Why Is The Space Jockey in ALIEN Much Larger Than The Engineers?

Well the Space Jockey is a odd thing, you see the proportions are not correct the arms and torso are not in proportion to the rest of the prop the legs which we cant see, the proportions of the Space Jockey are thus not human.

The actual Space Jockey Prop is 16ft long thats not total chair just length of Jockey to end of the chair where his legs are.

Its hard to gauge the actual size of the Space Jockey but it would total measurement be between 13-16ft long..... but if we take different suited proportions and compare to a man then we get a percentage difference that would make the Jockey stand about 18ft.

I would say as the drafts and concept work the Engineers stood 15ft tall would make for our Space Jockey to had been 16 foot tall suited and booted.... also they said he had grown out of the chair may mean that when the Space Jockey first got into the Pilot Seat while he was alive he was not quite as big.

Doing a few calculations on length and not bulk so ignoring the Head Size, if we measure the Space Jockeys Head to its pelvis, then its head to its wrists and compare to that crew member working on the prop and assume he is 6 feet well this give us a Space Jockey that is 13 feet tall. The same is if we take its shoulder blade to crotch area.  These give us a 13 foot Space Jockey well a 220% size difference.

Yeah if we measure the Head alone and Arms we get a 350% difference so our space Jockey Prop if they made same scale and stood him up would give us anything from 13-21 feet tall so i guess yes a 17 feet Tall Average if you average all proportions and measurements out could mean that yes a unsuited Engineer of 15 feet would be about right.

I have just created this again to show how easy it is to get scale wrong...

This image i have Necra David resized to be 6ft next to him i then have the Space Jockey suits at 8ft now the actors when suited stood about 7.5ft to just under 8 feet in the Ghost Engineer running scenes...

Next we have 10ft tall which i think is how Ridley finally wanted to have these Suited Engineers being, then we have the 15ft tall idea as far as concept and drafts and you see this image appears larger than the Space Jockey, finally we have the 26ft tall Space Jockey Scale which was the idea for Alien, and some still say the prop was 26ft tall and the 16ft one that was burnt in a Egyptian Museum was a smaller built prop.. lol

As you can see no way was the Space Jockey prop thus 26ft tall, i would stand by it was about 16ft in length, the total chair size would been about 18ft.

You may check the scales if you wish and you would find the first David image is 4.3X smaller than the tallest Space Jockey one, and if you look at the 10ft one and 15ft one and imagine something in the middle then look at the Space Jockey prop you can then see that indeed the Space Jockey would had been around about in the middle of those two and no more than the 15ft one. Which is why i still stand by the Space Jockey being 13-16ft tall.

Thus maybe why in prometheus drafts and concepts the Engineers was given heights of 12-15ft tall that i guess with the helmet etc can add a extra foot..

Here i have done the scale if the Space Jockey was 13 foot and also just done cut in torso so you can compare this shot to the guy working on the prop..

Think you will see the scale of these are now near same so indeed maybe 13ft is the right height?

I think the original Space Jockey have no legs, or at least that was the purpose of the original idea, you Know, before the God like Astronaut concept. Even the arms are disproportionatey long, and there is not enough space in the rest of the chair to the legs and feet of the creature, said that my thoughts are that the original Space Jockey:

1) Has an appendix instead of legs (ie, another type of creature and not an Engineer). In fact the head of the original creature has teeth and a tongue.

2) The body of the creature is attached to the rest of the machine, as a biomechanoid (could be another species but can also be a lissing link in the evolutionary chain of the Engineer race, or even the future of their evolution). I imegine this as an alien version of \\\\\\\"Thechnological Singularity\\\\\\\".

3) Occam\\\\\\\'s razor; it\\\\\\\'s a huge man in a spacesuit, and probably and elder Engineer.   

While not so sure on the teeth etc...

Yes some proportions did not add up with the Chair and i think thats why some fan art showed a Space Jockey with no legs as in the images you posted...

Ridley did say that it was a Space Suit however and its not a recent comment, but he made that comment a long long time ago..

But yes the Orginal Space Jockey did appear as though it was joined to the Chair and part of it, by the attachments of cables and tubes etc....

I do think that in future movies they could adress the Space Jockey by showing us that the Elders are taller or that they created a taller 12-15ft race as well as a smaller 8-10ft race of Engineers.

I agree, because for me this is one of the major inconsistency and it is something difficult to deal with this without answers.

