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 Ashiraya wrote:
See the post above mine. It was asserted that TDA adds a head in height. I dispute this claim. TDA is thick, yes, but it does not have 1' thick bootsoles.

No its more on the lines of that the AStartes within the suit is usually taller so is the suit. If terminator armor was the same size in the lore it wouldn't be describe as being more definitive or larger.

Its bulkier but as marine ages they also grow in height.

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
See the post above mine. It was asserted that TDA adds a head in height. I dispute this claim. TDA is thick, yes, but it does not have 1' thick bootsoles.

No its more on the lines of that the AStartes within the suit is usually taller so is the suit. If terminator armor was the same size in the lore it wouldn't be describe as being more definitive or larger.

Its bulkier but as marine ages they also grow in height.

Apparently if terminators grow in height their mass remains the same. Have you noticed how ridiculously scrawny a terminator's thigh is now on the models?

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
See the post above mine. It was asserted that TDA adds a head in height. I dispute this claim. TDA is thick, yes, but it does not have 1' thick bootsoles.

No its more on the lines of that the AStartes within the suit is usually taller so is the suit. If terminator armor was the same size in the lore it wouldn't be describe as being more definitive or larger.

Its bulkier but as marine ages they also grow in height.

There is no source that says they do.

The only page that says they do is Sibbering's homepage, but that is all literally fanfiction.


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 amanita wrote:


Apparently if terminators grow in height their mass remains the same. Have you noticed how ridiculously scrawny a terminator's thigh is now on the models?

Have you seen the thighs on CSM?

 Asherian Command wrote:
Its bulkier but as marine ages they also grow in height.

Unless things have changed recently I always understood this to be an invention of Phil Sibbering and not something that was part of the lore created by Games Workshop. I know he goes into great deal about this concept but it does seem somewhat unnecessary.


EDIT: Ninja'd

Oh so thats where that comes from!

Asherian Command wrote:Stop using Peregrine's argument.

That is data from the codex and cannot be disputed.

Headcanon only happens if you involve your own fan fiction.

It really is not indisputable as data from the codex. If codex data was absolutely indisputable, there would be no such thing as Miriael Sabathiel. Just as an example.

It is not "Peregrine's argument". It is the official stance of Games Workshop that the only canon is the canon you form when you choose the source data you prefer.

Asherian Command wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Asherian... You do know I assembled that picture, right?

The Space Marine is from Deathwatch and the DKoK from the FW books.

No I was attacking the statement headcanon, we know of the sizes there just never been an equal size measurement, you making a size comparison is technically not headcanon.

And yeah i know they are But it is not headcanon that a space marine is over 8 feet tall.

It is headcanon that a space marine is over eight feet tall. See for reference the recent Games Workshop lucky draw which stated that a Space Marine is seven feet tall.

The second you start discounting sources - any sources, be they Second Edition 40k, Black Library, FFG books or White Dwarf, or even Dark Millenium or the codices, you have formed a headcanon.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Co'tor Shas is correct. See the background - each box represents 1'.

I only barely grasp even the meter system, so that strange foreign and a bit nonsensical system of measurement you are using is totally alien to me. I have no idea how tall is 1' irl ^^.

Also, for the sake of argument, what is the current size range of humans? Just to check if all the different size for marines from various sources actually do fit within a similar range. Maybe they are all true .

 Furyou Miko wrote:
It is headcanon that a space marine is over eight feet tall. See for reference the recent Games Workshop lucky draw which stated that a Space Marine is seven feet tall.

The second you start discounting sources - any sources, be they Second Edition 40k, Black Library, FFG books or White Dwarf, or even Dark Millenium or the codices, you have formed a headcanon.

While technically true, that means that anything except Schrödinger's Space Marines is headcanon.

I prefer 9' Marines to Marines who manage to be 6' and almost 10' at the same time.


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 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Co'tor Shas is correct. See the background - each box represents 1'.

I only barely grasp even the meter system, so that strange foreign and a bit nonsensical system of measurement you are using is totally alien to me. I have no idea how tall is 1' irl ^^.

Also, for the sake of argument, what is the current size range of humans? Just to check if all the different size for marines from various sources actually do fit within a similar range. Maybe they are all true .

Humans range between only like 2' for the shortest guy ever to 8'11" for the tallest.

I doubt Marines have such a massive size variance though.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Humans range between only like 2' for the shortest guy ever to 8'11" for the tallest.

How about we restrict it to sizes that do not have a huge negative impact on your health, though ? I am pretty sure it would decrease the height range quite a bit and be more representative of the variations we might expect among Space Marines.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Humans range between only like 2' for the shortest guy ever to 8'11" for the tallest.

How about we restrict it to sizes that do not have a huge negative impact on your health, though ? I am pretty sure it would decrease the height range quite a bit and be more representative of the variations we might expect among Space Marines.

