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It is well known among the community that the height of Titans is somewhat inconsistent - ranging from 20-30 metres to walking mountains. Their size is actually given explicitly in the very first representation of Titans, which is 1988's Adeptus Titanicus. Quoting from page 5:

Titans are immense fighting machines, mechanical humanoid warriors up to 100 feet tall.
...
Battle Titans stand between 40 and 80 feet tall.
...
Emperor Titans are taller - some 70 to 100 feet tall - and considerably bulkier.

Essentially, Titans were roughly of a scale with mechs from BattleTech, although a bit larger - which is not surprising, as it was probably intended as a competitor. Studying the artwork in the book, it is consistent with this description. The cover art is perhaps arguably not completely accurate, but it is difficult to tell - and the discrepancy (if any) is not to the extent of later walking mountains. Studying later rulebooks, they are quite consistent with the sizes given above - Warlords perhaps grew a bit, but that is all. Few novels talk explicitly about Titan sizes, but I would argue that the plot of Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah requires that the Imperator Titan is a lot bigger than 30 metres (it is a great book too, you should read it). It is thus my conjecture that the inconsistency in sizes snuck in through artwork, including video games.

Space Marine 2nd Edition has an image that shows a Warlord in the background that looks too large compared to the surrounding buildings. The other drawings in that book show Titans in scale with those of 1988's Titanicus, so I do not think this is the source of inconsistency.

My current working hypothesis is that enormous Titans were introduced through the Titan Legions covert art from 1994. This is such a powerful image that it probably influenced the imagination of contemporary viewers, and more people probably saw that artwork than ever read the rulebook. I would be very interested if someone knows of a major piece of artwork from before 1994 that shows similarly large Titans. I would be especially interested if people can point to writing that has Titans out of scale with the rulebooks.

Regarding models, the story is not so complicated. The 1988 models were about as tall as the six/seven story buildings included in the box, which is what one would expect from a 40-80 feet robot. Later models in the Epic series were fairly consistent, and so are the modern Titanicus models (actually they are about twice the height of the 80s/90s ones, because the scale of Epic was always wonky, but we are clearly not talking about a kilometer-tall Titan here).

One of my earliest impressions is a picture of a Reaver Titan standing over some ruins, and the scale looked exagerrated even then. This is from the Titan Legions box though, which is later on in development. ('95ish?)

Even going back to Adeptus Titanicus, the art varied wildly.

I’ve got the rulebook upstairs, and Codex Titanicus. Can’t go get photos to demonstrate right now as I’m dog sitting, and the Nephloof is snoozing on the sofa.

Hopefully I’ll remember to provide tomorrow!

Why just Titans? Even most tanks have a wobbly sense of scale over the years. A few (like the classic Rhino) have lasted the test of time, but some others have changed a lot. Esp between different game formats (epic to 40K).

Buildings are also way out of scale - we have fortresses and bunkers the size of garden sheds that we fight over.

Throw on top the fact that most BL books are actually really bad at elaborating description of things. Because they are designed as a companion work to models they are a little light on detailing because an author doesn't want to flesh out the exact look of a thing if the next model changes the look (if it even has a model at the time of writing).


So things like titans end up very much within the imagination of the reader and that can vary a lot. Throw on top art and models and such and yeah you can get a wild variation in interpretations. Even something like the concept of a "city block" or "Skyscraper" can change loads considering that 40K is 40odd years old now and the average skyscraper is much taller now.


Titans evoke a feeling of titanic scale and massive structure. The fact that things like the Imperator have a chapel/cathedral and towers upon its back further leans into just trying to sell how big they are. Esp when they are then aimed to go up against things like Greater Demons which also have a huge variety of sizes and scales.


Don't forget that we don't really have real world titans. So people have very little real world sense to relate to them.


Finally 40K is a setting built from many viewpoints over many decades. There's no one great lore-master (with OCD) who has a perfect grasp of all the ins and outs of the setting; who wrote all specifics down in exacting detail. It's a messy conglomeration of authors, artists, sculptors and imaginations all building on the previous and also imposing their own impressions and ideals on the setting.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Even going back to Adeptus Titanicus, the art varied wildly.

I skimmed through the 1988 AT rulebook and the 1991 Space Marine rulebook, and I only found a single image with significantly inconsistent scale (linked in the original post), which may just be an error due to poor perspective. I think the inconsistency arrived later. The one exception is the cover art itself, which does show Titans as a bit too big.

Overread wrote:Why just Titans? Even most tanks have a wobbly sense of scale over the years. A few (like the classic Rhino) have lasted the test of time, but some others have changed a lot. Esp between different game formats (epic to 40K).

