On the question of scale

It's something that we can almost take for granted, but scale is somewhat key to miniature based hobbies, and is something that, as a designer making terrain, is a major headache at work.

Conventional model design has a fairly straightforward approach to scale. If you buy a kit that's 1:72, you can be fairly sure that the model will be 1/72 the size of the original. If you tried fitting a 1:35 rifle to a figure therein, however, it looks ridiculously oversized, since it's nearly twice the size it should be.

Scale gets a little more complicated when we get into railway modelling. At the core of model railways is the track. Of all elements in such a set-up, the track is the most mass-produced component. Tracks, in real life, however are far from universal in dimensions, with different gauges in Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and the Nordic nations, to give a small selection. To deal with this, either the modeller has to accept that the Flying Scotsman couldn't be used in France, alongside TGV engines, or the manufacturers decide on a gauge of track to mass-produce and scale all their models around such. The most obvious example is HO and OO, which both use 16.5mm track, despite being significantly different scales (HO is 1:87, OO 1:76.2, which is close enough that they can, just about, be intermixed without glaring discrepancies, but the discrepancies will still be noticeable.

When we get to gaming miniatures, there are numerous scales in use, but the most common are Heroics and 6mm. 6mm, for the most part, is used for huge, sweeping battles with lots of movement and lots, and lots of troops (Adeptus Titanicus being an obvious exception, where the scale allows the use of huge war machines instead). At 6mm, approximately 1:300, everything is small, so mistakes are harder to notice, and the focus is on the spectacle of brigades of troops and batteries of artillery, rather than the individual models.

Heroics, however, does put the emphasis on the individual piece. Myriad games, from the global brand names like Warhammer, Chainmail, Middle Earth, and such, through to smaller, more niche games like Bolt Action, Powder and Shotte, Void 1.1, Mutant Chronicles: Warzone, Infinity and Warmachine are all set in Heroics scale, but what actual scale is that? There are hundreds of articles that try to define it by a height of an adult, male figure, whether to the eyes or the top of the head, but few manufacturers agree, sometimes even within a range, and there is the ever present issue of scale-creep.

When I started buying models for gaming, rather than games that would work with the models I had, Heroics scale was commonly called 25mm, referring to the height to top of head, approximately 1:60. Nowadays, a comparable miniature, from the same company stands about 30-32mm to the eyes, so my figure from 1987 is shoulder high compared to a figure from 2007, and looking a model from 2007 in the belly. As i said, that's within one range by one company (so, space marines by Citadel Miniatures, for those that wonder).

Between different companies, the difference can be even more significant. Infinity and Warmachine, for example, are often referred to as "larger Heroics", while Warlord Games and Perry Miniatures, whose core markets are historical games, and so need to try to keep to a semi-universal scale. They use the ratio of 1:58, or the ambiguous 28mm scale.

For those of us who are really small companies, we have to dance a fine line. Take something as simple and ubiquitous as a sandbag. If we take the old scale of 1:60, players using the pieces for games of Infinity will find that the 1:60 sack is more like a hackey sack. If we, instead scale to Infinity, then a Bolt Action player fighting the German retreat after the failure of Barbarossa will be fighting in trenches lined with body bags, or at least big sacks of grain. As such, we have to judge what looks "about right" for as wide a range as possible, deferring to somewhere in the middle, and hoping we don't get a lecture from the Historical Fashion Police or scale Nazis too often.

...and all of that's before we get into ground scale, weapons range scale and bases...

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