Scale
Scale in the Transformers multiverse is, to put not too fine a point on it, screwed.
Virtually no generation, era, franchise, fiction, toyline or other incarnation of Transformers has presented scale in a consistent, logical or easily-believable fashion (Save perhaps, Alternators, but we all know where having a scale consistent with a young girl leads). Most fans would agree that one needs to either ignore it or accept it, lest they be tempted to actually explain away these problems and in the process undoubtedly fanwank themselves into oblivion.
However, this does not mean that the chronic scale problems of Transformers do not merit description.
Scale within toylines
Toys out of scale with others in the same line
As is generally well known, the early Generation 1 toyline, especially the entire pre-Movie lines, were created from repackaged and redecoed toys from several different Japanese transforming toylines. The crucial point being that they came from different toylines. All characters (well, virtually all; see below) should be in correct scale to each other as they all are supposed to represent real-world altmodes that can pass for correctly-scaled vehicles. However, since the Diaclone toys were not designed to be part of the same line as Microman toys, scale issue arise. Diaclone figures such as Optimus Prime, Prowl and Hound are more-or-less in correct scale to each other, but many of the Mini Vehicles from the New Microman line are clearly far too small by comparison. Even aside from the deformed penny-racer style proportions, even a comparatively small car such as a Volkswagen is disproportionately tiny when compared to a Porsche that should be in the same scale. The disparity becomes all the more obvious with other minibots such as Warpath and Seaspray whose altmodes would suggest that they should be many times their actual size.
Another glaring scale problem comes in the form of the Seekers, who turn into F-15 Eagles which, in real life, are 63.8' (19.44m) long; which, if correctly scaled, would make their robot modes colossal compared to most Autobots. Similarly, the Constructicons, despite also coming from the Diaclone line, are too small. Far worse are the other Diaclone-born combiner team, the Trainbots, who have train engine altmodes, much larger than cars, yet their toys are among the smallest of the original Diaclone releases.
Toys out of scale within teams
Even toys specifically designed to interact with each other often suffer from this problem. The Combaticons are wildly out of scale to each other — Blast Off's space shuttle mode should dwarf the others, while Swindle should be significantly smaller. Instead, they're about the same size. Among the aforementioned Constructicons, Long Haul, like most dumptrucks in Transformers, is actually one of those gigantic "earth-mover" mining trucks. He should be able to carry all his teammates in his bed, with some crowding. Similarly, Silverbolt (a Concorde jet) is dramatically undersized compared to his fighter-jet Aerialbot teammates. Assuming no size-changing, these scale problems are necessary to avoid massively misproportioned gestalt forms.
Same altmode, different sizes
Other scale problems come from characters who transform into the same (or very similar) altmodes but whose toys are very different sizes. For example Air Raid transforms into an F-15 Eagle, but his toy is half the size of Starscream's. The same can be said for Breakdown, who, having a Lamborghini Countach altmode, should be in scale with Sunstreaker. By the same token, Warpath should be roughly the same size as Blitzwing, but is instead considerably smaller. These discrepancies are also seen in the Stunticons and all the Special Teams/Scramble City-type combiners with Earth-based altmodes, whose toys are all out of scale to similar toys in earlier waves.
Toys out of scale with themselves
Triple-Changers create a whole new set of problems. Octane transforms from a roughly 60' tanker truck into a 200'-plus jumbo jet. Broadside transforms from an Earth jet into an entire aircraft carrier, presumably sized to carry quite a few Earth jets. More recent canon, such as Dreamwave's More Than Meets The Eye encyclopedia, suggest that this is possible due to a variety of sliding panels, essentially making the transformations akin to incredibly elaborate origami. You heard right; origami Transformers. Yup.
Even a two-mode toy can have this problem. For example, 20th Anniversary Optimus Prime has wheels which are proportionally too small for a Freightliner truck, while similarly his rear section onto which a trailer would be hitched is much too thick. These out-of-proportion vehicle parts were necessary to give to his robot mode better robot proportions.
