"How important is scale to you?" Topic

I am curious how important scale is to most people in 1:100 scale gaming? In this scale a 4x4 table is roughly 120 meters from side to side. This is quite small. At this range vehicles would still be almost on top of each other, although less so in 28mm scale. When you play your games do you build your terrain and play according to a realistic scale? I cannot quite get a grasp of this aspect myself. For example, when using vehicles I have some QRF Soviet vehicles, GZG, Old Crow and Khurasan. The first two companies vehicles are in done in a realistic size/scale. The last two, while having great scuplts, are quite larger than the first two companies. My T-80 looks like a scout car next to my Red Banner tank and my BMP looks like a clown car next to other APCs out there. If I play my larger vehicles against my QRF/GZG stuff, well it looks a little silly, a David vs. Goliath sort of thing.

This tends to bother me quite a bit since there seems to be no real guideline on how big stuff should be. Anyway, I am curious as to what other people do/play/approach the size/scale aspect. For larger vehicles do you take the approach that the actual model size is only for asthetic purposes and has no basis for the actual size in reality?

I am curious how important scale is to most people in 1:100 scale gaming? In this scale a 4x4 table is roughly 120 meters from side to side.

That is only possibly true if you are playing a skirmish game and even then the ground scale is often not the same as the figure scale.

And buildings are almost never in scale. The doors and windows should be, but the buildings themselves have to be shrunk down quite a bit, otherwise one building would take up a whole board!

otherwise one building would take up a whole board!

That would be a very large building … at 120m on a side – or are you talking about a city block?

The only game I play where I worry about the stuff truly scaling is Infinity in 28mm. It has no vehicles except the odd mech, and small ones at that. It uses about 10 figures or less a side typically.

In this case I want stuff to scale because the game models such small scale man-to-man combat. Otherwise, and in 15mm especially, I don't worry about it too much.

I do not worry about it too much. If it looks reasonable to me and the table looks good I am happy. I also have GZG, Khurasan, Combat Wombat, Micropanzer, Rebel and others. Everything works for what I am using it for. Most of my 15/18 mm Science Fiction games tend to be played on a 4 x 6 as I like having more than a few tanks, etc. I tend to have lots of terrain or a built up area to make that plausible. Tanks tend to not fare well unsupported without infantry in such environs so it makes for a good game.

When you look at most actual modern combat the majority of engagements tend to occur at what would be point blank range for the tanks. Just look at the Yom Kippur War, Chechnya, Syria, Even some of the engagements in Iraq were pretty close up when it came to AFVs especially in the urban areas.

The only time I really notice scaling issues is while painting the mini and looking at it up close or directly comparing myself, or seeing someone post a comparison image online. Once it's painted and on the table top, I rarely notice any differences (even among minis that I know are different! :) )
I'm sure it's the distance and perspective I have while playing.

First of all, since no can agree on what "15mm" means scale is pretty dead in the water from the get go.

It is a very rare game indeed where figure scale = ground scale. Even in 1:300 a 4 x 6 table is only about 1/4 x 1/3 mile.

I usually have a ground scale of 1" = 50 yards, so all figures and vehicles are really just a small dot and the models are there to look cool.

I play to WYSIWYG scale. I don't care much for mathematical conversions. 1/100th is sort of a rough estimate, but the size of the models defines the scale.

I do like, and I even seek out a wide variety of vehicle sizes for my collection. I think it's more authentic.

Maybe if I played historicals more, I'd be more concerned with matching up scales and model sizes, but with Sci-Fi, I don't waste the time worrying about it.

I play 15mm with the understanding that the figure scale is roughly 1/100th scale. I expect that there will be some variation, if for no other reason than castings can range dimensionally even if from a single mold. I accept that vehicles and aircraft will range from around 1/96 to 1/108, though I prefer to keep the range a little tighter. I'm am a little tighter yet with the range of infantry scale. For example, I don't even consider buying figs identified as 18mm for use with 15mm, and some of the larger and smaller figs in the 15mm range and out as well.

With respect to ground scale, in 15mm I use one of three scales (3m, 10m or 20m per inch),depending on the scope of the game. Terrain, buildings, etc are in roughly 1/100 scale, regardless of the ground scale in use.

