"Where did this whole 1/72 thang come from?" Topic

The human height discrepancy point is often made but if you look at a crowd of people from 100 yards away they all look the same height. You can't distinguish height differences any more than shoe size differences. With 1/72 vs 1/76 you can and it should not be feasible. The real issue is that you can't mix vehicles because there are no size variations between Shermans…

This discussion is exactly why I gave up on 20mm-1/76-25mm-1/72-HO-1/87- WHATEVER scale and now game with 15mm and 28mm. Cheers!

Yeah, about that.

Compare QRF to Peter Pig to Old Glory/Command Decision to Battlefront.

OG/CD minis are scaled to something like 1/120. Peter Pig are 1/100.

Compare QRF to Peter Pig to Old Glory/Command Decision to Battlefront. OG/CD minis are scaled to something like 1/120. Peter Pig are 1/100.

I have and use them in the same units. Can't really tell them apart with out looking closely at the figures. On the table they all blend in. Same goes for tanks, mix CD with Peter Pig no problem. Couldn't do that with Airfix and Hasegawa. Of all the figures I have used over the years I find 15mm the most forgiving.

The human height discrepancy point is often made but if you look at a crowd of people from 100 yards away they all look the same height.

Yet if you put a man 5'6" next to a man 6' tall, at 100 yards many people will be able to notice a difference in height. There is more at play than just what the human eye can perceive.

We only got concerned about scales around the end of the 19th and the early 20th century with things like Nurenberg toy soldiers being roughly 54mm tall.

Train manufacturers were among the first to start implementing actual scales though there was little standardisation and every country had different ways of measuring models not to mention the fact that early models were often "fudged" to allow motors to fit inside. The result is that HO and OO which were supposed to be different are in fact conflated together sharing the same rail gauge.

Aircraft scales like 1/72nd are simple arithmetic : 1/6th of an inch is equal to an actual foot. It makes for very easy conversion of plans and measurements of an original.

So both scales 1/76 and 1/72 were created from different principles. The main UK manufacturer being Airfix who had dabbled in trains simply extended HO scale into their vehicle kits, while others, most notably the Japanese kit manufacturers who also used 1/72nd scale as their guide opted for that approach.

Same for 1/32 and 1/35.

Which brings us to the older kits from the 1950's and 1960's which were often a "fit the box" scale or used their own bespoke scale for models.

Over time some scales became standard across the industry and at the end of the day most companies simply follow the industry for trying to force your own scale is something that might work, but will be done at your own peril.

Now wargaming comes from two sources, toy soldiers and modelling. Therefore they either tried to conform to existing scales and kits or were inspired by toy soldiers.

Classic 25mm was meant to be roughly equivalent to 1/72nd scale figures who are usually about 25mm in height, but casting technology of the day often resulted in bulkier figures that ended up looking much bigger than plastic figures by Airfix. Companies began to up the height to match the bulk of the figure, others made them slightly bigger to add more detail and in the end we have the scale creep into 32-35mm figures we see increasingly today.

@ Bill

Who's the tallest person in the middle distance of this crowd?

Nobody stands out. Put them all in a uniform and it only gets harder…

But stand a 1/72 figure alongside a 1/76 and they look like different scales – as indeed they are…

Great discussion and truly enlightening, at least for me. If only I'd known about the Airfix Churchill wheels, I spent ages in 1970-whatever trying to get them aligned and then even longer trying to get the tracks on, glueing my fingers together in the process. That's probably why I gave up on model kits and starting painting Hinchliffe Napoleonics instead. On figure sizes, as has already been said the important thing is not consistency in height or even width of figures, it's having the same size muskets, shakos, backpacks etc, and it is annoying when these vary wildly within the same figure range from the same manufacturer. Hinchliffe is the worst I've experienced; the later remodelled figures are much larger and generally much better, but the job was never completed. So the (later) British heavy dragoon trooper is a decent figure but the (older) trumpeter is simply incompatible. However these are really minor grumbles and I shouldn't complain too much – really we 28mm collectors are spoiled for choice – Perry, Elite, Connoisseur, Three Armies all go together pretty well, and standards have improved massively over the decades.

