Federation Commander

Just a quick question regarding scale in the Starline 2500 range. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the starships are somewhere around 1/3100 scale, but the shuttles look to be built on a larger scale than the starships. Are the shuttles built to a fixed scale and, if so, what?

No, the shutles are NOT to scale to the ships, obviously. I have not measured them yet (a good idea!) to see what scale they are on. The Franz Joseph Tehcnical Manual drawings show the shuttle to be 7.65 meters long by 4.75 meters wide. I've seen other data making them shorter.

The Starline 2500 ships were, I thought, designed on a 1:3125 scale, but a coule days ago I notices the ADB store listed them as being 1:3200 scale, which seems to be closer based on the measurements I have taken.

I would assume that 1/3200 listing for Starline 2500 is a typo. Every other listing on both the ADB and Mongoose pages references 1/3125 (as does Tenneshington Decals). The old Starline 2400 was (nominally) 1/3788.

The shuttlecraft minis for both lines are done in a unique scale, different than the starships in that line. Shuttles would be un-playably small if done in the same scale as the ships, so they were scaled up to at least have some "somebody sneezed" resistance.

ADB's shuttles and fighter minis are in roughly the same scale to each other. Mongoose chose to do a new shuttle in yet another (smaller) scale.

As SGt_G notes, I don't think anybody has done the measuring to establish what those scales actually are.

Any number I gave is all just guessing on my part based on some comment from Matthew about "we're going to make them XYZ big" and I did a dab of back ot the envelope math. If somebody does or did real numbers, well, maybe they did. I'm really not sure.

I just took some very careful measurements. I have 5xCC (metal) and 2xBC, 2xCA, and one CS (all resin).

The saucers measure, in mm, (CC) 40.0, 39.7, 39.6, 39.8, 39.9, (BC) 40.0, 39.8, (CA) 40.3, 40.2, (CS) 39.6. That's an overall average of 39.89. If I just use the metal (CC) ships, it's 39.8.

At 1:3125 scale, that's 124.6 or 124.375 meters (all / CC).
At 1:3200 scale, that's 127.6 or 127.36 meters.

The saucer should be 127.1 meters, per the Franz Joseph Technical Manual. Reversing the math, the mini should be 40.67 mm at 1:3125 scale or 39.72 mm at 1:3200 scale.

I have one DN (resin), and it measured 44.8 mm, which is correct at 1:3125 scale to be 140.0 meters.

I have two FFG (meteal) that are both 28.0 mm, which scale up to 87.5 meters at 1:3125 or 89.6 meters at 1:3200 scale.


All in all, it looks like 1:3200 is "more" correct, but there are exceptions.

I just pulled out three random shuttlecraft, and they all measured the same: 4.0mm high by 7.0mm wide by 11.5 mm long. Ergo, it appears the shuttlescraft are on a scale somewhere between 1:625 and 1:675.

So, the starships are roughly 1/3125 (or close enough for government work, depending on artistic interpretation) and the shuttles are, as a ballpark figure, 1/650?

Thanks, SgtG!

Yeah, "close enough". It's just >my< opinion, but if you're drafting deck plans, you can use anything between 1:3000 & 1:3250, but try to stay at or above 1:3125.

I don't have the patience for drafting deck plans

The only reason I was asking is that I'm working on a conversion of a DW into a CDW, and making some GAS and HTS to go with it... I just wanted to make sure that they'd look reasonably in scale with the Starline shuttles, and that they'd actually work in scale (shuttles that look the right size but in scale would have no space for their crew would annoy me, even if no-one else noticed...)

This came up in discussion again over on the SFB board, so I pulled out the newer minis I received since my last post. I have (in metal) two BC and one CA. They measure 39.8, 40.5, and 40.7. The last two are "cleaner" moldings, and are more correct to 1:3125 scale.