I’ve always wonder since childhood why armor and aircraft were on differnet scales. Specificly I’m talking about most larger scale armor is in 1/35 and aircraft are in 1/32. To the best of my knowledge there is no 1/48 scale armor to speak of. The only common scale is 1/72. Why is that?
And as soon as I posted this I find this thread in Armor…I guess I’m more interested in why 1/32 for aircraft and 1/35 for armor.
1/48 armor is big and getting bigger right now.
Way back when, a lot of the different model companies tended to produce kits in scales they chose. Tamiya 1/35 armor, Monogram 1/32 armor 1/48 planes, Revell 1/32 planes 1/40 armor, etc. As kit lines grew, some stayed and some did not for whatever reason. But recently some manufacturers have started to see that builders would like all of one scale. So now you see emerging 1/48 armor lines and at least in Helicopters 1/35 aircraft. Who knows what the future will bring in this area. The one con to larger scale kits is the amount of room the finished product requires. The newer releases are so beautiful and so detailed they are true gems to build but they do take up the display space. Try putting a 1/35 Blackhawk and Bradley in a Medevac diorama… you’ll need the whole kitchen table. I suppose thats where 72nd scale has its real advantage in commonality.
So it really wasn’t a standard or planed colaberatoin. It just happened like that. I agree with you about storage space of the large stuff. But shoot man, I can’t see those 1/72 things to paint, hard enough for me to see in the large scale stuff. [8D]
No I think it just happened with buyers popularity. Some product lines died and other prospered. I think 48th really grabbed the ideal there as it was big enough to really detail without too much fuss, but did not take up as much room as 32nd or 24th. At one point big armor was available in 40th, 35th, 32nd and 30th scale depending on the company. The Japanese companies seemed to have a gentleman’s agreement in the early days to produce in different scales, but once certain scales sold better than others they started going head to head.
Some of the manufactures scaled their models so that the kit would fit in a standard sized box, In the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of pressure put on the maunufactureres to standardize the scales. The pressure was applied through the IPMS, and other model organizations, and the model magazines of that time, that is the members and the readers (modelers).
The model railroaders had standardized scales that they call “Gauges” named for the track gauge. For example HO scale is 1/87th (IIR), O scale is 1/48th, etc. The aircraft and armour modelers picked up on this and pushed the industry with their “buying power”. Since the early 1970s the growth in 1/48th scale aircraft has been fantastic. Now we see a new growth in 1/32nd and 1/24th scale aircraft. 1/72nd scale has been referred to as the “international scale” for as long as I can remember. The European manufactrurers, like Airfix, Frog, etc. consistently produced in 1/72nd scale aircraft. It took awhile for the U.S. manufacturers to catch on. Note that Hawk, Aurora, and Lindberg also consistently produced in 1/72 and 1/48th scale. Monogram finally started doing that in the 60s and by the 1970s Monogram was producing almost exclusively in 1/48th and 1/72nd scales. The US manufacturers started moving away from the “toy” features in their kits at about the same time (1970s). Again, cconsumers wanted serious “scale replicas”, not toys.
The short answer to your question is that the market place, that is the consumer, decides what will be manufactured. If the 1/24th scale kits do not sell well they will quickly disapear.
I have always regarded 1:35 as an aberration. It’s a purely military scale and I suspect started by the Japanese.
Logically, 1:32 was the scale they should have used, after all it has a long history in model soldiers - just look at the output of William Britain!
Michael
I think you can say 1/35 really got its momentum with Tamiya, then Italeri. Airfix and Monogram tried 1/32 but their lines were not as extensive or popular.
1/35th was chosen, by Tamiya, because it was the smallest scale into which they could fit an electric motor; 1/32nd = model railway Gauge 1. 1/72nd was chosen because a 6’ man would be 1" tall, and all of the other scales were a logical progression, since all drawings, at that time were drawn in Imperial, rather than metric scales.
Edgar
1/72 got it’s real start when that was the scale chosen for identification models used to train military personnel and civilian spotters. 1/144 models were added to the system in the late 1940s to portray larger aircraft (B-36, B-52 etc).