Musclewizard said:
Should the Scout really be hulking from the get go, I always thought its the power armour that make 'em hulking and the black carapace that removes it (or at least the to-hit bonus the enemies get). Shouldn't scouts use Astartes Shotguns, Sniper Rifles and Astartes Bolters from DW? I'm assuming those are more powerful than their human counterparts which would lead to some balancing problems.

Musclewizard said:

I would say yes. They're like two-meter-tall fridge-shaped cybered super-mutants several times the mass of standard humans. In most images, the Space Marine is pretty snug within his armour; certainly no more of a bulk-grade than a guardsman wearing full carapace.

If the stats say Hulking, you could easily argue that the black carapace lets them use those servos [so hard not to think 'myomer bundles'] for more than straight-line movement. It gives them very little speed because they're already buffed to the gills in that department, but oh hey, power-steering.

Deathwatch already explained this. Space Marines are not Hulking. They're large, but not that large. Power Armour, on the other hand, increases their size to Hulking as it does everyone, but the Black Carapace allows them to have an inhuman level of agility and finesse inside it, so they don't give a +10 bonus to be hit but retain all other bonuses and penalties (+1 to movement, -10 to Stealth).

So no, a Space Marine Scout would not be Hulking.

JuankiMan said:

Which is rather strange when you think about it. Is it really just because of the pauldrons? I understand it for Terminator suits, but the more I think about it, it just sounds wrong for normal suits of power armour…

On the other hand, Ogryns in OW get the Hulking trait as well, and I would assume they are about Space Marine size. Which means that Marines should be Hulking without PA, whereas normal humans wouldn't be even when wearing PA - unless they don Terminator armour.

Meh, interpretations, I guess. Perhaps power armour is just supposed to be a lot thicker in this RPG than it is in GW's fluff.

I'm pretty sure Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau's "skin tight powered armour" is a bit of a rarity in 40k.

Lynata said:

I think it's more that PA puts you on the low scale of hulking agility and size wise (think Ork Nob level), while other things are on the large end of the hulking size (thinks like Ogryns and Ork Bosses); adding size categories in the middle only makes the game more complicated. Suffices to say that PA makes you bigger, taller and more less agile than being unarmored, and I would therefore say that marines are not hulking without the PA, as they aren't bigger than an otherwise very big human (ignoring Tech Priest with near full-body replacements).

KommissarK said:

Doesn't have to be skin tight - but an armour thickness of "up to an inch" (going purely by GW fluff, though!) shouldn't really make people that much bigger. Else we may as well start to apply individual size categories to human characters depending on what height they have on the character sheet.

The truly interesting thing is that even assuming that all the characters' size category increases with PA, their natural bodies would not. How does their biological body get injured by, say, an SP bullet that would have missed that arm had the target retained its original size? If we wanted to nitpick, this would represent the bullet simply hitting a part of the armour that has no flesh underneath whatsoever. I'm sure that excuses can be found to justify the injury, such as shrapnel or similar "splash damage", or even armour damage causing some sort of feedback surge, but still …

Props for remembering the most awesome 40k character of all time, though!

MorioMortis said:

Well, Space Marines aren't higher than very big humans … but they are certainly wider. At least that is what Jes Goodwin pointed out as he joked about Marines getting progressively bigger in the novels. "It's not about the height - it's about how massive they are!"

To me, the threshold between normal and hulking size is just awkward. If Ogryns have it, then so should (naked) Marines imo. Or neither of them. Where do you draw the line, is there a solid number? It does not seem to be the case.
The whole Black Carapace deal is something I find a bit strange as well. As if being more agile makes you harder to hit when you get shot in the back without warning. I think it would have been handier to just ditch it for normal power armour and only apply it to Terminator suits - where, coincidentally, even Marines aren't any more agile than normal humans, avoiding the necessity for a special rule to have them retain their agility.
Or, perhaps, a flat Agility penalty (-5? -10? might depend on quality) for power armour instead of a size modifier, again negated by the Black Carapace …

Of course this is all very much a matter of opinion and a good deal of simple gut-feeling, I guess.

I think Hulking is a bit of a mixture between size and sluggishness (you might want to call this mass to muscle ratio or something similar sciency but for me its mostly a 'what feels right' kind of thing) . Once you get enough HUGE POINTS you become HUGE (hulking), but if you only barely scratch the limits between hulking and normal sized its your sluggishness that might make the difference.
I think a naked Space Marine would be a bit smaller than an Ogyrn.
A Space Marine in Power Armour would probably be about the same size as an Ogyrn but due to the SMs Black Carapace they don't become as sluggish as a human would from the Power Armour so they only become Size(Hulking) without the penalty of becoming easier to hit.

Space Marines are somewhere between 2'10 and 2'5m in height, while Ogryns and Ork Nobz are easily 3m tall, maybe more. TT minis are not entirely to scale, but still a Nob is huge and an Ogryn is even larger. Power Armour doesn't make you that large, but for people without a Black Carapace, it is bulky, uncomfortable and slightly sluggish, which would justify the penalties.

JuankiMan said:

Entirely agree with this line of reasoning. A marine in PA treats it like a second skin, so can evade and shrug off damage better.

Kasatka said:

See, if it's supposed to work that way, the existing mechanic does a bad job at representing it. In my book, you'd actually need to be aware of an attack to attempt evading it. Again: Why is it harder to hit an unaware Space Marine in power armour than an unaware human in power armour? The funny thing is, the Marine should be even easier to hit under these circumstances since he's larger still. Instead, the opposite is the case.

If PA reduces Agility (which does not only affect evasion), it should come with exactly that as a penalty - and have the Black Carapace negate it.

Alas, I fear such changes would cut too deep into the game's core mechanics.

I think one way to think about it is that marines tend to carry themselves in their power armour in a way that is distinctly different from a mere mortal. Even passively, while unaware of any incoming attack, they move with such a grace while still being giant, to the point that they might as well be "normal" sized.

Honestly, I feel the exact purpose of the Black Carapace as it is written in the rules is to aid the GM's sanity.