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 Crimson wrote:
BTW, comparing to the GW's normal humans, the Primaris Marine models are scaled to be about seven and half feet.

This is why their principle purpose as far as I'm concerned is as the basis for Truescale proper Astartes.

 Alpharius wrote:
ADB puts the Night Lords in his novels at 3 meters tall, so there's always that too.

Basically?

They're as tall as they need to be?

Or alternatively never trust BL as a fluff source.

(Guilliman model is scaled to be about three metres. Imagine an army of those.)

Right?

So, who is the 'definitive source' then?

I'm guessing that there isn't one?

And that's what GW/BL/FW would tell you too?

 Alpharius wrote:

So, who is the 'definitive source' then?

I personally trust GW studio's fluff over BL fluff, as it seems to be way more consistent. BL authors have a lot of creative freedom and often strange ideas about fluff. YMMV.

In this specific instance seven to seven and half feet seems to be pretty consistent figure across multiple sources, so obviously sudden ten feet is an outlier.

Let's go with 8' ± 6" in armor and call it a day!

 Crimson wrote:
BTW, comparing to the GW's normal humans, the Primaris Marine models are scaled to be about seven and half feet.

Remember- Cadians are 6'8" Marines are 7' tall. That makes the Primaris marines quite a lot taller (to scale).


1- We have lots of references for the heights of space marines- most of them say 7' tall is average.

But we don't have references for the average heights of anyone else. It makes the most sense to base it off of the one we know rather than conjecture about Cadian height.

Absolutely all of the "marine minis are too short" comes down to people assuming Imperial Guard minis aren't too tall (they've had more recent scale creep than Marines).

2- Heroic Scale presents men as generally 6'6" to 6'8" - yes, that's tall. But they're not just people, they're "heroic" people. "Heroic scale" also pushes heights toward the center- smaller characters are presented larger, while larger creatures or vehicles are generally presented smaller.

GW don't make non-heroic scale minis.


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 Alpharius wrote:
Right?

So, who is the 'definitive source' then?

I'm guessing that there isn't one?

And that's what GW/BL/FW would tell you too?

Games Workshop has recently been consistent with 7' as the average space marine (unless you can do the meters to feet math, in which case they're 6'10). For whatever reason, many fans add six inches to this, and expect average marine height to be 7.5.

But remember- it took them until the 6th edition to put it into an official codex- before that, Marine height was not mentioned in any previous codex or core rule book (even though there was quite a bit of detail given to marine physiology). It was not a topic of debate in the Rogue Trader or Second Edition days.


As I see it, GW didn't have a height for Marines until the Black Library started up. BL authors fell in love with the idea that Marines were huge, and BL readers spread the word to all of fandom. Sometimes, I'm pretty sure that characters were meant to be crazy giants among marines, but the prominence of special snowflake giants increased the expected size for all marines.

The Movie Marine article (4th ed era) was a backlash against the Black Library- it states that BL fiction is to the fluff like Rambo is to history. In this context, the 7' tall figure in the Movie Marine list might have meant to be an exaggeration- Everything else in the article makes them larger than life, right, so why do we think the 7' tall figure is meant to be accurate?

In the 6th ed, GW have adopted the 7 foot figure officially (not seven and a half- seven even, and sometimes 6'10" if you know your metric conversion).



Personally- I'm old school, so I can live with human sized marines that are just about right when scaled against 2nd ed Imperial Guardsmen.

If Cadians are two metres tall, then how tall are tall human models like Greyfax? Yeah, I'm not buying that.

I base my calculations on assumption that 30mm model represents 180cm person. That is already taller than average and even many GW's non-character human models are 32mm, making them over 190cm in this scale. This leads 35mm Deathwatch marine being about seven feet and 38mm Primaris being seven and half feet. Seems to make sense to me.

 Crimson wrote:
If Cadians are two metres tall, then how tall are tall human models like Greyfax? Yeah, I'm not buying that.