Toys with roleplay altmodes
The characters with roleplay altmodes such as Megatron, Soundwave, Perceptor, or Armada Laserbeak are scaled to be human (well, kid)-scale. Although the size changing seen in the fiction is not possible for real toys (at least, that's what Takara wants us to think), this human-scaling makes in some cases for inordinately large robot modes, e.g., Blaster in robot mode is quite a bit larger than most other Transformers.
The converse problem is seen with Masterpiece Megatron, whose robot mode was designed to be in scale with Masterpiece Optimus Prime. The result is that, while he transforms into a very accurately-proportioned handgun, it's much larger than the real thing.
Fanciful altmodes
Most post-Movie G1 characters (and, for that matter, most post-G1 lines) are difficult to accurately scale, as they generally transform into "futuristic" or "Cybertonian" vehicles for which there are no real-world specifications — or, indeed, they don't transform into vehicles at all. Therefore the scale of characters such as Hot Rod or Leobreaker are fairly arbitrary and can at best be estimated by their relative size to characters of the same scale within the fiction (although most animation is highly inconsistent in this regard, see below.) Nevertheless, if one presumes that most vehicle altmodes are intended to house human passengers, comparisons of toys such as Chromedome and Lightspeed suggest a scale disparity similar to other combiners.
An exception
There has only been one notable exception to all of this scale weirdness; the Alternators toyline, where every item is a 1:24-scale representation of a real car model, and thus they are in near-perfect scale with each other. Unfortunately, for practical reasons this limits the choice of altmodes. A Blast Off (space shuttle) Alternator toy would be 5.1' (1.6m) long, while a Broadside (aircraft carrier) Alternator toy would be over 40' (12m).
Scale within fictions
Scale issues abound within the fiction, especially the G1 cartoon. A lot can be attributed to animation errors, but some "errors" were deliberate choices, for a variety of reasons.
Animated scale = toy scale
In most cases, the G1 cartoon depicts characters to the same relative scale as the toys (with all those inherent problems), when depicting the characters in robot modes. Prime, Megatron and Soundwave are generally animated at the same height, Seekers and Autobot cars slightly shorter (although not as much shorter as the actual toys are), and Minibots are given a smaller stature again. However, these depictions were far from consistent.
Variation for characterization
Some scale problems are for the sake of characterization. for example, Optimus Prime is routinely shown as being throughly gargantuan, equal to several stories in height and capable of cradling humans in the palm of one hand. Logically, assuming he's the same size as a real truck, and doesn't use size-changing technology, Prime in robot mode would probably be about 25'-30' (8m-10m) tall, at best. He's drawn large because he's a leader character.
Conversely, Bumblebee is sometimes shown as being only a few feet taller than an average human, where in reality he would be around 10'-15' (3m-5m) tall. He's drawn small because he's a human-friendly character, and a junior member of the Autobots.
And those pesky Seekers remain a walking scale problem; in reality they would be among the largest everyday Transformers and would tower over their Autobot adversaries, whereas the animation generally depicts characters such as Thundercracker and Wheeljack as being approximately the same height. Even though jets are much larger than cars, they're drawn the same height so that the battles appear fair. (And also to make it easier to animate; blocking a shot where characters differ radically in height is difficult.)
Transport characters
Transformers that act as transport for other Transformers often implicitly change size to do so (and thus end up out-of-scale). However, size changing is rarely explicitly depicted except for characters with roleplay altmodes, such as Megatron and Blaster. Instead, the following method is used: A character such as Astrotrain transforms in-frame from robot to shuttle with no visible expansion of size relative to his surroundings. Cut. In the following shot his fellow Decepticons are shown running into frame, suddenly relatively tiny in stature so that they can board the shuttle. Although Astrotrain has not been shown to actually grow (in the way Megatron perceptibly shrinks relative to his surroundings), one has to infer that this is more likely than that all his confederates have individually shrunk.
