What is the largest diorama that you have seen?

I haven't seen a dio of that scale in terms of the models that we build here, but if any of you are familiar with warhammer, a friend of mine has a 'gaming table', which I built with him. it's a full dio depicting a medieval castle in the middle. The castle measures two feet by two feet, and the whole table is about 15 by 15. There are a total of 260 figures on it, with about 20 vehicles, and a dozen or so artillery, etc peices.
But a 25 by 15 dio?

QUOTE: but it should keep me busy for a long time

lol, I can imagine that to be a VERY long time

I'd have to say, and I'm nor sure it's a diorama, but the local aerosciences museum has the model of the Akagi that they used on Tora Tora Tora....it is pretty big and has what I believe are either 1/72 or 1/48 scale Vals, Kates, and Zekes taking off....haven't been there in a year or two, so I don't remember what scale it was...but you had to climb a ladder to get a good look at the deck LOL

I saw one at a museum once depicting the landings at normandy. I think it was in 72 scale complete with aircraft and ships.... It was awsome but unfortunantly that was before I was really into modeling so I didn't appreciate it so much. But it was cool none the less...
It used some forced perspective since it was actually a huge shadow box. There was only a window at one end to see it from. The diorama was probably 10 feet or so wide and 5 or 6 feet deep if I remember.

I just posted this in the Aircraft forum, but it is indeed the largest non-museum diorama I've ever seen!



It's a 1/48 dio of a Blue Impulse air show, with T-4s, a T-2, an F-14, an F-16, an F-2, some F-4s and F-15s, and a C-130.

Sorry, no armor!

I was at the Hartenstein hotel museum in Oosterbeek Holland several years back and they had several 1:1 scale dios of the Market Garden battles in and around Arnhem. They were very impressive, but I guess not really on topic. I know I mis-spelled those Dutch names too.

Don't do it. I've seen these mega dioramas and they end up just looking dusty, disjointed and messy. I think you'd better serve your modelling interests by concentrating on various smaller dioramas. The issue of maintaining motivation will ebb away your rate of construction. If you plan and execute several smaller dioramas, you'll have energy and creativity each time. Can you imagine your 500th tree or bush on this diorama? Or 100th painted figure?

Less is more (especially in dioramas). I think the Japanese diorama builders have the best eye, IMHO.

RC

The base library at Camp Lejeune has a dio of the Tarawa landing, if memory serves. It's a whole display case, I'd guess 3 ft deep by about 6 ft long. Lots of figures, and LVTs. The detail was amazing!

Also, at the National Air & Space Museum in DC there's a model of either Enterprise or a Nimitz class carrier, complete with air wing that has to be 1/48 scale. Both of these stand out in my mind when I think of "if I had unlimited money and time to build".

The Australian National War Memorial has some dios about 15-20 feet x10 feet . and a fantastic sorce of info from the Boxer rebelion to today. The have a site at www.awm.gove.au check it out.

Link didn't work, here's one that does:
http://www.awm.gov.au/

Nice site.

the largest dio I ever saw was a model of the titanic sunken with all the debris laid out on the bottom of the ocean. It looked amazing!! It even included the thousands of tonnes of coal that spilled out! It was about 3m by 3m and 1m tall tinted glass around it.

I guess the biggest dio I've seen was a huge train layout. It took up a whole room and had latch doors as part of the scenery. What I mean is, they made the scenery and cut square holes here and there around the layout to service stalled trains on the tracks. The put hinges on the square pieces of landscape and when closed it blended in. You could crawl under the whole thing and open up the hatches around the layout to fix things, or just to watch or look. Big, I mean it was big! About 20X20ft room or so, looked cool...

Excluding model trains and museum displays, I've got one in my den that's 12 feet x 40" wide. The theme is modern desert. BAsically it's an armored column with support vehicles securing a water supply and preparing to clear out a disabled tank. Some of the other comments are correct, doing a setting that big is a long term project and it's hard to keep the focus. Figures must be mass produced and multiples of specific vehicles are a must (helps justify the scope). I.E.: 2 Hemtt's, 3 Bradleys. 2 Abrams, you get the drift. As for my motivation, it is a great way to display your work. When you get tired of piece, put it on hte shelf and put something else in it's place. It is a lot more appealing than a single model in a small scene.