I base my calculations on assumption that 30mm model represents 180cm person. That is already taller than average and even many GW's non-character human models are 32mm, making them over 190cm in this scale. This leads 35mm Deathwatch marine being about seven feet and 38mm Primaris being seven and half feet. Seems to make sense to me.

But remember- GW minis are 28mm scale (official word, at least). How does that calculate out if we assume that number is correct? We get two meter tall Cadians to start out with.



One thing to consider is the scale creep that has not taken effect with Space Marines. The Marine design we use was finalized with the 3rd ed box set- everything after that is compatible (you can part swap from plastic marines for the past 29 years).

This is not true of Cadians and Catachans- the plastic kits made they way bigger.

 odinsgrandson wrote:

But remember- GW minis are 28mm scale (official word, at least).

That's not how 28mm scale works. 28mm scale means 28mm to the eye level, which in turn means about 30mm tall model.

One thing to consider is the scale creep that has not taken effect with Space Marines. The Marine design we use was finalized with the 3rd ed box set- everything after that is compatible (you can part swap from plastic marines for the past 29 years).

This is not true of Cadians and Catachans- the plastic kits made they way bigger.

Not true, marines have gotten bigger over the years, even after third edition and prior Primaris. Later multiparts are a bit larger than earlier ones and the Deathwatch are substantially larger.

About seven feet tall out of armor, armor adding four or five inches at least, possibly up to half a foot.

One thing I find interesting is how much people expect is added from the armor, and how much people expect that Games workshop's 7' tall number is meant to be a marine out of his armor. Is that where the 7.5 number comes from?

The sources either do not indicate whether the size is out of armor or in armor, or they specify that it is in armor (Blanch scale picture is definitely a marine in armor who is 7' tall from the bottom of his boots to the top of his helmet).

The consistency to me indicates that the average GW Marines are 7' tall in full armor- while the average Black Library character marine is 7.5-9ft tall in full armor.

 Crimson wrote:

 odinsgrandson wrote:

But remember- GW minis are 28mm scale (official word, at least).

That's not how 28mm scale works. 28mm scale means 28mm to the eye level, which in turn means about 30mm tall model.

Sorry- the measurement to the head is so common now days that I forget some people measure to the eye.

Measuring to the eye is the minority- the majority of the time, scale is reported from foot to head before hair is added (although hair and headress can often make the minis taller than reported). All of these cause inconsistencies since very few minis are standing straight enough for us to properly measure their height.

I don't buy that GW have always measured to the eye. I'm old school, and my older minis were definitely a LOT shorter than the newer ones- they used to be roughly 28mm tall (I might even have some that were 25...). The only time they've openly acknowledge their scale creep was with orks (ork scale creep is cannon).

The pattern that I've noticed is that newer companies that make minis compatible with older companies tend to use larger numbers to describe them (28mm GW minis are the same scale as 30mm Privateer Press minis).

One thing to consider is the scale creep that has not taken effect with Space Marines. The Marine design we use was finalized with the 3rd ed box set- everything after that is compatible (you can part swap from plastic marines for the past 29 years).

This is not true of Cadians and Catachans- the plastic kits made they way bigger.

Not true, marines have gotten bigger over the years, even after third edition and prior Primaris. Later multiparts are a bit larger than earlier ones and the Deathwatch are substantially larger.

Yes, plastic IG are bigger than the old metal IG (and Catachans are abominations.) That also happened ages ago and all the new 'normal human' kits have matched that scale. That ship has sailed, normal humans in GW-land are 30-32mm tall. And no, normal humans are not two metres tall.

(Also, the old metal models are not that much shorter, they're mostly just less bulky.)

And yes, Chaos Chosen, Deathwatch, the new Plaguemarines as well as the Rubrics are bigger than older marines. That's the new 'normal marine' scale.

