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I bought some 6mm (1:285) modern infantry from Amazon to use on my bases and buildings but I put them in a box somewhere. Once I find them I'll put them up against the Warlord's rear hatch (which is kinda the only thing we have to scale them with) and we can see what's up.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LGM7NP0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

GW says they're 8mm scale but I just don't know about that. I've stood under an F14 so I know how huge they are but that's a two seater swing wing superiority fighter and the Thunderbolt is a single seat design based on WW2 Warhawks or ME109s, the 8mm AI Thunderbolt is MASSIVE compared to an AT titan so I really wonder.

The thing is I think we need to differentiate between 6 or 8mm scale humans and 6 or 8mm scale Space Marines. 6mm scale humans and 8mm scale Marines might be closer matches for this game because Marines are so much bigger than us.

both points is valid, but allso very confusing.

i guess this is the trouble of changing scales as GW does with their remakes.

The thunderbolt goes into space... dont remember the ME 109 being able to do that

I’m impressed, this is at .2mm resolution on a decent printer after spraying them gold. I should print an Orion for AI.


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Orion file sliced for printing tomorrow.

For epic scale stuff, I wouldn't print at more than 0.08. The difference is notable.

While very true my printer has a harder time with bridge supports at tiny resolutions.

 Fajita Fan wrote:
I bought some 6mm (1:285) modern infantry from Amazon to use on my bases and buildings but I put them in a box somewhere. Once I find them I'll put them up against the Warlord's rear hatch (which is kinda the only thing we have to scale them with) and we can see what's up.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LGM7NP0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

GW says they're 8mm scale but I just don't know about that. I've stood under an F14 so I know how huge they are but that's a two seater swing wing superiority fighter and the Thunderbolt is a single seat design based on WW2 Warhawks or ME109s, the 8mm AI Thunderbolt is MASSIVE compared to an AT titan so I really wonder.

The thing is I think we need to differentiate between 6 or 8mm scale humans and 6 or 8mm scale Space Marines. 6mm scale humans and 8mm scale Marines might be closer matches for this game because Marines are so much bigger than us.

The thing is, people don’t realise how small 40k titans are or how big actual aircraft are.

The thunderbolt is a big unit, it may look like it’s based off WW2 aircraft but in the fluff it’s 16m wingspan compared to WW2 fighters which were typically 10 give or take a metre. And it’s believable that it’s that big, look how small the canopy is relative to the rest of the aircraft.

From memory a warlord is only supposed to be 25m tall, so the wingspan of the thunderbolt should be roughly two thirds te height of a warlord.

33m to the shoulder and the crew is supposed to sit in the head. The canopy on the Thunderbolt is massive.

I must have been thinking of the reaver. So at 33m the warlord should be as tall as 2 wingspans worth of thunderbolts. I don’t have an AI warlord to check how close it is.

I meant the size of the canopy relative to the rest of the model, compare it to most WW2 planes which had notoriously cramped cockpits and you’ll realise WW2 fighters were tiny compared to a 40k thunderbolt.

I don’t own any AT kits to check the relative scale, but I feel like the thunderbolt was about right for its 16m wingspan from when I’ve held warlord in my hands previously.

Their wingspan is wider than a warhound is tall.

If the AI model is similarly scaled I don't see the problem.

God machine isn't just about size. The technology in a thunderbolt is far more basic and fragile than the tech in a titan.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
folks, any suggestions for sites selling IG infantry/vehicles proxies for base decoration? scale match is important.
whitout it these titans just looks like normal 40k dreadnoughts and knights to my eyes.
been trying to google myself but whenever i am lucky to come aross an 8mm range that is still for sale, the models dont look like anything that could pass for IG.

3d printing is out of the question.

I would go for vanguard miniatures - some really cool IG equivalents and they are perfect scale

As said above, I gather that in Titanicus scale a Marine would be 8mm while a normal trooper would be 6mm.

The old Epic Space Marine plastic infantry from the 80s is too small... but Epic minis varied a lot in scale over the years and tended to grow larger. The plastic Marine infantry in the 90s (Epic 40,000) used the old smallish models for the basic troops and Captains, but the characters like Librarians and Chaplains were bigger, and so were the Scouts.

