The Energon Pub

If you look up the character name on wikipedia and go to the toy section of the page it lists the actual dimensions of the original vehicle and what scale the toy is (eg 1/37th). It also suggests how tall the robot would be based on the transformation (take with a pinch of salt as the robots are not in scale with their own alt modes) and says how tall Bay says they should be.
The no mass shifting thing is rubbish - if you watch BB turn into a car he definately shrinks and so does Frenzy's head when it replaces the girl's mobile phone.

Of course there's mass shifting, but there's less than the old Transformers series (and the new stupid animated series).

Spiderbot101 wrote:You also gotta remember all the extending, folding and what not when they transform. Sure you can just take the SS figure and stand it vertical, measure the height (from nose tip to back engines) and say that when he's transformed, he's gonna be extremely close to that height (depending on how you pose him might not be even.) But when you actually transform him, you'll see that the nose flips down, taking down a couple for height, and that his legs fold like a chicken, making him kinda in a crouch position, taking another bunch off the total height. Or BB, with his feet folding/extending out, rising his height a bit. YOU CANNOT JUDGE A TRANSFORMER'S SIZE JUST BY THE SIZE OF HIS VEHICLE FORM IN REAL LIFE. Please, take it from a guy who went to college, AND sees how stuff like folding and extending can make all the difference in the world. I mean, who's to say that Megatron's transformation doesn't make him a whole lot bigger then a F22 Raptor.

It's not supposed to represent the actual scale of the Transformers as seen in the movie.

It's how tall the toys would be if their vehicle modes were all done to the same scale(1:1).

I think it's interesting. Obviously how the mass is distributed in the transformation differs from toy to movie. The way I see it, kibble is basically wasted mass. Any figure with a lot of extra kibble, could have had a taller bot mode if the transformation was more efficient.

Look at all the wasted mass on movie Leader Prime that makes up a backpack. There's enough there that they if they'd found a way to use it in the bot mode, they probably could've added an extra 2 inches to his height.

In toy form, Arcee comes out several feet shorter than the movie's scale. But the reason she can't make up that height is because she's got her front wheel and handlebars biting her ass. Plus the rear of the bike and saddle doesn't even become part of the bot mode and instead turns into a weapon.

Obviously it's a challenge between how important it is for the figure to look right Vs how important it is to be kibble-free. And all the other considerations that go into making a toy.