What I really meant was that when Marine scale became stable, normal humans were a lot smaller than they are now- which to me indicates that the minis were meant to be comparatively larger than they currently look.

Marines had spent so long in such a stable place, it is interesting to see them finally start catching up to the scale creep.



The most interesting thing I find about the Primaris marines isn't their height but their proportions. By the 4th ed, GW started making their marine artwork look more like they have human proportions under the armor. The Dark Heresy/Deathwatch RPGs definitely went this route as well.



It seems to me that in sizing up the Primaris Marines, they also dropped some of the dwarf proportions that go along with them (longer legs, smaller heads etc). I haven't tried it yet, but I read that Primaris heads are the same size as normal marine heads, and completely interchangeable.

 odinsgrandson wrote:
What I really meant was that when Marine scale became stable, normal humans were a lot smaller than they are now- which to me indicates that the minis were meant to be comparatively larger than they currently look.

Those first multipart plastic marine kits came in 3rd edition, as did the plastic Catachans. So they're actually from the same era. Though marines were released couple of years earlier, so technically you're right.

I haven't tried it yet, but I read that Primaris heads are the same size as normal marine heads, and completely interchangeable.

Yes, they are.

 Crimson wrote:

 odinsgrandson wrote:
What I really meant was that when Marine scale became stable, normal humans were a lot smaller than they are now- which to me indicates that the minis were meant to be comparatively larger than they currently look.

Those first multipart plastic marine kits came in 3rd edition, as did the plastic Catachans. So they're actually from the same era. Though marines were released couple of years earlier, so technically you're right.

Now, I'm thinking about the dates, but you're right. Catachans were absurdly out of scale when they came out. I really just meant that the humans that were around when they last assessed marine scale were way shorter, and I think that's true.

I I haven't tried it yet, but I read that Primaris heads are the same size as normal marine heads, and completely interchangeable.

Yes, they are.

That's cool. Honestly, I've recently realized how much I've been wanting marine minis that look like the (better proportioned) artwork, so that's terrific.

If Cadians averaged 6'8", that would mean there are many millions of 7'0" and taller Cadian guardsmen, just as part of the normal height distribution.


Cadian models cannot mean that Cadians are 6'8". The printed studio and WD background for those models is that they represent Cadians, regiments from worlds conquered by Cadians which have different nutrition, gravity, and preexisting human populations, and they also represent regiments from worlds with no relation at all to Cadia except for using commonly imitated patterns. So it wouldn't just be that Cadians are remarkably tall, it would be that billions of diverse and unrelated guardsmen are a foot taller than the average height of a male in the western world.

Cadians can be especially tall in background but there aren't any specifically Cadian models except Creed, Kell, and Bastonne?, which is not a representative sample.

So that is a reference.

Migs from Ironsleet (the Blanchitsu crew) has already created some true scale MK7s and MK6s using the Primaris.

Behold their glory:

 Alpharius wrote:
ADB puts the Night Lords in his novels at 3 meters tall, so there's always that too.

Basically?

They're as tall as they need to be?

In that particular case, they might measured to the top of the ridiculous erect bat wings on the helmets which might skew the results.

FWIW, in the official Deathwatch rpg, the now secondus marines were listed in armor at "over 2.1 meters tall" and "500-1000kg" with variation around that. Obviously primaries didn't exist at the time so can't comment on that.

 Alpharius wrote:
Let's go with 8' ± 6" in armor and call it a day!

Pfft...9 foot if its a day.


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 odinsgrandson wrote:
Where did it talk about 11 foot tall being monstrous creatures? The term didn't used to exist in 40k as a game term, and the sizes of most creatures weren't given.

You got me. 3rd? 4th edition? I get them confused.

 Alpharius wrote:
ADB puts the Night Lords in his novels at 3 meters tall, so there's always that too.

Basically?

They're as tall as they need to be?

