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[sprinkled chariot]

How lethal is hellgun?
What is the best it can penetrate with its fire? Can it pierce power armour?

[Kot]

How lethal is hellgun?

Very. It's said to be on-par with a Bolter.

What is the best it can penetrate with its fire? Can it pierce power armour?

I'd say yes.

[Tack]

It can. Specifically.

This is why it doesn't have a clip, but instead has a backpack, and is said to shriek as it fires.

[GiglameshDespair]

Er...

If it helps, in the Rogue Trader rpg 1e manual, hellguns do 1d10+4 damage and pierce 7 armour, while bolters do 1d10+5 damage and pierce 4 armour (though bolters roll twice and take the highest).

So hellguns are pretty stronk.
For comparison in the same system a lasgun is 1d10+3, but has no armour pen at all.

[nenjin]

How lethal is hellgun?

Very. It's said to be on-par with a Bolter.

What is the best it can penetrate with its fire? Can it pierce power armour?

I'd say yes.

Stats wise in the the FF table top, Bolter > Hellgun. That's been my impression from reading too. Hellgun is an overcharged lasgun with actual AP and a little more top end damage. Against an unarmored human it frags their asses pretty thoroughly. To power armor, it actually has the potential to penetrate somewhere other than the lightly armored joints, but not much of one. More concussion force that a las gun, but still not a serious threat unless it's massed fire.

Bolters IMO still overrule Hellguns, but only because GWS deems it so.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It makes a decent amount of sense against carapace or power. Using a heat based weapon to attack a ceramic based armor is not the greatest of ideas.

[Kot]

Eh, it has some serious advantages like effectively unlimited amount of shoots, being very accurate (pointing an laser pointer is not exactly hard) and capable of sending so many shoots downrange it basically continuous stream of light. None of this seems to be simulated in rules.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

All of those are indeed great advantages, and for the most part they work out, which is why the IG use las as their mainline. But the ceramic counter is exactly why small parties of CSM can potentially slaughter whole armies of IG.

I wonder if this kind of dichotomy will arise in meatspace when we finally crack personal directed energy weapons. A ceramic plate is terrible to stop bullets, but could stop lasers to proportions much higher than the difficulty of making good lasers makes practical. Yet anybody without them is maximum fucked.

[Frumple]

... what? Last I checked we use ceramic plates right now for bulletproof vests. Nevermind forty thousand years of space magic ceramic. They're not even remotely terrible at stopping bullets.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's a bit more complicated.

A ceramic is a non-metallic, inorganic material—like glass, but much stronger and consisting of a variety of possible materials. Ceramic plates, typically composed of boron carbide or near variants, are very popular in military application. These materials offer very high ballistic value. However, they do not do very well at dispersing blunt trauma. As a result they are often backed with materials like aramid fabrics, high density plastics, and/or metals. The advantages of ceramic armor is that they are not only lighter than metals, but much harder as well, which enables them to deform most penetrators.

The deeper a projectile burrows into a ceramic plate, the more it will deform from grinding against the comminuted plate material. But compared to steel or titanium, ceramic plates have inferior multi-hit resistance due to their brittle nature. They are particularly vulnerable to rounds which hit in a tight grouping, as these can exploit stress concentration and shatter the plate. [1] One example of this would be the double tap, a technique whereby the shooter fires two quick shots at the vital zone of the target.

In short, layers are OP. The big question is: Will an interior ceramic plate effectively diffuse the energy of a laser? If it has to be on the outside to work, that will present a problem if you're sometimes encountering bullets.

[Frumple]

Tbh, I'm pretty sure I actually remember some novel or another mentioning the flak jackets (or some of the carapace armor?) did use ceramic inserts, alongside the cloth itself. Or could, anyway. I guess they do alright, but one of those things that is easy to forget is that shit like lasguns are actually pretty damn powerful, so even if it does stop the direct hit, there's all that other stuff going on it's not going to do much against. Congrats, you kept the lasbeam from burning through you, now please enjoy the delightful feeling of superheated air boiling off your skin :3

... though impy medicine being what it is you might just recover from that if anyone cares enough to treat you.

Still, who knows. These are forty thousand years of ork heaven ceramics. Maybe the greenskins think it works, and so it does.

... can't lie, now I'm imagining that what lies in the depths of Mars isn't the void dragon but an inner sect of mechanicus dedicated to ork propaganda, tirelessly attempting to manipulate orkish memetic development to make sure they think imperial tech works better than is physically possible.

[Kot]

I belive that Lasguns are so powerful that what kills you is not actually the heat itself, but the explosion that happens when it hits you. And Hellguns are way more powerful.

[Rolepgeek]

Based on what I remember of the field manual for treating a lasgun wound, neither of those are true.

I mean, both are in a way, but it was the water in your.body part that we got rapidly vaporizing, and the swelling and whatnot that followed, that actually killed you.

I mean, if it hadn't already hit something vital.

[nenjin]

That reminds me, I really need to sit and down re-read both my IG Uplifting Infantry Primers cover to cover.

[Tack]

But yeah, hellguns, or hot shot lasguns as they're now apparently called, are S3 AP3 to the bolter's S4 AP5. So yeah, able to pierce power armor easily, but not as much straight-up stopping power.

Hot shot volley guns, however, are the new weapon GW brought out which are easily superior to bolters. S4 AP 3 Salvo 2/4. Consider them the LMG equivalent of a hellgun.

Edit: cheers Taricus