[OT] Honor Harrington miniatures

Roger Books wrote:
> 
> My biggest problem so far has been the mental block dealing with the
> size of these things.  Obviously you can't use the same scale that
> the standard FT ships are, a 1.2KM ship doesn't really fit, and that
> isn't even one of the big ones.

Even more of a problem than the relative scale differences between HH
and FT, there is a large difference in scales between the HH ships
themselves.

For my own reference, I made a sample size chart based on (mostly)
canonical class sizes:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tpope/miniatures/sculpting/harrington.jpg

The Minotaur (ship illustrated in the last book) would be just slightly
bigger than the Battleship.  From memory, the Superdreadmought was
4000m, the Dreadnought 3000m, Battleship 2000m, Battlecruiser 1500m,
etc...

Anythign smaller than a Cruiser is just speculation, but very well
researched speculations from the author of the Nefarious List.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tpope/misc/harrington/nefarious-list.html

At 1/30000 the largest ship would be just over 13cm long.  That's a bit
big for a game piece, espectially since you're going to have a lot more
'bulk' than may of the FT ships. (making the miniature very heavy)  

With that scale, you're looking at a 8cm (roughly) Minotaur.  In those
8cm, you've got less than 4cm of main body to somehow sculpt two rows of
25 hatches for the Shrikes.  The smaller the ship gets, the worse it
will be to get any detail at all...

I was going to machine the production masters from brass rod, then add
bits on as necessary (didn't think I could get that even a taper by
hand).	After that, I would send them away to be cast in pewter.  After
a bit of further thought, I decided that it would probably be best
(cheapest/lightest) to make them hollow.  Of course, that bring up all
sorts of other design problems...

It's mostly a moot point, since only one (three if you count the rough
drafts I've nabbed from the illustrator's page) design is done so far. 
Still, it would be darn cool to see them on the table.

Tom

--
Thomas Pope
Human Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tpope