Metus regem, on 03 January 2018 - 08:53 AM, said:
I always felt the Atlas should be around 11m, still big, but not totally unreasonable.... mind you at only a 100t fully loaded feels about as right as Bethesda in Fallout 4 saying that a sack of fertilizer only weighs 4 pounds....
Take a peek at TRO 3025. Ever wondered why the Atlas's head was so big?
The most commonly mentioned height when the narrating character is not in distress or boasting, is 13.6 meters or "Just under 14 meters."
A huge head would be needed to uncomfortably seat two people inside.
So it's about right. 11 meters is just shy of the length that a T-rex is long, though.
For some reason, 12 meters long doesn't seem all that long. And yeah this isn't actually to scale. I put them side by side and nope.
But here's 5'6" to 8 meters (Catapult shunt-legged version.)
Shunt-legged Catapult.
Stilt legged catapult
Both canonically exist (with those that are expressly stated to be one or the other also able to share variants, so you could have a C1 shunt or stilt legged Catapult). The difference between them is Shunt-legged catapults are frequently used on planets or regions with flatter terrain and minimal cover. Stilted versions are preferential for mountainous terrain, and terrain with exceptionally tall obstacles such as deep forests. Both are used in city scapes, with the stilted version preferable for areas with larger barrier walls with the notion of being able to 'stand tall' and shoot over them.
The K2 is the most commonly expressed stilted Catapult. The stilted Catapult and its shunt-legged counterpart have identical armor and structure values on the legs, but the longer legs are thinner and the armor plating at any specific point is also 'thinner' as the armor is spread over the length of the legs. As such you'd have an easier time shooting through the armor into an actuator against a stilted Catapult.
The stilted Catapult is stated to be roughly 10 to 11 meters in height (depending on what you read or game you play; Mechwarrior 1 has a stilted catapult that's 11 meters; it does not feature shunted catapults). The more common shorter version is often stated to be 8 to 9 meters in height. In some cases they were more general, with the silliest comparison being "as tall as a Commando." But that wasn't so silly when I came to find out that a Commando is said to be 8.1 meters tall in the same source.
As for how tall 13.6 meter is (what I've come to accept out of the many descriptions of an Atlas's height), you can find out in game very easily.
Look at a Hunchback.
13.6 meters tall.
Wanna know something funny?
The Hunchback is one of the shortest mediums to exist, hence the Hunch and externally mounted ammunition supply (the drum on its left torso; CENTER torso if it is the 4SP as depicted in the only canonical art of a 4SP). It happens to be the same height as a certain Catapult.
The only thing shorter in the 50 to 55 ton category is a Shadowhawk 1 or 2. Here's an SHK. I should note while I generally accept this to be a 2D or 2H, it isn't expressly stated and this could be a Shadowhawk 1R, but this really doesn't look like its carrying 14 tons of armor even if it is primitive. It visually has the right equipment to be a 1R, and it is slower than molasses (60 kph).
So. Yeah. Scale fun.
Little tidbits about scale: A mech's scale is greatly affected by its structure and armor type. Endo makes mechs huge. People can't just modify a mech to have endo steel, its gotta be done by a factory during production. (Technically you can do it in Megamek but it is so difficult that even with God-modded impossibly great clones of Star Trek's Scotty, and access to a factory, you'll have more than 80% failures and in the worst case scenario it cost more than 7 Atlas K's [keep in mind an Atlas K costs 26 million cbills] just to have a 35 ton paperweight made out of few tons of endo-steel and a lot of useless equipment on a machine that doesn't run) Ferro makes things bulkier. But in general it doesn't get really bad unless it has both. Also affecting scale is whether or not it has a torso twist function; all mechs without torso twist are inherently smaller than mechs that have it. An Ebon Jaguar is a squat little **** without torso twist, for example. Catapults, Locusts, Urbanmechs, Jenners, Novas, and several others also lack twisties.
Edit: Got into the Catapult tangent because of this image, where the BT team at harebrained schemes went with the novel-inspired height for the Catapult. They couldn't make the model that small due to issues with the model (and fit a person in it but in that game that didn't matter), but they did it for the art.
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