"Ground scale" Topic

Simple question. I sale miniatures for Bolt Action but I have never had a chance to play it.
A friend from the Infantry school was designing a training module using Bolt Action. Their question is What is the Ground scale for the rules.
From the discussion they are trying to find the best maps to use for the table top training.
I wish the army had been more open minded about using miniatures and games as they are now. Vehicle ID was the main use for miniatures back in the 1970-80s. Lol.

Bolt Action has no official ground scale. If pushed, I would use 10 yards to 1 inch, and that is pretty generous. Consider:

link

That is a good exposition. I was in the Army back in the 1970s and 1980s and can testify to Brown's analysis.

Jim

I told the guy 5 or 6 yards. So I was close.
Thanks

It's inconsistent. Based on range of weapons it varies significantly from weapon to weapon

The average engagement range for small arms in WW2 was about 300m As rifle range is given as 24'(60cms) I take this as a approximately 300m. This gives 1 inch = 12.5m or 1cm = 5m. It is a real 'rule of thumb' but it seems to work quite well.

I've looked into average engagement range and found a wide variety of information from various sources. As a general rule of thumb it seems to be shorter than people imagine. 300m engagement range is the maximum engagement range for an M1 Garand in the hands of an average infantrymen according to sources I have looked at.

I think a problem here is consideration of what theater you're looking at. Southwest Russia and Ukraine have a lot of open fields so you're going to have much longer engagement ranges. Western front 44-45 is likely to have shorter engagements because there is less open terrain. I've seen data that the average tank v tank engagement in Russia was over 1200m while in the west it was about 840m.

Games like Bolt Action don't account for this.

Wow, 12.5 meters is about 15 yard a inch. . That would make movement in a turn very limited.

As an Army veteran I was on a gun range frequently. I had infantry, mortar men, scouts and tankers , all taking their MOS certification tests at different times. The 300 meter target set was the further east for the M16 and 50 meter for the .45 cal. This was pre-desert practice, so extreme distances were not practical for your fire plan, range card. For machine guns, I had 11 .50 cal and four M60s. We did all sorts of funky test during the Division Restructuring tests. We even counted the bullets to see how long various gun tubes would last before they overheated. The .50 cal actually bent until the rounds fired through the sides. Lol.

Bolt action is not really a good system in these regards

There was a discussion on it several years ago: TMP link

I'm a former infantry and I have a hard time relating to most of the game systems. I recently played Crossfire (or was it Rapid Fire) which was not too bad.

The idea of having to activate a unit or issue it an order EVERY turn to tell a unit what to do seems like micro-management but there are no realistic ways to playably parse the action in a turn. Normally, you are given a mission or objective and don't need to be reminded or continually ordered to do it. That's my opinion.

Wolfhag