"Destroyer Combat: 1:700 or 1:1200scale ?" Topic

What scale do you think would be best for running mostly Destroy type combats?

My naval interest is in smaller actions in the Pacific: IJN vs USN. Some actions may include a few light or heavy cruisers, or PT boat raids, but generally the meat and potatoes of the games I want to run are based around Destroyer clashes.

I often modify various rule sets, as many tend to be rather battleship or carrier centric. I don't mind bath-tubing scales as I think that unless you are playing 1:6000th scale in a gymnasium, that is simply a necessity.

My usual playing surface can be expanded from 4'x6' to 6'x8'.

1:1200:
Since A&A Naval minis came out, 1:1200 scale has gotten a lot more popular and there are now also many models offered on Shapeways, so finding ships is easier than ever and it is still quite affordable. At this scale, Destroyers are still only around 2~2.5" long, but I feel this is the first scale where you can really start to see enough of the models details to differentiate classes and they become less generic looking tiny ships. However, I was spectating a game at a recent convention and I overheard some of the players complaining about the small size of the destroyers, how they were hard to tell apart and felt like they got lost on the huge mat (6'x8')

1:700
There are some model companies (Tamiya, Haegawa, etc..) that offer a good range of waterline kits in this scale. Detail is excellent and the larger models are visually impressive, but the larger scale models means ranges are seriously bath-tubed and I worry it will feel just too toy-like. We're talking models that are 7" long, moving up to 12" a turn, with gun ranges around 36".

I game WWII 1/2400 naval, but I also picked up and built some Tamiya 1/700 scale vessels. The detail on the Tamiyas are excellent indeed. I use the 1/700 for Check Your Six games – they mostly serve as floating targets/AA batteries for my 1/144 aircraft, and the difference in scales seems odd at first but does work. The ships may move only 12"-24" over the entire course of an engagement as the planes zip around, but that fits on a 6' x 8' table.
For actual surface combat at that scale you may need a bigger surface – maybe the floor? On a 6' x 8' table you may run out of room very quickly, esp if more than 2 vessels are involved. IIRC I saw an old photo of Peter Cushing playing a game like that.

I've always been intrigued by the waterline kits, but can you get a wide enough variety to cover different eras/locations?

I like 1/1200 or 1/1250 myself. I use the Figurehead Coastals range and fill it out with other manufacturers as needs or desires demand. I am also building up a collection of GHQ 1/2400, and I already have pretty much everything I need in 1/6000. I have played true 1/6000 (1 foot = 1 nautical mile) in my living room – the Battle of the River Platte among others, and the ships started about 12 or 15 feet apart.

A 6'x8' playing surface is as big as I can go. Playing on the floor is not an option.

Between various manufactures I have not yet run into any problems finding the classes of ships I need. Sometimes they are very close (as in the case with some of the IJN Destroyers) that I can "fill in" with other models, and 1:700 is a lot easier to kitbash/convert, IMHO.

A 6'x8' playing surface is as big as I can go. Playing on the floor is not an option.

Between various manufactures I have not yet run into any problems finding the classes of ships I need. Sometimes they are very close (as in the case with some of the IJN Destroyers) that I can "fill in" with other models, and 1:700 is a lot easier to kitbash/convert, IMHO.

"Running out of room" is subjective. In some of the engagements it was not uncommon for these ships to bring their secondary firepower like their AA guns to bear on one another or even ram.

For "strictly destroyer combats" and allowing for "bath-tubing scales" you can get by with 1/700 on a 6x8 table. There are plenty of models in this scale.

Since A&A Naval minis came out, 1:1200 scale has gotten a lot more popular

?

I thought that the A&A ships were 1/1800 scale. They'd be a lot more useful to me if 1/1200.

You can get just about any warship from WW1 onwards in 1/1200 and 1/1250 thanks to its popularity as a collectors scale. ome models can be pretty pricey, but if you contact some of the dealers who also cater for wargaming interests (such as The Anchorage – Stuart Barnes Watson – and Dreadnought Models – Dave Willcocks) they can be pretty slick at tracking down what you are after for reasonable prices. Both based in the UK but both shipping worldwide. If you are in the UK then the various 1/1200 collectors fairs that are held around the country are well worth a visit, as dealers often sell off excess ships at very low prices when they have bought a big collection (I recall getting a load of Fletcher DDs for a quid each and a couple of Brooklyn CLs for a fiver).

