weapon that fires them quite effective against most forms of infantry, and being capable of causing damage to most light vehicles as well; an average Astartes firing at a vehicle from behind and disabling, or even outright destroying it with glancing hits is not unheard of. Bolters are capable of both semi-automatic and automatic fire, and most renditions may also fire in two or four round bursts. In short, the Bolter is a gunslinging juvenile's dream come true – a gun that shoots explosive rockets (''not launches, '''shoots''''').

Humorously, the technology behind Bolters comes from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet guns that actually exist], though a failed design and one that never actually saw much use in spite of considerable potential; well, that and major design flaws making the gun's accuracy so bad that the bullet would actually at times fire out sideways Xcom style. Some [[/tg/|fa/tg/uys]] have suggested that this is an analogy for the entire franchise. Gyrojet technology is fundamentally based on extending the ''range'' of the weapon in question, giving the intrinsic flaw of having inferior penetration up close in exchange for superior penetration from afar, as you could always improve short-range penetration by converting all available propellant to kinetic energy up front, rather than delaying the conversion until later, regardless of technological level. Aside from differences in the propellant, the basic design is identical to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armor-piercing_shell#Second_World_War early armor-piercing shells used in World War II]. The primary flaw with them was that the explosive behind the core was found to be of minimal benefit compared to just using more core, which also provided additional momentum due to the core being denser than the explosive, on top of additional problems with timing the fuse properly.

While the latter problem could be fixed with technology – in particular, bolts could be programmed to intelligently change their fuse delay based on their target, something possible at the Imperium of Man's technological level, but never described as being performed by Bolt Weapons – the former is only solvable when the explosives can be nearly as dense as the cores, something known to be false in bolts. Modern rounds designed to solve the same problem put the explosive in front of the core, rather than behind it, maximizing the benefit of a relatively low amount of explosive. Against armor, this uses the shaped charge to prepare a "channel" for the core to penetrate, while against more poorly armored targets, this helps to mitigate over-penetration by exaggerating the size of the wound, as in hollow-point ammunition. In the end, this makes them worse at the jobs they were designed to do compared to the dedicated anti-tank or anti-personnel rounds, but better than either when used for cross-purposes. Accuracy is also a major issue. One of the ports that was meant to spin-stabilize the rocket as it traveled was partly blocked due to a design flaw, causing the rockets to corkscrew wildly instead of traveling in a straight line. "Smart bullet" technology might be able to fix this, but it is still in its experimental stages as of now. It must be assumed that in Warhammer 40000, some other solution was found that we have not come up with yet. This may have been in the form of even more potent explosives than we have available, or perhaps there are methods to produce them more efficiently than what we can do with the tools and knowledge we have currently.

Of course, it is reasonable to assume that as the Bolter exists in a much more technologically advanced setting than which we live in, it would be much more powerful than a Gyrojet gun we could build at our age, even if they were of the exact same size and caliber. The propellant would probably be much more powerful, making it go a lot faster. The shell casing and tip are most likely made out of much sterner and rarer stuff than what we can make/find or would be impractical for us to make. And the warhead would probably be a lot more potent than a 0.75 caliber rocket we could make with today's technology. Note that depleted deuterium makes no sense as deuterium is just a non-radioactive isotope of hydrogen, and later fluff seems to have replaced it with depleted uranium in order to make more sense. On top of that, unlike the Gyrojet, people actually give a flying fuck about the Bolter. So it seems reasonable to assume that the problems with the Gyrojet design were smoothed out because they have more resources to do so than a tiny company that few [[/k/|weapons enthusiasts]] know of it consider to have been little more than a curiosity. For additional consideration, one of the Gyrojet's main problems was that it relied on rocket power alone, which meant that its initial velocity exiting the barrel was laughable. A bolt is propelled by an initial charge of something analogous to gunpowder, though superior, giving it a velocity like (''or even better than'') a modern bullet, and it is then further accelerated by a rocket fuel, with the additional benefit of the continuous burn giving the projectile a flatter trajectory out until the point where the fuel runs out (bolts self-detonate when the rocket burns out if it hasn't hit anything). Relying upon rocket power alone, they would have been nigh useless in close combat. The Bolter has the best of both worlds where the bolt serves as a bullet '''''AND''''' a rocket, with a side benefit of whatever fuel hasn't been expended also going off on impact.