The Chaos Marines from the Epic 40K release were also quite big and ought to fit well with the Traitor Titans in AT.

The old Imperial Guardsmen should be about the right size, ish. If you go back far enough, there are even Epic IG models with jump packs and bikes, which would be useful for keeping up with the Warhounds and Knights.

For third-party stuff, particularly vehicles, Vanguard's seems to be in the right ballpark for AT. I once bought a few not-Ork vehicles from them for Epic, but they were noticeably bigger than my old GW Epic Orks. I'd really like some of their generic trucks and things to litter around an AT street.


... One other thing to consider is what visual effect you want to achieve. Sometimes getting the scale right isn't as important as getting the feel of the model across.

There's a trick often done in animated movies and TV shows where they'll exaggerate or diminish the scale from scene to scene in order to create the right mood. Yubaba the witch in the Ghibli film Spirited Away is a good example. They deliberately made her bigger in some scenes where she's meant to be especially scary. It's not something you're meant to notice unless you actually take the time to compare scenes--it's a subliminal thing.

This is also probably why you get all those classic GW illustrations of Titans towering over city skylines. 'Realistically' speaking, they're not that big... but they're so powerful and frightening that they feel that big to anyone fighting them.

So the classic 80s Space Marine infantry, or the old Epic vehicles, might be technically too small for AT, but they'll get across the all-important feeling that this giant robot is huge and destructive.

If the Aeronautica planes really are the same scale as the AT Titans, then I wish they were smaller. It would make the Titans 'feel' bigger and more imposing, even if the scale wasn't correct. Planes are big in real life, but they don't feel like they should be that big. (Possibly because we usually picture them up in the sky where there's nothing to compare them to?)

It can work the other way too. Someone in a Necromunda magazine once pointed out that vehicles and buildings can be smaller scaled than they ought to be relative to infantry, yet look 'right'. The Rhino in 40K is a good example--it's too small compared to Marine models from the same time, but it doesn't look too small (at least to me). I have to actually hunker down and compare the size of the doors to the size of the Marines in order to register the scale difference.

Similarly, the old plastic Rhinos and Land Raiders from Epic might be smaller scaled than the infantry, but they look fine next to them.

In classic Epic the Titans were much smaller scale than the vehicles and infantry, but they still felt massive and imposing on the table--partly because big things can be smaller than they should be and still feel 'right', and partly because the classic terrain tended to be in scale with them, rather than with the infantry. When I play classic Epic it usually feels like the Titans are the right size and the infantry are exaggerated markers showing where the smaller actual troops would be.

Sorry for the waffle, but I've been thinking a bit about scale recently while trying to work out if I can turn a 40K Carnifex kit into an old-school Hierodule for AT. Holding a Rhino in its claw, obviously...

(Edited to swap the order of paragraphs so it actually makes sense...)

It’s not uncommon to use a smaller scale for aircraft in games, 1/144 ww2 planes are used for 15 mm games.

I would have been happy if AI stayed 6mm.

Dogfights occur over extremely large expanses of sky, so a small scale makes sense. Even at WW2 speeds an aircraft could cover 1 to 2 km in the space of 10 seconds.

I couldn’t find my 6mm guys, they must be in a bag...

I've snagged some pics of old (and printed) stuff alongside the AT stuff:







Now, to more detailed comparisons:

As Zenithfleet said, the regular tactical marines are simply way too small:



Side by side with IG, they're tiny. The terminators are a bit better, and the characters are mostly OK:




Then again, use "correctly sized" 6mm SMs and...




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Making comparison shots with minis in sprues is kind of complicated, so I've done the best I could:





Honestly, I'd say the look pretty much alright to me:




...but a bit more correctly proportioned 6mm predator looks just a bit better:



Now, the only "objective" measure we have: the Warlord rear hatch. This was hard to do with bases:





Without bases, though, it's pretty easy.. and I'd say, quite informative:

good images, valid points.
been looking at vanguard and their stuff is mutch cheaper then similar things i have seen on Etsy.