Those three guys seem to be head & shoulders taller than those around them. But the height and angle at which this photo was taken isn't a fair test of the point being made. Put the subjects at the same level as the observer and the tallest people will be apparent.

Who's the tallest person in the middle distance of this crowd?

I couldn't tell you who is the tallest, but that is difficult to do without having all the people of approximately the same height stood next to each other, but you can pick out people of different heights. Just up from the centre of the picture their is a guy with a blue shirt and sunglasses, who has several shorter people next to him. To his left is a guy with pink shirt, beard and sunglasses who is surrounded by shorter people, and so on.

But stand a 1/72 figure alongside a 1/76 and they look like different scales

There is no such thing as a scale human. You can't make scale drawings of humans. The best that you can get to is a series of ratios like your arm span being equal to your height, but even those are subject to normal variations and vary according to your ethnicity.

That competition's too hard. Try this one:

link

Spot the 1/76 Crusader. No cheating by reading the text. Or knowing the Airfix kit was moulded in green plastic. Shows why I'm happy to use the S-Model version with my 1/76 nostalgia stuff.

The Airfix Grant turret is another question altogether….

And you can add Frontline to my 1/76 list.

@ deephorse

The viewing angle is much the same as it would be for tabletop figures, no?

Any perceived differences are largely subjective. Looking at your circled guys, the two in the front and middle look tall until you notice that they are the same height as the women to their right. The guy at the back is tall except that he's the same height as the bloke four away to his right.

The true differences are far smaller than those between scales, and probably postural rather than actual.

@ Fred
There is no such thing as a scale human.

There sort of is, actually. Average adult male height is 5'10" +/-4%. 68% of males are within that span. More than 4% taller or shorter puts you into 2 standard deviations territory. 1/72 is 6% taller than 1/76.

So maybe the answer is that out of every 100 figures 66 can be 1/76, 14 could be 1/72, 1 can be 1/87, 1 can be 28mm and the rest could be Lamming which resemble no human figure at all.

The scale issue is probably more troublesome for the 20th century where you have vehicles that can look plain wrong. Esci did a lovely 1/72 KV1 that farcically dwarfed any 1/76 Tiger I, for instance. With the horse and musket era, a solution you can often get away with is thicker bases for the shorter figures.

@ Jeffers
If I'm not mistaken, the Airfix Crusader is just an irrecoverable scale disaster.

It's not like the Airfix Tiger, where adding bits can produce a good result, or the Airfix Sherman, where plating the hull with plastic card and enlarging the turret can produce a reasonably-shaped result, or even the Airfix Panther, where removing and re-angling the glacis, inserting fillets into the lower hull to correct the sit, and moving the turret back can produce a passably shaped result (whether it's worth it is another matter). With the Crusader, AIUI, everything is the wrong length, or width, or height, or position, and it's not fixable because the road wheels are oversize meaning the whole vehicle is.

Along with the La Haye Sainte Farmhouse the Airfix Crusader pioneered the concept of the mixed scale: it's a different scale in every axis.

I knew a bloke who used to buy Matchbox GMC40s and saw the hulls in half both length- and widthways to make 1/76 HVSS Shermans. Someone like that could probably be ar5ed to fix the Airfix Crusader, but life's too short.

There sort of is, actually.

True there are averages and normal ratios, but within the human sphere there are enormous variations. The tallest human on record was 5x taller than the shortest. Such variations would bust any engineering project for which plans are drawn up. Even a tiny variation in one dimension of a single component in the US copy of the MG42 was enough to render the gun useless. Such minor variations are the norm in humans. But the real problem is not the figures it is weapons and equipment. They don't issue you with a larger Bren gun just because you are 6'6" tall and built like a brick outhouse.

So maybe the answer is that out of every 100 figures 66 can be 1/76, 14 could be 1/72, 1 can be 1/87, 1 can be 28mm and the rest could be Lamming which resemble no human figure at all.

There is a flaw in that argument in that even within the 4% there is variation. It is not like everyone is 1/76 until you hit the 4% mark when the height jumps suddenly. Within that range there will be figures closer to 1/72 or 1/87 than 1/76.

