Small Scale Military Headquarters

Hi guys,

I had posted this under GP's old website but lost the figures. Can anyone tell me how to convert 1:1 to 1:18 or how big buildings should be to stay within 1:18. Im trying to build some houses for a diorama but have a rough guesstimate of how big they should be, but am not sure. Also, what would be a good source for cobblestones?

I'm no math whiz, but 1:18 means that 1 foot would be equal to 18 feet in 1:18 scale. So 12 divided by 18 equals 0.666666666... aw shucks...

simple stuff. Just divide the dimension of the real thing by 18. So a building that is 9 feet tall in real life would be 9/18's of a foot tall in 1/18 scale, which is half a foot (six inches).

When doing your calculations just make sure you keep your units the same (inches, feet etc). I ususally multiply the dimension of the real thing by 12 first, thereby converting it from feet to inches and then divide by 18 so that my answer is in inches. So for a 12 foot tall building i would multiply by 12 and thus get 144 inches (this is the height of the real building in inches instead of feet). Then divide by 18 and you get 8. Which means a 12 foot tall building in real life is 8 inches tall in 1/18 scale.

A simple rule of thumb is that one inch in 1/18 scale is equal to a foot and a half in real life.

I don't want to come across as a smart ass,but I thought you just divide the 1/1 measurement by 18. I knocked up a few buildings over the last couple of days.
http://groups.msn.com/KiwiRCTankCombat/ ... dings.msnw
In my case,the buildings needed to be high enough to provide cover for my 1/16th tanks (with combat sensor sticking out the top).


Cobblestones? How about fibre cement sheet,and scribe the stone shapes,
then paint.I am going to use some of this material to make brick walls soon,it will involve a lot of work, I know.;any other ideas apprec.

You can get styrene sheets of brick, cobblestone, etc...cheap at a crafts shops.

This was idea I've wanted to try, but never got around to. In high school, my architecture class had some plastic templates that had raised edges to simulated brick, cobblestone, etc so that you would stick this under your drafting vellum (this was the dark ages of the early 90's - no CAD) and you would shade with you pencil to add the texture to your detailed views. Anyways, they seemed to be raised enough that you could either (1) press them into wet plaster to get the surface, then paint the plaster the appropriate color or (2) cover the surface with aluminum foil, transfer the texture to that, then put the foil sheet on top of the plaster.

Again, never tried, but an idea.

tankduel wrote:I don't want to come across as a smart ass,but I thought you just divide the 1/1 measurement by 18. I knocked up a few buildings over the last couple of days.
http://groups.msn.com/KiwiRCTankCombat/ ... dings.msnw
In my case,the buildings needed to be high enough to provide cover for my 1/16th tanks (with combat sensor sticking out the top).


Cobblestones? How about fibre cement sheet,and scribe the stone shapes,
then paint.I am going to use some of this material to make brick walls soon,it will involve a lot of work, I know.;any other ideas apprec.

Nice buildings !

Talk about major brain short if you read my post above. If forgot that I just bought at Christmas from Lemax a 20x30 sheet of vinyl cobblestone. Needs to be painted to look better, but not too bad.

G'day All

Some time back I created an Excel based Scale calculator for simular reasons, if it helps you can download the file at the following URL:

http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/langlot ... 0calc3.zip

It also does metric to imperial / imperial to metric conversions, which are more or less accurate although most figures are rounded off so don’t go and try to calculate the correct re-entry height for a Mars probe