Hitting the Buffers?

Sitting looking at the pair of (very nice!) Battleflag buildings I've built recently, it struck me that they seemed quite large.  So I fished out a couple of figures - one from Dixon and one from Foundry, they do look rather small alongside the buildings, and particularly the doors.  So I decided to do some measuring and calculating.  The Foundry and Dixon figures I chose (which are standing quite upright), are 25mm (sole of foot to eyeball).  Doing a quick foot to eyeball measurement on my son (who's about average height), got me a measurement of 5'3".  So if we equate 25mm with 5'3" (there's nothing quite like mixing up measurement units is there?), we get a scale of 1:64.  Now, the front door of the Sheriff's office is 38mm.  That means that, in 1:64 scale, it is about 8' tall - no wonder the figures looked a bit 'dwarfish'!!!  So, time to look at it a different way…

If we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that the door was 7' (on the large side of realistic, but still possible for an outside door).  In that case, a quick scale calculation gets us 1:56.  In that case, our 5'3: becomes 28.75mm - or the size of a 'typical' modern (post scale-creep) figure.

So, I'm left with several options. 

I could use the (lovely!) Dixon and Foundry figures, by putting them on deep bases (GW-style), to make them look more like the right size.  And then I'd still have access to lots of mounted figures, stagecoaches, wagons, etc.  But I would have figures mounted on 'daft' great slabs of plastic.

Or I could swap to using figures from the likes of Artizan Designs.  Nice figures, probably of a more acceptable size without using GW-style bases.  But then, there are almost no mounted figures available, and also a lack of useful things like wagons, etc.

Or, I could sell off the nice buildings (AAARRRGGGHHHH, NOOOOO!!!!!) and use buildings from the likes of Hovels, which are much smaller, and rather limited in the types available - and I don't like them as much - resin doesn't seem to have the right 'feel' somehow - and you can't put figures inside most of them.

Don't you just love wargames manufacturers and their weird idea of using 'sizes' instead of proper scales, and once they've done that, of each manufacturer seeming to use a different idea of what constitutes a millimetre?  So, I'm fed up, and struggling, again, to decide what to do.  Very frustrated.

Copyright © Dr. P.C. Hendry, 2010