Federation Commander

1/3788th scale, the standard miniatures scale of Star Fleet.

Um, why? It does not appear to divide by any whole numbers other than 2, 4 and 947.

How did this peculiar number get chosen? Was it back in the days of Lou Zocchi's SF Battle Manual game, or earlier?

I normally round it off to 1/3000, so the starships are in scale with my assorted 1880s to present day naval models. Makes it easier to visualise their size, and why you'd hope the turbolifts were working on a B10.

My understanding is that it is because, w-a-y back in the day Colonel Zochii had his GameScience mold for the classic plastic ships done so the "Enterprise" was three inches long. The scale fell out from that.

It's much like weird "box scale" issues that so often come up in scale plastic modeling as well. They scale the model to be the biggest that will fit their existing boxes, not to match one of the established scales like 1/72 or 1/48.

Will is correct. When Gamescience began producing the Star FLeet Battle Manual game (and the miniatures for it), Col. Zocchi wanted the Federation heavy cruiser to be 3-inches long. That worked out to 1:3788 scale.

All the SFB miniatures produced since then have been built to the same scale.

Confirming. That's correct.

That's been bugging me for a while. Thanks!