^^^^^^

That I would agree with.

Updated the thread with the new sources. Thanks.

By the way, the miniatures definitely tell a story in which there isn't very much divergence for human height at any given moment, but that humans are getting taller over time (old Cadians are quite a bit shorter than the new ones). Oh, and they grow larger with rank, similar to orks.

Ashiraya wrote:But the 7' canon is just as canon. Same level of canonicity.

Yes- the truth is, many of the different heights are cannon. GW is not consistent, so I prefer to give us a bunch of sources, and not necessarily choose one as the 'right' one.

War Kitten wrote:I believe they're described as being anywhere from 8-9 feet tall in the fluff, although i'm not sure where it's described.

We have quite a few sources in the first post, and if you find more, I will add them. There is quite a bit of range in what the sources say.

Mellow wrote:There are parts of HH novels that describe normal human women only coming up to just higher than an Astartes' waist.

I'd love to add that to the first post, if you can find a source to cite.

Glad to see you're still with us, Odin.

This topic frequently pops up on the forum, so keeping a sources thread could be very useful.


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 odinsgrandson wrote:
Yes- the truth is, many of the different heights are cannon. GW is not consistent, so I prefer to give us a bunch of sources, and not necessarily choose one as the 'right' one.

I think this is a good stance. People can see what's available and make their own call.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Humans range between only like 2' for the shortest guy ever to 8'11" for the tallest.

How about we restrict it to sizes that do not have a huge negative impact on your health, though ? I am pretty sure it would decrease the height range quite a bit and be more representative of the variations we might expect among Space Marines.

Well, I'm 6' which is 182.9 cm, and, IIRC, the human average is like 5'6" , but I'm not super tall or anything. My second cousin is 6'7" (200.7 cm) and he's perfectly fine, although he hits his head on door-frames a lot. I have a friend who is 4' something, but there are people shorter than that too.

I'm 5'9"-5'10"ish, and I've never felt very tall. My brother is six foot six.

I'm 6'1" and I feel like a fricken giant most of the time.

Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Co'tor Shas is correct. See the background - each box represents 1'.

I only barely grasp even the meter system, so that strange foreign and a bit nonsensical system of measurement you are using is totally alien to me. I have no idea how tall is 1' irl ^^.

Also, for the sake of argument, what is the current size range of humans? Just to check if all the different size for marines from various sources actually do fit within a similar range. Maybe they are all true .

1' is about 30cm (specifically, 30.48cm).

In England, we're lucky enough to use both metric and imperial systems. ^^;

Ashiraya wrote:
While technically true, that means that anything except Schrödinger's Space Marines is headcanon.

I prefer 9' Marines to Marines who manage to be 6' and almost 10' at the same time.

Schrödinger's Space Marines. Awesome concept, but actually yes, that illustrates my point perfectly.

I doubt Marines have such a massive size variance though.

Probably not, the outliers are unlikely to survive implantation, heh.

If you take my city as a snapshot of humanity as a whole (not unreasonable, its a massively multicultural university town with many overseas students), normal human height variance for an adult without rare genetic markers is between four and seven feet.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
I have no idea how tall is 1' irl ^^.

Roughly the size of your shoe or a piece of A4 paper.



I've always considered a good rule of thumb for Marine height to be 25% more than a normal man. So your average 5'9" man becomes roughly 7' and a 6'6" becomes roughly 8' and at 7' would be just under 9'.

 odinsgrandson wrote:

Mellow wrote:There are parts of HH novels that describe normal human women only coming up to just higher than an Astartes' waist.

I'd love to add that to the first post, if you can find a source to cite.

There was one that included a human woman that visited an Astartes in his chamber. He found that over time he had grown fond of her, if fond is the right word to use. In one of the scenes it is described as he being barely above his waist line. Which I found surprising as that really would be about 9ft.

There have also been numerous books describing Marines in Terminator armour being taller than normally armoured ones.

Astartes growing with age has never been mentioned before. That is pure fantasy. The only thing is their hair changes colour and facially they age. Only once they reach much older does the vitality diminish within them. Forcing them to effectively retire.

Cool. Any idea where it came from? Or does anyone else recognize the story and know the source?

Ashiraya wrote:I'm 5'9"-5'10"ish, and I've never felt very tall. My brother is six foot six.

No one can feel tall with a sibling over half a foot taller than them.

Mellow wrote:Astartes growing with age has never been mentioned before.

Except maybe in a post modern way, right? I mean, I can compare my 2nd ed and Rogue Trader marines to today's lot, and it is very clear that marines grow with age...

And Ragnar Blackmane was an absolute monstrosity in his day.


One more note- for people who want to figure out a realistic range in height differences, consider finding out what the minimum and maximum heights are for armed services around the world. The military will reject applicants who are too large or (more often) too small for them.

