Size Comparison: Real Robo Manifesto!

 

Click on this to see the full size 1764 x 1091 image.

  

After I posted my last blog it raised a comment about sizes, with one person coming out with the informed opinion that tracked or wheeled vehicles were just smaller, period. Walking vehicles are, and would always be too large to ever be practical.

This is one of those areas where peoples opinions are informed by a wide range of media, where the representation of walking vehicles goes from the sublime to the extreme. Gundam mobile suits are at the sublime end of the largeness, while the Gunbuster suit is at the mind blowing extreme end.

However, there is Real Robo.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team combat armour suits occupy the very big end of the Real Robo spectrum. The suits in Fang of the Sun Dougram are the size most people assume combat armour is. Dougram provided a large number of designs that were used in the BattleTech game, as did Super Dimension Fortress Macross aka Robotech. While Fang of the Sun Dougram remains one of my favourite anime shows, what inspired me to consider walking vehicles in a more serious light was Armored Trooper VOTOMS, which also has a TV Trope page.

The arguments all boil down to size. And size matters.

In the real world, smaller is better.

I can see how all of the above makes Real Robo a confusing hot mess of different concepts. I really do.

Especially, given that people watch the anime shows or play games with miniatures. The trouble is that wargame models are not to a scale, but made to a size. This distorts the proportions, and again leads to erroneous assumptions about the size of combat armour suits; Heavy Gear being one example of how the models are sculpted for the look on the table.

Fortunately, being crazy about Real Robo and VOTOMS, I have scale models by Takara of both the VOTOMS heroes combat armour suit, called a ScopeDog, and an Abrams tank. As you can see, the ScopeDog is taller than the tank. But, not by as much as one might have been led to believe.

To me, this is what I mean by Real Robo.

So, to be clear, Bad Dog is a  hard SF take on Real Robo. It takes the ideas of Armored Troopers VOTOMS, and turns up the hardness to eleven.

BTW: As promised, I took two pictures to show the difference when taking pictures in Hi-Res versus stacked images. The picture at the top was taken using the Hi-Res mode of my camera, the picture below was made using multiple exposures stacked together to form one image. Both models are on bases to equalize their heights off the ground.

Click on this to see the full size 909 x 603 image.