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Hello, Dakka. I've lurked here for a while (mostly while at work; I really hope they don't check their usage logs too often) but I've finally signed up because I've volunteered for a project that doesn't seem to have been covered here...or anywhere else on the internet, apparently. Or my search skills are far worse than I thought. If this is the case, can someone point me to the right thread?

Anyway, on to the point of this post...my FLGS wants to run a Fallout roleplay game in 28mm scale. I've volunteered to make some buildings for the game in the standard post-apocalyptic 1950's style. The trouble I'm running into is that I'm not sure how to go about making the proper measurements for 28mm scale buildings. Once I know how to make the proper measurements, I'll be set but until then, I'm stuck.

Thanks, Dakka!

Grotsmasha

Do you mean scale wise?

28mm is roughly 1/56 (dont tell GW that ) So objects are 56x smaller than their real life counter parts

In the cities of death buildings, a floor is roughly 3-4 inches tall. So base your measurements off that..

First, I want to say thank you for the information. I think it's gotten me pointed in the right direction, but my math skills have always been dubious at best, so I'd really appreciate a bit of math checking here.

Wikipedia (and a couple of other sources) states that a building story is about 12 feet on the exterior and 8 feet on the interior.
8 real feet = 96 real inches
12 real feet = 144 real inches
1/56 means that each inch = 56 scale inches. Given that, if I divide 56 by 12 I get 4.66mm.
Round that to 4.5mm for simplicity's sake, so 4.5mm = 1 scale foot. Based on this, I get the following calculations
4.5mm * 8 scale feet = 36mm
4.5mm * 12 scale feet = 54mm

Do these calculations sound correct or have I completely misunderstood the entire process?

Grotsmasha

That's about right, but when your talking about buildings that are going to be used for gaming purposes. You need to almost double what you get seeing the average SM stands over 8ft tall. That's why all the COD Buildings have floors roughly 3-4 tall, so you can move models in and around. Hope that helps some..

Ruff has hit the nail on the head - you need them to be a bit larger so there is room for you to move your hands about - so fudge your numbers a bit. In addition, remember that a lot of public buildings are going to have higher ceilings, and so forth.

1/56th means that the full scale measurement is divided by 56 to produce the model scale measurement.

Let's say you want to build a room with 10 feet between the floor and ceiling.

10 feet = 120 inches.
120/56 = 2.14

Your model needs 2.14 inches of space.

You can easily convert it into millimetres for more precision if you like.

Don't worry too much about precise modelling of buildings. What matters more is that they look good and work practically for moving troops around inside.

A very good starting point would be O scale (1/50 approx) model railway buildings. I'm sure I've seen a fair few 50's americana styled ones. They are slightly larger than 28mm, but that's kind of what you want.

Or do a basic escalation.

Let's say an average lad tis 175cm tall, which equals 1750mm

So, havin' 28mm minis means that 1mm (game) is 62.5mm (real) and escalate from there.

An average modern building have 5m tall floors, which is 5000mm, hence 80.64mm on the tabletop.