The idea of the Elders is now the most plausible explanation, and I hope that Ridley (ore someone else) take that route. 

Maybe the camera tricks combined whit CGI can help next time, with a reasonable buget of course.

Well the way i would gone in future and what i had as ideas for Paradise if i was to make the story....

Would be we have these Elders who stand about 12ft tall and they created the Engineers for the same reason that mankind created David, to perform labour intensive tasks and tasks deemed to risky for the Elders, the Engineers are thus expendble.

The Engineers are a race of about 8 to 10ft tall beings.

Mankind is a creation in the image of the Elders/Engineers to replace the Engineers, or maybe the Engineers created Mankind so that mankind could carry out such tasks, i think somethink like this has a connection with the Anunnaki Tale..

And as the movie has references to many Ancient Cultures and Beliefs indeed why can it not be that the Elders or Engineers had created another breed of Humanoid one that they used for even more risky missions than working on LV 223 with the Goo Bio Weapon..  This other breed of Engineer are 12-15ft tall and maybe the same as the Nephilim.

Thus in Biblical context...

The Engineers are the same as Goliath  thus 9-10ft tall.

The Space Jockey is the same as Og of Bashan thus 12-15ft tall.

Or they could have the Space Jockey as being a Elder, and i good story could be like the Annunaki and others in that maybe the Engineers got jelious of Mankind and they rebelled against the Elders... the Elders sent down to use a weapon on this rebelious faction of Engineers but he fell foul to the Bio Weapon..

The Engineers then turned that Weapon upon the Elders and then tried to get Mankind to worship the Engineers, but that failed so they attempted to use the Bio Weapon on Mankind and it was them who then fell foul to the Bio Weapon.

Waste of time its been talked about as much as Faux News and Bengazi time to let it go.

One more Idea 

The Engineers Bio suit most likely repairs and grows back damaged parts I mean it looks like its living tissue which is attached to the nevous system so what if after being impregnated in this case the suits fuctions went a little out of control and grew utill the engineer poped his xenomorph load ? 

Here is another image from pre production of the movie, when they had concept work complete and in this image we see a female member of the poduction team we assume, standing behind a print out of one of the Suited Engineer concept works.

If we assume she is 5.5ft tall this would make the Engineer  about 10ft which fitted with the final idea they had for the race as production started, which was down from the 12-15ft during the draft work and concept work stages.

From this and comments by Lindeloff who said these Engineers was 9-10ft tall, this seems to had been the idea of scale Ridley wanted to created but ultimately never was able to pull off, but its something that can be done right in Paradise.

If they using camera trickery and effects like Lord of the Rings managed to show the Engineers as 10ft tall as in the image above, so on screen we saw the same difference in size to the Prometheus crew then it would have been more easier for people to accept these guys are the same as the Space Jockey as to the causual viewer who saw a being the scale of the image above they would maybe not really notice much difference in size to the Space Jockey and would assume this Engineer above to be like 12-15ft because most people can not grasp the concept of what true scale is. Its why some never noticed our Engineers was actually only 7.5ft Tops.

@BigDave; the image you've provided ^^ is closer to the proper size of the original Space Jockey, but still, according to my estimations, at approx 10 feet tall it is still short by approx 4 feet. But, like you say, Ridley could have acheived this size with some clever camera trickery.

However, i think that Ridley will NOT address the size difference in a sequel/s! I think he is happy with how he has portrayed them in Prometheus.

Just my opinion.

Yes i hope not though... that would be a let down for sure.

But hey Petter Jackson is tied up lol

I too worked out the actual Space Jockey was about 13-15ft no more than 16ft and no less than 12ft, as you dont see the full Space Jockey and some of its proportions are more ape like than Human.

The idea was 26ft and Ridley hoped that using child actors we would get that scale, which in the first shot we do see the Space Jockey appears about 21ft... but the close ups that then show that it would be about 15ft..

But when you actually see the Space Jockey Prop that i worked out its size would be about 13ft or just over.

When they worked on the idea of Prometheus these Engineers was 15ft, they then got downsized to 12-15ft....

Then when Ridley realised that they could not create 12ft+ Engineers not using the shooting style he likes i.e no CGI etc...  They down sized them to a 9ft race who fit inside 10ft Space Jockey suits.