Good question. I will argue that while the size of a Rhino is never made clear and probably varies a lot in different art, let alone models, there is still the idea that it is roughly a bit bigger than a real-world tank, and similarly for most other vehicles. I do not know of any renditions that show a Rhino as being the size of an apartment block. In contrast, Titans vary widely, from the 50-100 feet you find in pretty much every rulebook, to skyscraper-sized behemoths in drawings and video games. What is interesting is also that this latter size, which is wrong according to every rulebook I can find, is the dominant one in people's imagination. I find that quite interesting. The precise size of a Land Raider is less interesting, because most interpretations are pretty close.

Overread wrote:
Titans evoke a feeling of titanic scale and massive structure. The fact that things like the Imperator have a chapel/cathedral and towers upon its back further leans into just trying to sell how big they are.

While Emperor Titans were mentioned by name in 1988, to my knowledge the walking cathedrals did not appear until 1994's Titan Legions. My working theory is that this is when Titans grew in people's imagination - partially because that walking cathedral design is a bit silly for the given height. (Of course, one could perhaps argue that the Emperor Titans of 1988 are not the Imperator Titans of 1994 - maybe I'll have to read the Titan Legions rulebook to see if they make a distinction.)

Overread wrote:Finally 40K is a setting built from many viewpoints over many decades. There's no one great lore-master (with OCD) who has a perfect grasp of all the ins and outs of the setting; who wrote all specifics down in exacting detail. It's a messy conglomeration of authors, artists, sculptors and imaginations all building on the previous and also imposing their own impressions and ideals on the setting.

Titans did start out with fairly precisely given dimensions, and my research so far shows that they did stick to the original size for at least a couple of years, so I think it is interesting from a historical point of view to pinpoint exactly when the transition happened, and what the cause might be.

It was when black library started letting external writers invent stuff that their internal writers hadn't created.

Virtually all the exaggerated crap about marines and titans comes from some horrible bl novel just not knowing or caring about existing information.

The current forge World titans all use the same height scale (in metres rather than feet) that the titans have always had since the 80s.

The games use consistent information, it's pretty much just fee for service pulp novels that cause issues.

 Hellebore wrote:
It was when black library started letting external writers invent stuff that their internal writers hadn't created.

Virtually all the exaggerated crap about marines and titans comes from some horrible bl novel just not knowing or caring about existing information.

Can you name sources for Titans specifically? I am not aware of any Black Library novel containing Titans that predates 1994's Titan Legions, which is my current hypothesis as to where outsized Titans first appeared. The Titanicus book is from 2008, for example, and I recall its rendition of Titans being fairly in line with the original sizes.

I'm talking about numbers rather than images.

Mark Gibbons did a reaver that looks out of scale:
https://artwork.40k.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Reaver-Titan.jpg


I would argue that the front of titan legions isn't out of scale at all. The shadowsword at the foot of the imperator is about the length of its shin. In total the imperator is about 3x its shin high. Shadowswords are 13.5 metres long. Which makes the imperator 40 metres tall in that picture, perfectly in scale.

Dan Abbett wrote that titan comic which had Kev walker covers showing it striding past mountain tops and ladders on the gun that make it far too large.
https://artwork.40k.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Titan.jpg

He did it again in his inquisitor books with over sized titans. He has a bad habit of retconing 40k with his own ideas.



I don't put any stock in art for accuracy because you'd have to claim that humans in 40k have abnormal faces and body proportions because the art in rogue trader was terrible...

Or that space marines are absolutely deformed in order to have the proportions of Karl kopinskis space marine:
https://artwork.40k.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Crimson-Fists.jpg


I only go with written numbers because they can't be interpreted or misunderstood.

And usually it's a bl author that used the wrong ones.

I remember that Mark Gibbons reaver for sure - it looks several hundreds of metres tall, at the very least. Do you know when it was first published?

My argument for why Titan Legions is out of scale is mostly due to the soldiers running out of the foot bastions (also a cool concept that doesn't work for a 30 metre Titan). That makes the Titan at least 100 meters tall.

The Abnett comic shows a Lucius-pattern Titan, which I think is something that came roughly at the same time as Epic 40000 in 1997. If we accept that the Titan Legions box art is actually in-scale, then it may well be that Abnett (or Abnett-related artwork) is the cause. Quickly going over the comic book itself, the scale seems to mostly be pretty fine (although individual drawings sometimes have perspective errors, e.g. the very last image of the first issue implies a ridiculously oversized kilometer-tall Titan).

 sigkill wrote:


My argument for why Titan Legions is out of scale is mostly due to the soldiers running out of the foot bastions (also a cool concept that doesn't work for a 30 metre Titan). That makes the Titan at least 100 meters tall.