I'd recommend 1/2400 or smaller, particularly if you care to introduce cruisers. Even 1/6000, the smallest commercially available scale of which I'm aware, requires considerable scale compression, though it looks pretty believable in 1/6000. On a 6x8 table 1/2400 looks acceptable, but everything looks like it's at point blank range.

Figuring standard gaming separations, usually you keep your formations, your warships are often separated by little more than a scale hundred yards. (Typically about 2", which is a hair over 130 yards.) "Extreme" range often works out to a scale 2400 yards or so. Heck, a good pitcher could probably throw a baseball that far . . . well . . . maybe not . . . but you get my drift. 1/2400 is usually quite compressed. I fear 1/1200 would look downright cramped and 1/700 just silly on a 6x8 table. A believebale formation of 3 DDs would need to be every bit of 6 feet long (allowing considerable visual compression). So where do you put the other side? Realistically, you'd have ships sailing withing .25 ship lengths of one another if you wanted to have any maneuver at all.

Also, even pricey 1/2400 miniatures won't run you anymore than inexpensive 1/700. GHQ is typically about $2 USD-3 for a destroyer. Almost everyone else 1/2400 is cheaper. I doubt you can find a new 1/700 kit of a DD for anything like that.

I've been pretty content with 1/2400, but if I had it to do over again, I'd go 1/6000, I think. There are also some quite tolerable 1/3000 and 1/4800 lines. Keep in mind that if you enjoy this, you may well move from small actions into fleet actions. What's fun with six destroyers can be even more fun with thirty. (If you have quick-play rules, anyway.)

For reference, here's a photograph from a game on a 6x8 table:

Obviously, I took the picture after the fact and doctored it up some, but the models and table are those used for the actual game. (The battle of Sangiang, as described on my blog)

The island is in approximately the center of the table, so what you see in the photograph is about three feet wide. To my eye, the destroyer formation is already unacceptably tight, but it played well, and there was sufficient room for maneuver to play a real role in the battle that unfolded. To each his own, of course, and there is nothing quite so lovely as a well built large scale model, but I like the small stuff and for gaming I think it works very well indeed.

I game in 1/1200. For DD's I use the various 1/1250 built/prepainted models and for the larger ships (CL's/CA's, etc) I use Superior (Alnavco) or source same on the second hand market.

Yes, the DD's can be expensive ($25.00-$35.00) but it allows me to spend my time building and painting the larger vessels which I really enjoy.

Using 1" = 1000 yds typical actions can be fought on a small table as long as one is willing to suspend disbelief in regards to range. It's all very subjective.

I'm also a scale modeler (in 1/700) and the large part count and fragile nature of the models puts off using them as wargaming models.

I usually host and we run large actions in my driveway while small night actions are played on the table inside.

The larger scales are certainly viable and allow for more scope in detailing and painting. It's a lot more fun to airbrush a Measure 12 scheme on a 1/1200 Atlanta then something smaller. Good luck with whatever you choose!

Regards,

J. P. Kelly

I don't know, it can be a tremendous amount of fun to brush MS-12 mod onto a 1/2400 scale Atlanta . . .

or even a cutter. I wouldn't wish to say it's more fun than painting a 1/700 model, but I also wouldn't wish to say it's less. Depends on what you enjoy. I can't tell you how rewarding it is to turn this . . .

into this . . .

All scales are a compromise, much as all ships are themselves a compromise. Some are more successful than others, and some certainly fit particular rolls better. 1/350 makes a better display model than 1/2400, but you'd be hard pressed to use them for gaming in anything smaller than a lake.

I'd say 1/350 and 1/700 are adequate display sizes. (I have several models in approximately these scales.) 1/2400 and 1/6000 are good gaming scales. 1/1200 is quite useful for some kinds of gaming (as targets for aerial games, for instance), and you could perhaps use it for a small display model, but for what I want to do smaller scales work better.

There's no question that a small model paints up quicker than a large one, and that a large one will show more detail, but I can afford to buy entire classes of ships in 1/2400, which would be out of my reach in any other scale. I still proxy quite a bit, as my collection is a little bit of a scatter shot, but I do it less and less these days. There is no "right" scale. It depends on your priorities. All scales can be tremendous fun and there's no universal measure that makes any one more fun than any other.

I don't want to force Dameon into a scale, but I'd argue that he would do well to consider smaller scales than those he initially listed, particularly since he stated that he has a limited playing area, even if the engagements he wants to recreate are small. If nothing else, there's a wide variety of contemporary rules available in the U.S. that address smaller scales directly, and 1/2400 is quite well supported. (And it's far and away the most popular gaming scale in my neck of the Midwest.) It never hurts if you can find opponents that have fleets in your scale.

