I think that what really is needed is stripping this game of players, that would make everyone's life easier ;P
Personally, I think it makes good sense to have pre-measuring in virtually all wargaming contexts. In my humble opinion, it is pretty silly for visually guesstimating distances to be part of a player's 'skill' at a game. And there's lots of quirky little ways around it too, like using your HVT placement as a reference (because you measured it and it doesn't move), or knowing the dimensions of a Bandua Q Building, or memorizing the distance between two fixed points while you are verifying range (which you might measure just for this purpose). I'd rather lose a game because my opponent spent orders more efficiently, chose optimal FtF match ups, reacted dynamically to changing conditions, etc. etc. than because I was aces at eyeballing the distance between two points. It's not terribly satisfying to do well in a game because your opponent made a millimeter mistake eyeballing ZoC, or accidentally left a little area exposed with a bad smoke placement. And there's also plenty of weird rules conundrums that happen in Infinity SOLEY because of the lack of pre-measuring. Experienced wargamers are gonna be pretty darn bang on with guestimations anyway, and so it only really matters when something is a very close call. How much does having to guesstimate an edge case like this add to the gameplay experience? So for me, if I was playing the OP, I would say "Let's just pre-measure, dude. I don't want to have some silly advantage over you because I can reliably eyeball 8 inches." BUT, that said, no pre-measuring is a rule. So always check with your opponent. At the end of the day, if my opponent got cranky about me extending a tape measure just to look at it... that's a game I would be happy to walk away from in a casual context, or declare nothing but Idle for the remainder of in a tournament setting. Because that's someone who is clawing for every inch of advantage, which isn't the point of playing Infinity, even in a tournament setting.
Yeah I also play Infinity to have fun so just ask before and I wouldn't even mind if you we just say that we both can premeasure, in the tournaments I was so far it probably would be ok if both players accept premeasuring. But you should of course ask beforehand to make sure, as others said having a ruler laying at the side is completly normal and in my games even in tournaments nobody batted an eye if you took out the template to look at it to decide if it could be in range. Have fun playing and enjoy the game :)
The problem with this discussion is that it immediately leads into another discussion over whether or not premeasuring should be part of the core rules in Infinity. I'm all for making exceptions for people with diagnosed disabilities. I can't support, in any way, the practice of normalizing the core game to accommodate exceptional rare circumstances.
