"AB miniatures Napoleonic horses" Topic

AB miniatures superb sculting and nicely proportioned but, does anyone else think the horses are too small for the riders, or is it just me?

sorry to say but for me elite's horse look like deer

front rank's light horses for huzars not

AB 15/18mm horses might be bit small for heavy cavalry I guess, but not markedly so, I think.

I do think Front Rank's horses are particularly ill proportioned in 28mm however. Legs too short and stubby, heads too big and overall very small horses next to those very beefy cavalry riders. Some of the best detailed figure sculpting you can find in 28mm however, but all are "well fed"

Pondered this doing Hanoverian Hussars, but also the smaller cavalry often got whatever they could get. Might be more picky for cuirassiers or British heavy Dragoons.

No I dont, I think they're actually perfectly proportioned with the riders. I've even used AB horses to fix other brands cavalry. The effect is astonishing, just replacing with a correctly detailed and proportioned horse lifts the other brand dramatically.

They are one of the few ranges which are not offering disguised elephants, horses were at this time not as high as today jumping horses.

Even heavy cavalry horses would be in the 155 cm to 160 cm (maximum) range.

This may help, mate. It's a comparison James D Gray did using photos of my son sitting on our two horses, and then silhouettes of the figures overlaid on his silhouette. The heads on the rider figures line up with where Ray's head was. He was about 5'8" when the photos were taken, so about right for a cavalryman. The larger horse (at the top) is well over size for cavalry. The smaller is average-to-large for heavy cavalry at 15.2hh (157.5cm).

PS Boof and Shady were Mike Broadbent's models for the horses he did for Eureka's SYW range

so, if I have interpreted this correctly, the AB horses are far smaller than they should be?

I took this same AB horse and measured.
This horse is 160-162cm in 1:100 scale.
15.2 hands is 154cm.
So there are something wrong in this picture.

May be this that your son is 173cm but AB rider is 190cm tall.

Problematic difference is visible here.
Left figure is almost 170cm tall and centre figure is 190cm tall.
My horses are both like AB ones, 160cm.

I think maybe some, not all, of the AB human figures are too large for their horses.

I do notice scale creep. My 15mm Minifigs have increased in size from 2nd Gen to 3rd Gen. I also use 18mm Blue Moon and AB figures.

Here are four of my 15/18mm Spanish general figures.
You can decide if the horses are too large for the human figs.

From left to right: Blue Moon – AB – Minifig 3rd Gen – Minifig 2nd Gen.

John T.

battle master, as far as I could see some AB horses are quite small compared to their riders. The horse is one of the "light cavalry" horses with a French Chasseur-a-Cheval rider. Compared to the rider (assuming the rider was 5'6"/167.5cm) the horse is about a scale 13.2hh or 14hh hands (132cm to 142cm), so pony sized. Their heavy cavalry horses are larger, and to me the horses for their one-piece Saxon heavy cavalry looked the best in proportion to the riders.

Sho Boki, the picture is what it is- photos of horse and rider figures scaled against a photo of a real person on a real horse, matching the height of the riders for scale. If you think it's wrong then ignore it.

I don't have my Napoleonic collection any more to measure the AB horse myself. I do have my SYW figures- I just measured that horse pose and it's 16mm +/-0.5mm (a horse's height is measured from hoof to withers, not hoof to top of the horse's head). That's a 1/100 scale 160cm at the withers, or 15.2hh.

I think the problem was that the new riders were 18mm (1/100) figures, but the horses were 15mm (1/120), as designed for Tony Barton's original Battle Honours figures. As John Tyson says, that makes the rider too tall in scale for the horse. After all, it's highly unlikely that the average height of a Napoleonic light cavalryman was 190cm/6'2"- so either the AB riders are too tall or the horses too small.

I think part of the reason is that the legs are too short. That's possibly a limitation of white metal, though- if the legs were longer they may bend too easily.

Cheers.

the height of the rider is a valid argument, while Suvarov looks small, the officer is very tall, almost two different scales.

Suvorov was very small, even smaller than I represent him.

"I think the problem was that the new riders were 18mm (1/100) figures, but the horses were 15mm (1/120)"

This is not very true. AB horses are true 1:100, like other AB earlier figures and equipment.
Average napoleonics 170cm human in 1:100 scale is 16mm to eyes.
Later AB figures grew up to 18mm, so they represent 190cm tall men.
Problem is not in horses but in human figures. AB cossacks horses are correctly even smaller.

I myself, as I try to fill gaps in AB lines, also do these 190cm giants to satisfy my customers, but I want to return to the correct scale.

This is a significant difference, i am planning on using mini-figs 2nd gen as i prefer 15mm figures (I like Heritage as well, but they are no longer available). I do like the detail on AB, but these images really show the difference in size.

@ dal

Don't you need to size the figures to the same as the human comparator, rather than just aligning the heads? Usually the rider's feet come just below the top of the horse's foreleg. If you line up the feet and the head you get a proportionately better horse.

@Sho Boki.