However, I was spectating a game at a recent convention and I overheard some of the players complaining about the small size of the destroyers, how they were hard to tell apart and felt like they got lost on the huge mat

Would it be heresy to place the 1/2400 models on a base, same a Langtons sculpted one, and attach a lable with ships name or pennant number for easy differentiation? Or even tone the seascape base a slightly different colour to provide a key?

Ah, I forgot that particular quote. Yes, bases are quite common and often have identifying information. Further, I think mis-identification and confusion about the identity of targets is a good feature, as I like the fog of war. (I make it a point to keep damage secret, so that opponents see only the observable effects, a ship smoking or vanishing or circling or slowing down, but not the stuff inside the hull, where circuits short and pumps fail and turrets go offline. If players forget which ships they were shooting at and shoot at the wrong ones, so much the better. This does actually happen.) But there are some contradictory bits to work out.

First a question for Dameon: Are you sure of the scale from the convention? You describe the destroyers from the convention as 2 inches or so, which sounds to me like 1/2400. (A typical "modern" WWII destroyer being from roughly 350 to 400 feet long.) This makes a typical 1/1200 destroyer almost 4 inches and a typical A&A War at Sea DD around 3. I'd guess there are more 2.25" WWII DDs in 1/2400 than 1/1800 (the WaS scale) and I'm quite sure there are more than in 1/1200. (Even a flower is 2" in 1/1200.)

I confess that to the untrained eye ships become hard to identify in unfamiliar scales. I did a doubletake at a 1/1200 cruiser in a game once before I realized it was a Kagero and no cruiser at all. Gives one a little more sympathy for all the flyboys that reported sighing cruisers and battleships when all they saw was fishing trawlers . . . or surf breaking on shoals. (If I had a nickel for every cruiser that turned out to be a DD.)

Sorry I forgot about that objection. Sparker is correct, basing solves much. Strictly optional, but it can be useful. It also helps to prevent wear and tear on delicate models, though I still neglect to do it myself, for reasons described earlier and elsewhere.

SP: very nice work on your Atlanta. And, I agree, there is no 'right' scale; as I said it's subjective. I was answering in regards to the OP's question.

Regards,

J. P. Kelly

A&A Minis ARE 1:1800, my mistake!

That is the smallest I am willing to go. Period. 1:2400 is totally out of the question. The whole idea is the focus on Destroyer combats, to have models where the different features of the various classes are distinguishable. The smaller you go, the more destroyers just become generic looking blobs.

Also, the idea of playing with teeny tiny ships yet still requiring a playing area so large that you have to play on the floor or outdoors, sounds like the antithesis of what I am trying to accomplish.

Fair enough. Just curious, since you quoted DD lengths (two inches) in the neighborhood of 1/2400 DD lengths. (I initially got out a ruler and measured a Kagero, Fletcher, and Tribal from my own collection, all of which were just a hair under two inches.) There are certainly enough 1/1800 models now, and 1/1800 is a nice enough compromise size. It'd be crowded for my taste, but if you're content with it they ought to be fun to paint. Whatever scale you choose in the end, good luck and enjoy your gaming.

I'd recommend 1/2400 or smaller, particularly if you care to introduce cruisers. Even 1/6000, the smallest commercially available scale of which I'm aware, requires considerable scale compression, though it looks pretty believable in 1/6000. On a 6x8 table 1/2400 looks acceptable, but everything looks like it's at point blank range.

I gamed with 1/2400 ships and 1"=1000 yards, measuring ranges to the mainmast. It did look a bit cramped compared to the "Victory at Sea" films, but it played fine.

I think the range of available ships is better at 1/1200 or 1/1250.

I'm debating between 1/1200 and 1/2400 for my ships supporting the Normandy landings. I think the better choice for the DDs is 1/1200, as that visually puts them at ~900 yards off the beach.

I'd consider 1/1200 ships and 1"=100 yards groundscale, as that's pretty close to ship scale. Great for night actions on a 6x8 board, too, but you can't do any really long-range shooting. Cruisers will be at the ragged edge of what you can do, I'm not sure I'd want to be within 7000 yards of a Baltimore-class CA (or heaven forbid a Des Moines-class with the 8" automatics!).

For ships, I'm a big fan of decimal groundscales, 1"=100 yards or 1"=1000 yards. That allows you to directly convert table range to real range for your gunnery tables.