@FrozenDwarf:

The confusion in scales is understandable, as the designers of the miniatures did 1/4 of 40k scale, which hovers somewhere around the 28 mm standard but their media team heard them musing about "marines looking good if they'd be 8 mm tall" and used that without stopping to think that marines are not regular humans, from whom the scale is derived. As this went on the WarCom site, lots of folks erroneusly just took it at face value.

Yodhrin did some calculations here a year back and we could see that in the AT scale a regular 180 cm human miniature would be about 6.5 mm tall. Thus using 6 mm stuff is entirely fine and, indeed, a lot more accurate looking than a more obscure 8 mm would be.

Personally I use 6 mm stuff in basing quite frivolously, as the old Epic infantry stash in my bitz box doesn't seem to run out any time soon and the God-Engines look suitably majestic over them

I just measured the wingspan of a Thunderbolt model, it was a smidge under 72mm from the outer extremities of the little squares at the tips of the wings.

So if we assume the 16m "real" wingspan as written in the old AI literature, that makes these models 1/222 scale, which depending on how you define 8mm is pretty much right. It's roughly the equivalent of a person who is 1.78m to the eyes being 8mm to the eyes.

Old school Epic was horribly inconsistent in scale. Some infantry models were as short as 5mm, others were as big as 8mm, and the vehicles were completely skewed where you could clearly see you wouldn't fit a person within the confines of the vehicle.

For what it's worth, I just bought the Eavy Bommers which has a grot model as the gunner. The grot looks pretty cool and is bigger than I thought he would be.

Printed an Orion and four more grav tanks today, they’re sprayed gold and curing outside.

 Albertorius wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 Sherrypie wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
folks, any suggestions for sites selling IG infantry/vehicles proxies for base decoration? scale match is important.
whitout it these titans just looks like normal 40k dreadnoughts and knights to my eyes.
been trying to google myself but whenever i am lucky to come aross an 8mm range that is still for sale, the models dont look like anything that could pass for IG.

3d printing is out of the question.

You're looking at a wrong scale, since AT isn't 8 mm but heroic 6 mm. Vanguard does pretty good metal guardsmen, if Ebaying old Epic stuff isn't doing it for you.

gw long time ago confirmed AT is 8mm scale just as AI is, why should i then not search for 8mm figs?

Mostly because when comparing the actual AT titans with the old Epic infantry the doors and such are exactly in-scale.

I've never understood while people take hatch size to mean anything.

Hatches can be different sizes, and especially on military vehicles they aren't necessarily sized for comfortable entry.

The hatch inside the head of Forge World titans is small enough that you'd probably be crawling through it, and there's plenty of examples of real world military vehicles with hatches that you need to bend over or crawl to get through.

Because that Warlord, like other 40k scale vehicles, is an approximation. In the books the head of a Warlord is more like the bridge of a ship with the princeps sitting between and above two other crew along with a separate weapons locker the moderati had to get up to access. Enemy skitarri stormed the head of a Warlord in Titanicus.

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Because that Warlord, like other 40k scale vehicles, is an approximation. In the books the head of a Warlord is more like the bridge of a ship with the princeps sitting between and above two other crew along with a separate weapons locker the moderati had to get up to access. Enemy skitarri stormed the head of a Warlord in Titanicus.

Sure, but that wasn't my point. My point was hatches don't have to be tall enough for an upright person to comfortably walk through, especially on military vehicles, ease of entry/exit is not a high priority. Making a big door creates a structurally weak point, and in a military vehicle where the primary concern is engines/armaments/armour/etc you aren't going to shift critical components just so someone doesn't have to bend over when entering and exiting the vehicle.







Or maybe the Warlord is so absurd that the doors are 14 feet tall. Either way door size seems like a crazy way to justify scale. You just have to go visit a few different houses to see how much variation there can be in door sizes even in cases where comfort is the main concern.

I know earlier on I used canopy size to justify the scale of the Thunderbolt, but that was primarily comparing to WW2 fighters which have notoriously tight cockpits.

sad thing is, we wont get any conclusion to this discussion before GW makes some infantry models for this scale, aka epic re release.

on a side note, just noticed that the 76$ terrain kit from FW has been split up in smaller 19$ kits.

