Scale speed

[Paul75Participant @paul75]

Hello Everyone.

I'm fitting out a 1/128th model ship and have been musing over the correct scale speed for the model.

The full size top speed for the ship was 28.5 knots, or 52.8 km/h in new money. When I've divided this by 128 it gives a scale speed of 413 metres/hour or 6.9 metres/minute.

Whilst acknowledging that the ship was no speedboat, this scale speed seems a bit slow, amounting to approximately 4 boat lengths per minute.

Could somebody please indicate whether my scale calculations are correct or have I made a silly error?

Many thanks,

Paul.

[Paul75Participant @paul75]

[Gareth JonesParticipant @garethjones79649]

Hi Paul,

To calculate the scale speed you should divide the full sized ships speed by the square root of the scale rather than the scale. The square root of 128 is 11.3 so the scale speed will be 52.8 divided by 11.3 = 4.7 Km/hour or 78 metres per minute. I have no idea why the square root of the scale is used, but that's what the books say. Anyway it should look a bit more exciting than crawling along at 7 m/min.

Gareth

[Paul75Participant @paul75]

Thanks Gareth – what a relief!

Paul.

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