Yeah yeah not another scale thread.  

Any of you familiar with my topics in the past know I've worked a lot on making scale charts for this and that. Those are easily accessed on this forum. But what can be harder is finding official scale charts and Transformers' heights in-fiction.

I've gone through a lot of computers and hard drives over the years and the fear of losing obscure information grows constantly so I finally sat down and dumped all my scale and size-related numbers and charts onto the TFWiki.

Here's a list of all the scale charts I've saved over the years from various sources, some you may have seen but at least some I'm sure have escaped the most hardcore fans-
Scale charts - Transformers Wiki

And here's a list of heights and sizes, many from those charts but also from biographies, comics and so on for those interested in the various sizes actually listed across fiction-
Official sizes and heights - Transformers Wiki

I'll be making similar pages on TFWiki in the future. So if anyone learned something about the inconsistent and fickle mistress called scale I'm glad.

 

Outstanding! I had never seen the Armada and Energon ones before, it'd be nice to see them in colour I don't really have the skill but might give it a crack this weekend.

Half of the enjoyment I get from these is seeing characters lined up together.

 

Thanks. I've updated the scale chart page to include a few more like the season 3 scale chart from Gen 1 and the Beast Wars Neo scale chart.

 

amazing. love scale, my whole collection is determined by it. loved your previous threads and love this whole project.

 

I'm a huge fanatic about scale. Keep it up! I actually might post scale questions in this thread if you don't mind.  

 

By all means go for it.

 

Super Ginrai - how tall is he in comparison to other G1 characters, like Ultra Magnus?

 

Ultra Magnus is approximately 7 meters tall.



In the Ark book scale charts it lists Super Ginrai at 15 meters. According to another member here who had some production notes for Ginrai his actual super mode height is 15 meters. So that's correct, but the chart may be incorrect about Ginrai's smaller form. The chart states he's 10 meters but the notes he had claim he's 8 meters. But it seems his Super mode is 15 meters.

 

Thank you for the answer Cobalt. It's very helpful.  

 

I'm not sure that TF: Animated scale chart from "How to draw Transformers" really lines up with the actual full series scale chart shown in the Animated Allspark Almanac.

 

It doesn't, but it doesn't really need to to qualify. The Armada video game heights don't line up with the cartoon scale charts afterall.

 

The chart showing Unicron and the other planets featured in the 86 movie is really cool. The labels could perhaps use a translating as I'm not sure which one Earth is meant to be?

 

Earth should be the last one to the right. It's no fully shown but it's definitely bigger than Cybertron. Based on the curvature of Earth it would make Cybertron either moon-sized or small planet/Mars-ish.

 

Ok so I fleshed out Earth's appearance and did the math. With Earth having a diameter of 7,917.5 miles, this scale gives Cybertron a diameter of about 3,543 miles. So Cybertron in cartoon continuity is bigger than the Moon (having a diameter of 2,159 miles) but smaller than Mars (having a diameter of 4,212 miles).

It does qualify as being a planet, though, and not just a metal moon. The smallest true planet in our solar system, Mercury, is 3,032 miles. Cybertron is bigger than Mercury.

 

Thanks for clarifying that one for me. Does anyone else get the idea that Megatron has shrank as the movies go on? It makes sense because he dwarfed Prime in 07 and after being resurrected in ROTF using "zee little one" for parts he seemed only slightly larger than Prime. Then after sustaining further injuries and changing alt modes in DOTM he's equal to Prime despite his trailer being part of his robot mode and Prime just being the cab of a truck. AOE comes along and Galvatron is the same height as Prime.

 

Size is not the true definition for a planet. Jupiter, for example, has moons as large as and larger than Mercury. We can determine that Cybertron is a planet through two methods: Firstly, it has its own satellites and does not appear to orbit another planet. Secondly, with the exception of the very special case that is Unicron, it does not appear to be in danger of colliding with any large object in its orbit and it doesn't regularly pass through any asteroid fields. (Even though we are never expressly told that it doesn't, it is highly unlikely that Shockwave's tower or any other tall structures would survive for millions of years if that were the case.) Therefore, we can presume that Cybertron has cleared its own orbit as any smaller objects would have been either collected by or cast aside by Cybertron's gravitational force. (If you recall, the second definition is why Pluto is no longer considered a planet despite having multiple moons of its own.)

 

I never intended to have a scientific debate about cosmic semantics but..

Size is still a factor in determining planet status. Planets are generally spherical as a result of their mass and gravitational binding energy. Many have criticized Cybertron's status as a planet for reasons including its visible buildings being "unrealistic" or "physically impossible" (it's fiction) and its often-portrayed irregular shape. In the first seasons of the cartoon Cybertron was portrayed as having a giant gash or chasm on one size as if it had been blown out. Under normal circumstances a planet would literally pull itself back together through its own gravity. Asteroids can tend to be irregularly shaped ovoids because they're not normally as massive as planetoids. And while moons can be as large as planets they can just as easily be a few kilometers like the tiny avoid moons or Mars.

Cybertron's appearance changes over the course of two seasons and the film, but generally it's easy to remember Cybertron as a weirdly-shaped metal moon-thing. Megatron's drunken speech about the "land of the metal moon" has also lended credence to that idea.

A similar case is Gobotron from Gobots. That is an absurdly shaped "planet".

 

I've never gone by cartoon scale. I always go by toy scale, and my preference is bigger is better, so I always go the big toys, preferably Leader-Class.