Help with vehicle terrain scale and opinion on bases

By Ilostmycactus, in Terrain Building

Hey guys, I've gotten into 3d printing and have set my heart on printing up a LAAT gunship. I've got a good model to try, but I'm not quite sure what scale to put it at. I've been told to put it at 1/48 scale. But does the official listed length include the rear turret length? Right now I'm just eyeballing it with reference photos, but I'm also running into the question of what to do about bases. Should I make vehicles larger than miniature scale in order to compensate for the extra height? The LAAT has open bay doors so the reason I'm wondering is because if you put a mini inside you have all this extra height to deal with. I guess this wouldn't be a big deal if I just put the LAAT on its own base and didn't let mini's go through, but that's no fun. I'd love to get your opinions on this, thanks so much.

In general, speaking from a wargame perspective, for large vehicles like tanks, APCs, etc. it isn't usually worth it to try to re-scale the vehicle to accommodate the distortion caused by a figure's base. Some smaller vehicles can have a base added (cars, motorcycles, etc.) to them, much the way that doorways on your terrain can have a step or threshold added to offset the height distortion caused by minis' bases.

YMMV, of course, but I would consider re-basing your clone squads before anything else. Depending how it prints, you might also be able to hollow out the interior with a file/sander. A LAATi is already quite large for a tabletop; if you try to make it bigger to accommodate the bases, you might end up with something prohibitively oversized.

Just my $0.02.