Firearms Expert Reacts To Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s Guns

Explaining to Jonathan what an "Ogryn" is to give a sense of how MASSIVE their weapons are will definitely be doing down as a career highlight for me! I hope you enjoy this one, fellow Warhammer 40,000 nerds, as much as I did making it and watching him react in real time to some of these weapons.... We also did a deep-dive into the Bolter a couple years ago, and explained more about the real-world Gyrojet weapons that inspired some of the very earliest Space Marine weaponry (complete with some potentially familiar faces : https://youtu.be/Glu0GmyTJyo

Dear God, he even knows about warhammer style and history of the franchise! He is a true geek and a national treasure.

The Ripper Gun is actually designed specifically for the Ogryn. It's abnormally chunky for the sake of durability, since Ogryns are well known to use their weapons as bludgeons whenever anyone gets close, and you want a gun that still fires after you smash someone in the face with it.

A small detail in 40k gun lore that I love. The Lawbringer Shotgun, used by Arbites (The Police in 40k) Was designed, to have as LOUD of a cocking as possible. So when they manually pump it, its meant to be very loud, for intimidation purposes, since that's meant to be used against mainly Civilian targets, for who the very loud CHUNK CHUNK is very intimidating

Jonathan gets little smirk and his eyes light up when he's describing the theoretical action of these crazy guns. This man loves what he does and I love him for it.

Why are they blocky ? Some people might have forgotten that this started as a miniature game, so those things had to be easy enough to sculpt, cast, easily replicable and recognizable from a distance while playing, so all the details were fairly chunky.

Boltguns use a sort of hybrid ammunition. You have an initial propellent charge, like normal real life ammunition, that fires the round down the barrel where it engages with the rifling of the barrel then the rocket engine kicks in as it leaves the barrel. Bolters in the books and lore have a distinctive "bang, roar" sound from the initial charge going then the rocket engine firing.

"If it works, keep it for 40,000 years" Quite accurate description of the entire premise of 40k

There were two patterns of lasrifle present here: the Kantrael pattern and the Lucius pattern. The Kantrael pattern is the Cadian favored one, it's capable of semi-auto and full-auto shooting. It's fairly standard. The Lucius pattern is the Krieg weapon of choice. The Krieg themselves have a very WW1 German aesthetic, so the weapon doesn't look all that modern. However, the Lucius pattern is capable of semi-auto shooting with the ability to overcharge their lascells (the magazines) for more powerful shots at the expense of the longevity of the battery.

13:17 Gotta love how sometimes the Ogryn reload animations are different for the ripper. Sometimes he bumps the mag into the rail and sometimes he tries to put the magazine backwards, before turning it the right way.

Something that impressed me with the shotgun is that you can use it for long range targets. It never magically disappears at a distance but carries on to whatever you aim at.

So the reason 40k weapons are so bulky, other than obvious rule of cool aesthetics, are because they're basically all cast in a single construction in giant manufactories that almost no one understands how they work

I'm so glad Jonathan brought up that the cocking handle of the top gun on the twin Heavy Stubber being attached to the bottom one so they're pulled together would make sense, because Ogryns really do have enough strength that pulling both at the same time wouldn't be an issue for them!

Maybe the reason the revolver has that bar “reloader” that gets ignored in favor of gravity is because the revolver isn’t necessarily always used in a gravitational field. A very astute observation from Mr. Gun! Very insightful video, and quite enjoyable.

Idk if Jonathan reads the comments but the Lasgun is such a fun weapon because it is cheap to make and very sturdy kind of like the 40K version of a Kalashnikov. But my favorite Lasgun trivia is that the magazines have solar charging capabilities so you can put it out on a sunny day and it charges a few shots but they also can be taken out of the weapon and thrown like a grenade.

An interesting note on the Heavy Stubbers rounds looking like .50 cal, they basically are. The M2 Browning is so good they are using it thousands of years later.

One thing to mention about why Lasguns are visually similar to the ballistic guns: Familiarity for the soldier using it. You can put a lasgun and a stubber next to one another and someone who is trained in the use of either one will generally be capable of recognizing and operating the other.

11:02 so theres actually an explanation for this and for why bolters eject brass. While they do have a gyrojet style rocket it activates as the bolt round leaves the barrel, the initial propulsion is done via standard powder in a brass cartridge exploding. The rocket part is just rule of cool and it extends the range

Would love to see a look at Deep Rock Galactic. From the fairly grounded like the Scout's assault rifle or the Gunner's revolver, to the action movie classics like the Driller's flamethrower or the Gunner's minigun, to the total sci-fi like the Driller's cryo gun or wave cooker, it's got a little bit of everything.

That shotgun is an in-universe police shotgun. I believe the SPAS-15 (which has a magazine) was originally designed for police, but police organizations saw it and said "no, we need a feed port and pump action so we can spontaneously load different ammo" and Franchi went back to the drawing board and made the SPAS-12. You could say this shotgun is inspired by weapons like the SPAS-12, which is semi-automatic but still has a manual pump.