Editing Nobledark Imperium Imperial Forces (section)

== Weapons of the Imperium ==

=== Lasguns ===

The first instances of las-weapon technology came from Terra itself. Thought to be a recreational weapon used in mock battles during the Dark Age of Technology, at that time these las-weapons beams had the power of 4mm stubber pellets, thus even thick cloth was effective armor against it. These relics were present on Terra and other worlds during the Warlord Era, but it was the Emperor who reshaped it to become a lethal weapon. The Emperor’s scouts had presented him with some prototype weapons while preparing for the unification with Mars. One such weapon was a proto-Lascarbine that was superior to stubber carbines in all but firepower. The Las beams still had the power of a 4mm stubber pellet, thus the Emperor - in his intelligence - recrafted the weapon so that it fired with the power of an 8mm stubber round. The Lascarbine first saw service as a replacement for the Autorifles, which were the standard weapon for the Imperial Army at the time, in the unification of the Sol system. Next were the Laspistols, which were designed to replace the stubber pistols. The mass use of Las-weapons found that Lascarbine barrels started to warp after ~5,000 shots, and the Laspistol barrels warped after ~2,000 shots. When these barrels warped, what would have been unmodified hitscan fire devolved into looser and inaccurate beams, such that Guardsmen had to fire two or more times in the same place to hit. Even worse, when the Laspistol barrels warped, soldiers had to fire at point-blank range to hit their targets at all.

The Imperial Army Handheld Weapons Development Bureau would develop the Lasgun in response, which featured a longer barrel and limited the power to 7.9mm stubber round strength. The iron sights of the weapon were changed to allow attachable optics, and a stock was added for increased accuracy. The first Lasguns were deployed to the front during the Hunting Era, where it was noted that these weapons had effectively the same firepower as the Lascarbines but the barrels didn’t warp until after ~10,000 shots. When the Apostasy Era started Guardsmen on both sides reported that Lascarbines and Lasguns in night-time fighting left noticeable muzzle flashes, thus making the shooter an easy target. The Weapons Development Bureau would again work on the Lasgun and Lascarbine just after the Apostasy Era, creating the attachable flash suppressor, for better night-time combat, and the light attachable stock for the Lascarbine.

=== Flak Armor ===

There was no such thing as a standardized armor used by the Imperial Army during the Great Crusade. The closest thing to such a concept came in the form of the Solar Pattern Void Armor, used widely by the Solar Auxilia, but that was a carapace-reinforced void suit rather than Flak Armor as we know it today. The first documented instances of what could be considered Flak Armor was when Cadian Shock Troops started equipping soldiers en masse with light anti-shrapnel armor near the end of the Great Crusade. Cadian officers found that when Cadian Guardsmen attacked entrenched positions on the battlefield, most of their losses sustained were from artillery or random bits of debris thrown into the air by artillery. The different regiments from Cadia phased out the traditional metal plate armor for Flak Armor, and thus all future campaigns used Flak Armor once manufactorums switched production lines right before the War of the Beast.

The breastplate, shoulder pauldrons, knee plates, and greaves all use the same material and layering. The fabric connecting the armor is much weaker and lacks any sort of plating. Most of the actual armor in Flak Armor uses an inner layer of shock absorbent gel, with metal plating between the gel and outer ceramic layer. All three of these layers are connected and interwoven with carbon-fibers, metal-fabrics, and nylon fabrics, forcing the layers to stay together under most conditions. The ceramic plate was designed to deflect shrapnel, or at least cause it to be stuck in the plate. The metal layer was emplaced to stop lasbolts or stubber rounds from fully penetrating through the armor, in case the shot passed the ceramic plate. The gel is present as either a last ditch effort to stop shrapnel from fully penetrating the armor or to prevent internal bleeding after receiving a direct hit. The fabric of Flak Armor is made from a variety of different carbon-fibers, metal fabrics, and thick cloths, to prevent shrapnel from cutting through or a blade from tearing it. Flak Armor helmets have considerably more armor, tending to have extra metal plating to ensure that not all shots to the head are fatal and random falling debris don't kill the Guardsman.

