"Voluntary Standards Body for Scale?" Topic

The system already exists. It is called scale. Manufacturers could simply tell us what scale their figures are made in.

Within the scale, the height (and other dimensions) of the figures could and should vary, as do actually humans, but all of their M1 rifles, helmets, packs, etc would be the same size.

Sadly, I would no more trust a figure manufacturer's "1/48" than I would his "28mm."

I do miss the Barrett Measurement.

The system already exists. It is called scale.

I am a member of several technical voluntary and regulatory standards bodies. The standard has more to do with how you come up with the answer than what the question is.

The whole VW scandal was not about them lying on their emissions numbers. The data and analysis was valid. The problem was the way they conducted the test.

Similarly, the scale/size issue is not really about what manufacturers report, but way in which they arrive at their evaluation. In this case, it's not people cooking the books, but people using fundamentally different techniques.

So you may get one figure line bigger than the other, with both reporting 28mm. Our problem is not method per se, but standardization. If each manufacturer used their method on the other line, they would say the other was not 28mm, while maintaining theirs is.

Could standardization help? Possibly. But it also has its downsides in an existing market.

It could cause some manufacturers to change the nature of their lines to make them fit the standard for a particular scale. That would mean their "new" minis wouldn't match their "old" minis. Sure, some people do that now. And we all know how well that is received by the market.

It could also cause fracturing of the market. Instead of changing my minis, I simply change the scale I report. I don't make 28mm minis … I make 27.75mm minis, the One True Scale. This would make it much harder to be a customer in the market, especially if you found the 27.75mm to be compatible with the 28mm.

And speaking of harder, we would probably end up with more than one stat to handle. Our scales would look more like a standardized nutrition label with height, basing, minimum thickness, level of detail, and a few other stats on top of that. That's extremely useful on the nutrition side. Not sure it would help us.

What I am sure of is that, like other standards (especially regulatory ones), manufacturers who felt disadvantaged by the changes would make the standards committee meetings such a bloodbath that it would divert claims of brutality and violence away from actual wargamers.

A certifying organization would only have a change at making a difference if they published how they measure, and then used a mix of individual figures from a single line and announced the smallest, largest and mean.

And I have never understood why some figures are rated as such-and-so to their eyes, and others are to the top of their head (or where their head would be.

And any minis that are NOT slotta-base ready should have that horrible base of metal included. Because when you glue that guy to the top of some base, it has a double height base. Having a perfectly scaled mini, on a metal lozenge, mounted to the top of an actual base, just makes the thing even taller!

So slotta-base figs gets measured from the bottom of the foot to (eyes or top of head, but state it is so), and the lozenge figures get measured from the bottom of that horrible base thingy! Because it is far too much work to cut it off, so I am stuck with it.

It will never happen. The thought is nice, but reality is far different. Everyone interprets scales differently.

For example, the 1/72 scale makes perfect sense if you assume the depicted Human is 72 inches, or six feet, tall. Then the 1/72 scale figure would be 25mm/1 inch tall, not 20mm, not 22mm… TMP members cannot even agree on that simple calculation which makes perfect sense as the math is so easy to do.

Do you wish there was an organization which certified the size of manufacturer's figures?

We don't need an "organization", what we need is for every manufacturer to take photo's of their products with a ruler next to them… We can tell, at a glance, what size/scale/how tall they really are; we can see how thick the base is, and what style it is, so we will know how many millimeters above the tabletop the figures will stand at the tops of their heads/hats/etc. The solution really is just that simple.

Honestly, I vote with my wallet. I buy figures in the scales/sizes I prefer. That is why I look for photo's showing the miniatures next to a ruler -- so I can see exactly how tall they are! Don't tell what "scale", or "size", they are -- those terms are meaningless, today. Show me the ruler!

For example Dwarf figures are often as tall, or taller, than Humans. To me that is an oxymoron. I want my Dwarves to be 3-4 scale feet tall -- much shorter than my 6 scale feet tall, Human figures! Otherwise, they are just stocky Humans. I prefer my Elves 4-5 scale feet tall, as well, not the same, or bigger(!) than Humans. I'm a crusty, old-school'er, though.

Damn scale creep… Get off my lawn! Cheers!