"Some thoughts on 6mm and scale" Topic

If I am not mistaken, the basic ground scale in 6mm is about 1 inch to 8 yards.

Taking that at face value, let's examine a few things.

"Assault range" where things like sub machine guns, throwing grenades and whatnot become a thing is about 3-4 inches.

At a decent walking pace of about a hundred yards per minute, our 6mm guy will cover 12.5". He could probably run much further if he wasn't too concerned about having grenades thrown at him.

An infantry platoon will have an attack frontage between 12-24" depending.

A tank platoon will have 6-12" between each vehicle.

The 300 yard engagement distance we tend to talk about for infantry fire is 37 inches or thereabouts. That's pretty much how wide my dinner table is across.
That's also very close range for tank fire.

Looks like for a realistic scale 6mm game, my dinner table is about a platoon level engagement and by the time the game starts, the assault is already under way.

Thoughts?

Yes, but 6mm usually shines at a bit larger scale fight than that. Basically, the individual figures are so small that it is better for massed infantry, say ACW, or for vehicle combat.

Interesting…But a better question to ask would be how many miniature games are played to "Scale"?

Inari7 is right.

I've almost never played a rule set where it tries to match the ground scale with the figure scale. In all cases the figures were simply pretty markers.

A couple of rules even just throw scale out the window. Eg: Crossfire.

I _do_ remember agonising over it when I was younger. Then I learnt that it didn't matter.

Cheers,
John

Get a bigger dinner table?

You don't really want to play on the floor as there is always the chance of accidently stepping on them. If that should happen, about all you can do is bellow "I am kaiju!"….

Pretty much no games are played to any semblance of scale :)

It's funny though, we'll agonize over the exact amount of wide brimmed hats in a given unit during the summer month of 1943, or the exact performance difference between one 75mm gun and another, but scale is almost universally given up on, to an almost crazy degree.

surely you mean "…the exact number of wide brimmed hats..?

I'm sure I did :)

I think you pretty much have suspend belief when dealing with the contraction of figure scale to ground scale. Tank fire in particular just needs to feel right rather than be right.

6mm is one of the few scales where you can do true ground scale games, however it gets fairly tedious quite quickly. I use 6mm for anything from tactical games up to operational stuff at 1" to 5km.

Yep. Not to mention all the vertical issues. Most hills then are little more than folds in the ground.

Yep, next to 2-3mm, 6mm is as close to "real" scale as is generally possible in mini games. All I now do is 6mm … And we use 1 vehicle = 1 vehicle and 3-8 Infantry on a base … And also note a 6mm scale modern or future Heavy Artillery piece in scale could probably fire 1/2 the length of a real football field or basketball court … What is 17-20 miles in 6mm scale ?

Using 1/300 as a rough scale equivalent for 6mm, 17 miles would be around 299.2 feet. That's a full football field! Crikey!

If you're willing to just play the assault, 6mm or even 15mm can be played without any groundscale compression.

But if you want 'out of range' to be a consideration, you need to compress the groundscale. Even if you're playing 1/300 groundscale (12"-100 yards), it's tough to play horse&musket games. Your artillery would have a range of over 10 feet!

also note a 6mm scale modern or future Heavy Artillery piece in scale could probably fire 1/2 the length of a real football field or basketball court … What is 17-20 miles in 6mm scale ?

Try more like 25-35 miles for the GPS-guided M982 Excalibur shell, 10 miles for the laser-guided M712 Copperhead, 12 miles for the Russian laser-guided 30F39 Krasnopol, or 45 miles for the South African G6-52 Extended Range self-propelled howitzer shooting the M9703A1 V-LAP Velocity-enhanced Long Range Projectile.

For utterly obscene ranges, you should see what the US Navy is coming up with. The US Navy's 5" ERGM (Extended Range Guided Munition) has a range of 68 miles, and the GPS-guided Long Range Land Attack Projectile LRLAP is even longer-ranged: 5" LRLAP reaches to 62 miles, and the 155mm LRLAP can reach 115 miles. But I believe that the 155mm LRLAP is a bit too long for the standard NATO-spec 155mm artillery tube (translation: time to change the spec!)

