Thanks to a few people who replied to the previous thread "How tall is a space marine really?" I have received a bit of confirmation that Space Marines are of some tall height, but nobody really knows for certain how tall "tall is". But at best guess, they're between seven and eight feet in height in armor. Eight feet in armor makes more sense than seven feet in armor for reasons that amount to "take away the armor and suddenly they're no taller than any of us."
Regardless, what I am about to tell you is a secret which has been hidden in plain sight since 3rd edition was released and Forgeworld created Imperial Armour II Space Marines and the Forces of the Inqusition. A secret so terrible, so evil, that it can only mean one thing - which is more heinous (and amusing) than this first semi-secret.
The Mystery of the Squats!
It all began sometime ago as I decided to scratch build the vehicles for my Battle Company. Mind you, I've been building battle company formations for going on a decade now (Apocalypse is just an officially recognized version of games I'm used to playing). And when I look at even the slightly smaller models I use (1.5" tall metal space marines that are effectively late 2e/early 3e models) I find it difficult to imagine that a
GW Rhino (even the new one) could hold 10 marines and a driver. If you stack them like wood, yes, otherwise, good luck getting out when that missile hits.
Being a long-time model-builder, I decided to build proper scale versions of my rhinos, razorbacks, etc.
Step 1: find a "canon" resource that would give me insight into relative scales of this fictional setting. The closest thing? Forgeworld Imperial Armour II Space Marines and the Forces of the Inquisition
Step 2: read it
Step 3: make scale mock up's
Step 4: build prototypes
Step 5: build final models, assemble them, paint them, and scare people.
It was between 2 and 3 that I noticed something was out of place. Between the diagram showing a marine and a dreadnought in the Thunderhawk's assault hold, and the "relative scale" profile diagram at the back of the book, at 9.8 meters in height the Thunderhawk felt "small." I did some basic measurements between the profile at the back and the marine in the thunderhawk diagram. The marine came out to approximately 1/7th the height of a Thunderhawk! If a thunderhawk is 9.8 meters tall, that makes marines 1.4 meters tall. That makes a full grown space marine approximately 4 feet 7 inches tall.
Something began to stir from 2nd edition. And I redid the calculations. Again, a marine came out to 1.4 meters. It was at this time that it clicked. The Squats... they weren't much bigger than 1.4 meters tall, even in armor... and they vanished around the time this book came out. Then it became clear: the squats had not vanished. They had infiltrated the imperium and taken over, replacing everything and everyone with squats, which is why everything is superdeformed/chibi-macross in size.
After making note of this, I performed basica calculations to find out how large a Thunderhawk would be in "real life" to be in 'proper scale' (yes, a horrible idea for fiction) - the numbers came out to be 46.3296 meters x 46.417... meters x 17.068 meters if a space marine was 8' or 2.4384 meters tall. (or 152x152.3..x56 feet - roughly the size of a Boeing 767:
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/767family/pf/pf_200prod.html) so long as the profile images shown were accurate with the space marine being compared to the various vehicles, including the Thunderhawk.
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And then I calculated the size of this unit in
40k scale. It came out to approximately 28x28x11 inches. (edit in: and for a 1 1/4 tall average marine model - 23.75 x ~23.8 x 8.75)
So I wrote a letter to Forgeworld asking them if they realized what the Squats had done. Infiltrating the Imperium and turning "FOR THE EMPEROR" into code for "FOR THE GREATER GOOD!" Still waiting on that response. *chuckle*
I've since gone on to calculate all the vehicles to "more accurate size" in "real life" and on the table. Turns out nearly everything in the Space Marine armoury is about 30% undersize (both in "fictional specification" and in actual models size) when compared to these Forgeworld values. And then I compared them to modern fighting vehicles. Some amusing things were noticed, but none compared to this solution of the Mystery of the Squats. Evil little buggers aren't they?
You're smart.
