@Big Jim posted:I understand about the figures. It's even worse with Dept.56 figures! I was just curious as to how the buildings in this series scaled out?
Jon mentioned the term nebulous above. I tend to agree, but my term would be adjustable.
Why is that? In the early days (1960's), before umpteen-gazillion "special" pieces, we had bricks of only a few configurations, and then windows, doors, small wheels, and slightly larger wheels.
Assembling a building, or a vehicle, from this limited set of pieces always resulted in a fixed scale, which to your eye the size of the windows and doors had established. This scale was in my opinion very roughly 'O', even though the bricks individually were clearly much larger than 'O'. They were clearly not HO, N, G or anything else, other than maybe 'S'.
With the addition of so many special pieces over the years, to introduce curves and add details, doors and windows no longer set the stage. Sizes for special pieces are all over the map, and often created initially to make nicely complex models of varying sizes without regard to a specific scale, but still built around the core bricks. Therefore these models are never scaled to a standard, but they are scaled to some undefined reference scale, in order to make them look correct, in three dimensions, to your eye.
My conclusion: Things can be made in many scales, but approximately 'O', maybe 1:50, is probably the smallest size when you're building with Lego in which you see start to see nicely-detailed models, given the nature of the special pieces. Anything smaller and they're not detailed enough for most of us.
It goes up from there. Clearly if you shoot for 'G' you can build much more nicely detailed stuff than if your target is 'O'.
Most often though you use the special pieces to set the level of detail you'd like to see, then the scale follows automatically from there. What ever that scale turns out to be, precisely, is of no great consequence to most Lego modelers. This makes it hard for 'O' scalers because you have to work backwards.
Mike