Well, half a meter of that is bat wings, top knots and/or horns


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 Crimson wrote:
If Cadians are two metres tall, then how tall are tall human models like Greyfax? Yeah, I'm not buying that.

I base my calculations on assumption that 30mm model represents 180cm person. That is already taller than average and even many GW's non-character human models are 32mm, making them over 190cm in this scale. This leads 35mm Deathwatch marine being about seven feet and 38mm Primaris being seven and half feet. Seems to make sense to me.

I choose to believe GW doesn't use a consistent scale for it's minatures, and just produces minatures in sizes that 'feel right' and are 'practically sized'.

You can have one space marine, who is very tall in the fluff have a miniature which is shorter than another character which isn't meant to be particularly tall.

pelicaniforce wrote:
If Cadians averaged 6'8", that would mean there are many millions of 7'0" and taller Cadian guardsmen, just as part of the normal height distribution.


Cadian models cannot mean that Cadians are 6'8". The printed studio and WD background for those models is that they represent Cadians, regiments from worlds conquered by Cadians which have different nutrition, gravity, and preexisting human populations, and they also represent regiments from worlds with no relation at all to Cadia except for using commonly imitated patterns. So it wouldn't just be that Cadians are remarkably tall, it would be that billions of diverse and unrelated guardsmen are a foot taller than the average height of a male in the western world.

Cadians can be especially tall in background but there aren't any specifically Cadian models except Creed, Kell, and Bastonne?, which is not a representative sample.

So that is a reference.

You have misunderstood me. Find some major miniatures sculptor, and they'll tell you plainly that they don't every sculpt average anything (I wonder if "This War of Mine" was an exception). The face shapes and proportions they use are based on some "ideal" not "average."

What I'm saying is that "heroic" minis are never designed to represent the average Cadian, or average Imperial Guardsman, or Averag anything. They're meant to represent "Heroic." guardsmen.

Heroic scale is about exaggerating the strength and size of the characters. In a D&D game, no one plays an Average person- they all play heroes that are especially powerful and stand out among a crowd. That's where the scale comes from- but it gets funny when pretty much every mini you make is meant to stand out from the crowd- so Scale Creep happens.

Games workshop has taken that approach to all of their minis (I got this confirmed in an old WD interview). It is unfortunate that they have taken that approach to Imperial Guardsmen- because the fluff on them is about how they're the peons of the universe who have an average active lifespan of 14 hours (including down time).

Also of note- it has been a common practice for GW to make the game's proper heroes in a larger scale than the other models (this is also what Avatars of War does). I mean, the fluff doesn't talk enough about Creed's enormous appetite and ogre like proportions to justify the way his mini doesn't fit on a 25mm base. Or Ragnar Blackmane's absolutely massive size (of note- there was another wolf character noted for his massive size back in Ragnar's heyday- and they never made a mini for him).


What I'm saying is that in a game where the most elite force in the universe is played by half the gamers, the humans represented are all non-average.


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 warboss wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
ADB puts the Night Lords in his novels at 3 meters tall, so there's always that too.

Basically?

They're as tall as they need to be?

In that particular case, they might measured to the top of the ridiculous erect bat wings on the helmets which might skew the results.

FWIW, in the official Deathwatch rpg, the now secondus marines were listed in armor at "over 2.1 meters tall" and "500-1000kg" with variation around that. Obviously primaries didn't exist at the time so can't comment on that.

Thanks. Do you have a page number on that?

Edit- scratch that- we have that reference listed (it is page 28). Although, if you have the book, can you confirm that it reads "Over" 210 cm? That would change the reading a little.

Racerguy180 wrote:
I'm 2.02m tall and 275lbs, I would assume that a space marine would probably be somewhere a little taller and heavier than me.

When I walk up to the new Dark Imperium space marine display if both if our feet were at the same level I would be looking directly in the eyes of the marine in power armour.

They've always been a little inconsistent on actual measurements for Marines. I would also assume that depending on geneseed and each marines own genetic make up, you could have a large discrepancy in heights across the astartes.