The first major combat test of Flak Armor was seen in the War of the Beast. On the front lines, Flak Armor proved to be basically ineffective in protecting against Ork weaponry; the Orks had used unusually large stubber rounds, up to but not limited to 10 or 12mm, that would slice right through Flak plating. However, what would otherwise be considered deadly Ork rockets would often fail to kill Guardsmen, even with flame ammo, as the Flak Armor was more than enough protection against most Ork rocketry short of city-block-levelling size. Crone Eldar and Dark Eldar weapons, of both Saw and Splinter ammo types, likewise had difficult times penetrating Flak plating unless there was a concentrated barrage of fire, as even the Flak plating can only protect against so much. When the Fallen first turned on Imperial Army elements, bolters were used for the first time against Flak Armor. The bolter rounds would often penetrate Flak plating, only to cleanly exit out on the other side and then explode. If the Guardsman was lucky they would still be alive after the ordeal. When a Guardsman was even luckier, the bolter round would be deflected off of Flak plating altogether and explodes prematurely in mid-air, meaning that unless the deflected round exploded in their face the shrapnel would be mostly harmless. The flexibility, simplicity, and cheapness of producing Flak Armor instead of Void suits led to many Imperial worlds adopting the Flak Armor. Production quotas meant resources were limited in the total economic mobilization that happened during the War of the Beast, making the simple and affordable Flak Armor even more popular.

During the Apostasy, Imperial Guard regiments openly fought against one another, resulting in the first use of Flak Armor against massed artillery. Regiments would launch massive formations to charge at entrenched opposing Guardsmen, who were themselves well prepared for such an attack. The defenders would fire blinding volleys of artillery shells to delay the charge. The Flak Armor proved a Guardsman could survive an artillery barrage, and short of a direct hit right next to their feet the Guardsman would be fine (if the shockwave from the explosion didn’t destroy their bodily organs, that is). Artillery barrages could now only slow down attacks from Guardsmen thanks to Flak Armor. Several field modifications were noted to have been used by regiments during the Apostasy, including extra cloth to prevent shrapnel from easily slicing the joints. Similarly, thicker ceramic plates are often used by veteran Guardsmen against Orks to at least survive glancing shots from Ork stubbers, and regiments constantly facing Crone or Dark Eldar are deployed with extra metal layered into their Flak Armor to prevent enemy fire from penetrating Flak plating.

=== Bolters ===

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All modern varieties of bolter, from the humble workhorse that is the mainstay of the Space Marine legions to the bolt pistol used by baseline humans, are at least partially influenced by a design created by the Emperor of Mankind himself. Believe it or not, bolters were originally not that important a part of ancient humanity’s arsenal. This can be seen in the nature of warfare in the 41st millennium, as warfare in the 41st millennium almost resembles that of pre-gunpowder humanity, with a heavy focus on armor and the viability of melee combat. Humanity’s weapons of choice during the Dark Age of Technology were Volkite guns and Adrathic disintegrators, neither of which armor offered much protection against. Military tactics during this period would have been more familiar to older groups of humans (potentially as far back as M2) than their descendants, with a greater emphasis on utilizing cover and avoiding fire than melee combat. Knowledge of how to make advanced armor survived the Age of Strife better than similar knowledge of weaponry, shifting the advantage to armor over arms and making melee combat viable again. Bolters only entered into the military sphere much later in the Dark Age of Technology, believed to have been a weaponized version of a power tool, after it was noticed how well they performed against Orks, other high-durability xenos, and rogue Men of Iron and other Silica Animus.

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The Emperor had contributed to the reinvention of the bolter back before he was the Emperor, before he was the Steward, even before he was the Warlord, but when he was merely Oscar of the Terrawatt Clan. The Terrawatt Clan was a technocracy, with societal standing and authority being based on one’s inventiveness and research productivity, and if one could not prove their mental ability there was no way for them to advance in status. Embarking on a project that advanced Terrawatt’s sum of knowledge in some way was a common coming of age ritual in the country, and although he saw himself as artificial and a shadow of humanity, Oscar wanted to be viewed slightly less as Malcador's trophy taken from the ruins of Chthonia and slightly more as a person. 

