The Ship Model Forum

Final to be four ship diorama. Rectangle shaped.

Given two 1/450 ships, is it best to position two 1/400 ships in the background or two 1/500 ships in the foreground or what? Do not have two other 1/450 ships for this scheme.

Or scrap and use only the two like scale 1/450 ships?

The first thing that came to my mind was two separate diorama bases that will match up to each other (front to back; or left to right) with the smallest of seams between them. The water would go right up to the edge of each base.

And I'm think of this with photography in mind and a sky background. With that said, making a piece of water base with no ships on it, could be used to slide in between the two bases with the ships on them.

Future such dioramas could be done in this same manner; swapping out one dio for another, etc.

I did this trick with these two models which are on their own separate bases with a piece of water between them

"Two Mighty Sampsons"

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Carl Musselman
(Formerly Back-Aft Models)

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As to which scale goes where, it depends on how the diorama, or combination of dioramas, is to be viewed.

If you look at them as in Carl's photo, putting the scales graduated from large to small, going away from the eye, would create the illusion of greater distance between ship pairs. Placing the smaller scales closer to the eye should have the opposite effect. But, the only way to tell for sure is to place them and then eyeball them. Note that there is also the issue of scaling wave height.

Viwed from above, from one side of the display, the larger scale farther from the eye should, intuitively, make the difference in scales less noticable. But again, your eyeball is the final judge.

It may help to photograph them, from several angles in each configuration, in order to get a record of the various effects.

In your scenario, the scales are relatively close. Now if Carl were to put a 1/350 near and a 1/700 far, it would be interesting to see the effect focusing on the near model with a short depth of field camera, thus slightly blurring the image of the far model.

Clarification when you say larger scale farther from the eye and considering 1/400, 1/450, 1/500, then 1/400 is the larger scale although smallest numerically. So that would be 1/400 behind 1/450 or 1/450 behind 1/500. Am I correct with that statement?

The smaller the denominator, the number under the line, larger the scale. So from large to small it would be 1/350, 1/400, 1/450, 1/500, 1/550, 1/600, 1/700, 1/1250.

If you put the 1/350 closest to you and then the 1/400 would "look" like it is farther away.

A easy way to think about sizes and numbers of scales is to think of halves and quarters:
1/2
1/4

Which one is bigger? I'm sure you can visualize that easily enough.

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