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Sometimes when I look though what’s available in models I’m still amazed at just how many different scales there are out there. There’s 1/6, 1/9, 1/12, 1/16, 1/18, 1/24, 1/32, 1/35, 1/43, 1/48, 1/72, 1/76, 1/87, 1/144, 1/200, 1/350, 1/700 and that’s just naming the most common ones, don’t even get me started on some of the obscure ones like many of the Revell Ships where it looks like rather than being built to a scale someone built them by eye and then worked out what scale they were.

I’ve tried many times to understand the logic behind them all, possibly because I’m one of those people who likes order so assumes there must be logic to everything even when it often seems there really actually isn’t. Some scale make perfect sense, 1/6, 1/12, 1/24, 1/48, 1/96 all look logical, each is just half the size of the preceding one and they translate into inches well. Likewise 1/18, 1/36, 1/72 and 1/144 are half of the preceding scale. The stumbling block there of course being that 1/96 and 1/36 have pretty much faded away. It also doesn’t answer which scale started it or why.

I know a lot of scales originated from railroad modelling with HO being the 1/87, O Guage the 1/43 and 1 Guage was 1/32 though I’m buggered if I know how they arrived at those. In fact sometimes it seems like someone just built a railway set back in the 19th or early 20th Century and then worried about what scale it was later. That’s how it was with 1/35 ( Tamiya built their first kit, a Panther, the size it needed to be then worked out what scale it was later ) so I would expect that’s actually a pretty accurate assessment of how most of them came about.

But whatever the origins they’re here now and we’re stuck with them, but I have to admit that sometimes I wish everything was just built in half a dozen nice orderly scales, so you could chose to model large with 1/16, medium with 1/32, small with 1/72 and then have a couple of scales for things like ships ( and I guess Starship Enterprises ) that would be too large in those scales like 1/350 and 1/700 ( or a nice tidy 1/250 and 1/500 would suit me better ).

But that’s just me wanting an orderly world, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with their own chosen scale who really don’t care about the rest, they just want manufacturers to build more in their given scale. I just hope no-one decides we need to introduce a few more.

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