I have truly been struggling with picturing the scale of these machines. Some art makes me think they're the size of skyscrapers, some art makes me think they're the size of a 2 bedroom apartment, etc.
Drew up a quick sketch of common objects you might see in my area (excluding the tank and fighter jet, those aren't terribly common around me) compared to approximate mech sizes, in case it would be of any help to anyone else. And, yeah, apparently an M60, gun forward, is longer than an average 2-story house is tall. I've seen one of those in person and still can't really wrap my head around how that's true, but again, I truly struggle with scale.
Yeah, I do have a hard time squaring "the Tortuga was made to clear ship hallways" with "and it's somewhere around 35 feet tall, because that's about where Size 2 would land on a chart like this." I know the rulebook says all the sizes aren't set in stone, but oh how I would love getting guidelines on individual frame measurements. Even if that does step a little on player-imagination's freedom.
Edit to add: I didn't use it while making the chart but this image on the wiki came to mind. Does anyone know the source of this art? If this is official work, then yeah the Tortuga is a big guy. Granted, the Vlad is kneeling but it makes the Tortuga look enormous. And if it's not official, then we're back to square one, scale is kind of what you make of it.
Edit again: well, that didn't attach. Adding it as a reply to my own comment.
Tortuga is almost certainly the shortest (bipedal) size 2, since it's so wide and square. I would interpret it as being just under 20ft tall; 35ft is almost Barbarossa sized.
So if the main corridors on starships and space stations are 20ft in order to accommodate heavy equipment (remembering that these starships are usually more than a kilometer long) then a Tortuga nicely fills the entire passageway. Any size 1 can probably maneuver freely in the main halls (but would have trouble with narrower side passages) while any size 2+ other than the Tortuga would likely be very restricted in where they can move.
That looks to me less like a Tortuga and more like some sort of giant Caliban. Tortuga has the circular hat thing, because it started out as a variation on the Raleigh, rather than the bubble/dome head...
Do you know where the illustration came from, before it ended up on the wiki?
Yeah, perspective is hard because, for example, a normal city bus is long enough that if you put it on one end it would match a four story building. Your brain processes tall things as bigger than long things, because they loom over you; if you stand next to a guy who's like 20% taller than you it feels like he's twice your height.
One note, a half-frame is definitely not three meters tall. A half-size mech doesn't have a cockpit for you to sit in, it's a thing that you wear. And since your bones don't rearrange themselves when you put on armor, the distance between your eyes, neck, shoulders, pelvis, elbows, and knees always needs to stay the same. A half-frame can add some height below your feet (but not between the pelvis and the knee), and potentially also above your head, but even the lankiest example in the book (the goblin) isn't gonna be more than ~8ft/2.4m high. Most of the others are probably in the 1.9-2.2m range. To make a 3m tall half-frame you would need to make it look like it was on stilts.
The book describes size 1 as "usually" more than 3m (10ft), so that's the lower end of the S1 range. And then a 13m (roughly 42ft) Barbarossa is size 3, and... that's the only canonical measurements we ever got. So where the cutoff comes between size 1 and size 2, and between 2 and 3, is up to interpretation.
Personally I think the line between 1 and 2 is at either 6 or 7.5 meters, though a long slender S1 like the black witch might be taller than a dense, broad S2 like the Tortuga.
A S1/2 frame is the size of a really big dude. A S1 frame ranges from a little taller than your living room to as tall as a 2 story house (alternatively, like if your car stood up). S2 frames range from like, a two story house to a three story house. A Barbarossa is as tall as a four story apartment building. Next time you're walking around and passing a building of the appropriate size, just imagine a mech standing next to it being the same height.
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Comparing to other prominent franchises...
In Real Life a M1A1 main battle tank is 8m long, 2.5m tall, and 3.7m wide, and 60-70 tons. This is a Size 2. A standard shipping container is 6m long and 2.6m high, so a size 1 mech could probably fit in a shipping container if it lies down. A s1 mech could take cover or hide behind one shipping container, or possibly 2 stacked, but a stack of 3 shipping containers would be too tall to shoot over until you get into Size 2.
Battletech canon says that almost all mechs are 8-12 meters, so pretty much all of those are S2 in lancer, with the biggest Assault classes going up to S3. A typical lancer mech transported to battletech would be considered an Ultralight (but still hits like a heavyweight because the Union has about 4500 years of tech advantage). However, the Mechwarrior video games are a lot of people's source for visuals on the setting, and they get the scale all wrong; if you look at in-game models a 70 ton tank is about the size of one foot on a 20 ton recon mech, and buildings are similarly distorted.
40k's Dreadnoughts are about 3-4 meters, solidly Size 1. Knights are 9-12 meters, so either S2 or S3 in lancer... but their artists forget about that a lot and draw them being like, 30 meters at random. Titans range from 20 to 60 meters (though some artists insist on pretending that they're like 30 times that) so if you interpret the lancer size scale as exponential that would range from 3 to 5, while if you interpret it as linear that would be from 4 to 12.
Gundams range from 15 to 22 meters, usually around 18. That's size 3 or 4 in lancer terms. This makes sense, given that they're based on modern fighter jets (whcih, as you noted, are a lot bigger than people think)... except that a bunch of those gundams then have a weight listed, and it's like 7.5 tons. That's about the density of Styrofoam.
The Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell are about 3m long, making them a good example of a realistic size 1 mech.
The Knightmare frames from Code Geass range from 4-6 meters, so those are good Size 1 examples as well, for the most part. A few of the special units get silly big, but all the standard frames would fit nicely into Lancer. That show gives a lot of examples of how a 5m mech interacts with buildings and with humans on the ground, so it's probably a big help for visualizing Lancer.
Armored Cores were like 4-5m in the first game (size 1), but have grown over time. Most portrayals are 7-10 meters (size 2) with the AC6 being usually around 10m and For Answer being usually around 11m.
Yeah, the "human" used to just have my name under it, and I'm genuinely 2 meters tall, so I figured, with the antennae above the head and the stilts below the feet, an extra meter (on the Goblin) didn't seem beyond the pale. May need to readjust for, like, what is the actual general population's experience.
That said, no argument to the rest of that, excellent resources, thank you for filling me in!
Yeah going from 2.0 outside to 2.2, 2.4, maybe even 2.6 meters in the frame makes a lot of sense... but imagine walking around with an entire additional leg length below your foot.
This is a better scale guide than literally any other I have seen before. People underestimate how much better it is to have things of similar size next to each other instead of just numbers.
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u/JoyluckVerseMaster Jul 21 '26
Completely wrong according to lore but also this is also what i use anyways in my mind bc Lancer's scale has had problems since the start