Friday 16 December 2016

Size Comparison Part Two

 

Back here I did a size comparison of Heavy Gear walkers with some modern tanks to 1/144th scale.  The comparison was most illuminating and it begged a question, how would a 15mm tank look with the walkers, and would I be better off making my Bad Dog project in 15mm?

I just made up a Visigoth Khan tank made by Dream Pod 9 for their Heavy Gear game.

So what we have here are a 10mm scale Abrams with a 15mm Abrams from Battlefront Miniatures next to a Dream Pod 9 Visigoth Khan to show, as my friend David Barrow said, it's way too large to be a 1/144th scale tank.  As you can see it's enormous, so large that it might make a good giant cybertank, except that the proportions aren't quite right and it would be a lot of work to convert.

The Acco snuck in front for comparison as to whether it's suitable for a manned walker if it were treated as a 1/100th scale 15mm wargame model?

This only brings home a point I always make that 15mm is a size and 1/100th is a scale, and while one may use the former to work with the latter (15mm figures with 1/100th scale kits), the figures are not to a scale.  For a start wargame figures are stylized caricatures of real people.  Don't get me wrong, they're full of character, which true scale figures are not, but what that amounts to is larger hands and head etc. that are out of proportion to real life.

TL;DR: What is good for wargaming, figures one can relate too, is not necessarily accurate to a fixed scale.

Why am I going on about this?  Simple really, my Bad Dog conversions of 12mm Heavy Gear's look to be more suitable to represent 15mm combat armour suits.  And as for the Accos, they'll manned by very short men and women pilots.

Edit: Except the cockpits are too small for 15mm, so I'm back to Bad Dog in 12mm and perhaps doing Heavy Gear is 15mm.  That's called two for the price of one–or so I keep telling myself.
  

3 comments:

  1. I like your point about 15mm being a size, not a scale. I fall into that trap all too often.

    Not sure why some manufacturers make bigger/disproportionate minis, but I always figured part of it was because of problems with making moulds. Flimsy parts that are in-scale may have been harder to reproduce with consistency. But never researched it, so that's just a guess. :)

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    1. I must get around to taking a picture of 1/144th scale figures next to 12mm ones from Dream Pod 9 and Pendraken. I don't have any 1/100th scale figures though.

      Anyway, you're right–they're made that way for ease of casting, and they look better when slightly chunkier too.

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  2. And if anyone ever questions the Accos manning policies, you can always mention the way how the USAAF selected gunners for the B-17 ball turrets ;)

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