Editing Plasma (section)

==A Small Notice to all Devou/tg/uardsmen on Plasma Weaponry==
Due to a recent modeling discrepancy with man-portable Imperial plasma weaponry (and GW making the errors canon), two things need to be said:

''First'', the Plasma Pistol, Gun, and Cannon only have one barrel. The bottom "barrel" is actually the access port to the main accelerator coil of the weapon. The accelerator coil is a ferromagnetic electromagnet, and thus loses magnetic potency as its molecules shift due to the powerful charges and pulses it experiences. This means it wears out with frequency, and needs to be replaced every so often, or at least often enough for the designers to add an access hatch.

''Second'', handheld plasma weaponry has a very small opening for the plasma to escape from. The large space that everybody seems so fond of drilling out to make an enormous-caliber barrel is in fact a magnetic plate shaped like a parabolic dish. The ''actual'' barrel hole, inside that plate, is small enough to get drilled with an in-universe pin vice(!) so you can see why no one tries to mould it (soft sci-fi weaponry is SRS BZNESS!) This is because the plasma, when it is being charged, is compressed to what is almost a dense gas in order to increase heat retention. The tiny plasma reactor (a maintained micro fusion reaction, holy shit look at a nuclear power plant and think of this) within the weapon is breached for a quick moment, and the spill is immediately drawn along the length and through a narrow tube in a large, ferrometalic block. The block is supercooled to avoid catastrophic burnout, but it is mainly a focusing and directing mechanism. Through the tiny pinhole runs the plasma charge, but it does not touch the sides due to the block's strong magnetic field. When it reaches the muzzle, it is going so fast and is under so much pressure that the parabolic disk shape is necessary in order to focus the plasma as it nearly explodes out of the barrel. The disk face is also magnetized to avoid touching the plasma. The '''''one''''' exception to this is the latest Pattern of Plasma Cannon, which borrows design elements heavily from the Mars-pattern Plasma Destroyer mounted upon the [[Leman Russ Battle Tank|Leman Russ Executioner]]. It should be noted that all Mars Pattern vehicle-mounted plasma weapons use the "newer" huge-caliber devices, while Ryza Patterns use the pinhole-barrel devices. This can be seen in the Mars-pattern Plasma Blastguns, and conversely on the Ryza-pattern Plasma Annihilator mounted on the Emperor-class [[Titan]]. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Ryza plasma technology does not overheat nearly as easily as Mars-pattern plasma tech?

=== Gets Hot ===
This is basically the ''ONE'' downside of plasma weapons. They have a chance to overheat to the point where it explodes in the user's face. If any of a plasma weapon's shooting dice come up 1, the model has to make a save (armor or invulnerable) or take a wound. To multi-wound models, this is a noticeable dent, and to most models, which only have one wound, it's potentially deadly. Vehicles were immune to this rule until 6th Edition; with the advent of Hull Points, they now lose one Hull Point unless they save on a 4+.

Still, a lot of players aren't really concerned with this because of the simple fact that plasma is one of the most easily-accessible anti-armor weapons there is to IG, SM, and CSM players. Besides, it's not like you're rolling a 1 every turn, right? In any event, if your plasma gunner(s) are power armored, you usually won't care, although bad luck can cause a pretty nasty waste of points sometimes. If they are guardsmen, you have reserves so, again, you won't care, other than about the gun itself a bit.

It's a common belief that when a plasma weapon gets hot it always explodes and like many common beliefs, it's totally wrong. What happens most of the time is the weapon's fail-safe mechanism makes an emergency heat dump in order to avoid the containment breach and explosion (sometimes, albeit rare, plasma guns do experience meltdown and an explosion). Unfortunately for the wielder, this "heat dumping" takes the form of a cloud of superheated steam, hot enough to boil the unfortunate wielder's flesh alive. While such occurrences are almost guaranteed to be lethal to unarmored shooters, a Space Marine's power armour could provide some measure of protection from it.

Note that all of the previous paragraph is nullified in 8th edition; see the section below:

===8th edition crunch===
8th edition rulebook makes a rather radical departure in terms of how imperial plasma guns work in tabletop's crunch (as per fluff the overheating issue of most imperial plasma guns, barring some experimental models, remains as it was). Now a player can choose to fire his plasma weapons in normal or supercharged mode. Essentially, the ordinary overheat is not simulated for the sake of gameplay, but the overcharge fuck ups are, and you are out of the battle/the tank takes some bad damage if that happens.<br>
- On '''normal''' firing mode the gun functions normally and doesn't have any equivalent to "gets hot" rule and is safe to fire.<br>
- On '''supercharged''' mode, however, the gun gains +1 Strength and +1 Damage, but on "to hit" roll of one it suffers catastrophic meltdown that either slays the shooting model with no armor or invulnerable save allowed or inflicts mortal wounds, depending on the unit and the gun. [[wat|Due to how modifiers work in]] [[derp|8th edition this happens]] [[FAIL|more at night]], [[Awesome|but sometimes never happens at all]]. This has been fixed in 9th edition by changing the rule to specifically say "unmodified ones".

Interestingly, the idea of an overheat-less normal mode appears in the fluff before the 8th Edition. The Fantasy Flight RPGs included the option for Plasma Guns to use an alternate fuel type that would stop them from Overheating, at the cost of not being able to Overcharge at all. On a similar note, Dawn of War 2 portrays some instances of plasma guns being able to be temporarily overcharged at the cost of overheating it (though the overheating drawback isn't potentially killing its user).