Space Marines 101 - Scouts & Land Speeder Storm

Scouts

There are several ways to equip your scouts, depending on what you want them to do.

If you want your scouts to hold your own objective or other objectives nearby your deployment zone, then you might want the extra range from the sniper equipped scouts.

If you take sniper rifles then 10p extra for a heavy bolter or missile launcher is well spent. Its also good to take camo cloaks on static sniper squads, as they will most likely be in 4+ cover giving them a 3+ cover save.

However if you want your scouts to be on the offensive then you'll want to keep them with their boltguns or then exchange them for a combat blade. Some people equip them with shotguns, but personally I don't think its worth it.

Camo cloaks aren't needed on forward positioned scouts, as they don't really get a cover save at all anyways.  Yes you get a 5+ if you go to ground, but if you need to do that, you're almost certainly dead anyways.

All scouts come with the infiltrate, scouts and move through cover rule which all greatly help them to do what they need. Infiltrate combined with scouts makes your units able to go almost anywhere they need to on the deployment phase.

Sadly scouts cannot take rhinos or razorbacks as dedicated transports (however they may chose to use another squads rhino/razorback). This is one of the reasons scouts aren't as viable as objective holders as the tactical squad. One heavy flamer and your scout squad cries.

Land Speeder Storm

You can take a Land Speeder Storm to carry them around, however it takes up a fast attack choice. As it is a open topped vehicle, your scouts can disembark 2" from any point of its hull AND assault on the same turn. This tactic, combined with the cerberus launcher and combat blade equipped scouts (and sergeant with power fist), can be truly devastating against  non assault oriented armies like Necrons.

You are almost guaranteed to get a turn 1 or at least turn 2 assault and if you win, you have a good chance of catching them with sweeping advances.

You can upgrade the heavy bolter to a heavy flamer, multi melta or assault cannon. I think that the heavy flamer or multi melta are the best choices as you will want to get close to the enemy with the scouts. The assault cannon is a bit price and increases the price of the speeder by too much.

The bad side is that the storm can only fit 5 scouts, which means that you need to chose your targets carefully or your scouts will get heavily outnumbered. Another negative side is that its AV 10 all around AND open topped. Which means it will go down pretty fast just to standard small arms fire. And against melta weapons (and other AP 1 weapons) it will go down even faster.