Now I don't really buy into true scale, mostly because creative basing can be used to make a marine look pretty huge next to a regular human. But a question which has been bothering me is who decided that True Scale required increasing the size of a Space Marine? Why not approach the concept from the other direction, and reduce the scale of regular humans? Or use smaller scaled IG, and bits on marines, to make the regular marines models appear relatively 'bigger' (ie. smaller heads)
Because filling in the marine gaps to make bigger statures is easier than filing away at the guard pieces to make smaller ones.
Awesome. Awesome to the head.
because its easier to make a SM bigger than make the other races smaller...
^ Basically this.
Originally Posted by Spiney Norman
I would also like to thank all those crazy gamers with too much money to spend that buy hundreds of the same marine models, paint them different colours and pretend they are different armies. You are the heroes upon whose backs the future of GW sales is assured.
Plus marine figures are fairly out of proportion. True scale marines often look better anatomicaly.
Depends on the true scale. A lot of the ones made out of terminator legs look like Kim Kardashian with a giant ass and an absurdly tiny waist, lol.
But the most correct answer to the OP's question is that modifying the Guard models to be smaller would be essentially impossible. You're talking about more or less filing down the entire model, and re-scultping it yourself. Bigger Marines can be made by adding plastic card and some green stuff. Plus, like it has been said, the proportions on the Marines are already off (arms are too long, heads are too big), so things can easily be brought more into line by increasing their size.
I guess the big debate is on what is "True Scale". Given a 7-7.5 foot height, Marines should only be about a head taller than IGuard, so I make mine by inserting plastic card to the legs and and waist to add about 2.5mm to their overall height which corrects most of the deficiency. But, because I use the standard Marine bodies and legs, I call it "Tall Scale", not True Scale.
Mileage will vary. I imagine some people make giant Marines just because they can look pretty impressive and it's a fun modeling challenge. The modeling challenge is why I do it. However, I have no interest in actually creating a figure from scratch by trying to shrink a Guardsman.
Besides, in the end, I can't shrink other peoples' armies. So, if I want my Space Marines to be bigger in comparison to their opponents, the only army I can control is my own.
The thing that always bothered me with true-scale, is that the only army they are out of scale in comparison to is the IG. And even that is only as far as Cadian and Catachans go... FW's Elysians and Krieg models are in scale to everything else. True Scale marines always struck me as an excuse to try to make 10' tall marines, because apparently their canon for being 7' - 7.5' isn't enough. Making them more proportional in a realistic sense is nice, but that involves smaller hands, pauldrons, and heads.
"You're not a good person, you know that, right? Good people don't end up here..."
-GLaDOS, Portal
If you make big marines your army is in proportion to everybody else's army as long as they use normal models.
If you make a bunch of tiny guard then your army is just an army of tiny men any time it faces anything other than Space Marines.
Yeah this. I have never liked true scale projects for this reason alone really.
Noise Marines
To be fair, beef up the torso and legs, the hands and heads will look more in proportion.
I'm a big fan of true scale when done right. I have to say I find the current space marines look somewhat cartoonish when in comparison with some of the illustrations and soforth. I've been playing the Space Marine game from THQ and the Space Marines there look just spot on. They're not that much taller than the guardmen around them but they have serious bulk and they seem much better proportioned than the basic plastic kits. Same is true of the Inquisitor kit.
As for other races, I think Eldar are the only one begging for a similar truescale treatment, to make them look properly alien. If they were a head taller than the humans and impossibly skinny, that would make them seem a lot more alien. The other races - eh, how big is an ork or tyranid? They're not something we have a frame of reference on unlike the humans, eldar or marines.
Last edited by Lord Inquisitor; 22-06-2012 at 18:24.
... and then I won.
Space Marines in canon are 7' to 7.5' with their armour OFF. With armour on they're going to be 8' to 8.5' easy. I say the average Guardsman is probably 6.5'.
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Negative. This is a common misconception, and one that seems to perpetuate itself, especially since nowhere in the fluff has this ever been said. So it is certainly not canon.
The Space Marines are 7-7.5 total. The armor doesn't add any significant height, maybe a few inches. Certainly not an entire foot. After all, the Marine inside it still has to be able to wear it, and he's not magically stretching to fit. The height scale image at Warhammer World shows the Marine, in armor, at the 7-7.5 range. And there's been no indication that normal humans are any taller than they are now on average. The models have just always been out of scale.
I think this impression comes from nearly all of the recent marine artwork featuring tiny heads. As in the case of the recent Blood Angels codex cover:
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/ca...Id=prod680010a
If that fellow is only one foot taller than I am, then his head is somewhere between the size of a child's head and a coffee cup.
Which isn't to say marines aren't supposed to be seven feet tall - but with so much artwork depicting gigantic marines with pinheads (a phenomenon I recall quite a bit while playing terminators in the Dawn of War II games) I guess it's only natural folks want to emulate it.
That is incorrect. Marines are canon 7' to 7.5', counting armor. There is a Jess Goodwyn photo (a very famous one a lot of people use as a reference), that shows him sitting down in front of a life-size sketch of a space marine. The head is shown at the 8' mark, but what is often times missed is that he "burned a foot". The bottom of the marine's feet are at the 1' mark, hence the marine is actually 7' tall. 'Burning a Foot' is very common for scale artwork or even construction.
Funny you should mention Ork... There IS actually a canonical scale for how big an Ork is. It's found in their last codex, the green one, which depicts (in meters, iirc) the average height of a Grot, Ork Boy, Skarboy (now nonexistent), Nob, and Warboss. Boyz come out at about 6 to 6.5' tall (with slouch), while Nobs are towering over marines at 8' average. Warbosses are shown at roughly 10', iirc.
Last edited by GrogDaTyrant; 22-06-2012 at 19:44.
"You're not a good person, you know that, right? Good people don't end up here..."
-GLaDOS, Portal
for me, I still use steel legion, and they are scaled smaller than your regular plastic guard, so marines still look huge compared to.
I have to say, this is an excellent article on this subject:
http://ritesofbattle.blogspot.com/20...of-marine.html
the author goes to the trouble of presenting normal humans in scale with the 7.5 foot marines to provide a sense of scale. The quality of the artwork is really quite good - about the best I've seen anyone do trying to portray how much of a marine's bulk is flesh and how much armor.
As a blatant pitch for an auction I have on ebay, I have a two squads of very detailed TRUE SCALE Space marines on auction right now!!!
Preview of the next Eldar Codex
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nice graphic... but his sizing if off by 10%. the supposed 5.75 foot height/6.4cm tall normal human, then the supposed 7 1/2 foot /a 7.7 cm tall marine. He's using a different scale for a foot in each picture. The scale for a foot, on the marine, is 8% longer. The marine height is off by almost a cm. Pull out a ruler and do the math
Last edited by Beppo1234; 23-06-2012 at 00:56.
Problem with true scale is most people only compare them with guard, this often makes them look well out of proportion with other races. When I see a true scale marine that is about the size of a tyranid warrior and much bigger than an ork boy it makes me shake my head. A warrior is quite abit bigger than a marine and this is shown in almost all the artwork.
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