Yours must be bigger than the one at my shop.
I'm only 6'2 and can look the marine in the eye, and he's standing on a large rock.
Still what was mentioned about bigger physically impressive guys seeming bigger still is true, he's still a massive looking dude. My guess is Marines have variable height depending on their height as "normal" humans which is also dependent on location, even in our neighbourhood of Holy Terra there's noticable differences in the average height of different nationalities - the average height across Northern Europe's Viking countries is 5'10, the average height in Mongolia is 5'6, the average height in South American countries is 5'4. Take that to a literal universal scale and you'd have some pretty messed up differences between "normals" let alone what Space Marine upgrades would do to them - it's not hard to imagine your average six foot something Fenrisian being the same height as the average Marine for a planet and an eight foot tall Space Wolf being an absolute collossus to that planet's "normals".

As for the need and use for overpriced marines just look at professional football, doesn't matter which code, overpaid muppets who dive for the ground to get penalties. The most interesting part of any soccer match is when the crowd decides to brawl over some percieved insult to their idols.
There's a lot more strength in the power of an idol than just their physical abilities, people will risk their lives in riots to defend their ideal of a player who might not even know their name.

We do have record of some space marines being particularly tall (2nd ed Codex Space Wolves features a particularly tall Wolf Guard character- although his exact height is not included). Maybe I should include it in the references anyway, just because a lot of people want to discuss the variances in marine height.

The minis reference this some as well- but depending on the era of mini you have, almost every race works the same as the orks (ie- with rank comes size). I'm willing to call this a sort of artistic interpretation to express their power rather than a comment on literal size.

I'm of two minds about this.

- The human races is pretty diverse- and spending the next forty millenia on different planets with vastly different environments than anywhere on earth can provide should make the human race even more diverse. People from planets with a little less or a little more gravity would shake things up that even our genetic diversity can't. I mean, Ratlings, Squats and Ogryns are all humans (and might even be genetically capable of becoming space marines, even if the inquisition and brother-chaplains won't allow it).

It doesn't seem too unlikely that the universe was populated by ships that were racially non-diverse (we have things like Atilla or Chogoris for example). There might even be some advantages to colonizing planets with monocultures like this (although I personally think that so long as all members of the colony are capable of communicating, they'd probably develop a distinct colonial culture).

But I know that Games Workshop doesn't really attempt to create credible speculative fiction. They're more about having themes and the rule of cool- hence we have Space Vikings and the Space Mongol Horde, but not a lot of racial diversity among the Dark Angels (who recruit from many planets).

 Bottle wrote:
Migs from Ironsleet (the Blanchitsu crew) has already created some true scale MK7s and MK6s using the Primaris.

Behold their glory:

Spoiler:

Thank you for the glory.


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I just reread the fluff on Wolf Guard Ranulf. I had thought it put him as "nearly as tall as Leman Russ" but it doesn't. The entry puts this dude as both taller and stronger than Russ.

And he's just a plain old marine- not even a captain or wolf lord.



It goes on to tell about how he and his wolf guard killed thousands of orks in battle- and that when he finally fell, the orks created a shrine, convinced that he was a god.

Then it gave him an unimpressive statline deserving of a character veteran sergeant from his era.



It seems clear to me that Primarchs weren't the ten foot tall giants that we see now. I guess the old Leman Russ mini wasn't any larger than your average Space Wolf Captain (and quite a lot smaller than Ragnar Blackmane).

As a side note- I found a picture of Ranult from the internet. It looks like an official GW photo, but I can't find the source on it. Does anyone here know where it comes from?



(the pic is clearly meant to show scale on Ranulf- and remember, Russ is shorter than Ranulf here).

 odinsgrandson wrote:
I just reread the fluff on Wolf Guard Ranulf. I had thought it put him as "nearly as tall as Leman Russ" but it doesn't. The entry puts this dude as both taller and stronger than Russ.
As a side note- I found a picture of Ranult from the internet. It looks like an official GW photo, but I can't find the source on it. Does anyone here know where it comes from?

