Greetings & Tools of the Hunt

Wolf Lord Herne here, a new writer to the blog for you all. I’ve been playing the game on and off for ten years now. I played as Tyranids and Dark Angels (for shame) but always wanted to start off an army as a Space Wolves player. 3 years ago I bit the bullet and I’m never going back. In terms of the game I feel that the Sons of Russ offer something truly unique – versatility. This may seem a strange compliment, but think about it. The Space Wolves may appear little more than feral barbarians when in fact they a ruthless and cunning army to wield, who are experts with each weapon at their disposal. Each part of our codex compliments the next, every unit possessing the specific tools for a specific job, forming a seamless destructive force with very few weaknesses.

However in a universe of alien monstrosities, the stagnant domain of mankind, space elves, E.T’s distant cousins the Tau and genetically augmented human demigods with wolfish tendencies it’s easy to become desensitised to the less flashy, game changing models and war gear. With this in mind this series of articles will be dedicated to the war gear at our disposal, what it is and how it does what it does so well. So without further ado I present to you…

Now then, this beauty and its variations are the most used piece of gear in the entire army.  Your standard blood claw to your wolf lord and everything in between make use of this wonderful bit of kit. But how does it work…?

The Emperor designed the ultimate human soldiers in his war uniting Terra but when he began to look to the stars and the humans lost in-between he knew these soldiers would be eaten alive by the hordes of alien foes that waited. So the Adeptus Astartes were made. But these superior soldiers needed a superior weapon, the bolt gun.

I could go into the history of the gun and the bullet but let’s not go down that road…

The bolt gun in essence is the perfected semi-automatic rifle deployed by many of today’s armies. It’s powerful, simple to use and incredibly versatile with many forms and augmentations making it the perfect standard weapon for a Son of Russ.

These bad boys pack one hell of a wallop. In fact, if you or I even managed to actually lift one and fire, we’d wind up shattering the bones in our arms, cracking our ribs and puncturing a lung with the recoil. Hence why it takes a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes to wield one effectively. The standard imperial guardsman simply does not have the physical capacity and its officers only manage to wield a bolt weapon with augmentations or support devices to save them the pain. Instead they prefer the las weaponry - cheap to manufacture and easy to use laser guns that you can just pick up and fire. It also has a very easy to store battery pack that can simply be swapped out when it’s gone dead. You can see its advantages as you won’t be weighed down by giant bolter mags or run out of ammo too easily (fun fact, space marines are said to go through enough bolt rounds to fill a mountain in a single campaign). Also they don’t have the time to train a basic guardsman with an average life span of two minutes once his off the ship in the art of cleaning and changing mags of an expensive gun they’ll kill themselves firing.

So what do we have here so far? A semi automatic rifle that is incredibly powerful and would most certainly kill you or I if we fired it. But wait! There’s more! The real glory of a bolt weapon is the bullet itself. The gun fires the bullet by using a “small” charge that gets the bullet out of the barrel, then, the base of the bullet ignites turning it into a small rocket. Now you can imagine the damage this thing could do but after it penetrates? Boom! They’re designed to ignite after leaving the barrel and after it has hit it explodes, leaving a nice little crater inside its target.

That, is the standard round. There are variations such as the kraken, that are rigged to provide a more powerful explosion, the inferno bolt that contains a promethium core, the hellfire that contains acid, silenced bolts that are pretty self explanatory... The list goes on and on.

The boltgun comes with numerous different marks  and of course the variations we’re all familiar with such as the bolt pistol, storm bolter and the heavy bolter.  The bolt pistol is simply a modified bolt gun so that it is more easily wielded in close combat while sacrificing none of the power whereas the storm bolter is simply a double barrelled bolt gun. The heavy bolter is essentially two bolt guns in one, rigged so that they can deliver powerful bursts of synchronised fire. Now some of you might be wondering about the chaos space marines combi bolters but in all honesty these are just two bolt guns slapped together and are far less effective than a storm bolter.

Now then this is all wrapped into our basic boys’ gear with the unimpressive statistics of strength 4 and AP 5 which in my eyes just makes the hides of orks, tyranids and the rest seem suddenly very impressive and the very idea that something this powerful can only bounce off of the bigger creatures like a chaos dreadnought or carnifex or tank etc. just... Scary!

And because this article on the bolt gun is so long I’ll throw in a freebie. 

The Astartes that follow the codex set down by Guillman receive one when they recover from receiving the multiple implants that makes a space marine and carry it with them throughout their service. For space wolves it is simply a very big sharp knife that is designed to never dull. Sorry to disappoint anyone that thought it would be some impressive futuristic knife but no. It’s just a reeeeally sharp knife that doesn't dull.

That’s all for this week! Next week the chain sword. Let me know what else you’d like to see in the series in the comments below.