4th

If you look at the conclusions he states what scales the models actually are, none of which seem to be right. As I'm on a nostalgia trip, I've picked something which is near as dammit to the Airfix kit, rather than accurately scaled to 1/76.

I have tried to remodel the Grant turret with brown stuff to make it the right size, but have given up and ordered one from the spikey-bonced master modeller at S&S. This probably makes my Grants the same price as Milicast, but that's not what I'm trying to achieve.

@ Fred

68% of males are within 3" of 5'10". In either of 1/72 or 1/76, that range is one millimetre. At normal viewing distances this is an invisible size distinction. If you can see a size difference between two figures three or four feet away, one of them's the wrong size.

95% of males are within 6" of the average height. Of every 100 figures, you'd have 68 that were + or -1mm of the same height as each other, and another 13 or 14 that were respectively up to 2mm taller or shorter. The total is 95%.

Once you get past that difference of + or – 6", I very much doubt there'd be many of either in the same typical unit. Only 5% of people are more than that much different from the average, of whom half are shorter, and half are taller.

7' and 5' tall individuals are many standard deviations off the norm again, to the point where they wouldn't be found in typical military units, because of issues like size of uniform.

Wide height discrepancies are rare, basically. And even when they occur, people who exhibit them are often grouped together because they do: tall guardsmen, short tank crews, and so on.

@ 4th.

Not convinced. A 1/76 figure represents someone who is just over 3" shorter than a 5'10" 1/72 guy. That is roughly a 1/3 of a head taller for the 1/72 figure. I disagree about enlisted service personnel all being roughly the same height. They will be grouped around the average, but the differences between the tallest and shortest in the unit will stand out. See this picture of WW2 GI's and it is obvious there a number of guys who are a head shorter that the tallest.

The guy on the left at the front is short and the guy next to him, even without a helmet is a head taller. Their is guy towards the end of the column that is clearly nearly a head taller than all the guys around him.

Not too sure about that link……might need to recheck that.

Numbers are fine, but I think what we all remember is Airfix Cuirassiers up against Airfix Waterloo Hussars or RHA. Airfix WWI British or US, vs Germans or French. Tiny figures lacking any detail, up against massive figures, which, for their day, were also very well detailed (if weird. How many carrier pigeons did the French need? How many Poilus went over the top on bicycles? How many Hussar kettledrumers does one need?)

I think our complaint is when it is so obvious that one company's figures cannot be mixed with another's. Weedy thin asthenic folk up against stubby Hobbits, who bear no relation to human proportions

@ Jeffers
In comparison I measured the Airfix Crusader to be 1/70th scale in length, 1/77th in width and 1/67th scale in height.

LOL – just as I remembered….and the average scale is 1/71.3!

And via links I got to this piece on completing the Airfix Sherman accurately. The hull side additions and the turret solution are precisely what I have arrived at as the way ahead – which is encouraging.
link

@ Deadhead.

Fixed it. I agree, but that is more about 1 companies inability to make things to a consistent standard. The giveaway is the weapons and equipment. The original British and German sets have weapons that a much smaller scale than the 8th Army or Afrika Korps. But it is never about figure size. It is about equipment and weapons. If tanks showed the same variation as humans then an average tank squadron would have a mix of tanks of varying "scales". Oh and the Airfix Crusader would be the tall skinny guy!
As for the strange poses that is one of the reasons I gave up on 20mm plastics. I don't think a box ever provided a decent mix of weapons and poses. Still at least you can play Airfix charades.

And via links I got to this piece on completing the Airfix Sherman accurately.

Wow! That is a lot of work!

The main problem with the Airfix Sherman is the turret, which is too low and too small. Fixing that improves the profile problem. I'm not sure I will bother to replace the splashguards. Simply maxing out the turret size within what's there, and adding card to the hull sides to correct the width, gets you most of the way. A lot of the other stuff he's done is finessing, that you'd need to do with a lot of kits.

This was a heroic build of the Airfix Panther someone did about 10 years ago.

link

You can see how much is involved to get the sit, shape and general profile right. Out of the box, it's a very accurate rendition of one specific actual wrecked and stripped Panther.