Rarely does ground scale match figure scale. I only use it to make sure that figures, equipment, buildings and trees "fit".

"Scale"? Not really a concern in my 15mm games, Sci-Fi and historical alike. "Size" tends to be much more important.

I have done true scale modeling and also spend a great deal of time as a plein air landscape painter so I am well aware of how different the sizes of objects and spaces in the real world are to their counterparts on the wargames table.

If the relative sizes are ok, then the game is fine to me. A "big" building should be larger than a "small" one, a "big" tank should be larger than a "small" one. Since ground scale and vertical scale are not matched to figure scale, there is no need for each figure to be perfectly in scale with each other figure either.

OK, I'm about to write a really long reply, but the short answer is that I'll keep stuff that doesn't look right together separated in different "maps", keep them far apart (if possible) on the table, or assign the "underscale" stuff to one faction and the "overscale" stuff to another faction (if possible).

Haven't played yet, but I recently did inventory. I have a bunch of, for instance, 1/100 scale aircraft (Revell & Tamiya) and 1/100 "series" aircraft (Model Power, New Ray etc.) That is, some are plastic model kits (so, pretty true to scale) and the others are diecast "not-toys" (so, "box scale" at best). Hopefully I was smart enough to keep the scale variance low, somewhere between 1/96 and about 1/112 or so, on the diecast ones. Even so, the diecast ones generally look smaller, to me at least.

I bought these aircraft to use as scenery and objectives for a "map" I'm calling The Museum of Universal Concord (a military museum). Their collection will be mainly fighters and ground attack aircraft from the Cold War era. Since, to me, the models look bigger than the diecasts, I'll use one set of planes in one area of the museum (say the airfield) and the other set in a different area (say on display in the hangar, or overhead flying above the airfield).

[Later I may use all of these planes with a different ruleset, like a cold war fighter game, or give them to my friends' kids.]

{I may even make it harder on myself, and start buying Italeri diecast, which are purportedly much more likely to be "true" 1/100, so I'll have three varieties to confuse myself with.}

Here's the thing: I'm playing skirmish. I'm building a couple of 2' X 4' tables, instead of playing on a 4' X 6' or 4' X 8' table, so I'm breaking my platoon-sized actions into several squad/section-sized skirmishes. I'm playing a FoF/TW campaign, with each engagement affecting the overall campaign. Locations like the Museum of Universal Concord will be broken up into several sections, with a skirmish taking place in each section, as a focused-on part of the larger engagement. Museum of Universal Concord: The Airfield, the Hangar, the Motor Pool, etc. Each mini-map will have objectives and victory conditions for each faction, and the result of the bigger battle will be a cumulative score, based on how each fireteam or squad fared in their particular objective, with certain objectives influencing what happened "simultaneously" elsewhere.

I think it was Miles Davis who said "Make your weaknesses into your strengths." Maybe it was Sun Tzu.

I've thought about this a lot. Maybe way too much. Soon I will continue building it.

I've thought about it so much I'll probably reply more later.

Cheers.

While there is a generally accepted scale of 1/100 for 15mm vehicles, it becomes a little trickier with sci fi because there is no real vehicle against which to scale it, so it almost impossible to say just how big something 'should' be.

That said, I am hoping to add a range of Sci fi vehicles soon which will be sealed much closer to our existing 1/100 ranges

Depends on how much background materials your setting has, Geoff. For example, most of the anime series honestly have dimensions given for all the craft. That's how I figured out which DP9 Heavy Gears to use as the base for my Gasaraki Tactical Armors and Metal Fakes. I still need to make the support vehicles, but the TAs and Fakes are locked down.

True, but those dimensions are whatever they state them to be. Once stated, and the scale known, then it becomes as easy as making a Panzer IV or Bradley.

However Khurusans rather large tank, for example, has nothing to work against, so it is big as it has been made. :-)

Also SF tanks are usually TOO big. The plastic Mechwarrior vehicles could be used if they haven't a visible cockpit or crew, as they are often incredibly large.
[URL=http://s85.photobucket.com/user/thoughtengine/media/DSCN0901_zpsdda70eb6.jpg.html]

[/URL]
That loco is supposed to be 1/148 scale, while the vehicles are 1/160.
I have purchased one of the old 1/144 kits from the Combat Mecha Xabungle range, as I thought the thing would be smaller and more managable than the 1/100 version, just replace the aft open turret. Then it comes to assembly and we see the thing is big enough to be a giant robot platoon by itself!
As for buildings, the details have to scale for me, but unless I can use the minis inside them, some selective compression can occur. Even at a ground scale of 1"=80', even so much as a WW2 airfield turns out bigger than the average 8x6 games table. I use buildings all the way up to HO scale, because with careful selection you can find them not too big.

