Size Matters - Scale Creep and Pasta

OK I have to say from the outset this is a bit ranty. I also have to say there is no suggestion I could do better as a putty pusher, but this has got under my skin and I need to vent.

Why are figures getting bigger?

As a side project I've been working on some Boxer Rebellion Great Powers units. The plan is to have a go at 55 Days at Peking in 28mm as a club game using a varient on The Men Who Would Be Kings rules (TMWWBK). I already had some Old Glory Austrian Sailors. These represent the landing party from the Cruiser Zenta. Old Glory's range is several years old and a nominal 25mm, but in reality they are on the large side which means they pass easily with most "modern" 28mm .

At this point I should add OG were a bit "cute" with their Boxer range - as far as I can tell the Italian and Austrian Sailors they do are the same bodies but with a head- swap. Worse things happen at sea. The other issue is the posing - OG have gone for some very dynamic running poses, even to the point of one guy running with his rifle to his shoulder in a firing pose - very strange. And while I'm on the subject the packaging from OG is very inflexible - you get 30 in a bag, usually an Officer pose and 5 "normal" guy poses. One last minor problem is OG don't make a Skoda M93 machinegun, which the Austrians had at the Legation, but this isn't a problem as Redoubt do, and their crew, although bigger than OG, are still close enough. Anyway I have had them a while and I rather like them. I also had the mixed Naval Arty crew OG do - again mostly headswaps.

So at Vapnartak in a moment of weakness I found myself buying a bag of Pom Pom guns from OG too. The twisted logic being use the arty crew plus some suitable Matelot gunners to make a 1Prd QF which the Italians had at Peking. This has so far went smoothly, so my next thought was "if you have the gun, why not get the Italian sailors to go with it??" Here I ran into a problem. OG only sell their figures in bags of 30 (as I mentioned earlier). In TMWWBK units are generally 12 strong, and in fact the whole Italian contingent at the Legation was only 29 men meant that buying a bag of Italian Sailors was going to be wasteful, so I thought I would shop around.

I discovered 2 other manufacturers of 28mm (note that) Boxer Rebellion era Italian Sailors - A fairly old Redoubt Miniatures range, and EMP miniatures, who had recently created a range using Kickstarter and these looked quite nice, so only needing a dozen, I decided to order them from EMPs "28mm Historical" range over the weekend. EMP were damned fast and the figures arrived today. I opened the package to discover 2 had broken rifles (in transit I assume) so I got on to EMP and they happily volunteered to replace them with no quibble. All good. Then I took a look at the figures, and another problem loomed - literally. They're HUGE. Not just in relation to the admittedly "25mm" OG figures, but also in relation to just about every other figure I have.  One of them stands 37mm tall! the rest a few mm less, but all so far past 28mm foot to eye as to be useless alongside other figures. Either pasta in the late 19th Century had powers to build the physique only dreamed about by modern bodybuilders, or there is a scale creep problem.  Here's a pic to explain far more than words can.

 L-R EMP, Old Glory, Redoubt (EMP stood behind) and EMP again.

As you can see the EMP figures are literally head and shoulders taller than Redoubt and OG, and yet are nominally the same "28mm" scale. And that's before you put them on a base.

I'm at a loss as to what to do. Actually I'm not - I'm going to go to OG and buy a bag of Italians from them, even if that means spending more and getting "spares". At least they will fit with the rest of the collection. This is a shame because the EMP figures are interesting if you ignore the size problems - there are some nice poses in there (but importantly no officer - another problem with them).

Anyway - Caveat Emptor and all that, but it does wind me up that figures are getting bigger and bigger for no apparent reason. Ah Well