This is not very true. AB horses are true 1:100, like other AB earlier figures and equipment.

That may be true now- I haven't bought any AB for quite a few years. The photo's were taken in 2001 and some of the horses were the same as been offered under the Battle Honours label. I think, but can't be sure, that the horse used in that photo may have been one of those.

@4th Cuirassier

Good point, Phil. Though the feet on the 1st, 2nd and 4th photos seem to be close to where you'd expect. I think they were done that way to stop any excessive manipulation of the photos producing distortion.

I only have the original photos of Ray on the horses and the one of the Eureka Prussian figure (though I can take more photo's of them). James took the photos of the other figures, and I don't have the originals, nor equivalent figures (though I may have a few suitable photos from my old Nap's collection, somewhere), to test that out. If you'd like to give it a go then send me a PM and I'll send you the two horse photos.

I'm not having a go at AB- they are still one of my favourite brands and my ACW collection is 95% AB. But when the BH thing happened and Tony launched AB, there were a few comments about the horse sizes and "growing" figures. I got quite a few emails at Spanner and the Yank, which prompted the experiment that James came up with.

Cheers.

In case one takes a look, it is the torso of the rider which creates the difference of making appear horses small.

In case you look at other ranges, other scale, sometimes the torsos are very small compared to the length of the legs.

About horses, in general too huge, a good impression is Perry plastic rider on Perry metal horses.

Maybe I am over critical – or have a distorted sense of proportions, but a lot of mounted miniatures look like jockeys on jump horses.

Otherwise I agree with Sho, the miniatures should not exceed 18 mm, still I love my mounted French officer in hat.

It seems the consensus is that it is the rider's are too big for the horses and as some of you have pointed out that the horses were from the battle honours range. it is a pity as the horses should have been redesigned to fit in with the larger AB figures.

Just for fun I took the top left figures in Dal's picture and resized the rider so his feet and head were lined up with where the human silhouette's were:

…which suggests that the horse's hindquarters are a larger problem than the horse/human proportions. The horse is a bit on the small side, perhaps not wildly so for an animal of the day, but the set of the hindquarters makes it look much smaller. Between that and the unavoidable stoutness of metals I think that's the problem.

If resize and rotate to the right angle then correct comparison must look like this..
Nothing wrong with AB horse.

Scale is determined by size of equipment.. muskets, flagpoles, guns etc.
So if equipment is 1:100 and horses are 1:100.. and they are.. then human figures must also be 1:100.

Godd morning.

H-K, I agree, it would be a lot better if the figures were made to a standard (with some variations of height, proportions and heft) but the equipment should be consistent scale. People in the early 1800's were shorter on average than today. Sources vary, but the average height of a Frenchman was 164cm in 1810, as opposed to 176.5cm in 1980. So in 1810 a horse would be larger in comparison to its rider than today.

bm, considering what happened with BH and the need to re-establish his business as AB, I think Tony didn't have much choice. He'd have had to use what masters he had left to increase his range of product. Later, though, the old BH figures looked a bit small and some, at least, were replaced.

Phil, instead of using Boof's silhouette (he's a big horse, heavily built and a bit on the portly side these days), why not try it against Shady (bottom row of silhouettes), who at 15.2hh was at the top end of acceptable cavalry horses? The sloping hindquarters can be indicative of a horse that's lost a lot of condition (which horses on campaign would do), but I agree it does make a horse look smaller.

I don't have my Napoleonic figures any more, as I said, so I measured 7 different poses of BH/AB horse in my ACW collection, grabbed at random, and the sizes ranged between 14.5 to 15.5mm +/- 0.5mm (I couldn't find a horse that matched the one James used with a quick search, but as it has light cavalry harness I doubt I would have bought it for ACW figures). The horses were contemporary with the BH/AB "Napoleonic" horses and many are the same figure.

That gives a range of 1.45m (13.3hh- pony size) to 1.55m (15.1hh- good cavalry horse) at 1:100- but they fit nicely with the "larger 15mm" (ie roughly 16mm, not 1:100/18mm) figures that BH/AB used for the ACW range.

Sho Boki, I'm glad the figures you have are perfect. Enjoy them, mate.

Cheers.

There I painted a few Battle Honours miniatures, Austrian Revolutionary Cuirassiers, with BH horses – I have to say that the AB horses are new sculpts and different to BH.

Anyway, my consensus it that the horses are excellent but as Sho pointed out the rider should not exceed 18 mm (see the difference what 1 mm can do – for the mounted French Revolutionary officer in hat, compared to that one in the helmet).

It is difficult to find a balance for the rider of length of legs and height of torso, Perrys do quite a short one – but they use a different method of mounting, that is rider is not with attached saddle cloth – which is directly sculpted on the horse.

It seems the consensus is that it is the rider's are too big for the horses and as some of you have pointed out that the horses were from the battle honours range. it is a pity as the horses should have been redesigned to fit in with the larger AB figures.

In fact, AB heavy cavalry horses have been recently redesigned. They are larger than the previous ones. By the way, the previous ones were authentic AB horses, not BH.