As you may have noticed, I acquired the Hammer's Slammers game recently. This and other nascent got me thinking about the ever-present scale issue.

While it is no secret I most enjoy working with 28mm figures, I'm not a stranger to other scales either. I will readily acknowledge that 28mm just doesn't work for all subjects. Tank battles might be doable in certain cases, but air battles is not really going to work and battleships would be just ludicrous. In the past I have painted a substantial amount of 6mm land and air and even some boats, 15mm infantry and vehicles, 1:1200 and 1:3000 ships plus some starships of indeterminate scale.

The Slammers game is built for 28mm, and might be just doable in that scale. But it would be rather claustrophobic and a substantial financial investment. The stuff is also available in 15mm and 6mm, which basically gives a freedom to pick the scale you like. In the old days I would have gone for micro-armor instantly. I already have a substantial collection of it, it's pretty affordable to get more and quite frankly the Slammers background would suggest smaller scale to fully realize the line-of-sight weapons.

But lately I've become disenchanted with micro armor. You need lots of micro stuff to look good -- who wants to move five micro tanks on an otherwise empty table? And the one thing I don't really have the patience for anymore is moving a zillion separate bits.

15mm sounds like a reasonable compromise. The table won't be too cluttered with perhaps twenty vehicles and infantry stands and the cost will be reasonable. So I went ahead and ordered a bunch of tanks and infantry in 15mm.

But that's not all I'm working on. I really want to get back to naval gaming. I already have a substantial collection of WWI ships in 1:3000 but WWII brings in aircraft. And quite frankly 1:3000 aircraft models don't really float my boat.

I've had some 1:1200 plastic ship models for a while (you know the story, I bought them because they were cheap). I recently built one of them and it was actually quite fun to do. Even though this is the classic naval scale, model availability these days isn't quite that good anymore and the bigger ships start to get pretty expensive. But they would mix better with 1:300 or 1:600 aircraft.

So I've ordered a bunch of 1:1200 scale ships as well. Doesn't mean I've given up on 1:3000, just that the bigger models can be used to stage more impressive games with just a few ships per side and perhaps some ships vs. planes games. I'm really itching to do Java sea, but I can't locate all the necessary models in 1:1200. Maybe I'll go for the smaller scale with that after all.

With the aircraft there is some lure with the 1:600 planes, but those would really require a different sort of rules that don't really seem to exist. I'll probably stick with 1:300 when it comes to war in the air.

But what am I going to do with my old microarmor collection?

maxxon