 Gogsnik wrote:
I've always considered a good rule of thumb for Marine height to be 25% more than a normal man.

My rule of thumb is 50%. (See the 'half again the height of a man' source in the OP.)

So a healthy male specimen who would be 6' when adult would end up 9' if Astartes.

I imagine there's little height variance between Astartes, because they've been tampered with so massively.

A perfectly reasonable basis using some of the background but I feel that 25% allows for all of those disparate sources to cohere together. Roughly 80% of men are under 6'2" which accounts for the majority of sources which give heights of 7'+ for Marines. 10-15% would be 8'+ and a handful in the almost 9' range. This means that everyone's ideal of a Space Marine's height is true without anyone arguing validity of sources and works nicely with characters like Pasanius Lysane or Haegr the Mountain.

 odinsgrandson wrote:
Cool. Any idea where it came from? Or does anyone else recognize the story and know the source?

Ashiraya wrote:I'm 5'9"-5'10"ish, and I've never felt very tall. My brother is six foot six.

No one can feel tall with a sibling over half a foot taller than them.

Mellow wrote:Astartes growing with age has never been mentioned before.

Except maybe in a post modern way, right? I mean, I can compare my 2nd ed and Rogue Trader marines to today's lot, and it is very clear that marines grow with age...

And Ragnar Blackmane was an absolute monstrosity in his day.


One more note- for people who want to figure out a realistic range in height differences, consider finding out what the minimum and maximum heights are for armed services around the world. The military will reject applicants who are too large or (more often) too small for them.

It sounds like Gravel Loken, which is early in the Horus Heresy Series, but I believe is spread over several books. I'll have a look later and see if I can find it.

 Gogsnik wrote:
A perfectly reasonable basis using some of the background but I feel that 25% allows for all of those disparate sources to cohere together. Roughly 80% of men are under 6'2" which accounts for the majority of sources which give heights of 7'+ for Marines. 10-15% would be 8'+ and a handful in the almost 9' range. This means that everyone's ideal of a Space Marine's height is true without anyone arguing validity of sources and works nicely with characters like Pasanius Lysane or Haegr the Mountain.

I'd call it fair.

 odinsgrandson wrote:
One more note- for people who want to figure out a realistic range in height differences, consider finding out what the minimum and maximum heights are for armed services around the world. The military will reject applicants who are too large or (more often) too small for them.

Yeah, but marines are not exactly rational, and the difference in geneseed can make some marines grow more than other, and cultural and/or physical difference between planets population can allow for a bigger height difference among marines than among current-day armed forces.
I think the idea that marines have a wider variety of height works quite well.

does anyone know why space marines have to be so large?

Because 40k players are all size queens.

Maximus Bitch wrote:
does anyone know why space marines have to be so large?

Their organs and the amount of strength that is required in general. Most space marines grow into size equalivent to their forefathers (The Primarchs)

They are large because one its intimidating as all hell and their armor is gigantic to begin with, which allows for a lot of extra technology.

Space marines also have the black caraparace underneath their skin that might add to their height. Plus most of the surgeries that happen to become a space marine happen to teenagers, and then they sort of grow out from that.

The Black Carapace does not add to a Marine's height at all. It is a thin layer of plastic that sits over their fused ribcage only, and its only job is to act as an circuit board into which all the neural connections between the armour and the marine can be implanted.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
The Black Carapace does not add to a Marine's height at all. It is a thin layer of plastic that sits over their fused ribcage only, and its only job is to act as an circuit board into which all the neural connections between the armour and the marine can be implanted.

Space marines also have the black caraparace underneath their skin that might add to their height.

Read that word

Might:past of may, used especially.
May: meaning Maybe

I am not saying definately I am saying it might. As I didn't know how thick it was.

7+ feet is plenty big enough, especially when combined with their increased width, which will further emphasise the whole "iron giants" thing when compared to normal humans. 9+ feet is just silly. Power armoured Marines are not Centurions, lol. Those Marines only exist in the tapestries, statues, paintings, base reliefs, etc, furthering their mythological, legendary status in the eyes of the rest of the Imperium and its enemies.

Maximus Bitch wrote:
does anyone know why space marines have to be so large?

To be fair, I don't think they've always been that large. I don't have access to all of the oldest Rogue Trader fluff, but the 2nd edition Codex Imperialis has a large section on all of the effects of the Geneseed, and all of the extra organs, and none of them mention a change in height. It just seems like that's something too large to miss, given how detailed the write up of the changes is.

I'm not sure when the idea that marines are larger than normal humans started up, but I can't find references to it in any of the older materials. I think I first heard about it during the forth edition, but it might have come about during the third, or even something I missed in the latter portion of the 2nd.


By the way, does anyone think I should include that reference in my list? It is kind of a 'lack of evidence as evidence' sort of thing, so I'm not sure if it belongs.