Everything else in BattleTech has the map scale and the 'Mech scale wildly out of sync, why do the trees need to be arbitrarily closer to 'Mech scale?
To be fair, that is no different to any other wargame (or for that matter, RPG ground scale though), because you simply cannot do a model scale and ground scale that match (especially if you are making ANY attempt at simulating realism). The real world is just too big and complex and too unwieldy come to that. Hell, RPGs can't manage to do it accurately, generally confined as they are to a 5' square grid at 28mm. So you can never have ground scale and model scale that match, the best you can aim for is that your abstractions manage to model the most critical distances reasonably well.
I think you're interpreting that exactly the opposite direction I meant. The trees are around 2" tall in the box set. This is not to scale with real trees. This is completely fine and at no point, ever, has BattleTech terrain tried to be in scale with the 'Mechs on it.
Most real trees are much bigger, yes. But again - practial considerations. One the one hand 20-40m tall trees[1] take up a huge amount of storage space, and, as noted, a dispropotionate amount of board-space per tree because you can't model them one to one. So one the other, now you're abstracting, the trees need to be at LEAST tall enough to credibly obscure a BattleMech's view and block LOS, which sets the minimum height and after that, you want as many as you can fit so you maximise their usage. Flat trees work quite nicely as woods when put down in some volume and at different angles, but you need a modest number.
(Pro recommendation to everyone incidently - angel hair/sizoflor florist wraping fabric, whatever its called is dirt cheap and comes in multiple colours; cut it to what sizes of woods (or shapes) you want and use that to delineate the area nicely. In combination with the trees and being a mesh, it gives a nice shadow effect and drapes pretty mwell over terrain. We pinched the idea from someone we saw one convention as have never gone back.
Theory works just as well with nebulas for starships too, for anyone wanting to do BT space combat:
(Practical consideration there was at the other end; to make the "clouds" less than the height of a starship flight stand, since starships are mostly horizontal, not vertical like mechs and thus would require a lot more both moving around in play of the cruciforms AND more crusiforms AND more painting of crusiforms.)
I mean, if you want to argue that you could just cue a bit of flat coloured card like it was on a map sheet to delinitate terrain you could, but I would like to think when not playing on a mapsheet (hell, technically even WHEn playing in a mapsheet), BattleTech could do better than those frack awful historical competion games which have rules-ritually mandated terrain peices (in service of terrain not getting in the why of having armies which stretch the entire width of the board and delete any maneouvring and are generally won the night before on army list decisions. GW may be the worst end of the hobby, but competition ancients really don't help.
(Anecdote: one year at the World's convention, Dad ran a Stargrunt II competition (which had the rules be more about sportaman ship at that). Pertinently, a TV crew came in to film the competetion, and to film they picked the set of tables with all the card board buildings and cardboard smoke cells that was dirty scifi over the historical games on their flat featureless boards. That really upset them - he wasn't allowed to do it again...! This has been today's entry for Aotrs Rambles About Quasi-Related Things.)
[1]Citation: first order google search for beech and oak trees.
