It's smaller than normal battlemech scale (6mm). It's more like 3mm scale, or maybe even smaller. I resized the briefing map until all of the main landscape features were visible, and able to occupy a hex.
To create it:
I took a screenshot of the level map in the mission briefing screen, and in a graphic program I made a 3 feet x 4 feet hex grid (I wanted a map to cover my miniatures table). I then put the screenshot of the map underneath the hex grid, and rotated it until the roads were lined up to make straight lines from hex to hex underneath the grid. Because the game briefing map was only a hundred pixels wide (or something) it was super pixellated, so I then free-hand drew over the top of all of the shapes, in the graphic program, just blocking in the landscape, concrete, roads, water with paint tools, but keeping the grid drawn over the top. I made the grid grey so it wouldn't leap out too much, but it turned out so faded that it is hard to make out the grid on the paper.
Now that I know what terrain is in each hex, I'm thinking of using Heavy Metal Map to convert it into illustrated hex map sheets. The level is 24 hexes wide, and about 40 hexes tall, with the flat sides being left/right and the angled sides pointing up/down. Because you can't draw map sheets bigger than default map size in Heavy Metal Map, I'll have to work out how to connect multiple map sheets together to create the level. I haven't really used Heavy Metal Map all that much before.
I've played out a mission on once so far, and it works pretty well. (Battle report on my blog). If I do recreate it with Heavy Metal Map with proper illustrated hexes, I'll post another pic, and maybe a link to the map sheet images if anyone else wants to try it out.
