I've been talking about my plans for a 1/72 scale space station a lot recently because a lot of toys that are more or less in that scale have been going on clearance lately. You know what...I was just thinking that this talk of scale ratios might sound like Greek to you. Let me quickly explain how scale works.
I normally collect 1/12 scale figures. They are approximately six inches tall, or half of a foot tall. If we take the average size of a human being as six feet tall, then a one foot tall would be 1/6 scale. Six inches tall is 1/12. Four inches is 1/18 scale. And so on, on down to what I'm talking about, 1/72 scale, in which a human being is approximately one inch tall.
Anyhow, a while back, when I first came up with the plan for the space station, I was looking into what toys at that scale were available, and I saw that Hot Wheels are supposedly very close to 1/72 scale. The internet says they are 1/64 scale representations of cars...although they vary a little bit from car to car. Not all of them are exactly 1/64, but they're all pretty close, and that's very close to the scale of my space station...slightly larger, but not really enough to tell.
However, Hot Wheels are so small, and I had a hard time believing that they really are that scale. So, I asked my kid to bring me one of his Hot Wheels cars so that I could compare it to some of the little one inch tall figures my Star Wars spaceships came with.
Turns out, however, that he and his mom just went through all of his toys while cleaning up his room, and packed them away. He doesn't really play with his Hot Wheels anymore. He didn't want to throw them out, but he was fine with packing them up and putting them in the garage. That meant, however, that I either had to dig around in the garage to find them, or come up with some other way to compare them.
The great thing about Hot Wheels, is that, for the most part, they're very cheap. They only cost about a dollar a piece. So, today, while I was at Walmart getting some lotion, I swung by the toy aisle, looked at the Hot Wheels, and picked one that looked pretty futuristic. It cost $1.18 I believe, which is slightly cheaper even than the dollar store, which hiked its prices up to $1.25 per item.
I brought this car home, and pulled out my box with my 1/72 ships in it, and pulled out that same Luke Skywalker X-Wing pilot figure that I had in my earlier posts. I stood it next to the car. What do you think?
Looks perfect, right. Maybe even slightly too large, if it's out of scale at all, but I don't think so. It looks just right. I'll have to see if I can't give it a paint job and help it fit in in the lived-in universe of a Star Wars-style space station.
The car needs one of those stupid bumper stickers that says, "My Other Car Is An X-Wing," or something.
My son has a bunch of those tracks that you can run Hot Wheels in, like the one that Buzz Lightyear uses to fall with style.
And I wonder if I could use them to make roads running through the space station that these little cars could drive on...or maybe I could use Hot Wheels to create a monorail train that runs through the space station or something. I like it, either way. It'll be fun...some day when I finally get around to it.
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