Kilkrazy wrote:
sing your life wrote: Kilkrazy wrote:You can't play a battle with hundreds of tanks in 1/72 unless you use a church hall floor or something. Not to mention the expense. It can be done on a large tabletop setup in 1/300.
I was more talking about a dozen or so tanks, not hundreds!
1/72 scale would be fairly cheap, then, though a normal table is not a large space to manoeuvre them. If the typical range of engagement is say 800 yards for WW2, you want a table maybe four times wider than that to allow space for manoeuvring so making one foot == 800 yards. Then you have tank models that are 200 yards long. It is an aesthetic consideration, to be sure.
Back when the Russians were the Evil Empire and we were gearing up for the apocalypse, the DoD routinely did studies of potential battle environs. Direct Line of Site across most of Europe, Turkey and Eastern Asia tended to be less than 600 yards for armored vehicles (unlike snipers, they could not easily maneuver to higher ground for a good vantage point to engage the enemy from). In Central Europe it generally ranged from less than 200 yards to somewhere around 400 yards. While the guns can shoot much further than that, there are generally things in the way before you reach the maximum range of the weapons. Sometimes those things are hills and other natural terrain features, quite often they are things like banks, hotels and other buildings. At an uncompressed ground scale - our game table is about 100 yards by 200 yards. Several city blocks for modern, ultra-modern and sci-fi. For historical engagements, we occasionally will run a compressed ground scale (3 to 1 up to 5 to 1). Works well enough for North Africa and it gives you a lot of room for moving.
For the sizes, one of my bigger tanks is an Abrams. Measures out to 4" by 2" or so. Not tiny - but, we have played games where we have had two tank battalions face off against each other (around 60 tanks per side with supporting infantry and AFVs). If you just string them across the board - it does look a bit like a parking lot though. Cost wise - they are not terribly expensive. The tanks go for around $10-15 per, while figures are normally down around 50 cents each or less (with metals going for about a dollar each). For a hundred dollars or so you can have a nice sized force with a bunch of vehicles and a hundred or so infantry.
Practically speaking though, if you look at history, there aren't too many situations that you would see hundreds of tanks on the same table top sized battle field. Looking at two big ones (Golan Heights in the October War and the Battle of the Bulge in WWII) the fronts were 60+ miles across. For the Battle of the Bulge, there were 240 some odd allied tanks and the Germans had 350 or so. In Golan Heights, Israel had 180 tanks while Syria came with 800 or so. That is a lot of tanks in either case. However, if you look at a 10 foot long table - it barely represents half a mile of the front in 1/285 scale. For simplicity, if you were to consider an even distribution of tanks across the front (not the case...but simplicity after all) you would only have 5 tanks combined for the Battle of the Bulge and 8 tanks for the Golan Heights. By the time anyone got into a firing solution position - the game would be called on account of boredom.
Instead, you focus on locations like Noville from the Battle of the Bulge or Rafid Gap in the Golan Heights. These more focused actions tend to have much shorter engagement ranges (Noville due to civilian structures and Rafid Gap due to night fighting conditions). Even there though - you are still a good bit off in terms of real scales even at 1/285.
So...I just prefer the 1/72. Can't really get accurate actions even at some of the smallest wargame scales (really need a more abstract rule set for full on battles dealing with hundreds of tanks). Might as well enjoy the modeling aspect and when you put them on the table - you get pretty well stuck in without much doing.