The story is probably just legend, or the Primarchs were still considered nothing extra in size at that time (Ranulf is from a 2000 WD). Or a combination of both.

The pic is apparently fan-made, though in GW style. Far as I can tell Ranulf is just a newer WG Termy kit, maybe with modded face, while the smaller termy is an old metal Wolf Guard. And the guy has put the new model on the older smaller base to make it seem even bigger.

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/File:Ranulf_the_Strong.jpg

 odinsgrandson wrote:
Ok, Space Marine sizes have been something of a strange bit of fluff. People I talk to say the size of a marine is anywhere between six and twelve feet tall. I'm pretty sure that both Games Workshop and the fandom have been pretty inconsistent about the average Space Marine height, so I'd like to compile a list of references, along with the sizes that they each claim a Space Marine to be.

They started out as being undefined, but larger. Then they were 7'. Then it was 8'. Then it was 9', with some outliers that could reach 12'. Then there were fanwanks that could have them at any size, so long as it was more than 2' higher than the tallest human the author knew.

Correct answer: They're bigger than humans, easily matched by Orks and some Eldar, shorter than MC's.

 odinsgrandson wrote:




(the pic is clearly meant to show scale on Ranulf- and remember, Russ is shorter than Ranulf here).

Big fella kind of reminds me of a Sabre-Tooth Cat.
So much more than just a Long Fang.

 Selym wrote:

 odinsgrandson wrote:
Ok, Space Marine sizes have been something of a strange bit of fluff. People I talk to say the size of a marine is anywhere between six and twelve feet tall. I'm pretty sure that both Games Workshop and the fandom have been pretty inconsistent about the average Space Marine height, so I'd like to compile a list of references, along with the sizes that they each claim a Space Marine to be.

They started out as being undefined, but larger. Then they were 7'. Then it was 8'. Then it was 9', with some outliers that could reach 12'. Then there were fanwanks that could have them at any size, so long as it was more than 2' higher than the tallest human the author knew.

Correct answer: They're bigger than humans, easily matched by Orks and some Eldar, shorter than MC's.

Correct answer is correct (if dissatisfying for people who want to pin down a particular number). For all we know, one 'Imperial Foot' in the year 40,000 is actually 5mm, which puts Cadians at exactly 28mm tall and the models are, in fact, life-size

Grot<Tau><Human><Ork/Eldar/Marine/Necron Warrior><Primaris/Nob/Necron Immortal><Ogryn

Where Primarchs fit is probably variable, and these are also average heights so I'm sure there are particularly tall Marines (Alpha Legion) and short-ass Ogryns. Also, for the record, ~7.5" fits for Marines for me. I tire greatly of the fanwank of making them taller and taller and taller. I quite like the fact that Marines are, actually, small fry in terms of the truly horrible things the galaxy holds. The novels paint them as unkillable supersoldiers I'm sure, but at the end of the day they're T4 with a 3+ sv. They die like...well...Marines.

The thing is, that's a good thing. It gives them a real underdog feel that's honestly missing in a lot of their fluff. Plus, I also like the fact that you have to do all of that to a baseline human just to put them on par with some of the galaxy's gribblies.>

I just came across a picture from the rogue trader days- but I'm not sure what book it is from:



The two marines pictured look Shorter than the ganger that they seem to be arresting... man, the fluff has come a long way since then.

 odinsgrandson wrote:
I just came across a picture from the rogue trader days- but I'm not sure what book it is from:

It's from the main Rogue Trader rulebook.

 Crimson wrote:

 odinsgrandson wrote:
I just came across a picture from the rogue trader days- but I'm not sure what book it is from:

It's from the main Rogue Trader rulebook.

Awesome- do you happen to have a page number?