Oscar chose as his project the reverse-engineering of an old ballistics weapon that had been uncovered some centuries before by expeditions from Terrawatt into the deserts of the former Tharkian Empire (specifically, the province of Anatolia). The weapon’s systems had been fouled by sand and half of its components were missing, but Oscar managed to piece together enough of its workings to construct a working replica sized to his frame, or at least fill in enough of the missing pieces to construct a model that actually worked. This would be the precursor of the Astartes pattern boltgun, and explains - among other things - why the prototype bolter was already built for someone of an Astartes’ size.

The Theologiteks were impressed, and Oscar was proud of his creation (not to mention happy to have a weapon that didn’t feel like a child’s toy in his hands), eventually taking the prototype as his sidearm when he embarked to reunify Old Earth. The gun faithfully served as his sidearm for many years, before finally failing some two hundred years after the Battle of Terra in about 700.M31. Oscar was saddened by the loss, seemingly one more aspect of his life that seemed to be eroding away, but the remains of the so-called ‘father of bolters’ survived and remains enshrined to this day in the museum in the Imperial Palace.


Originally, the Warlord’s armies of Thunder Warriors were armed with Volkite weaponry and autoguns, but as the numbers of augmented warriors grew and Volkite weapons were gradually lost to attrition, three-quarters of the Warlord’s soldiers were armed with bolters about the time the Thunder Legions were being phased out in favor of the Legio Astartes. Volkite weaponry may have been more powerful and autoguns were cheap, but bolters were reliable, relatively powerful (unlike autoguns), and more importantly their workings were well-understood and could be easily replicated (unlike Volkite weapons).

The Warlord was not the only individual to reverse engineer the secrets of the bolter. Other human nations during the Age of Strife had come to the same conclusion regarding the bolter’s reliability and ease of production, and the Imperium encountered other models of bolters on places like Mars, the Hubworld League, and the Auretian Technocracy, several of which were based on actual STC designs. Information from these designs was assimilated by the Imperium to create a syncretic design that improved upon the initial Astartes pattern (Oscar, to his embarrassment, [[fail|had gotten some of his assumptions wrong and had replaced several missing systems with slightly more inefficient versions he had created from scratch]]). However, not all bolter designs were equally optimal in all situations, with some performing better at certain tasks than others. Eventually, a wide array of bolter types proliferated throughout the Imperium, ranging from the numerous variants of the Astartes pattern, in which the initial kick from the propellant recoil is enough to break an unaugmented human’s arm, to the smaller bolt pistol commonly used by commissars, which trades caliber size and rate of fire for recoil to the point that it can be used by normal humans.


By approximately early M34, enough principles of miniaturization had been rediscovered to downsize the traditional full-size Astartes bolter to the Godwin-De’az Pattern. Nevertheless, despite this miniaturization the recoil still made it almost impossible for normal humans to use unless you were genetically enhanced, were wearing powered armor, or from Catachan or the Hubworld League. For many years the Godwin-De’az pattern occupied an awkward position for many years, being too large to be used by most Guardsmen yet too small in caliber to be an efficient weapon for Astartes. However, this all changed after the founding of the Adeptus Securitas and the Sisters of Battle in M36, who, with their enhanced strength, found this intermediate-sized bolter almost perfect for their needs. Indeed, the name Godwin-De'az came about as a reference to Sister De'az, the Nocturnean Sister who was the first successful recipient of the augmentations used by the Sisters of Battle. Before that, they were merely referred to as "miniaturized Bolters" due to their scarcity. Godwin-De'az bolters are much more common in the Imperium now, mostly due to their use by the Securitas.

The invention of the precursor to the modern bolter is perhaps one of the achievements the Emperor is most proud of. It was not something created by Oscar, the Man of Gold, nor Oscar, the Warlord of Earth, but by Oscar, the person, in the name of the betterment of his species.

