This forum post describes the size attribute as the canonical size of an object.

However, the Manticore has several references to its size, and none of them quite match!

1. (Corporate Command) Playerships.xml: 30 meters
2. CommonwealthShips.xml: 33 meters
3. Neurohack promo 30.3 meters
4. BattleArenaGladiators.xml: 33 meters, several references
5. Reverse-engineering from the graphic: 32.2 meters

I'm losing sleep over this one to be honest. What's the actual size of the ship?

george moromisato 20 Feb 2017:

Agreed—I need to be better about true scales.

Corporate Command 1.2.8 has the Manticore at 33 meters, consistent with 1.7 Beta 6. But this wasn't true in previous versions.

In more recent models (after June 2016 or so) I use a scale of 1 = 10 meters (with some exceptions for particularly large stations). The Manticore model (Manticore.scn) measures 3.305 in length (y-axis) and is thus 33.05 meters.

But as I said, previous versions (including the promo) are inconsistent.

For all future models, the .scn file will contain the true size, and the size variable in the XML should reflect that (with round-off to the nearest meter).

There are probably a few places where even recent models don't match up with the size parameters. I'm OK if you open those up as bugs so I can fix them.