"1/72 British Napoleonic Artillery Comparison" Topic

I had the week off so have of course been working with my miniatures collection. For those of you who are enthusiasts of the hobby, I hope the artillery comparison will prove useful. I would love some additional feedback on measurements from other manufacturers, so if you have the time to do so, please feel free to contact me or just add to the comments section of my blog. I have also included some Works In Progress, so pop on by for a look.

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Interesting. So they're all nearer 1/76 – or smaller – than 1/72.

The Airfix RHA 9-pounder has 18.5mm wheels, making it 1/82 scale.

Depends on which component you are measuring. The funkiest is the Der Kriegspieler with short wheels and a long carriage.

The funkiest is the Der Kriegspieler with short wheels and a long carriage.

Which is, of course, a Hinton Hunt model.

rmaker – yep. Marcus Hinton was not known for his artillery renditions, that is for sure, though they can have a certain toy soldier charm.

What a great posting.

How we really do need far more of such comparative images…and not just in Napoleonics. I am struggling to crew my Free French armour with various resin figures. The AFVs are mostly 1/72, but the figures are small, even for 1/76. Fine, if we are just talking about head and shoulders presentation, but standing next to a Heller jeep, they are dwarves.

Agreed Deadhead. Sometimes the variability in scale is maddening, especially when talking about out of production figures!

A few years ago I compared a number of 28mm Gribeauval 8-pounders with each other and it was a total farce. To get an accurate model I would have needed the wheels off one, the carriage off another and the barrel off a third. At 5 or 6 squid a pop that gets expensive. Even then what I'd have got would have been an 8-pounder in which the major bits were the correct relative size, but not something like 1/59 scale.

How hard can it be to sculpt an accurate 1/56 scale Gribeauval gun? It's not like it's a carroballista or a trebuchet where there's no extant original to work from.

I've wondered the same. The older casting techniques did involve some shrinkage of the figure from master mould to production figures, but seems like that should be fairly consistent and could be accounted for. Perhaps a different set of sculpting skills are required.

Shrinkage would account for the thing coming out 1/59 instead of 1/56, or 1/82 instead of 1/76 in the Airfix RHA case. But unless there's somehow different shrinkage for each part, it should not produce a model where the tube, wheels and carriage are each a different scale, and overall the wrong shape.

The unpainted rightmost model in your first photo above is an egregious example of this. From the table at your blog, its wheels are 1/84, its barrel is 1/83 (so near enough allowing for said shrinkage), but its carriage is 1/64 scale and its track is 1/73 scale. So it's a different scale in every dimension, and none is 1/72. It's the Airfix La Haye Sainte of gun models.

OK, so it's an old model, but modern ones aren't any better so far as I can tell. We need someone to laser-scan an example and then create a 3D printable file.

You've saved me the bother of hunting down old 20mm Hinchliffe pieces, as they're no better!