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=== Leman Russ Tank ===

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''“We should've waited for the Fenrisian ale before rushing here just to find half a tractor. At least we'd've something that would lift the mens' spirits after such a disappointment.”''<br>
— Primarch Leman Russ, post-Imperial Compliance of Nova Borilia.

THE REGIMENTAL STANDARD: A HISTORY OF THE LEMAN RUSS TANK

In today's battlefield, almost all of the armed forces flying Imperial banners have either used or fought alongside the Leman Russ Battle Tank. Many view it with great relief, no longer having to be at the forefront of an advance on fortified positions. Others call it their “ride”. And some view the Leman Russ as an inelegant and ugly hunk of metal that conceals brutal effectiveness and resilience worthy of the name. Its treads have rolled over thousands of battlegrounds, and its guns have obliterated many a foe. Yet one wonders where the seeds for this venerable war machine were sown. If you have had the same question that we at the Regimental Standard did then read on, fellow historians, as we detail the venerable history of the Leman Russ Tank.

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The Leman Russ Battle Tank, and its subsequent and numerous variants, originates from the early days of the Great Crusades. The tank itself is not to be confused with Primarch Leman Russ, who discovered it on Nova Borilia when rumors of an STC for a tank dating from the Dark Age of Technology drew his attention to the campaign against the Noman xenos' planetary empire, which was already marked for destruction as Xenos Horrificus due to its brutal enslavement of the local human population and violent refusal of all diplomatic attempts. Fortunately, resistance was broken after a series of engagements that saw the Nomans and a disobedient slave army reeling from the hard hitting tactics of the Space Wolves and accompanying Solar Auxilia attachments. For the expeditionary forces, what they salvaged from the last Noman stronghold was an immense let down.

The STC was, in fact, the fragments of a blueprint for an all-terrain tractor that started production sometime before the Age Of Strife, not the weapon the intel had suggested. Presumably it had been mistaken for a valuable human relic, and so it was situated in the most secure collection in the Noman fortress.

But the Imperial Army would not be denied their tank, and in the span of a decade several components of the discovery were incorporated into a new design, christened the Leman Russ Battle Tank, Mark I. It set a gyrostabilized Battle Cannon turret on top of a ceramite and plasteel hull with a steel-sprung suspension, while a complex transmission mated to an enormous twin-turbocharged V12 multi-fuel HL230 engine gave it a top speed of 80 km/h and 40 km/h off-road (widely considered ludicrous for a tracked vehicle twice as tall as a Space Marine). This ability was used to great effect, as commanders swung behind enemy positions and unloaded rounds into petty tyrants and slavers.

However, as the Imperium expanded further and encountered tougher opposition, the Leman Russ proved inadequate. Its main gun struggled to defeat more heavily-armored horrors and what was left often outmaneuvered the Leman Russ, and breakdowns ranging from burnt out turbocharger components to transmission failures intensified a growing logistics headache. This led to the replacement of the Mk. I with the Mk. II-V, similar variants that traded mobility for protection and ease of maintenance by bolting on armor, dropping the forced-induction chargers, and, in the case of the Mk. IV and V, switching to a simpler transmission. This was deemed acceptable, as the Imperium couldn't afford the best equipment possible for all its soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Beast.

That is not to say desperation did not proliferate the loaded idea of 'innovation'. During and after the War of the Beast, new variants were hurriedly fitted with crew-operated sponsons to add anti-infantry firepower, and while still inferior to the Land Raider-killing Vanquisher Cannon, a long-barrelled Battle Cannon increased muzzle velocity and was easier to mass-produce. Later, more improvements filtered through, like a hydropneumatic suspension and lifted armor skirts that allowed the road wheels freedom of movement and together provided better acceleration and a more stable firing platform. Other changes included light, replaceable composite rectangles attached to the sides (sanctioned for Chimera variants and Salamanders after APC crew entrepreneurs decided they too wanted more armor) and a set of wide-angle optics that replaced the glass visor slit in the driver's hatch and made it possible to drive the tank and fire the hull weapon without switching seats or controls.

