tstockton said:
Your comments got me to thinking about a time (far too long ago!) when ... we thought about trying to rent a local gymnasium to try to get to scale. But as I recall, we figured out that with a horizon at 24,000 yards (on a clear, calm day), we would need 60' just to reach that range....
He he he. Rent a Gym. Yeah, we thought of that too. Well,
use a gym, at least, if not
rent one. We used to walk around the gym of my Jr High School and daydream about the tank battles we could hold. So so long ago...
When I first started wargaming, as a lad of 14, with some GHQ micros and WRG's rules from a local hobby shop, I knew of no experienced gamers to provide guidance. I, and a group of buddies, developed our own approaches in complete isolation. Didn't even know that there were wargaming magazines to read. Just the rules.
The WRG rules provided all the charts in meters. There was a brief mention of ground scale in the introduction, but we passed over that without giving it too much thought. My first measuring instrument was the mathemetician's compass from my school kit -- opened to about 84mm to represent 25m at 1/300. We used to walk the compass across loooonnnng distances to take a shot. I can remember cutting cardboard strips to 84mm lengths so we could lay out a path from shooter to target. Never even occured to us to try a tape measure!
We used to play in the dirt of the back yard. Made our terrain out of the real terra-firma. We had a small sand plot in my back yard, but we could never get more than 1500m of range given its size. So we devised all kinds of fancifull terrain -- dirt-walled forts with moats, AT ditches dug with pocket-knife to 2 or 3 inch depths, carboard "bunkers" buried in the sand... But my buddy Greg's whole back yard was just flat dirt. We could get 3,000m or more if we used it. Oy, how he loved his 88's. Oy, how I hated them! But I was always the innovator, bringing such clever ideas as infantry and artillery into our battles (after figuring out how to mail-order them from the UK), and scratch-building my own aircraft with card stock and putty. Always had trouble as the day wore on into evening, and the light started to fade, but as die-hards we were not ready to call our game. Lost innumerable turrets that way.
It was only when I reached adulthood and bought my first home that I started to use the garage floor for wargaming. By that time (mid-1980s) it was all moderns. Oh the days of crawling around on the floor pushing pewter, hoping like heck no one stepped on anything of value as a M60 / M113 company combat team faced off against a battalion of Soviet Motor Rifles in BTR-60s with a company of T-62s in support!
Now we had lighting, and the battle could run all day AND all night!
But then, over the years, garage floor space became increasingly covered with tricycles and boxes of last year's toys. And my knees became less and less happy with the process of crawling around. And wargaming became rare. But now, with a Ping-pong table in the garage, I am ready for wargaming again at half-an-hour's notice!
Of course, if I was still using true ground scale, I'd be daft to put 5 tanks on the board. But over the same periods of time I've managed to find other gamers, in person at hobby shops, in articles from magazines, and online from chat groups and now forums, from whom I have learned that it is indeed possible (and even normal!) to use 1/300 models at 1/1000 or 1/2000 ground scale.
Makes it all so much simpler.
