So… Cactus’ recent inquiries into the size of the great spirit robot got me thinking. We know that the official height is listed at 40 million feet. This just seems absurd. I mean, the diameter of the Earth is 41.8 million feet. Given the fact that the GSR was lying down on a moon, this seems a bit silly. Yes, Mata Nui is fuckhuge, but not that fuckhuge, unless the entire Spherus Magna system is bizarrely scaled as well.

Anyway, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is figure out a more reasonable height for the GSR, one that makes sense given everything else we’ve seen. We know that the island of Mata Nui covers the GSR’s face. We know how big the face is compared to the rest of the robot. If we know the size of the island, we can extrapolate the height of the GSR from there.

Figure A:

Note the little dimension lines along the side. The north/south one, the one we care about, says 357 kio. Cool, we now know just how long the island is… in kio. Fortunately, BS01 has us covered, saying that 1 kio = 4500 feet. This makes the island 1.6 million feet long, or a little over 300 miles. This seems reasonable enough, so we can work with the assumption that the island, and in turn Mata Nui’s head, are about 300 miles long/tall.

Figure B:

The scale measurements at the side are not accurate to given dimensions of 40 million feet (assuming those are miles, this puts the GSR at less than half the canonical size). Anyway, holding a ruler up to my computer screen (I know it’s jank, but I don’t really care) puts him at about 11 inches tall, his head taking up just a bout 1 inch. Hey, that worked out pretty well. With a head roughly 300 miles tall, and a 1:11 head:body ratio, we get… 3300 miles, exactly what the dimension listed on Faber’s concept is. Cool, this means that the GSR is 3300 miles tall, or about 43.6% as tall as its stated, canonical size. While still absolutely fuckhuge, it’s a bit more reasonable this way.

TL;DR: Faber makes well-scaled, consistent concept art, which is ignored because planet-sized robots fighting each other is cooler than robots 40% of the size of a planet.