The same change-in-scale-via-implicit-size-changing is used with Omega Supreme and other characters used as transport. For example, in the episode "Make Tracks", Hoist, who is depicted as one of the larger Autobots in robot mode, is shown riding inside Huffer, a Minibot whose truck mode is usually depicted as being smaller than Optimus Prime's. So either Huffer is extremely large in that scene, or Hoist is suddenly the size of a human.
Combiner characters
Combiner characters are often depicted as far larger than the sum of their parts. Characters such as Devastator and Menasor are frequently shown as Godzilla-sized, sometimes even the size of skyscrapers. When one thinks that their individual limbs are composed of mere cars and construction vehicles, this becomes patently absurd. (Superion, by contrast, would be building-sized, given that his torso is a small passenger plane.)
Combiners are also often shown out-of-scale with other Transformers; a combiner with cars for legs and another car for its torso should be only twice as tall as a one-car Transformer, but they are routinely drawn as five to dozens of times taller than their comrades. Logically, this can only be accounted for by serious size-change-o-rama but no depiction of this process actually taking place is shown.
Pretender characters
The G1 Pretenders had interesting scale issues. In the original comic the Pretenders appeared fairly literally as their toy counterparts; Transformer-sized robots inside (usually) humanoid shells. The result of was that the Autobot Pretenders were depicted as giant-sized humans. This successfully disguised them (for about five seconds, literally) from the Decepticons, and also hid their mechanical nature from aliens. However, it was utterly useless at fooling humans. Further, in Guess Who the Mecannibals are Having for Dinner?, Cloudburst exited his shell, transformed into jet mode, and then his shell (as well as Landmine) boarded him as a passenger. The fact that his shell was now much smaller than the "inner" robot was quietly glossed over; one assumes the sort of size-changing mentioned under Transport characters, above, was involved.
In the U.S. toy commercials, Grimlock, Bumblebee, and Jazz in their new Pretender forms were depicted as small enough to fit in Powermaster Optimus Prime's hand, so, in the micro-continuity of the commercials, at least, they were human-sized.
Although the original American cartoon did not feature any Pretenders, the Japanese-only continuity did, in their series Super-God Masterforce. Here the Pretenders were not shells so much as ill-defined holistic transformations which explicitly involved size-changing, allowing the large Autobots to convincingly pass themselves off as humans. The Decepticons, by comparison, chose to retain their gigantic proportions when in Pretender-mode.
Although never depicted in any of their actual fiction, Dreamwave's More Than Meets The Eye encyclopedia included a description of their take on the Pretender concept. Something of a fusion of the above two, it described a physical shell that utilizes shrinking technology to achieve the Masterforce-like capacity to pass the wearer off as a real human (or other bipedal lifeform of choice). Intriguingly, the profile also obliquely implies that such Pretender technology would/could later lead to the development of the synthetic faux-organic beast-mode tech of the Beast Era.
Scale problems and size-changing
Some fans interpret otherwise-unexplained scale issues to all be the result of size changing, but this is debatable. If virtually all characters used mass-shifting (or whatever) to gain or drop a few feet of height for no apparent reason, the technology would seem pointlessly mundane. There's also no sensible reason for, e.g., the Seekers to choose to be shorter when going into battle. A to-scale Starscream in robot mode could swat Bumblebee around like a soccer ball. Furthermore there is no strong evidence in the series to indicate that size-changing is truly so widespread.
Transformers (2007) movie
The creators of the live-action movie took great pains to avoid out-of-scale issues among characters with Earth-based alternate modes. (Well, "greater" than most previous franchises.) This is sometimes reflected in the choice of vehicle (Optimus Prime is a extended hood truck cab in order to offer more mass to make a taller robot mode out of) or the design of their robot modes. For example, Starscream's robot mode is nearly as wide as it is tall, with shorter, digitigrade-style legs, so the massive jet-former won't end up twice as tall as Optimus. In the case of Blackout, his huge alternate mode simply results in a huge, hulking, towering robot mode.
There are still scale issues to be found in the movie, though. For example, Optimus Prime can hold both Sam and Mikaela in one hand; yet when he picks up Archibald Witwicky's glasses, they're almost large enough for Bumblebee to wear (a visual cheat so the glasses between Prime's fingers are visible to the audience). Also, it's highly unlikely that Frenzy's head, which is about the size of a human head, can turn into a much smaller mobile phone.