But just as ultimately the Space Jockey did not completely give us the 20ft+ size they hoped as some angles and close ups showed our Jockey to be 15ft tops... Prometheus Engineers in some shots simply appear 7.5ft tops...

I think they can adress this, by having the Engineers on LV 223 be a shorter race of 7-9ft tall Engineers, maybe this is why the Elder scenes not shown, in part to keep them a mystrey but also maybe as they want to revamp them and make them appear taller than our 8ft Engineers,  and the Space Jockey could be just another variant of Humanoid created by the Engineers who stand 12ft tall.  Or even a Elder itself.

I am watching ALIEN right now and there is definitely a mouth and teeth seen in the head, there is also the nose attached to the mid body. Sorry but this is without a doubt skeletal and not a suit. He maybe changed his mind at some point to make it a suit because he did not like the design but anyone wathcing can see this is no suit when he made ALIEN.

It is clear in this picture that the broken part of the body where the alien burst out is skeletal and to the right you see the nose join on to the mid section and is the same material as the ribs showing that they are both skeletal for sure

CLICK THE MAGNIFYING GLASS ICON IN THE LINK AT THE TOP RIGHT FOR FULL IMAGE SIZE.

1.http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y201/starcraft_20002000/nose_zps5yjlgy3z.png

Now we see further out the mouth, eyes and teeth

2.http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y201/starcraft_20002000/nosemidsection_zpsduyn0b7r.png

That is no suit!!!

@Mitchcraft; It's no secret that the designer (and also one of the sculptors) of the original space jockey, was none other than H R Giger, whome himself intended it to be a fossilized creature and not a suit.

In the Prometheus documentary 'The Furious Gods,' Ridley shows one of his concepts of an engineer in a space jockey suit and said to Giger, "That's a suit," to which Giger (to me) seemed puzzled.

Whenever i watch Alien, during the scene where there is a close up of the jockey, i can just about make out an eyeball. It makes you wonder whether or not Ridley picked up on this and the teeth.

However, it's Ridley's project and if he feels that that is a suit, we have to suspend our disbelief if we want to see where the story leads.

We don't know yet exactly where the story will take us. It might just turn out that the original space jockey was a completely different race to the engineers and the engineers infact discovered the derelict and his cargo and proceeded to back engineer their technology for their own use.

I had a thought the other day, that maybe the leader of the engineers is their equivalent of Weylan/Yutani and the engineers on LV223 are its employees. We all know that the company want the alien for it's bio-weapons division, maybe the engineers are very similar in that way?

Weyland thought he was "God," so maybe, the engineer leader/king thinks of himself/herself as god?

There does appear to be teeth, the head did appear to be a Skeleton of sorts but the Arms do not look like a Skeleton...

But maybe we dont have to look at it as being a Endo Skeleton but a Exo Skeleton like say a Scorpion.... So yes this could have been a Organism, not a suit...

A interesting thing to back this up was the ORIGINAL....

That was not Giger, but Star Beast Draft.... the Derelict was different shape etc but what was found was the Skeletons of a Giant Race, that did not look Human....

This Race did not connect with the Chair at all...

Ripley liked some of Gigers work.. mainly this..

He got Giger to design a Pilot that was based on the above, i.e something that was attached to the Ship.... and the result was the Space Jockey..

The above is a lightened version, in the Original you can make out like a Buble over the head and the breathing tube that comes from out of this...

As far as it being a Race or Suit, i think Originally it was both, what we have is a Race a Organism that was Bio-Mechanical like the Alien Xenomorph, and what we had in Alien was a ossification rather than fossil....

We need to not think of the Space Jockey as like Human...  we have to consider a Exo-Skeleton like that of a Crab, a Spider or Scorpion and not that the Space Jockey was a Skeleton that had flesh over its bones...

This Bio-Mech Organism, is dead but unlike Skeleton where Flesh rots away to leave Bone, we have to consider it is like another living Organism..

Lets take the Cactus..

Now lets look at a dead one...

If you see what i am getting at?

Or this.. Scorpion and its Molt..

And how its Molt looks dried out and kind of dead, but still looks like the alive Scorpion that grew out of that Molt....

The Xeno has a Exo-Skeleton and so thats what the Space Jockey looks like..

Thats what we have.. not a Skeleton at all IMO!

But then thats not to say the idea was a Space Suit but Ridley did around time of Alien have that idea that the Space Jockey was a Suit.. but a Living Bio-Mech Suit thats part of its wearer.