If you hunt around on the 1/1250 sites you can often find really good deals. I have four Clydeside Hunt's that I picked up for $.25 USD each. I do a number of offbeat (Greek for example) and what-if destroyers in 1/1200 as well.

I have played them out using the old Destroyer Captain board game system but recently have fell for the computer assisted "Battleship Zenith" rules. There is no accounting for ships smaller than a destroyer in this system but it works gereat for small battles and is very fast.

Dave G
The PT Dockyard
ptdockyard.com

Getting back off topic again, since the OP wants to do larger stuff . . . but what's available in 1/1200-1250 that's not available in 1/2400? I'd guess there's probably slightly more small ships in 1/1200, but man there's a lot of small ships in 1/2400. I have several different kinds of flowers from almost as many manufacurers, seven different classes of USCG cutters, three classes of French sloops, several classes of Thai ships, a Chinese "cruiser", Japanese ASW escorts, minesweepers, torpedo boats, a couple of classes of military ocean going tugs, four or five different sorts of generic harbor tugs, assorted US and Japanese landing craft, barges, lighters, and even assorted ships boats. And that's just the stuff I have. I also know of many classes of torpedo boats, minesweepers, military tugs, and landing craft that I don't have.

I think there's a also wider variety of liners and merchies in 1/1200-1250, but given that I have something like fifty different indentifiable classes of merchant ship models (not even counting kitbashed and improvised ships) from four major and several minor manufacturers, and that merchant ships can be easily modified to simulate other similar merchant ships (even on 1-1 scale) I don't really see why a wargamer would need any more than that. And again, there are more models out there than those that I own. At least as many more, if you want to buy the premium/expensive stuff. (I buy cheap.)

I really don't think the contention that there's "more" will hold water in either 1/2400 or 1/1200. I suspect that virtually every major combatant of DD size or greater from about 1900 onward is available in both sizes if you look hard enough, and most combatants from 1860 onward. (Though there will be more holes here, since wargamers tend to favor ships actually involved in wars and the Pax Britannica kept the number of those down for a little while.)

Lots of reasons to go with either scale, but at least in the U.S. and for WWII you can find it in 1/2400. Again, there are four major manufacturers with catalogs of hundreds of ships each: Panzerschiffe, Viking Forge/Seabattles, C in C, and GHQ. I wouldn't doubt that between them they have close to a thousand completely different models. Maybe over a thousand. I am quite confident that you can find models for every ship in every major battle from 1860 to the present in 1/2400. If you want Age of Sail the breadth really is better in 1/1200, but in the steam and steel era it's up to you.

Please forgive me. I know it's off topic. But you have to understand, I've got my fleet review set up across the basement from me right now. And I have six-hundred-some-odd models in my collection. For WWII, if I ain't got it you don't need it. (Not that I plan to quit buying, mind you. It's an obsession.) I dare you to name WWII warships that saw combat that I couldn't believably proxy out of my collection. (There are a few. Can you pick them?) Let's say you get five picks and we'll see how many I've got.

Note: for our purposes "warship" can include "boats" (such as submarines or purpose-built ASW trawlers) so long as they are independently seaworthy enough for reasonable use in the open seas in all sea states. Militarized merchant ships are excluded (though I have many in my collection), since the variation is sufficiently great that you can't even begin to find good descriptions of all of them, let alone photographs. Likewise landing craft and strictly littoral, lake, or riverine ships ships are excluded, even if specifically naval.

"Believable proxy" shall be defined as a ship of the same class or one not visually distinct from it in length, beam, height, and general armament and arrangements at 1/2400.

I make no bets. This is simply a matter of honor. If you get five I will tip my hat to you and do the "I'm not worthy" dance. If you miss on five I expect the same in return, but I shan't force the issue. Results in the middle will be pro-rated appropriately. If you get four I will be duly impressed. Three would count as reasonably impressed, two as somewhat impressed, and one as non-plussed, but convinced you're not a total boner. I leave reciprocation up to you.

Care to take a stab? I'll post a photo of the result.

I am very happy with 1/1250 scale. As has been previously stated all models are a compromise between detail (cost) and space (bath tubbing) I think it is a personal opinion.
I started out with 1/2400 and was frustrated so moved up and have been very happy. I have included CLs now as well.

Platoonforward.blogspot.com
Look under May "VIPs from Greece" for Pictures; you can ignore the writing.

Cheers

Joe