Show scale vs. toy scale
Some characters have great discrepancies between their cartoon scale and their toy scale. "Giant" characters such as Omega Supreme are, even aside from any size changing for transport purposes, clearly not in the same scale in toy form as they are depicted on screen. Cassette characters such as Rumble's toys are roughly the same height as most Minibots, while in the show they are usually portrayed as human-sized (which is odd, considering that Soundwave is capable of expanding to massive size).
Rodimus Prime and Ultra Magnus are usually shown to be of a fairly similar height (although Magnus is much bulkier), whereas there is a considerable difference between the size of their toys. By the same token, Rodimus is always depicted as being an equal stature to his opposing leader Galvatron, whereas the toy Galvatron is instead the same size as Magnus. Optimus Prime is also usually shown as only a head or so shorter than Magnus (if that), which gets very strange when you realise that a recolour of Prime's toy forms but a small part of Magnus' robot mode.
Cybertron Metroplex and the other citizens of Gigantion are depicted as gargantuan in animation, whereas the toys are merely among the normal boxed size-classes. (Although, the Japanese Galaxy Force release, dubbed "Megalo Convoy", included an exclusive redeco of the Legends of Cybertron Optimus Prime to indicate the "correct" scale.) Within the animation, though, this causes problems with their Mini-Con partners, who are depicted as human-sized in robot mode by themselves, but when directly interacting with their larger partners, have their relative size in relation to the toy . . . meaning some temporarily gigantic Mini-Cons!
Small Transformers
The assorted toys produced over the decades to hit the lowest price point usually include "mini" or "micro" in their name, and they usually are depicted as smaller than other Transformers in the fiction as well.
Micromasters
The Micromasters are roughly human-sized in robot mode, and thus virtually all of them turn into (generic or specific) Earth vehicles that are patently incapable of seating human passengers inside them. The Marvel comic featured some of them implicitly size-changing to vehicles that were to human scale (as we saw humans riding inside), but this wasn't applied consistently.
The more recent Dreamwave miniseries Micromasters hinted at some kind of explanation, indicating that the Micromasters were Transformers scaled down to fit a smaller race of humans. This is met with skepticism from fans, as it still doesn't explain the scale problems within the line, as all Micromasters are about the same height in robot-mode, but transform into small cars, large trucks, planes, tanks, and other vehicles of vastly different size. The alleged "smaller race of humans" must thus vary in size quite a bit, and only the really teeny ones get to fly the planes . . .
However, there is little indication in most fiction that the Micromasters were (unlike the rest of G1) even supposed to have any scale. They were explictly downsized Transformers, and the scale problems that caused were tacitly acknowledged in the fiction. Their passenger compartments thus can be regarded as vestigial.
Mini-Cons
The Mini-Cons of the Unicron Trilogy are another race of small robots who stand approximately the same height as a human and, like the Micromasters before them, are clearly modeled to include cockpits for carrying passengers. Really teeny passengers. (Notable exceptions are Grindor, Sureshock and High Wire, who become small one-man vehicles . . . well, Energon Grindor doesn't.) In this continuity, who these passengers could possibly be is something of a mystery. (Though the possibility that the Mini-Cons simply scan normal vehicles and then resize them to fit their smaller bodies is viable.) In the Cybertron cartoon, the Recon Mini-Con Team retain their slightly-larger-than-human robot modes, but their alternate modes are large enough to contain a single human passenger, thus implying either a modest amount of size-changing, or that their cockpits are just kinda cramped.
Big Transformers
On the other end of the scale, the problems posed by really big Transformers lie in how they interact with normal-sized ones.