The Mk. XVII, created in the late 36th millennium, was supposed to use a scaled-down version of the Malcador Heavy Tank's electric drive system. You will never see this outside the Mechanicus' basements.

[[File:NobledarkLemanRussMarkXXIV.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Mk. XXIV Leman Russ with Imperial Guardsman and eldar Guardian for scale]]

The Mk. XXIV Leman Russ Battle Tank is the most recent variant (see Remembrancer's sketch at left), created in response to reports of a spike in Leman Russ losses due to an increased prevalence of Crone Eldar and Necron tank analogues. The Imperial Couple had put pressure on Mars and the Fabricator-General to either keep the venerable tank a viable part of the Imperial Guard armory or risk losing further contracts to Forge Worlds unaligned with Mars' branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, many of whom were experimenting with unsanctioned tank designs. This was enough incentive to finally push the program into its final field tests and evaluation stage.

It carries over the extremely sloped frontal turret and glacis present since the Mk. XX, but replaces the original hull weapon's swivel mount with a ball mount in a smaller housing. To address the vulnerability of the Leman Russ to being flanked, particularly in urban warfare, the tank hull went from being 4.42 meters tall to a flatter profile 3.3 meters high. The front-facing plates of the widened and extended turret are angled to better resist side shots, and the Battle Cannon magazines were relocated to the back of the turret, so an ammo cook-off wouldn't be surrounded by critical systems and the crew. Blow-off vents further increase the chances a disabled Mk. XXIV can escape without Atlas recovery vehicles being put at risk, and two sponsons utilizing cogitators based off the Predator's and Tarantula Sentry Turret's are managed by a remote gunner seated by the driver. Lastly, a refined version of the Great Crusade's forced-induction setup and a weight reduction of 5 tons have allowed the Leman Russ to regain the nimbleness of the Mk. I, without the original's notorious mechanical problems.

While the newest Leman Russ might still be recognizable to an Imperial officer of the 30th millennium, it is not the same war machine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents used. Keep an eye out for those shiny new Mk. XXIVs, and remember to report any issues to your commanding officer or a Commissar!
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=== Psycannons and the Psi-Disruptor ===

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[[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Men_of_Gold|Justinian]] and Theodora were the Man of Gold and Iron Mind of the Sol System, based out of Earth and Mars respectively. When the Age of Strife happened, and the Men of Gold and Iron Minds were driven mad by seeing that which was not meant to be seen, Justinian and Theodora waged demented war on each other first in the grips of their madness. Ironically, the fact that the two of them killed each other off so early in the Iron War meant that the Sol System was spared the worst excesses of the Age of Strife, and thus had more working Dark Age technology lying around compared to a place like [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]], whose inner face was sterilized when someone induced the star it orbited to go supernova. Of course, this isn't to say that either Justinian or Theodora were in a healthy state of mind at the time; Justinian may have gone for Theodora first, but he was still psychotically insane and destroyed everything and everyone in his way to get to his goal, while concurrently Theodora targeted Earth with orbital bombardments and scrapcode. The descendants of the technicians that attended to Justinian and Theodora, in a very roundabout way, became the ancestors of the Terrawatt Clan and the Martian Mechanicum, though the Mechanicum accomplished this in a more indirect fashion in that the technicians of the Iron Mind were integrated into the general population whilst Mars more broadly devolved into technology worshipping cults (of which the future Mechanicum was but one of many) after the destruction of Mars' terraformed biosphere.

In order to kill Theodora, Justinian built a device known as the psi-disruptor, a device designed and optimized for killing Iron Minds. One can point it at a lesser mortal and pull the trigger to some effect, though said effects can vary from anywhere between a noticeable headache all the way up to total bodily disruption. The device draws on the psychic potential of the wielder, and so can only be used by an active psyker. The one made and used by Justinian was built to such a scale that it was only usable by Men of Gold. The higher end of baseline psykers could presumably wield Justinian's psi-disruptor to an extent, but the list of such talented candidates is very short, and as the Imperium only has one such weapon they aren't willing to risk the destruction of such a powerful device on such meagre speculation, so inquiries in this direction remain fruitless. This device would later be taken out of the doomsday vaults of the Mechanicum and used by the Steward to strike down the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|Rangda Abomination]] when it became clear that conventional options were just not enough.

