Laspistol

The 'Laspistol' is the pistol-sized variant of the Lasgun, which is built for Imperial Guard assault troops and officers. A laspistol can be made in many different ways ranging from your standard factory-built for your typical IG squad sergeant to ornately crafted ones for Governor Generals and can be easily stored in a holster or in a coat pocket.

Virtually all Imperial Guard officers (Most famously the Commissar), combat personnel, and assault troops who can't get access to shinier bits like plasma or bolt pistols will pretty much be armed with this pistol since it's fuckeasy to make, maintain, use, and die with. The laspistol lacks the range of the lasgun but when in range it has the same effect as the lasgun so basically if the Lasgun is a flash light, the Laspistol is your pocket light.

Of course like the lasgun; it can still shoot through ten feet of modern day concrete with one shot and deals a similar amount of damage to people and armor as a high velocity 30mm armor piercing shell (which is to say it pops them like water balloons). Unfortunately; the power of a modern day anti-materiel rifle isn't very impressive in warhammer 40,000 because Flak armor makes Carbon Nanotubes or Reinforced Concrete look like a pile of dogshit in comparison and even the weakest pistol makes Dirty Harry's 0.44 magnum look like a water pistol is comparison.

So remember, the pistol is actually very powerful by our standards, it's just that it's in a setting where the standards are guns loaded with miniature rockets for ammunition, lightweight guns that fire super-heated bolts of energy capable of penetrating heavy armor as if it were wet tissue paper, guns capable of disintegrating anything that it's fired at, literally recoiless guns that are capable of sending out a flurry of jagged disks capable of severing limbs, or somewhere along those lines.

See Also

• Commissar - The famous users of the laspistol, which they use to motivate their troops.
• Lasgun - The full-sized variant.