Just starter painting the rest of my titans...Another warlord, reaver and two more dogs will finish off my griffons only to be complemented by some weapon kits down the line.

Initially I was gonna paint these as traitors to have two armies to go at it but changed my mind and decided to complete the one army. Perhaps ill go ahead and do a second army sometime in the future but that depends on the lottery

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Because that Warlord, like other 40k scale vehicles, is an approximation. In the books the head of a Warlord is more like the bridge of a ship with the princeps sitting between and above two other crew along with a separate weapons locker the moderati had to get up to access. Enemy skitarri stormed the head of a Warlord in Titanicus.

Sure, but that wasn't my point. My point was hatches don't have to be tall enough for an upright person to comfortably walk through, especially on military vehicles, ease of entry/exit is not a high priority. Making a big door creates a structurally weak point, and in a military vehicle where the primary concern is engines/armaments/armour/etc you aren't going to shift critical components just so someone doesn't have to bend over when entering and exiting the vehicle.







Or maybe the Warlord is so absurd that the doors are 14 feet tall. Either way door size seems like a crazy way to justify scale. You just have to go visit a few different houses to see how much variation there can be in door sizes even in cases where comfort is the main concern.

I know earlier on I used canopy size to justify the scale of the Thunderbolt, but that was primarily comparing to WW2 fighters which have notoriously tight cockpits.

All well and good, but you'll also notice there's a buttons panel there, and railings:




And both are where you would expect them to be if they were for... well, people (more or less chest-high).


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Plus, we also kind of know how big they're supposed to be in 40k... about yay big:



Which means that my 3d printed cadian lieutenant is a tad too small (assuming that the princeps is about as big as a cadian, here, because I don't really know), but it already is a tad smaller than the regular plastic Epic IG, so I'd say that's good. The marine, OTOH, is exactly as it should be: way bigger than that princeps.

EDIT: actually... seeing where the buttons and the railings go compared with the princeps I'd say it is already a tad too big, but well, it might just be the base.

How tall is your 3D printed guardsman? Also how tall is the princeps (remembering FW use a less heroic scale than GW proper, I have some DKOK and they're a lot smaller than Cadians).

From the pictures in your most recent post, I'd assume your red guardsman model is about one head too short. The princep model looks roughly equal in height to the hatch (excluding the bottom sill of the hatch), and if you removed the base his elbow would be button height. Your red guardsman if you removed the base the buttons look to be more like shoulder if not head height, and he's about 1 head short relative to the height of the hatch (again, ignoring the sill height, which isn't too far off your base height).

If your red guardsman is 6mm scale with GW-like proportions, adding 1 head height will put him at about 7.5mm scale (as GW hero scale models are around or under 4.5 heads tall).

If that's right and your guardsman is printed at 6mm scale, I'd say the Warlord is pretty close to 8mm scale.

The Thunderbolt is also about 8mm scale based on my measurements, so it all seems pretty close scale wise. I've found in the past FW have been a lot better than GW proper at nailing proportions.

The red guardsman is a bit less than 7 mm to the top of the sword, so I'd say it's a bit shy of 6mm to the top of the hat.

I'm not exactly sure of the size of that princeps, though.

That said, I personally feel that the 6mm Epic stuff scales pretty well with the current AT stuff, or at the very least well enough for me to not mind it too much.

I might try to print some tanks and infantry to the assumed "8mm" scale to see how they look, though.

The different between 8mm and 6mm isn’t so bad that you couldn’t use 6mm infantry with 8mm titans I don’t think.

Old epic ranges from about 4.5mm to 7mm, and the vehicles often felt closer to 3 to 4mm scale.

I think as long as the titans are all the same scale, vehicles all the same scale, infantry all the same scale and aircraft all the same scale it doesn’t matter too much if those scales are different between each other.

I mentioned somewhere previously that I’d be happy with smaller scale AI stuff as it makes sense to shrink aircraft scale rather than going 1:1 with all the ground forces.

Personally I would have preferred that AI was in as smaller scale too. The current models are very pretty, yes... but also very cumbersome on the hexmap. The bombers are simply too big to fit comfortably inside the hexes and spill all over the place.

Not bad for a fast print and cheap gold spray paint.