According to page 37 of the Only War rulebook the average Guardsman (Strength and Toughness in the 30s) can only...

What the fuck are you on about? Have you ever deadlifted? Picking up 75kg is actually pretty impressive.

Nah.
80% of guard are cadians.

they train from birth.

>paying too much attention to numbers in 40k games

It's quite obvious they don't care so much about lifting capacity when the chart fucking stops at 20. It's exceptionally easy to go off the cahrts even at character creation in Black Crusade and Death Watch.

Also there's this magic fucking thing called GM hand waving.

>75 kg
>impressive

weak

In fact, by virtue of the selection process, guardsmen are on the high end of the scale for an average human.

It goes like this: planets that deliver tithes of men, such as Cadia, are required to raise a PDF of a standard number of troops (usually determined by population, if I recall). The guard regiments are selected from these, and are always selected from the best-performing soldiers therein.

Furthermore, a planet that pays its tithe in guardsmen can usually be assured to have a relatively good standard of selection, so the PDF's aren't slack-jawed yokels that barely know which way to point a gun. If they WERE, then the planet's tithe wouldn't be acceptable, and then they get audited. Which is a no-no.

So a guardsman, by the time he's mustered up to regiment and shipped off to his first warzone, has already been conscripted and trained into one military force, and by virtue of exception, been selected for another, more prestigious, more elite military force.

Let's talk in terms of percents. Say a planet has a population of a billion. Of these citizens, ten percent are fit for PDF service, and the planet raises five percent, to keep up the breeding stock. This is a standing PDF force of 50 million troops. Of these, the top 1 percent are selected for Guard service every time the tithe comes up (once every five years, as I recall). That's half a million men, who are in turn the top 99.95% in performance of their respective population.

By modern earth scale, each and every guardsman serving offworld has already gone through a selection process more rigorous and exclusive than the Navy SEALs. They're issued weapons and armor that are worlds away from anything that our modern military would ever get.

And it's still only BARELY enough. That's the kind of universe 40k is.

Why does that drawing suck so much?

Pretty much this. Marines dying when they fall down stairs, Techpriests juggling rhinos and and promethium nukes comes to mind when talking about FFG in particular.

To be fair, basic range is mainly here to give you bonuses and maluses. You can fire up to four time the basic range, which makes it 400m for most rifles, and 120m for pistols. Still a bit low, but not really outrageous.

This post is hilarious.

You should write jokes more often.

*over 100m / 300ft pistol shots. Good luck with that kind of shot without a good bit of aiming... and a optic of some sort.

Why? Literally everything in that post was true to lore. Of course, it doesn't automatically make every Guardsman some super elite soldier that could deal with our own forces, though that's more down to the inherent flaws in the training system.

>To be fair, basic range is mainly here to give you bonuses and maluses. You can fire up to four time the basic range, which makes it 400m for most rifles, and 120m for pistols. Still a bit low, but not really outrageous.

It really is up the the matter of what the design paradigm, training paradigm, and what the game designer is reading.

Take NATO 5.56 ammo for example. Various sources have different official effective ranges, going from 450 to 600 meters. Same round, different views on what point it is not worth firing it. If the game designer were looking to say 7.62x39 mm 400 meters is generally the viewed as the effective range.

>Let's talk in terms of percents. Say a planet has a population of a billion. Of these citizens, ten percent are fit for PDF service, and the planet raises five percent

That would be a higher level of militarization then what North Korea has.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_military_and_paramilitary_personnel

See Per 1000 active personal

Of which without Chinese aid they could hold their economy together long term. Counties can go to that level and even past for a few years at a time but they can not keep themselves at that level. The highest peace time service rate of any country that does not get notable outside help with their military is Singapore at 13.3 per 1000, or just over 1.3 percent. I would not be shocked if the percent of population in active armed service could have a higher sustainable level then that of Singapore but likely not that much higher.

>This is a standing PDF force of 50 million troops. Of these, the top 1 percent are selected for Guard service every time the tithe comes up

Some may, but from what I know most do not. The terms of the tithe is that the standard of the given units most be as good as the best in the PDF of that planet.Some planets thus do not even field any elite units or have their elite unit be very small and/or technically not part of their PDF. A example of the latter that I have come across in a novel is a "governors household guard" that is only for "internal security". Doing so lowers the standards of what they have to give.

Yes, this does hurt the effectiveness of PDF on worlds that do that type of thing, and it does friction in between those planets and the higher levels of the administratum.

>Some may, but from what I know most do not

Pretty much every codex says they are taken from the best of the PDF as the planetary governor(s) would be executed if he/they were caught doing otherwise.

Of course there are exceptions. Some corrupt governors use the imperial guard to get rid of over crowded areas or get rid of people they don't like. Other times the tithe may be so high that the governors may have no choice but to conscript entire portions of their planet. These are more of an exceptions than the rule though.

Guard tithe is "no less" than 10% of the PDF.

>technically not part of their PDF

Just to add to my comment here . PDF stands for planet defence force. It is everyone expected to defend a planet in times of crisis. It includes everyone from formal armies, mercenaries and gangs.

For the same reason the Leman Russ looks worse on paper than damn near every modern MBT, because they can't into numbers.