Wouldnt it be possible to find the "correct" size of the WC1 Fighters by compairing the WC1 and the WC2 rapier?
Well, obviously there's no way to make the 'correct' length for a fictional spaceship.
The 'Rapier II' switch is as good as anything, in that it's true that Wing Commander II features 'reasonable' lengths for its fighters, and they both share the Rapier II. On the other hand, we do see variation in lengths -- the Arrow in Armada is 18 meters versus the Arrow in Wing Commander III/IV's 20 meters. The five meter difference between the F-44A Rapier II and the F-44G Rapier II doesn't seem outlandish in this context; furthermore, the fact that both lengths are printed in the Kilrathi Saga manual lends credence to the fact that the Wing Commander II ships are just plain shorter.
I don't like the 'cockpit' idea, because it reeks of SpaceBattles -- there's far too much leeway to claim that ones 'mathematical' analysis of characters standing next to cockpits supports any given theory of length.
Well, the Sabre isn't scaled down at all - the WCA manual lists the Sabre as being 23.6 metres long, and that's its length in Standoff, too.
I'm not sure why I said Sabre -- it's certainly the right length (that is to say, there's no alternate length in some other source that I might have be referring to, the mistake was mine).
However, we do have a good canon-related excuse - in the two other cases where an Armada ship appeared in another game, it was sized differently than in Armada. The Arrow in WC3 was bigger than the Armada Arrow, while the Wraith in WCA was smaller than the Armada Arrow. In both cases, the ships appeared to be different variants. We felt that if this works in the case of the Arrow and the Wraith, it's also possible that the Priv variant of the Gladius would be sized differently than in Armada.
There's a third instance, too: the Armada Jrathek (35 meters) versus the Academy Jrathek (20m).
On the other hand, there's also one "same" -- the Armada Dralthi (28m) is the same length as the Wing Commander I Dralthi. That suggests to me that in terms of scale Armada is making a conscious effort to follow the 'giant' Wing Commander I fighters rather than the reasonable Wing Commander II fighters.
(This and anything I post is just trivia, mind you. I think you made the right choices with regards to Standoff. I just like talking about the how and why of lengths.)
I don't think this troubles anyone too much, given the amount of contradictory information we know about the Gladius. Can we even say that the crappy light fighter in Privateer and the state of the art torpedo bomber in Armada are the same ship? Sure, they have the same name (Concordias anyone?) and the same look (Scimitar = Banshee? Salthi = Jalthi? Talon = Gratha? Gladius = Raptor?)... but everything else Armada and Privateer have to say on this matter is contradicting.
I believe we can say that they're the same fighter -- the same model given different names by different development teams and used in different eras, perhaps (I have to wonder if the 36 meter length comes from Super Wing Commander in the first place -- it seems odd that the Gladius has the same length as the Raptor with whom it shares a 3D model)... but you'd have a lot of trouble convincing me that the same ship with the same name, the same design, in the same era and in games developed by the same team are supposed to be different, especially given the wide variation in ship classifications sometimes seen in Wing Commander.
Moreover, in the specific case of the Gladius, I think the missiles are a dead giveaway -- the Privateer Gladius' eight Proton Torpedoes transition into the Armada version's eight Darts. I think that has to be intentional and not some happy accident.
(On the other hand, however pointless I've always enjoyed the *idea* of giant multi-seater Gladii deep in my brain, however little sense it makes... my particular fantasy of future Wing Commander missions has always been to see World War II style strategic bombing in space, with your fighter charged with escorting large planet-based B-24 analogues.)
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