Multi-melta

The multi-melta is a heavy melta weapon, a bulky multi-barrelled version of the meltagun built to gut the largest war-engines. It projects a wide, sub-molecular blast of heat that vaporises armour plate and boils away everything behind it, hollowing tanks and toppling walking war-machines in a single blinding discharge of pure thermal fury.

Like all melta weapons it is murderously short-ranged, so the multi-melta is carried by warriors who mean to fight at close quarters. It is mounted on fast attack bikes and speeders that can dart in to strike and away again, or shouldered by heavily armoured infantry who can weather the killing ground its short reach demands. When it strikes home the effect is total; there is a hiss, a flash, and a glowing hole where a tank used to be.

The Space Marines favour it above almost any other heavy weapon for the hunting of enemy armour and monstrous beasts, prizing the certainty of its kill over the reach of longer-ranged guns. It turns up too in the hands of Imperial Guard veterans and among the war-shrines of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who tend its complex innards with reverent care. Against the biggest, best-armoured targets on the field, few weapons a squad can carry are deadlier. When it is fielded, the enemy's armoured spearhead becomes its greatest liability, for every tank and walker that rolls into the multi-melta's short, lethal reach is one more funeral pyre waiting only to be lit.