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The original psi-disruptor gun is contained in the low-risk section on Ganymede. Psycannons are thought to be in some way derived from the study of the original device; a much cruder weapon, but one that can be made using currently available technology. Creation of the Psycannon is attributed to the founding of the Grey Knights, though to one of Magnus' students rather than the Primarch himself. Magnus the Red was without peer amongst humanity in terms of daemon-lore and warp studies, but neither he nor Russ were very good with machinery.


The downsides to Justinian’s psi-disruptor are that it takes a huge amount of time to charge up and is very easy to dodge, but if you’re fighting an Iron Mind — whose physical forms and central processing units are quite literal building complexes — both of these deficiencies are non-issues. The psi-disruptor also has quite a large “splash zone”; when Justinian fired the weapon at Theodora it didn’t just kill the Iron Mind but also horrifically mutilated and massacred every sapient creature within a few kilometers of the blast radius.

When Oscar fired the weapon at the Rangda Abomination, the only things in the blast radius were the abomination itself, some Slaugth and their bio-constructs, and members of various sapient species the Slaugth had taken as livestock and slaves (the latter of which nobody wanted to hit, but reasoned that a quick death was better than spending years living in the Slaugth's feedlots). The Imperium nevertheless ensured that all of their forces and allies stood well away when the disruptor was fired. The Eldar threw a fit over the possibility of Eldar chattel being in the blast zone — especially given those Eldar had no soul stones and would go straight to She Who Thirsts — but backed down when even they had to admit there wasn’t a better option. The best they could come up with was pulling one of their own doomsday devices out of Yme-Loc, which would probably blow up the planet and wouldn’t be much better. At least when using the mon-keigh device the Eldar slaves outside of the blast zone would survive.

The Steward also seriously considered using Justinian’s psi-disruptor on the corrupted Man of Gold back in M34, given how it was so insane that its path was easily predictable, before the Grey Knights managed to resolve that problem on their own. It is a horrible weapon built by a madman to kill a god, with a terrible history on top of whatever reality scarring power it might already direct, and tends to rack up a massive body count in collateral damaged whenever it is fired. It is little wonder the Steward is so reluctant to use it.


After striking the killing blow on Theodora with the psi-disruptor in the initial days of the Iron War, Justinian just kind of wandered off. The members of the resistance found him in the sands of Mars, sitting in a fetal position staring at something no one could see off in the distance, tears streaming down his cheeks. Mars’ carefully constructed biosphere had been stripped away by the Iron War, and the fourth planet of Sol had returned to the red wasteland humanity had first set foot on almost twelve millennia previously. Justinian knew why they were there, as he could see their minds. But one doesn’t have to be a Man of Gold to figure it out.

The resistance members knew their duty was to shoot and kill. Justinian was calm now, but who knew how long this bout of stability would last, and it wasn’t especially long ago that he was throwing around ships in Martian orbit like they were children’s toys to attack Theodora. At the same time, his executioners couldn't bring themselves to do it. Everyone there knew Justinian, possibly personally if someone like Tiberius was there, and Justinian had been there for almost every human on Earth since before they were born. The Justinian they knew didn’t deserve to die. And if he had to die, he deserved to go out in a blaze of glory. Demigods shouldn’t die like this.

There were no kine shields, no nuclear eruptions, none of the cosmic temper-tantrums that characterized the death of his kin across the galaxy. Just a simple question:

“Do you think... do you think she will be waiting for me on the other side?”

Weapons are raised.

[[*BLAM*|“Yes… she is…”]]

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=== Kinebrach Blades ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Kinebrach_Blades|Kinebrach Blades]]