Thanks for the calculations Javelin & Lion ! I'm too lazy to have figured it out and I suck at math ! So unless you are fighting a Berlin or Manila type scenario … put your 6mm FA in at least the next room !

Used to play a lot of Vietnam 6mm, either using the 1 inch equals 50m or 100m, depending on the scenario. The H&R soldiers were individually based and the scale perfectly matched the rapid transition between company operations and the individual small unit fire fights.

One could I suppose fight on two scales, with a larger scale being used for higher echelon initiated operations and a transition to a smaller board with a realistic scale, to work out the result of the combat. Units could then realistically reinforce the initial contact, by moving from one board to another, without the need for die rolls to show time of arrival and orientation.

No worries, L4! We know you were Infantry!

LOL !!!!!

Milites,
We MG looked at the two scale games in our case 1:144 and 1:74. The problem is that you can get a area that is so large to play in 1/72 that it loses interest. We have found for instance that after you have taken your 20th house it gets booring! Even if you could do 1:1 (trouble is the figure base at real scale, is bigger than a real doorway) and you were happy to use twezzers to manouver troops behind garden walls set ony 6ft apprart (you could even fight from my WII air raid shelter in my back garden!) you would only want to fight a few houses before it became tedious. Proably much less than 1% of a significant built up area. MG works on built up area being represented at about 1:25 with respect to houses and does not represent all the intervening hedges, wall etc. We do not even model rooms in small buildings and even then a small built up area may take an evenings gameing to secure it enough to pass through with the logistics train. Admittedly this falls significantly when playing the "platoon" comander who knows where you are going better than you do!;-).

I Ain't Been Shot Mum has a ground scale of 1:300, and looks very good played with 6mm figures.

Chain of Command from Two Fat Lardies uses a ground scale that is true in 15mm. Hand weapons would have the range to cover the whole table, but for cover. And they are experimenting with a hard Sci if version with overtones of Asimov novels.

For tactical games I tend to use 1/300th ground scale (so 12" = 100 yards) but with 15mm toys, although we have occasionally done it with 6mm.

I have played Final Combat with 1/35th scale figures and a ground scale of 1" = 1 yard or 1/36. Each player had 3 figures to command. Was a fun game.

This all explains the attraction of 3mm

OK, fudge 1:285 just a little and call it 1:300, and 1 foot equals 300 feet, or 100 yards. Fudge just a little more (10%) and call it 100 meters. At that scale, my 5x8-foot table is half a kilometer wide and half a mile long.

No HistoryPhD, although more realistic scale might be a factor, I tend to think that for someone used to 28mm cost is a major attraction.
When someone like that first load up picoarmor.com they look at the prices and think, what the hell.. lets just buy EVERYTHING.

In the first GW 6mm Space Marine game, they had off-board indirect fire support. You could "purchase" types[Heavy, Light, etc.] with up to 25% of your basic force level. And you rolled to call it in … generally pretty realistic. It could scattter or your call didn't make it, etc., etc. … It could be distant batteries, CAS, Orbital assets, even Naval Gun fire … We like it …

Original Space Marine was wicked good :)

Yeah, I get the occasional urge to play Adeptus Titanicus too…

Yes, there we a lot of good things from SM1. We still use some of the Army Templates/TO&Es [Lists for you amatuers … ] We also like/use the Random Scenario System very much … But in typical GW style they abandoned those in future iterations …

Hammer's Slammers: The Crucible uses infantry weapons many of which have ranges of over a metre (in 15mm) and most of the rest have (effectively) infinite range. In 6mm, the same weapons – again – have infinite range.

By "(effectively) infinite" it means "anywhere on any table you'd ever want to use.

At Salute 2013 we had tank weapons – both primary and secondary (ie Heavy Machine guns and tribarrel powerguns) weapons firing the length of an 11 metre table – at 1/100 that's over a kilometre…

John T