Which scale do you prefer for your WWII Naval Convoy Battles, and why?
Most likely candidates include:
1/600th
1/1200th
1/2400th
1/3000th
1/4800th
1/6000th
Other?
Not a Naval Convoy Gamer
Listed below are some thoughts to consider for the WWII Naval Convoy, and Air Gamer.
I can see advantages to a number of the above, e.g. smaller scales for the really large battles, assuming you want to play those out with 1 miniature = 1 real vessel on the tabletop, and/or for battles with larger vessels supporting or attacking a convoy.
Of course, you can always just reduce the numbers of merchants, escorts, enemy subs, and aircraft accordingly, to make the larger battles a bit easier to handle, if desired, like many do for land and air battles already.
The smaller vessels and aircraft certainly are much easier to acquire budget-wise, quicker to paint, and easier to field on a table of reasonable size.
A complete convoy, at 1:1 ratio, arrayed in formation, would be a wonderful spectacle to behold, in pretty much any scale.
Of course, I tend to like larger minis, since they are a bit more impressive on the tabletop, but the downside is that they cost more, and you need a larger playing area for them. To get around that, you can probably adjust the ratio of minis to real vessels present, if running a large historical scenario, or just select some smaller convoys to game out.
In some cases, it is actually about the same price, or even cheaper, to go with minis twice the size of offerings from other companies (1/600th scale, for example vs. 1/1200th). 1/1200th, while a very nice compromise in terms of scale, is rather expensive compared to the other scales, for merchant vessels, and larger units, e.g. corvettes, destroyer escorts, destroyers, and other larger units.
Going large is fine, if doing aircraft, subs, and a few escort-type vessels, but is especially problematical when you start adding in heavy units, like cruisers, battleships, and carriers though, due to costs and space constraints, and sometimes availability issues (1/600th scale, for example).
Another thing to consider, is the availability of aircraft, if you want to include those as well. For some scales, nice looking planes are easy to find in the same scale as the vessels, e.g. 1/600th, 1/1200th, and 1/2400 (in some cases).
In others, you'll need to go up a size, in order to find suitable aircraft for your battles (1/2400th, in some cases, like German medium and torpedo bombers, 1/3000th, 1/4800th, and 1/6000th scales) – that usually isn't a huge issue, if you assume the aircraft are flying higher than wave-top height, so are larger, since they are closer to the observer. For these scales, you can use 1/600th, 1/1200th, or 1/2400th scale planes, when they are available.
I've even used 1/300th and 1/144th scale aircraft with 1/600th scale naval vessels, to suggest altitude of the aircraft, when conducting dive bombing raids on ships in the English Channel. The effect of the large planes diving on the small vessels below was quite visually attractive.
So, which scale do you prefer, and why?
goes to sea with the Terrain Mat.
. Robert