I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I did do some cooking, and I hung out with my sister this evening. And earlier, while my Wife was at her Dojo, I headed out to a hobby store to take a look at some of the stuff they had there.
Yes, I know it sounds incredibly geeky to be going to a hobby store after spending three and a half days wandering around a gaming convention, but there were some ideas that I had that I needed more information about…
Basically, at the con I was incredibly impressed with a lot of the miniature gaming tables and scenarios set up in the mini-gaming room. There were vendors there from all sorts of companies with all sorts of nifty bits of terrain and buildings and such, ranging from the fully painted and assembled houses and inns of The Miniature Building Authority to the various TerraForm kit parts from Armorcast.
Possibly the single most impressive bit of kit that I saw was the TerraForm Beverage Can Storage Tank kit. It’s a very cool sci-fi set piece that, when it’s assembled, looks like a storage tank for some unwholesome industrial byproduct. They provide the top and the base, and you provide the empty soft drink can. Unfortunately, I’ve got absolutely no use for it.
On the other hand, I’ve always liked model trains… I had an “N” scale model railroad set when I was growing up, and my Wife and I had talked about doing a model railroad setup at some point. So at the con, the idea hit of combining model railroading and miniature gaming. I could do a strange, sci-fi cyberpunk style train set with various pipes and tubes and industrial rubble that could be used for mini gaming as well.
All I needed to know was what size trains would work best with minis, so after dropping my Wife off at the dojo, I braved the Ann Arbor construction traffic to head out to Hobby World. It was a productive outing. For one thing, I know not to go to the local Hobby World for train stuff. They don’t have much of a selection anymore. I also learned that minis are an awkward scale. Well, actually it took me a while to figure out what the different companies mean when they talk about scale.
Gaming miniatures claim to be based around a 28mm height scale. However, since there’s some debate over whether the 28mm height refers to the top of an average person’s head or the top of an average person’s eyes, and even how tall an average person actually is, human figures tend to range between 25 – 30mm tall depending on the company that made the mini.
Meanwhile, model railroading uses a nicely standardized proportional scale rather than mucking about with arbitrary person heights that no one can agree on. HO, for example is 1:87, while O is 1:48. Using a ratio for scale makes a lot more sense to me than using a single arbitrary number, but since I’m going to be mixing the two, I needed to find out what would fit with what.
Eventually I was able to track down a site that had the math for converting Ratio scales to Height scales. According to The Miniatures Page Glossary, you use a conversion factor of 1717. So, a 28mm model would have a ratio of 1 to (1717 / 28), or roughly 1:61.
That falls nice and awkwardly between HO (1717/87 = 19.7mm) and O (1717/48 = 35.7mm). On the other hand, O scale trains use three rails, which I think looks silly, so if I do this thing, I’m probably going to use HO.
Yes, I know that was an awful lot of math, but it could prove handy to someone else in a similarly bizarre set of circumstances. And since it was the only thing I did today, I thought I ought to share with the rest of the class…