Long time no post, eh?
As we all know, following Takara Tomy's re-tooling of Decepticon Air commander Starscream, the toy company's next action figure in their Masterpiece line is Lambor, or better known in the western hemisphere as the savvy, albeit reckless, Sideswipe.
If you're as old as I am (or, if you have read my previous post), MP-12 assumes the alternate form of the G1 Sideswipe — a 1980's Lamborghini Countach. If you want to be more specific about it, I believe Sideswipe's an LP 500S (or an LP 500QV).
Anyway, discussions within different Transformers forums have members giving their cents' worth regarding the figure's apparent scale, and I guess we all could only speculate on the actual size. Until this scanned page was taken from Figure King, a Japanese hobby magazine:
The lower-left portion shows an illustration of the recently released MP-10 Convoy (Optimus Prime) together with the upcoming MP-12 Lambor, an indication of the two figures' scale. We all know that the MP-10 is small, but for other self-proclaimed Transformers forum "gurus", the MP-12 looks puny and out-of-scale. Or is it? This is what this post is all about.
Using the magical powers of a very popular image-editing software on a larger version of the scanned illustration resulted into this:
As you can see, the width of the Autobot leader's chest has been measured at around 100 (whatever unit that may be), and the width of Sideswipe's chest is at around 89.
Great. If you can still remember your elementary math, we now have 2 givens. All we need now are actual measured widths of the Freightliner FL86 cab-over-engine semi trailer truck, which is G1 Prime's alternate mode, and the Lamborghini Countach LP 500S.
Based on a Google search, I've opened up quite a number of browser tabs just to see if there's any site containing dimensions of the Freightliner, but came up with nothing. So if you've got a trucker-neighbor who happens to drive or own an FL86 semi, please be a darling and measure it's width so I can come up with a more accurate computation. I digress. However, I learned that the standard width for a semi could be no more than 8 feet (96 inches). Yeah, I could use that length.
Finding out the width of an LP 500S was much easier. It is 78.7 inches wide.
Now, I have all the parameters I need. A bit of a warning, though — what follows next is some geeky, algebra shit. Actually, it's quite simple:
MP-10 width in units / standard semi-truck width = ratio for Optimus Prime
MP-12 width in units / Lamborghini Countach LP 500S width = ratio for Sideswipe
Substituting the values would give us:
100 / 96 = 1.04
89 / 78.7 = 1.13
Ergo,
Optimus Prime's ratio = 1.04
Sideswipe's ratio = 1.13
I don't know about you guys, but 1.04 is pretty close to 1.13, especially if one scales it down to the size of toys.
Going a bit further if height is concerned, MP-10 Convoy is around 9.5 inches high in it's robot mode. Based on the scanned image above, MP-12 Lambor's robot mode would be a little over 7 inches.
So, YES, there we have it. Even before it is officially released, I can go out on a limb and say that Masterpiece Sideswipe is on the proper scale with Masterpiece Optimus Prime (at least with the MP-10 version). The "gurus" are wrong.
Great job, Takara Tomy!
Sources:
Wikipedia: Lamborghini Countach
Wikipedia: Sideswipe
Figure King scan
Standard width for a semi-truck
