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So, according to the core rules:
You can’t voluntarily wear or hold an amount of bulk that is greater than your Strength score.
That's all fine and good, but since carrying capacity isn't modified by creature size, we can run into some weird problems. A few sessions ago, I had a player whose character was large, with 18 strength. He wanted to pick up and carry an unconscious ally. Now, the ally was a well built medium humanoid, and with all his gear I decided he'd be pushing 180 pounds. Since Starfinder does things by "bulk" rather than just weight, I needed to figure that out.
Further down on the page is the following
As a general rule, an item that weighs around 5 to 10 pounds is 1 bulk (and every multiple of 10 is an additional bulk), an item weighing a few ounces is negligible, and anything in between is light. An awkward or unwieldy item might have a higher bulk.
So that works out to this unconscious ally being 18 bulk, maybe even a little higher, since a floppy human is certainly unwieldy. The thing is, as written, my player can't carry him. He can't even lift him up, since that would exceed his bulk limit. A 12 foot giant with super human strength in peak physical condition can't lift or carry a human. Similarly, a horse ported in from Pathfinder would, as written, be encumbered by even a light rider.
Is this right? Is bulk just for gear, and lifting and carrying intended to be handled by common sense? What about the issue with larger or smaller weapons? Is a tiny doshko just as hard to carry around as a huge one?
Pathfinder had rules for these things, and they feel conspicuously absent in SF, especially when PCs of radically different sizes are something the game is built for.
Creatures aren't items - it's why the Tensile Reinforcement armor upgrade doesn't work on Androids. RAW, the problem is the opposite of what you are describing; the ally was Bulk 0, because creatures are Bulkless. In fact, they have to stay Bulkless for many rules to make sense, like Mechanics taking Saddles on their Drones, or the Survival rules for mounted stuff doing anything, because as you point out, otherwise it's fundamentally unfeasible for almost anything to carry a rider. In your situation, RAW, the Large character would need to worry about the bulk of the Medium character's gear, but not about the bulk of the Medium character.
We don't have rules for larger or smaller weapons changing bulk - Hover drones and Large PCs currently have to carry weapons sized specifically for them with the same mass, changing the weapons' densities. The rules in question are on page 168.
Yeah, bulk was meant to be a simplifying abstraction, but we don't have rules for how to "convert" characters (and other things) into bulk.
Bulk was a good abstraction for item carrying capacity, but it doesn't work well at covering anything else.
As a stop gap measure (but not within the rules) I would suggest looking at Pathfinder's carrying capacity rules and go from there.
The carrying capacity rules are pretty screwed up in general. Even an average smallish untrained person (not a soldier or weightlifter or whatever) in real life can usually carry somewhere north of 150 pounds total so long as about a third of it is distributed to a backpack, not the 12 bulk max that would be indicated by the table for someone with Strength 10 and an industrial backpack. Sure, they'll be quite encumbered, but not immobilized. The bulk rules in Starfinder would almost prevent people from even lifting up one end of a couch.
You get broadly better carrying capacity numbers if you multiply strength by constitution - for example, you'll get a maximum of 324 pounds for 18S/18C, and 784 pounds for 28S/28C - but you'll nerf people down in the 8-9 range for both stats. For even more realism, since carrying capacity is quadratic in size, you can use (S*C*(size^2))^(2/3), where humans are size 5. That'll get you 403 pounds for an 18/18 human, 727 pounds for 28/28, and 514/927 for a Shobhad with the same stats. 8/8/Medium is 137, 8/8/Large is 174, and 8/8/Small is 102.
Creatures aren't items - it's why the Tensile Reinforcement armor upgrade doesn't work on Androids. RAW, the problem is the opposite of what you are describing; the ally was Bulk 0, because creatures are Bulkless. In fact, they have to stay Bulkless for many rules to make sense, like Mechanics taking Saddles on their Drones, or the Survival rules for mounted stuff doing anything, because as you point out, otherwise it's fundamentally unfeasible for almost anything to carry a rider. In your situation, RAW, the Large character would need to worry about the bulk of the Medium character's gear, but not about the bulk of the Medium character.
We don't have rules for larger or smaller weapons changing bulk - Hover drones and Large PCs currently have to carry weapons sized specifically for them with the same mass, changing the weapons' densities. The rules in question are on page 168.
I agree that many rules don't make sense unless creatures are bulkless, but the rules, at least as I read them, don't say anything concrete about that. Though even if creatures are bulkless, my point would still apply to objects of human-like weights, so there's even more weirdness. Now a horse can carry a rider, but is rendered immobile when carrying a a mannequin of equal weight. A real nightmare for the fashion industry, I'm sure.
As for the rules for weapon sizes, all that they say is that different sized weapons exist. My post is about bulk, something that isn't addressed. Obviously the default assumption is that none of the statistics change, and when bulk limits are unaffected by size, that makes sense. That just leads to some really weird consequences.
What if you treat them as an unwieldy weapon?
Or better yet, build a starfinder thrower extreme mk 2, load them in it and treat them as ammo , then they only way what the starfinderthrower extreme mk2 does...
The carrying capacity rules are pretty screwed up in general. Even an average smallish untrained person (not a soldier or weightlifter or whatever) in real life can usually carry somewhere north of 150 pounds total so long as about a third of it is distributed to a backpack, not the 12 bulk max that would be indicated by the table for someone with Strength 10 and an industrial backpack. Sure, they'll be quite encumbered, but not immobilized. The bulk rules in Starfinder would almost prevent people from even lifting up one end of a couch.
The overburdened condition still allows you to move 5 feet per round, which also doesn't have a defined carry limit. You can conceivably carry 10 couches stacked on top of one another up a flight of stairs.
The carrying capacity rules are pretty screwed up in general. Even an average smallish untrained person (not a soldier or weightlifter or whatever) in real life can usually carry somewhere north of 150 pounds total so long as about a third of it is distributed to a backpack, not the 12 bulk max that would be indicated by the table for someone with Strength 10 and an industrial backpack. Sure, they'll be quite encumbered, but not immobilized. The bulk rules in Starfinder would almost prevent people from even lifting up one end of a couch.The overburdened condition still allows you to move 5 feet per round, which also doesn't have a defined carry limit. You can conceivably carry 10 couches stacked on top of one another up a flight of stairs.
Except a creature can't willingly exceed their bulk limit, so they can never intentionally overburden themselves.
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"No, no, please stop piling those on me...oh well, guess I'll head upstairs now."