Let's Settle This...

The problem is, minifigs themselves are too short to be really accurate representations of actual people.

Minifigure scale is anything that minifigures can fit in without a ridiculous amount of space.

There is the concept in lego of "play scale" which upscale small things and downscales large things.

Id love to see someone build an accurately sized cargo ship

I think this leads into a good discussion about lego Star Wars and how less than $100 sets are way oversized to scale but then the bigger ones are way to small. The prices are brutal on sets that are bigger than they need to be

As a kid it always bugged me that the cars were single seats, so I would make 8 stud wide cars. They looked weird as hell.

Minifigs are far too wide for their height. That's the actual issue. The figs are very badly proportioned.

Don't forget that minifigs have a totally different width to hight ratio than humans. May Rule of thumb is this: ideal main body width for passenger cars is six; vans and trucks are allowed to be 8 studs wide. However, the best example for the right size of a LEGO car is set 6612.

I've used the 1 stud = 1 foot scale for the last 20 years. It makes model building so easy. I only ever built one 10 stud wide train though, it looked perfect but was too huge.

The correct scale of vehicles depends on if you base it off the figures' height or their width

I scale all my stuff to the width of a minifigure, rather than the height. They look short next to all their cars and stuff, but at least they fit normally enough. Compared to when you scale to their height, and you barely have enough space to fit two figures in a car

I'd argue that using the "height" of the minifigure isn't good to use as standard, as minifigures are exactly stylized in that regard, squished down. If we apply the same logic for the width, an avarege man shoulder-to-shoulder is 1,5 feet wide. A lego minifig is 3 studs wide counting the arms as the shoulders, making 1 stud equal to 0.5 feet width. Making 6 feet wide car's proper stud-size 12 studs.

Now one thing to note regarding ships is that they come in a lot of shapes and sizes, there are probably cargo ships that are 12 foot wide, but yea most are a lot bigger

I think lego should make more use of its micro scale figures for larger models. That would roughly translate to 1 stud = 3 feet.

As much as I love the simplicity of your conversion, I have to point out that minifigures are too wide, and thus a more accurate measure would be to take a value between measuring their width as if it were a person and their height as if it were a person. Additionally, since these things /are/ to match a minifigure, not a person, perhaps we should be using a different number for width measurements than we use for height measurements. Now having said all of that, I think I'm just going to use your method.

Nice to point out that price scales with volume, making something twice as big actually 8 times pricier

To be fair, it's just the limitations of Lego. If you apply the same analogy of 'correctly sized car should fit 2 people side by side' to a normal bus (12 meter ones), which should be able to fit 5 people side by side, 10258 London bus is the one you're looking at!

Minifig scale is a real puzzle since a fig doesn’t have the same prepositions as we do. And we don’t work in a world where everything connects to studs and fits in a system. So it’s impossible to pin point. However I’d love to have 1x2 foot bills 💵 and 1x3 feet 📞

I had an art education, with drawing and sculpting to live models. One of the more important things I learned was 'art anatomy does not have to be right, it has to look right'. Something similar goes with Lego minifigures. As mentioned in the video, the mini figs are horizontally uhm, a bit off. Way too wide compared to their height. This translates into all kind of weird problems with cars and trains, once to try to fit them in. All in all, Lego is not a 'model-building-medium', it is a world building medium. You can make what you want!

I’d say six studs is the best scale to work with. I’ve built many steam trains and six is the best scale to work with so that it doesn’t overshadow the landscape. Same goes for the cars.