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Voss wrote:
They're objectively on a smaller scale. Most standard transports can fit 10 (or 12) of their faction models in them.

Give that an actual physical try. Even feel free to take the bases off.

If you really want to rub it in, try with vehicles that have seating benches in them.

Forge World made kits to do literally that.

Valkyrie with 10 passengers plus space for gunners (scroll down)
Gorgon, fully loaded with 50 passengers
Centaur, 5 passengers (two hidden by overhangs)

The idea that 40K's transports are too small is a mix of:
-severe over-estimation of how big real-world transport vehicles are, or how much personal space is afforded to the passengers
-severe over-estimation of how much room a soldier takes up, based on the action poses that 40K minis are locked into

A real M113 can hold 11 guys, but you would never, ever be able to cram 11x 28mm human-sized minis in dynamic poses into a to-scale M113- it'd be about the same size as that Centaur above.

 catbarf wrote:

Voss wrote:
They're objectively on a smaller scale. Most standard transports can fit 10 (or 12) of their faction models in them.

Give that an actual physical try. Even feel free to take the bases off.

If you really want to rub it in, try with vehicles that have seating benches in them.

Forge World made kits to do literally that.

Valkyrie with 10 passengers plus space for gunners (scroll down)
Gorgon, fully loaded with 50 passengers
Centaur, 5 passengers (two hidden by overhangs)

The idea that 40K's transports are too small is a mix of:
-severe over-estimation of how big real-world transport vehicles are, or how much personal space is afforded to the passengers
-severe over-estimation of how much room a soldier takes up, based on the action poses that 40K minis are locked into

A real M113 can hold 11 guys, but you would never, ever be able to cram 11x 28mm human-sized minis in dynamic poses into a to-scale M113- it'd be about the same size as that Centaur above.

Good explanation, you have really changed my mind in regards to this. Cool.

Yup, loving my models. Stopped playing the game recently and lost interest in the fluff long ago (BL library has some good writers: Abnett, Wraight, Dembksi-Bowden, but what they write isn't the fluff).

AnomanderRake wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
...The tanks of 40k are weirdly sized. They're short and wide. But they're also like really big.

I suspect that's to do with the fact that 40k as a wargame takes a lot of its inspiration from WWI/WWII, back when tanks were a new development and not very efficiently constructed. A British Mk.1 tank from 1917 is roughly the same size as a modern tank (~25ft long, ~13ft wide, ~8ft tall) but weighed less than half as much (~30 tons to ~70 tons) and had twice the crew. If you wanted to make a tank that was constructed like a WWI tank (see: Land Raider) but had the protective capabilities and armament of a modern tank it'd have to be really, really big.

A Mk1, or M1, whichever, is substantially longer than it is wide. A Leman Russ is very short. This is pretty easily visible if you fetch up some 1/36, 1/48 or 1/56 scale miniatures, that Imperial tanks are short and wide, and some xenos tanks like the Hammerhead or the Wave Serpent are just huge.

It doesn't really have to do with the desire to look like WWI/II tanks, because A: not all the tanks look like WWI/II tanks, and B: WWI tanks were particularly extreme in how long they were compared to how wide, because they needed to cross trenches, so comparing their form factors is actually quite striking.

The size of 40k tanks is almost exclusively arbitrary and their insides don't even line up [see the Leman Russ, where the breech intersects with the Commander's legs], but if you scale them up by 1/56 "true 28mm", you wind up with absolutely monstrous tanks.

Type40 wrote:

Good explanation, you have really changed my mind in regards to this. Cool.

Yeah it is. That said, 40k is in "Heroic Scale", which means that the relative proportions of everything are distorted to be wider giving a more cartoony look.