My Butterfly Brain is still thinking about gaming in the Trek World, mostly because I like the spaceship designs. So I'm thinking about where this project is going to fit into my already overloaded priority matrix, and the idea of scale again rears its head because I need an idea of how much space and how many ships will be needed. . . and I remember seeing a WW2 naval game once played on a gymnasium floor to represent scale distance and I thought "wouldn't that be a cool way to play with spaceships."
That led to some work with the calculator to work out some scale ranges. The little 4" Reliant is actually over 800 feet long in "real life." According to the Haynes Manual on the U.S.S.Enterprise, the original Enterprise's phasers had a range of 300,000 kilometers (roughly 200,000 miles), and photon torpedoes were effective out to 750,000 kilometers (roughly 500,000 miles). Yikes. 500,000 miles is almost two times the distance between the Earth and Moon!
So at 1/2500 scale, phaser range for the 4" Reliant is 77 MILES and photon torpedoes are good to 200 MILES. That's about the distance from Tulsa to Kansas City! The gym floor suddenly seems ridiculous. Along with the idea that maneuver or firing arcs matter. . .
Not sure that models are the way to game Star Trek after all. . . gonna think about this some more.
