Sieges: The Doofer and the Scale Paradox

It would be fatuous - probably even very irritating - to come up with some kind of useful personal spin-off from the current corona-virus situation, but it is a fact that, since quite a lot of things that I had planned to do are not going to be possible, then I am going to be forced to do something else instead. In the interests of preserving the tiny, ragged edges of what is left of my sanity I have an enforced opportunity to revisit things which have been shelved or passed over, and there will be any amount of time (if, of course, I am spared) to think about stuff.

Therefore it cannot be a complete coincidence that today's post returns to what used to be a tradition on this blog a few years ago - I shall begin with a lengthy digression. I, at least, will probably enjoy it, and it serves a useful secondary purpose in filtering out any unfortunate readers who arrived here by accident, and who are beginning to see what a huge mistake that was.

I always assumed that "a doofer" was just a saying used in my own family. My grandmother (the one from Preston) used the phrase to refer to any object whose real name she had forgotten, or simply didn't know. There was also a faint edge of intolerance in there - in my grandmother's world, which mostly was built around Dickens, Mozart, cats and Rich Tea biscuits, anything which had overtones of technology was an overhead - the sort of thing that some (common) technical person would know about. Thus, though the thing itself might be useful, the idea of actually understanding it was well beneath contempt. She had a doofer with which she lit the gas stove, and doofers which secured the stair carpet. Her life was filled with them.

Stove-lighting Doofer

Stair-carpet Doofers

Her brother, Alf, worked for many years in the tram (later bus) workshops at Edge Lane, Liverpool, and he also spoke of doofers. Originally, I believe, the term may come from the army - possibly WW1 - to describe something which was improvised, or fixed, or botched, and which would "do for now". [I checked my etymological dictionary, since that is the sort of thing for which I now have more time, and I see that the likely origins of doofer are pretty much as I thought, though the date is felt to be 1930s. That would surprise me if it were true, since Great Uncle Alf would never have adopted any phrase which appeared as late as the 1930s. Yes, this was a digression within a digression - we have nested digressions].

Gradually this evolved into a general term for something whose proper name you didn't know, and I am surprised at how widespread this became. It is bound to be out of fashion now, of course, but I recall that as my grandmother became older and more dotty there were more and more doofers around the place. In more recent years, my mother started calling almost everything "the thing-io"; it is a great comfort to be able to forget the real names of everyday objects - I can see this.

What were we talking about, again?

Oh yes - doofers. Well, you will be excited to read that I have taken delivery of a new doofer - it arrived on Saturday. I have been waiting for this doofer for nearly two years, and to be more accurate it is a prototype doofer.

Some time ago I commissioned the manufacture of some rather similar doofers for my medieval/ECW sieges. They worked well - they were, to be specific about it, firing platforms which could be stood behind fortress walls, to give standing room for guns or bodies of musketeers. I got my friend Michael at SLD to design and laser-cut them from MDF, enhanced a little with masonry-style engraving, and I made them up and painted and matt-varnished them, and they were good. They were doofers to help with problems arising from the eternal Scale Paradox in tabletop wargames (which, for reasons which I shall attempt to explain, reach their zenith in the arcane world of miniature sieges). At the time, I was also very surprised at the amount of criticism they generated.

Doofer to facilitate sieges on Medieval Walls - shades of "2001: Space Odyssey"?

And in action - a bit crude, but effective

The problem is, you see, that if you had attended a real medieval or Renaissance siege with your digital camera handy, you would not have seen any of my doofers in action. They are not part of the model-railway-style facsimile of a real siege, and quite a few readers reacted badly to this. I called them "gun platforms" or sometimes "buttresses", but really they were just add-on doofers to solve a problem arising from the Scale Paradox.

Before I get buried even further in this effort, let me insert a spoiler here, to explain that the new doofer I have received is a prototype of the same sort of device, but designed to work with Vauban-period walls. After adding the first-generation doofers to my ECW sieges, I realised that progress with my 18th-19th Century sieges would require the Mark II Siege Doofer. The walkways behind the parapets on my model Vauban walls are only 30mm wide, which is not nearly enough to mount a gun up there, without some form of extra support. I shall, I promise, come back to this after I have burbled on about the Scale Paradox for a bit. If you are still with me, you have my heartfelt admiration and gratitude.

