How BIG are Recognizers, actually? Every time I try to look it up, there seems to be no established size. Even on the wikis, there’s no exact measurement.
I feel like it varies between grids too. Encom/82, Flynn’s grid, Dillinger’s grid… All different
Alrighty, I may have fallen asleep before I could finish this last night, but I got some numbers crunched today and the actual result is absolutely not what I expected! So let me break down what exactly I did to get the heights that I did, which involved inventing placeholder units based on actor proxies to get a better sense of scale.
This will be the first of at least two (likely three) reblogs due to limits on images per reblog. It’ll take me a little time, but they will all be up soon!
[Disclaimers: the results are a ballpark estimate. There are complicating factors for getting an exact height for each of them, but the results I yielded are at least pretty damn close. I also did not include the Recognizers from Uprising due to lacking a measurable real proxy to compare them to.]
First: the ‘82 Recognizers
The first thing I did for each Recognizer iteration was to find good screencaps to use. I ended up needing more for '82 than the latter two versions combined, since we don’t get a single shot with a lone Program (or Flynn) and a full Recognizer in frame. That posed a bit of a problem, so I started by looking at these two images:
On one hand, we can see that the physical set and digital model don’t match 100 percent. The ledge above their heads in the second image is absent in the first, where the 'roofline’ slopes down to about the height of where the bottom of the ledge should be. Close enough for us to figure out what the height of that area should be for the digital model.
And alas, poor Ram. But what’s helpful here is Flynn, since he’s standing mostly upright in the entrance to the cockpit. Were he fully upright and at the exact top of the slope, it would be safe to guess that his height would more or less equal the height from the floor to the bottom of the ledge just above the entrance. Hence, the unit I used for this one was Kevins.
Then, we have this image, which is the clearest head-on shot of a Recognizer in the movie:
… the only problem being, though, that it’s shown from behind. Compare that to this shot from the front, which is slightly more skewed and blurrier:
Yeah, not the most helpful on its own.
But layer the two as closely as possible?
Now we’re getting somewhere. We can put in a unit line (one Kevin) from floor height to the bottom of the ledge, and start duplicating from there.
Ultimately, the '82 Recognizer was 70.5 Kevins tall. But how tall is a Kevin, anyway?
We’ll round a smidge and call that 6 feet. Then it’s just a matter of converting Kevins to feet, which gets us…
423 feet. Absolutely massive!
Sigh, I fully had the second rb ready to go and then the site crashed on me when I tried to actually rb it, so let’s try this again…
Second: the Legacy Recognizers
This one was by far the easiest to figure out, in part thanks to this great shot:
… and the fact that these are seemingly the Weenie Hut Jrs. of Recognizers.
Logically, the unit for this one is Sams. It’s hard to see exactly where the top of his head is, but we can get close given that the top of the head aligns roughly with the elbow with an arm raised like this. And how tall is a Sam?
We’ll round again to 6'3", or 6.25 feet.
So how tall is this itty bitty little Recognizer? Just 6.75 Sams, or in other words…
'Only’ about 42 feet!
Third: Ares Recognizers
This one wasn’t as quick to do as Legacy’s, but still fairly easy. There’s a good wide shot of Athena’s Recognizer:
It’s hard to tell exactly where she’s standing at first glance. A closer shot shows that where she’s standing as she pilots it places her feet level to the entry floor, and her head a little below her screens.
Going back to the first image, we can get a one-Athena unit for scale.
Now there is a tiny bit of the bottom of the Recognizer’s legs that’s cut off in this image, so the bottom line for measuring needs to be cheated a tad low. Still, we can yield a pretty good number of 26 Athenas, or in other words…
About 150 feet!
I absolutely was not expecting for the '82 version to be so incredibly gigantic compared to the others. To get a better sense of scale, here are all three together:
And here they are with the Pyramids of Giza for comparison, the tallest of which at 430 feet is just seven feet taller than the '82 Recognizer!
I wasn’t kidding when I said the Legacy version is the Weenie Hut Jr. edition. As imposing as they looked in the movie, they’re dinky as hell compared to the others.
