Microscale: Small Scale with Big Possibilities

When we looked at minifigs back in Chapter 3, I helped you figure out that structures or vehicles intended for those little folks should be built to about 1:48 scale. However, microscale models aren’t locked into one set of numbers, much like the macroscale bricks back in Chapter 5 that weren’t all built to the same scale. For example, a 1-foot-tall model of the Empire State Building in New York would be approximately 1:1250 scale, because the actual building is 1,250 feet tall. On the other hand, a 1-foot-tall model of the Great Pyramid in Egypt would be approximately 1:480, because the actual pyramid is about 480 feet tall.

This might seem a bit confusing because earlier I mentioned that some builders use a 1x1 cylinder brick to represent the height of a microscale person. The examples of the Empire State Building and the Great Pyramid are obviously not built to the same 1-brick-equals-6-feet specification. In fact, they aren’t even built to the same scale as each other! But they are microscale examples nonetheless. These examples demonstrate that the actual scale can vary within the micro world, but models still hold to the same principle; they are extremely small versions of very large things. Just as you did in Chapter 5, where you learned to build 4X and 10X versions of the same brick, you can use different numbers to achieve the dimensions for a microscale model.