Tanks have gotten an awful lot bigger since WW2, greater than doubling in weight. A Sherman would be 5.8cm long, 2.6cm wide, and 2.7cm tall in 1/100, while an M2 Bradley IFV would be 6.55cm long, 3.6cm wide, and 2.98cm tall. A 1/100 Abrams would be 7.93cm long, 3.66cm wide, and 2.44m tall. (A modern train locomotive is ~2.4m wide, so even a Sherman should hang over the edge of a flatcar a bit)

As to whether tanks will continue to get bigger, I can make arguments either way.

At one level, since 1914 we've seen more and more weapons pushed down from Division to Brigade, Brigade to Battalion, and Battalion to Company. I mean, a Stryker company has 120mm mortars, 'light tanks', and even a sniper team, and those all used to be battalion or higher level assets. So I can make a case for any new tank to have a small mortar for indirect fire, as well as some kind of AA capability as part of the defensive systems. Infantrymen now have 2 or 3 machineguns per squad, when there were 2-3 per battalion in 1914! Infantrymen also have 2-3 grenade launchers per squad, replacing the 2-3 37mm infantry guns per regiment/brigade of 1914.

The argument the other direction is that big heavy vehicles are slow in a strategic sense. You can't move large numbers of them by air, they need to be loaded onto railcars and then taken to a port, unloaded from the rails to the pier, and then pier to the ship, etc. It takes more than a month to move a division anywhere.

Personally, I'd love to see the old Future Combat System partially resurrected. All the FCS vehicles were built to fit inside a C130, so you can fit an entire platoon of them inside a C17 or C5. I'd rebuild the 82nd and 101st as FCS rapid deployment forces (plus a couple other divisions), armed and trained for a short-notice deployment for 30-60 days until the heavy armor (Abrams/Bradleys) gets their stuff loaded up and delivered to the trouble spot.

Is that British or US loading gauge though?

There's "bigger than a truck" and then there's "bigger than a city block."

Too answer the quirents question Scale is kinda important to me, I build my terrain and vehicles to the 1:100th scale because it is easy and looks right. But that is my choice.

I also am weird in that I have done a bunch of 1=1 scale gaming meaning figure scale and ground scale match. In these games vehicles a mostly terrain, heck often inside a vehicle (Read Starship)is the terrain setup. When I say skirmish i tend mean Special Operations/gang warfare. A platoon is a large deployment in most of my games.

Mostly what infojunky said. It's quite important to me.

On darebear's OP, though, I don't have too much of a problem with that. WW2 vehicles often look small compared to modern ones (the MRAP vehicle look huge – and are – just for example) nd where there's justificarion for SF vehicles being a certan size (like it's dictated by some pre-existing literature or maybe a film or TV series or something) I don't have an issue with the disparity, providing the rules allow for combat across a large spread of technologies.

John T

I like Scale to a degree, if it looks good for the board then it's good to go, I know many vehicle are or seem to be a little small or too big, I'm okay with that for most part they reprsent the fact that they are there, doors and widows help for scale but the building doesn't have to be, buildings to scale in general would be to big for the boards, and would crowd the board a limit movement, for most part I try to reach a happy medium.

If it matters so much set a base scale of 10m:1mm (10000:1)and treat all terrain as area terrain. But when units get within 100mm (1km) of each other have the scale jump to 1m:10mm (1:100)and treat terrain as in scale models. Time makes a similar shift within the scaled up area. Alternately, mark the table with a proportionately scaled down rectangle in the middle as the intercept zone where the scale. This works best if you can match each 28mm model with a 6mm model to show the scale shift.

I should add that I'm willing to allow for some variability in the size of the troops, but not of their gear.

An M41 pulse rifle does not magically get bigger just because someone 7'4 picks it up!