My games usually take place on a hex-gridded table, which I have found helps greatly and keeps things simple. There is still an implied groundscale - my hexes are 7 inches across the flats, which is near enough 180mm. My default horizontal scale is (approx) 1mm = 1 yard/metre. This obviously varies for big battles scaled down, but that default is (approx) 200 paces = 1 hex, which is a useful round number.

I use 20mm or 1/72 scale soldiers, and for infantry and cavalry I use an age-old ratio of 3 figures = 100 men, so that my battalions normally have about 2 dozen men. The basing is designed to give frontages compatible with the 1/1000 groundscale, and it also tries to make the spacing of the miniature soldiers look about right for the kind of troops and the kind of warfare they represent. [Though please try to remember, Claude, that this is not the same as visual "realism" - a 24-man battalion is not at all realistic, however much the photos out of Charles Grant and Don Featherstone have come to shape our understanding].

Just to be awkward - another personal compromise - I have yet another scale on the go at the same time. My buildings are usually 15mm scale, which is about 1/100 - this is similar to the old TT model railway scale. The underscale buildings have a few advantages - they are cheaper, they have a smaller footprint, and they can be grouped into what seem to me to be more convincing villages. You can also, with time, get used to the look of the thing - the fact that a soldier would get stuck in the door of the church is a relatively unimportant matter when you are fighting Leipzig. I work on the assumption that a smallish village is marked by a representative cluster of slightly undersized houses - they are usually placed around the edges of a hex, so that a unit may be placed among them, and the houses themselves can be shunted about as necessary to make room for what is going on - the individual model buildings do not represent real individual buildings, and you can't take roofs off or put people inside. In the games I play, that is not necessary or useful. The important things about a village are its outline (and in a hex-based game that is an obvious concept, though non-hex players will still have a requirement to define the edges of the built-up area) and who is in it.

Anyway, you get the idea. On occasions I may choose to use 20mm-scale walls and hedges for my soldiers to stand behind, just for the look of the thing, but by and large this odd mish-mash of scales is now tried and tested and works well. Let's remind ourselves, that's

* 1/1000 horizontal scale, for ranges, moves, frontages, table layout.

* 1/72 (visual) vertical scale for the model soldiers - which is a given.

* 1/100  vertical scale for the buildings - which is simply a convenient compromise.

Now then. When we consider sieges this suddenly becomes more of a problem. The layout of a fort is not just a matter of appearance or convention - the lengths of the walls, the positioning and dimensions of the bastions and so on are set by rules which relate to the effective range of a musket (or whatever), and a representative model is no longer going to be fit for purpose unless it has about the right footprint. We now bump our noses quite firmly against the "look of the thing" problem - we can use 15mm buildings if we wish, but the big issue here is the Scale Paradox - our toy soldiers live in a world where a man is about 22mm tall, but the distances and the ground plan require a world where 1mm is 1 metre (or 2mm = 1 toise, if you insist). There - did you feel that bump on your nose? That's because the groundscale is one tenth of the visual scale. It always was, but it just became a problem.

For reasons which I really don't understand - I can only assume that the model designers had been through all this same reasoning before - the old Terrain Warehouse 15mm Vauban pieces that I use look OK with the soldiers, but the footprint of the various bits also makes sense in the groundscale I use. So it works in both senses (though obviously this must be a pretty silly-looking fort from the point of view of proportions, but it is silly in the same way as the soldiers themselves, so maybe that's what matters).

I've now reminded myself (again) that I don't really understand why this works, but it does. Further, it may not actually work at all - it might just be that I think it does. There you go - full circle - you set your games up to suit you, and I'll suit myself. That's probably where we came in. Before I finally put this note out of its misery, here's some photos of the new doofer. Since I am pleased that it is what I designed, that it works and is what I wanted, I shall get Michael to make me some more, and I'll make them up and store them away in the Sieges boxes. 

The new prototype Mk II Siege Doofer - assembled, painted and varnished

In position on the Terrain Warehouse 15mm scale Vauban wall

And here demonstrating how some big French guns may be deployed