Except it's not just those pics. They weren't cherry picked, they were just the first two screencaps I ran across. Even though the show had tons of errors and inconsistencies, Astrotrain's bot mode isn't one of them. Shuttle mode is another matter...










As Emgo says, it's your toy, do what you want. But I can't think of a time when he was ever shown a different size than a seeker or the other triple changers. Now the shuttle mode is all over the place, but to me that says it was the alt mode that resizes, not the bot mode. Not that that's unheard of - Megatron seems to be human or transformer sized at will, and Cyclonus did it too. Everybody calls Hoist riding in Huffer an animation error, but given that Bumblebee rode in Wheeljack in the first episode, I tend to think mass shifting alt modes is more or less an official, if unexplored thing. At the end of the day, I prefer to scale around bot mode (alt mode scaling is an exercise in futility) so I'm hoping my triple changers and seekers are the same size.

 

Ya know, I'd wondered where NA referenced their forearms from.

Your first two pics show him bigger than Megatron and Starscream..

 

You know, that may explain POTP starscream. Yuck.

That only makes sense if his wings are different sizes and Thrust is smaller than Starscream. It's perspective - objects in the foreground are drawn bigger. Take a look at his left wingtip - it's right beside Starscream's shoulder, and a the same height. Also, you can see Starscream's wingtips above and behind his. That only works if his flat wing is lower than the top of Starscream's slanted wings. In the second picture, Megatron is bending over to grab him and Blitzwing (who are both the same size as the Starscream the whole epsisode). Makes perfect sense if Megatron's a little taller, doesn't work otherwise.

 

Wingtips? Look at the heads:

"Wingtips" 

 

You know... I’m sure other fandoms argue more about story points or continuity or character arcs than we do... but I bet nobody, NOBODY has the same kind of spirited, neverending debates about size and scale that we Tranformers fans do.  

(Not saying that as a bad thing... I engage in scale arguments as much as anyone. I just think that it’s a funny peculiarly of our fandom.)

 

Check out the red line - same slant. That's not a height difference, it's perspective. The green circle shows his wingtip the same height as Starscream's shoulder. The part in the red circle wouldn't show at all if Astrotrain was bigger.



Here's the real life Hasbro version. No, Thundercracker isn't taller than Starscream or Skywarp, even if I can draw a slanted line above their heads.










I need seeker sized triple changers to pull this off for real.

 

The whole image features illustration errors, because it was drawn by humans for quick completion, not technical accuracy. They're meant to be 'read' as standing side by side, when technically one would have to stand in front of the next in order for their wings to overlap as drawn.

Not saying you're wrong, or that there is any right. In the realm of G1 scale charts and screenshots, it's hard to find two of the same.

Personally, I scale my figures mostly based on their real world alts, which was why I said big alts get big bots.

 

I expect them to scale by alt in the sense that a bigger alt generally means a bigger bot but I don't go by alt scale because, if we did, the seekers would tower over Optimus, and Astrotrain would tower over them.

As far as Astrotrain vs Starscream, it's whatever. As long as he's not smaller than Screamer and isn't like ginormous next to him either, then I'm good. This figure looks fine scalewise for a Legends+ collection though he should be alright in a regular legends collection as well. It's all pretty much whatever.

 

And Silverbolt would absolutely tower over most any other jet-former---except for Octane, who'd blow them all away by being a 747. (yes, a two-engined 747, but he's totally a 747).

Astrotrain and Octane should both be pretty darn big, if using alt-mode for size.

 

Is why I think the CHUG deluxe guys work pretty well with legends too.

 

Yeah, I thought about alt mode scaling, but there are SOOO many cases where it consistently doesn't work - Battlechargers, Cosmos, Powerglide, really all the mini bots, every combiner team, Inferno / Grapple, Reflector/Soundwave/Megatron... That way lies madness.

Except for a few exceptions - Dinobots, Titans, Insecticons, show bot mode scaling is fairly consistent. And no, I'm not counting blatant errors stuff like Frumble eye to eye with Thrust.

 

Yep, I may even use Siege Astro, if the size measures right. He's near a big deluxe.

 

Skylynx is roughly the size of Predaking. So Blastoff should be that big, as should Astrotrain...

 

That shows him as barely a head taller than Starsceam. And it shows Starscream as taller than Thrust, which no one considers cannon. Splitting scale-hairs when they're THIS CLOSE is a great way to go bald.

 

Yeah; it is funny the original designers in the eighties choose a truck as the core rather than the space shuttle. Also why brown?
It's best not to think too hard about it really; like no one recognizing Clark Kent is Superman.

 

blastoff says hi. As do a number of other bots such as seaspray. they all send their well-wishes.

 

I have a mild face blindness - I'm not completely unable to learn faces but it takes me meeting a person a few times and little things like hairstyles and glasses can throw it off so that I can't recognize people. If a movie has more than one character who look even a little similar, I often can't tell the two apart. So when people joke about Superman's disguise, I'm always like, it'd totally work on me - I would never figure out that Clark Kent was Superman. And, just to go even further off topic, I've always had trouble with names too - I can never remember people's names OR faces.

 

A friend of mine was discussing the minutia of high end flashlights and linked me to a forum for them. A whole forum, for flashlights. And they were having heated debates about brightness and build quality.

I saw a person on twitter talking about a fountain pen forum, where people were debating the best angle to hold the pen.

 

I need to know these things...

 

People think TF fans obsess over scale? Over at the model train forums they discuss the scale thickness of the paint. (As in, if you have a 1/160 scale model, that then has a layer of paint all over it---will that enlarge it to make it 1/159 overall? Should small parts be intentionally molded undersized to account for that?)