Citybots
The characters Metroplex, Trypticon, Fortress Maximus and Scorponok each have altmodes which are described as a "city" (with Fort Max being supposedly the biggest of the four). However, the scale at which they could plausibly house enough humans, let alone Transformers, to be in any way reasonably defined as a "city" would suggest a robot-mode scale that would make Godzilla look like a gecko. No fiction to date, not even the very large depiction in the Japanese Headmasters cartoon, even begins to approximate the size that a true "citybot" would logically become. In reality, the grossly-undersized depiction of Unicron (see below) would probably be closer to the scale of an actual transformed city. Which is ironic, as in Season 3 of the G1 cartoon Unicron requires citybot eyes to replace his own shattered ones. (Though, "realistically", his eyes should be the size of Texas, if not larger.)
Rare examples which suggest a realistic citybot scale include occasional Japanese promotional art (e.g., at right).
Furthermore, there is virtually no way to reconcile the "city" altmodes of the actual toys with any believable use of the term. Using windows as even a vague scale, they would hardly qualify as a city block. The cartoon episode Thief in the Night makes some headway in explaining this via an establishing shot that shows Metroplex to be only a small smaller sub-section of the "actual" Autobot City, although this was not repeated. It seems that in Transformer terms, "city" is better read as "large building".
Although little fiction to date has significantly featured the Headmaster leaders fulfilling their "city" roles, they have in the Japanese-exclusive cartoons been employed in their tertiary modes as massive starships capable of transporting and housing many normal-sized Transformers. Conversely, the Marvel G1 comic depicted Fort Max and Scorpy as merely "large-standard" size characters, of an equal height to Powermaster Optimus Prime and, in some UK issues, even the same as Rodimus Prime (to be fair, Powermaster Prime was often drawn "undersized" in the comics). Parts of Time Wars were notable in this department for featuring characters as diverse as Goldbug, Fortress Maximus, and Blaster as all being the exact same height. Goldbug must transform into one big ol' car.
Planets
Scale when it comes to planets is almost so fraught it's actively painful. The logic problems of describing citybots as "cities" is a thousand times worse if Unicron is supposed to have a planet-sized altmode, and that Cybertron is in turn supposed to be in scale with him. Although different fictions have compared both Cybertron/Primus and Unicron to drastically different Sol-system planets, the fact remains that they are supposed to be planets, and yet across most fictions they are shown in such insane scale to characters that it would suggest they are barely the size of a very, very small moon (or a space station).
To start with, Cybertron itself was depicted throughout G1 as having buildings visible from space. Although this was clearly intended to make it immediately obvious that the planet was entirely technological in nature, it actually makes no sense whatsoever, as such structures would have to be the size of small nations to actually be visible from such a distance. If the buildings were in fact supposed to be Transformers-scale skyscrapers (or even 2000 A.D. style mega-bocks), Cybertron would still be barely a fraction the size of Earth's Moon. By comparison, the rather Coruscant-like orbit-views of Cybertron in the Beast Machines cartoon may be less distinctive or recognizably "Cybertronian", but are far more believable.
Unicron, however, is a much more extreme problem. If one presumes that no size changing occurs during his transformation (and really, why would he want to become smaller?), he would be so massive that any shot that features a recognizable part of his body, let alone the whole thing, would be of such a scale that no normal Transformer would be visible. His depiction in the The Transformers: The Movie in which he directly interacts with normal-sized Cybertronian characters is blatantly absurd (regardless of how totally phat it looks). Shots such as the Dinobots fleeing his grasping hand, a starship penetrating his eye or especially picking up Galvatron between his thumb and forefinger before swallowing him (or, similarly in the comic, impaling Brainstorm on his fingernail before crunching him between his teeth) bend any concept of "planetary" scale beyond breaking point. If Unicron is the size of a planet, his hands would be the size of continents. This would make Galvatron (in the image to the right) the size of Great Britain.
There is no explanation for any of this. Just go with it.
The depiction of Unicron's scale in Armada was (very debatably) a slight improvement, at least in as much as the concept of physical interaction with tiny beings was not even attempted. He preferred instead to communicate with normal Transformers by possessing another body in their own scale. Nevertheless, shots featuring Thrust and Megatron standing on his neck are still farcically out of scale.