More pictures of it here. It was actually fished out of a river where it had been abandoned upside down.

link

You can see that the loader's hatch on Airfix's subject was missing. There's just a hole. Obviously having no clue what should go there, Airfix simply omitted it. Probably this was because whether they guessed it wrong or omitted it, purists would want to replace it, and nobody else would care.

On the one hand I can't be bothered to replicate all that work, but on the other, whose 1/76 Panther is any better for the money?

@ 4th

Thanks for the link, but I don't think he has it quite right. He has put a filler in the lower hull, but the problem with the real vehicle is the torsion bars have collapsed down so the road wheels sit too high in relation to the sprocket and rear idler. To correct it you need to reposition them so they are angled down.
My favourite 1/76 Panther back in the day was the Nitto one. Be lucky to find one now, but I'm sure some firm must do a nice Panther by now.
link

I was just going to suggest the Nitto one. Still have one in my collection but it never ventures out these days. I have enough Dragon ones for my needs. There are currently some Nitto Panthers up on eBay UK.

There are several stabs in the same thread at reworking the Panther. There was an Airfix Magazine article that I have lost and a Military Modelling one I still have. As I recall, one hid/worked around, and the other corrected the suspension issue. The workaround leaves the ground clearance too low.

There's a similar but easier-to-fix c0ck-up with the Tiger. The Tiger's suspension has trailing arms on one side and leading arms on the other. Airfix's kit has trailing arms on both sides. To fix this you cut out the lower half of the lower hull side, turn it upside down and glue it back in. The sanding involved to hide what you've done is deeply fiddly.

Apparently many Tiger kits have inaccurate symmetrical turrets where the left and right halves are mirrors. In fact the actual Tiger 1 turret sloped in slightly on the right so the mantlet is offset slightly to the left. The Airfix Tiger's turret sides are so flimsy I reckon you could fix this just by a bit of brute force, ignorance and a new turret bottom-plate.

The Nitto Panther was nice IIRC. Who ended up with it, was it Fujimi? There's a few Fujimi Panthers on at £14.00 GBP or so. Arguably these are better value than Airfix's £7.00 GBP effort….

That isn't a picture of two people at 100 yards 4th Cuirassier. I suspect if you gave me 500 figures ranging between 21mm and 24mm tall I could produce a similar effect.

As I said there is more than just the human eye's ability to perceive height differences at play. This was something that I ran up against back in my model railroad days.

I've just scored a couple of Nitto M4A1s on eBay for £8.00 GBP each. That's £16.00 GBP gone because of this thread.

I've just scored a couple of Nitto M4A1s on eBay …

You might be interested in this:
link

@ Jeffers

You know you wanted to reely.

Hornswoggler's link is interesting. I've always liked the cast-hull Sherman shape.

Interestingly there's an ad on the front page for a Butlers Printed Models Panther tank. If you go look at the page, which I did, the same model is available 3D-printed in pretty much any scale.

One is 20mm, which the seller describes as 1/76 and offers for £10.00 GBP There's an option to upgrade to 1/72, which costs £1.50 GBP, which is 15% more.

The actual volume difference between 1/72 and 1/76 is…18%. So the man's prices reflect, remarkably closely, the materials cost difference between the two scales.

That's the only time I've seen it writ so starkly, though. The switch to 1/72 meant we had to buy everything again for 15% more money….

Ah yes, the brittle tracks. Like the good Boy Scout I never was (I hate camping) I have prepared spares from the Airfix Sherman! Mind you, £8.00 GBP was a stroke of luck and doubt I'll get that again. When they go above £10.00 GBP I'll buy Milicast.

BPM have their critics for quality of the print, but the kits I've had from them are robust and paint up nicely. Service is top notch.

It pays to keep an eye on Amazon prices.

A while back I was buying Sherman + LCMIII kits for £8.00 GBP eBay the LCMIII, and the tank is virtually free. Today, OTOH, the Sherman on its own is £11.07 GBP – at which point you'd buy Milicast. Similar money, better model.

Amazon are now also doing the gift set Cromwell (which includes glue, a paintbrush and some dodgy paints) for £7.99 GBP, whereas the Cromwell on its own is £9.94 GBP. No idea what that's all about.
link

The Panzer 4s have gone up – they were £7.49 GBP in December!

StuG IIIs are still £5.99 GBP though :-)