Among the many, many gorgeous background details littered throughout Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2, the ruined Titan on the tomb world Demerium is one of the most striking. This colossal wreck of a war engine is visible in just one scene, slumped in place in the background in the PVE Operation Reliquary, incalculably vast. And thanks to work by data miner ‘The Reaper’ we now know that it’s the biggest Titan in the 40k universe.
Warhammer Titans are truly massive war engines, each one a walking battleship festooned with void shields and massive ordnance, a manifestation of the Machine God’s wrath. In-universe they’re the most powerful land warmachines available to any of the Warhammer 40k factions, and in the real world they’re the biggest and most expensive Warhammer 40k models that Games Workshop makes.
But the exact size of Titans is a little bit woolly. The heights of different kinds of Titans have varied up and down whenever they’ve been described in lore, illustrations, or with models. Community consensus thinks that the very largest class of Titan, the Imperator, is no more than 330’ tall – the wreck in Space Marine 2 is at least ten times that height.
Writing on the Space Battles forum, The Reaper explains how they extracted the 3D model data from Space Marine 2 and, after processing it, discovered that every model is already presented in a consistent scale, measured in meters.
The Cadian Guardsmen measure a very normal 1.81m, or 5’11”, while the Primaris Space Marines’ height varies depending on their total adornments and what mark of Space Marine armor they’re wearing. The SM2 classes range in height from 8’3” (2.52m) for the Sniper, to just over 10’ (3.09m) for the Heavy, measured to the top of his Iron Halo.
The Reaper says it took “forever to successfully extract the model for the Emperor class Titan because it was so large and kept crashing the game and tool” – which isn’t surprising, as it’s 40 times taller than a Space Marine and might have thousands of times as many polygons. The war engine is 3363’ (1,025m) tall, and would be even larger if it wasn’t hunched over.
The data miner notes that it’s “a seemingly unique pattern of Imperator as the layout of its weapons is not found in the art of your normal Imperators”. My brother in the Emperor, if this thing is modeled to scale then it is far, far too big to be an Imperator.
It even dwarfs the Castigator, the mythical precursor to the Titans that shows up possessed by Chaos in the Warhammer 40k book ‘Dark Adeptus’ by Ben Counter.
The simplest explanation is that this is a depiction of an Imperator, just one that has been rescaled so that it looks the part when placed in the landscape. If so, a nerd can dream that this is a sneaky peak at an upcoming model for Legions Imperialis, the tiny-scale spin-off to Warhammer 40k…
Titans are so huge that most Warhammer 40k games only render them as background details. But dedicated modders have added them to Dawn of War, and – thanks to an unexpected update that unlocks all the DLC for anyone who owns the base game – there’s never been a better time to try. Or you could try Final Liberation for a true retro classic…
Source: Wargamer