I don't think that foot bastions automatically rule out a 30-metre-ish titan - 30 metres is a pretty much a modern, 10-story office building, and a good third of the Imperator is made of it's lower legs. There's easily space for a 3-4 level bastion in there, as they'll probably don't have exactly lofty ceilings in there.You could almost stack two of the "Imperial Bastion" terrain pieces in there, without going into how much wider than that the legs are. If you fudge it a bit, maybe by saying the 30m is up to the titan's head, discounting the church on the back, it's entirely feasible.

Titans are stuck between two mutually exclusive ideas. The first one is being conservatively sized so GW can sell miniatures about the damn things.

The other being absurdly oversized because Bigger is Cooler and 40k runs on the rule of cool.

Based on the original damage card, there were 6 stands of infantry per leg. Pretty easy to fit 30 guys in a relatively small room, let alone a multi-storey leg structure

 Tyran wrote:
Titans are stuck between two mutually exclusive ideas. The first one is being conservatively sized so GW can sell miniatures about the damn things.

Yep and even in Epic/titan Legions the models still have to reach some sense of sane size for the table.
Even if you could put an Imperator down the size of a 40K Warlord how many are going to build enough smaller models or have table big enough to field that kind of monster etc....


So yep the model limit I suspect is why some larger things have become a little smaller. However the reverse has also been true too. Look at the 1st generation Hive Tyrant, its utterly tiny compared to the 3rd edition and 4th edition (which we still have today) models. As GW's model technology improved some things got larger - heck we are steadily seeing a lot of the pit-ponies most fantasy factions rode around on, being replaced with modern horse sized equine mounts (or equivalent fantasy monsters)

 Overread wrote:
So yep the model limit I suspect is why some larger things have become a little smaller.

Which things have become smaller? I see only things becoming larger over time.

I am also not sure about the idea that 40k is about "big things". While The Imperium as a whole is of course characterised as impossibly large ever since Rogue Trader, the objects within the Imperium (ships, thanks, Titans) are not generally represented as particularly oversized compared to other fictional universes, or even compared to the real world - we have industrial mobile machines that are larger than 40k Titans. Sure, Imperium warships are big (I think a battleship is considered 12km in length), but not extremely so.

Moving outside a pure textual reading, I also find that the dystopian atmosphere of the Imperium is reinforced when it consists of reasonably human-scale things, but many of them, and grow the horror and dysfunction from the sheer scale and age of the organisation. 40k warships have entire social castes inside of them where people live for generations without leaving the ship, but that is not because the ship is so large that it is impossible to leave, it is because the social dynamics are so oppressive that you cannot.

A 12km battleship is absurdly big.

FFS a 6km battleship was already absurdly big.

I question the need of having space ships with more internal volume that the entirety of New York City.

 Flinty wrote:
Based on the original damage card, there were 6 stands of infantry per leg. Pretty easy to fit 30 guys in a relatively small room, let alone a multi-storey leg structure

Yes it's the height of a baneblades length which is 13 metres. Which is a 3 storey building. The Gorgon is the same size and carried 50 troops. But it's not a 3 dimensional cylinder so the 3 storey shin of an imperator can hold a lot more than 50 troops. Especially as at it's base it's almost the width of the shadowsword.

Imo all this says is that people are bad at judging vertical scale. This picture has an imperator at 40 odd metres, making it shorter than an Olympic swimming pool is long. Flat on the ground that doesn't seem large, but vertically it's huge.

 sigkill wrote:

Which things have become smaller? I see only things becoming larger over time.

The one that comes to mind is the 40k Monolith. The recent kit is a smaller vehicle than the 3rd ed one.

In Epic the 3rd ed plastic Land Raiders were bigger than the later metal ones, I think.

 Tyran wrote:
A 12km battleship is absurdly big.

FFS a 6km battleship was already absurdly big.

I question the need of having space ships with more internal volume that the entirety of New York City.

Because it carries a lot of guns and armour, and therefore the engines, warp drive and Gellar field equipment also need to be quite large?


Then there are consumables. For example, Edinburghbis a relatively small city at about 350,000 population, and its primary water supply is about 70bn litres. I think this is A cube about 400m or so per side. Would that be enough reserves for a dodgy recycling system that might have to sustain the crew for decades on a mid jump?

Based on more half-assed maths and WW2 stats for supplies, the same population would need 450 tonnes of food per day. That’s a cube another couple of hundred metres a side. Then air conditioning fans, pumps, arms and armaments, shuttles, attack craft, enough volume to allow people (including marines and ogryns) to move about freely, eat, sleep, recreate, and work. It really adds up.

Also Imperial ships are statements as well as methods of conveyance.

Sure you could have a sleek ergonomic vessel, or you could have a kilometers long behemoth with a giant bird sculpted to the front with massive arches and spires with a cannon half the size of the ship strapped to the front.

 Flinty wrote:
Based on more half-assed maths and WW2 stats for supplies, the same population would need 450 tonnes of food per day. That’s a cube another couple of hundred metres a side.