Big Toys
It probably goes without saying that the citybot and planetbot toys are not remotely to scale with normal Transformer toys. While they are indeed large toys, they're only two to five times bigger than typical Transformer toys, and thus transform into "cities" and "planets" about the (relative) size of a house. However, it's hard to begrudge Hasbro not offering us a Primus toy the size of an asteroid. Where would we keep it?
Beast Era scale
In the Beast Era scale is not such a large issue, although it certainly does crop up in less obvious (depending on your point of view) ways.
Real world scale
Although the Beast Warriors all seem to exist quite happily in their own relative scale, their scale in relation to the real-world animals they have adopted as altmodes is more problematic. While the "giant insect" characters such as Waspinator and Inferno are obviously not in real world scale, when considered carefully virtually none of the characters actually are. The only characters who have been clearly depicted interacting with real members of their adopted species are Cheetor and Tigatron, who (to take the former example) is seen attempting to interact with other cheetahs in Beast Wars, Part 1, who react in fright. Cheetor was shown here to be in the same scale as real cheetahs, which effectively makes him the measuring stick for all other characters. Obviously Rattrap is therefore a monstrously huge rat, about the size of a large dog, Rhinox is a rather small rhinoceros, and Optimus Primal is probably a roughly normal-sized gorilla. However, Megatron is therefore a positively dwarfish specimen of a Tyrannosaurus rex, possibly closer to a Nanotyrannus.
The Beast Wars writers once noted that first-season Rattrap was five feet (1.5 metres) tall, and that the other characters can be scaled around that. This would make Rattrap one of the few Transformers who are shorter than the average adult human in robot mode.
In their few interactions with (adult) protohumans, the Cybertronian characters seem between twice and three times the average height of protohumans. Considering human ancestors really were smaller than modern humans, this scale issue is not as extreme as it may appear, but the point deserves addressing. Oddly enough, the smaller Beast Warriors still seem to interact with Autobot-scale computers and spacecraft quite happily, as seen in "Nemesis Part Two, where the remaining Maximals take control of an Autobot Shuttle and fly it home.
Scale relative to G1
Size changing appears to be a thing of the past by the Beast Era, as the majority of the Cybertronian race seems to have considerably downgraded in size, apparently due to the Maximal Upgrade Program (although this is of course a backwards rationalization, since the show's basic premise requires the characters to transform into (vaguely) normal-sized animals, compared to the G1 characters transforming into large vehicles etc.). When entering the Ark, the Beast Warriors are very small compared to the dormant G1 characters, especially Optimus Prime. They are roughly the size humans should be (but usually weren't) depicted in relation to these characters.
On the other hand Robot Masters depicted G1 and BW characters like Optimus Prime and Optimus Primal as being exactly the same size. Yup. It's possible that passage through the Blasty Zone may somehow account for this discrepancy,
Toy scale vs. cartoon scale
The first season's cast of Beast Wars characters were not designed in the same relative scale to each other as depicted in the toyline, although from Season 2 onwards the scales (and general appearance) of the cartoon became much more consistent with the newer toys (however previously featured characters, such as Waspinator, remained the same throughout).
For example, of the Season 1 Maximal crew, Dinobot, Cheetor, Tigatron and Rhinox are all from the same deluxe size class, while Airazor and Rattrap are considerably smaller basics. Optimus Primal, an ultra, stands at virtually twice the size of the deluxes. In the show, Dinobot is the tallest, followed by Rhinox and a slightly shorter Optimus Primal, shorter again is Tigatron, while shorter still is Cheetor (despite being an identical mold) and Airazor, while Rattrap is marginally the shortest, but by no means to such a degree as his toy would suggest.
The Beast Machines' toyline was far worse in terms of scale discrepancies with its cartoon, with the tallest character Silverbolt becoming the shortest (show-featured) Maximal toy, and similarly the diminutive Nightscream was enlarged to a massive ultra-class. And, sadly, the most show-accurate toy in the line (well, sorta in the line...) "Air Attack Optimus Primal" was rendered as an enormous supreme figure, completely incompatible with the other toys.
