Model ships and naval wargaming

Just before the Second World War, the American naval historian (and science fiction author) Fletcher Pratt published a book on naval wargaming as could be done by civilians using ship models cut off at the waterline to be moved on the floors of basketball courts and similar locales. The scale he used was very strange (maybe 1:550), but as the hobby progressed, it was progressively replaced by the series 1:600, 1:1200, and 1:2400. These had the advantage of approximating the nautical mile as 120 inches, 60 inches, and 30 inches, respectively. As the knot is based on this mile and a 60-minute hour, this was quite handy.

After the war, firms emerged to produce models from the same white metal used to make toy soldiers. One British firm offered a tremendously wide line of merchant ships and dockyard equipment in the scale 1:1200.

A prestige scale for boats, comparable to that of 1:32 for fighter planes, is 1:72, producing huge models. For the smaller ships, kits are offered in the traditional shipyard scales of 1:96, 1:108, or 1:192. Airfix makes full-hull models in the scale which the Royal Navy has used to compare the relative sizes of ships: 1:600. Monogram makes some kits to half the scale of the US Army standard: 1:570. Some American and foreign firms have made models in a proportion from the Engineer's scale: "one-sixtieth-of-an-inch-to-the-foot", or 1:720.

But the continental Europeans have an on-going project of getting rid of all conversions and measurements which they consider non-standard. As they saw how four Japanese model-making firms (Tamiya, Hasegawa, Aoshima, and Fujimi) formed a cartel to apportion out the project of putting out waterline kits of the whole fleet of Japanese warships of the Second World War on the market in a proportion that no firm from any other country did - 1:700, the Europeans are attempting to have the scale of 1:400 standardized for full-hull model ships, even though some Japanese firms have produced larger ships in the luxury scale of 1:350. And in scales more conducive to wargaming, Europeans are now marketing waterline kits in the scales 1:1250 and 1:2500 to supplant the British and American lines. The Chinese are joining them. Such trends toward standardization has not affected the Japanese firm Nichimaco, which still produces fit-in-the-box sizes from old molds, and 1:450 size models.