We have been doing Starline minis for over 35 years, including the TFG-1 lead 2200s, the TFG-4 pewter 2300s, ADB's 2400s and 2450s, and the Shapeways ships. Many of them are slightly different in shape, size, or style. (The Klingon D7 was 2.25 inches long in 2200, but the masters for the one-piece 2400s were 1.87 inches long.) Some of this is just accepting that we cannot be perfect (or didn't try hard enough), some of it was sculptors with a "take it or leave it, but pay me anyway" attitude, and some of it was just not noticing much difference.

From time to time, we have heard people say "everybody knows" that this ship or that ship is out of scale, but not "everybody" could agree on just what they knew.

In theory the 2500s were just scaled up footprints of the 2400s, but this isn't always the case. Sometimes, the 2500 sculptors just thought that a ship "looked better" if they did it differently. This became problematic when we tried to do one design for Shapeways and just scale it up or down 17%. Sometimes we had to shoot for a happy medium.

The Shapeways ships have attempted to rationalize the scales of the ships. This is partly a matter that for the first time we could calculate volumetrics and we ran a proportional scale against the SSD box counts (which is not a perfect science). We have tried to keep the ships consistent with the metal sizes, sometimes making a ship "thicker" to keep the metal footprint while adding bulk. Other times we just bit the bullet and said "It's wrong and we're going to fix it."

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 24, 2018 - 12:56 pm: Edit

This is a visual comparison of one ship (the Klingon D5) created by Will McCammon to show the legacy metal 2400, the artistic 2500, and the happy medium Shapeways design.