I would check that math, 450 tonnes of food, assuming it is all bread with a density of 250kg/m³, would be a cube 12.165 meters per side.
It is an utterly irrelevant figure in a multi-km ship.

Do you have a point that we have no idea how much space the engines and gellar field and guns occupy. But people?
People don't need much, a modern submarine carries 150 people in a 10-15 thousand cubic meters package. So lets simplify and say each human gets a 100 cubic meters.

A 12km battleship is around 40-50 billion cubic meters. And if we assume 50% of it is dedicated to engine, weapons and other miscellaneous machinery, the other 50% could still hold up to 200-250 million people. So we halve that again for extra rations, equipment, etc. That still leaves us with around a hundred million.

Does the lore justify individual ships carrying a medium to large sized country in crew? Maybe for Orks and Tyranids but Imperial Navy?

Even the smaller 6km battleships should be carrying a dozen or more million people in crew, basically a space capable large city.

This is not really related to the question of titan sizes, but one argument in favour of large spaceships is due to the rarity of navigators. If you need one navigator for a 200m yacht and one navigator for a 12km bulk freighter, then the latter is more efficient use of available resources. As others mentioned above, a big ship could likely also pack more powerful Gellar fields, which is useful if the threat of a warp breach is otherwise independent of ship size (which is conjecture).

I'd also caution against scaling up crew sizes as proportional to volume. HMS Victory had a displacement of around 3500 tons and a crew of 800. USS Missouri had a displacement of 58000 tons and about 3000 crew members. Emma Maersk has a displacement of 170000 tons and a crew of 13. Obviously the latter is not a warship, but the point is that different ship designs imply different crew needs. A 12km battleship can obviously fit a huge crew, but it does not need to be the tens of millions it could theoretically fit. I think the food argument is not so important - with sufficient energy you can re-constitute food from whatever matter you have available, and if there is one thing 40k shares with most sci-fi universes, it is that reactors are powerful enough that you basically always have sufficient energy for whatever you want.

That last point is actually how I mentally justify that 40m Titans are "God-machines" and "capable of conquering a world". It's not their size that is particularly impressive, but their density. A Titan packs more defensive and offensive power into a single location than any other land-based technology in the 40k universe, and its reactor has a power density only matched by nontrivial warships. There are probably other entities in the Imperium that could (and do!) build 40m tall machines, but without plasma reactors, void shields, and volcano cannons, they are not even remotely similar to the power of Titans.

Interestingly, in one of these old rulebooks I found a mention that millions of Warlord Titans had been built. That might make them more numerous than Space Marines, which is a bit weird.

It doesn't need to have an insane number of crew until you factor in that the reloading on the main guns is done by teams of people literally pulling the guns back into position to fire.

 Tyran wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Based on more half-assed maths and WW2 stats for supplies, the same population would need 450 tonnes of food per day. That’s a cube another couple of hundred metres a side.

I would check that math, 450 tonnes of food, assuming it is all bread with a density of 250kg/m³, would be a cube 12.165 meters per side.
It is an utterly irrelevant figure in a multi-km ship.

Apologies, I missed the 10 year supply step to match the water assumption

Titans are much cooler if they are 'small' enough to actually be able to take cover behind large buildings IMO.

'Moderati; get me a location of the enemy engine!'
'My Princeps, it's over there clearly visible due to being too large to be obscured by anything less then mountains'
'Ah yes. A cunning ambush...'

TBF buildings in 40k can be just as crazy big.

Ain't they can? Titans already small enought, you forget that buildings in imperial city also not small 500m building is pretty common for hive world or industrial. And we even can read about titans duels in city with hiding behind building in HH, iirc it's in the Calth book

Also in 1st ed Titans were carrying 40k weapons (autocannon, lascannon, as well as the larger defence lasers and macro cannon from the rogue trader rulebook).

Yeah but back then GW commonly used a single name for the same weapon at different scales. A lascannon was the common name for all laser cannon weapons.

Just as the term autocannon is a generic term in the real world for a large range of weapons.

It didn't last long though, they started creating bespoke names for every tiny version of weapons after that point.

GW's early weapon designations did cover a range, but there was some variation available at the larger end.

The original Space Marine had Volcano Cannon, laser blasters and laser burners as titan grade laser weapons, and quake cannon as a titan grade solid projectile weapon.

RT did have autocannon covering up to tank armament, but they also had macro-cannon as a larger option. 2nd ed split autocannon up a bit more by adding battlecannon for large-calibre solid shot weapons, with autocannon taking on the more 30mm style light vehicle armament. RT also had defence lasers as an option above lascannon.

Also worth considering at which point Reaver Titans lost the ability to climb ladders.



Image from Space Marine 1st edition.