Lit Fleet Junkie Flagship- The technical discussions of the GFFA (Capital Ships thread Mk. II)

Anyone see this picture of "Oumuamua" and think...



...well it looks kinda like a MC30c frigate, right?

 

Truly impressive again, but I'd like to know his sources for obtaining some of those lengths? In particular, I assumed the MC95 was a sizable fraction of the size of a Resurgent-class Destroyer, going off of Rise of the Resistance, when we see then both close to each other; although it also seems the subtypes vary quite a bit in scale, so wonder what the baseline is? If it's a foreshortened Home One, CGI model, presumably.
The Hynestian Cruiser, meanwhile is a trifle bigger than I thought (minimum of 900 metres) but still in the same rough size range I was working off of.

I'm also FED up by now, of constantly shifting TIE fighter scales. If they've built a full-scale exterior and interior for TFA, then why not stick to close to that? (about 6.7 m overall length) the rest are fairly dubious grounds, for adjusted scale. Though at least we can calculate an R2 dome relative to a T-65's length, generally.

 

I've ignored new canon sizes for TIE fighters, X-wings, Y-wings and the like and just use the original Cross-Sections prior to the reboot. Better than the inconsistencies.

 

Most of these newcanon sizes were intended to iron out the inconsistencies. Rogue One was the main source for rescaled TIEs and X-Wings, and the two Owners Workshop Manuals used Rogue One as a starting point.

The 12.5m figure for X-Wings, for example, didn't come from the movie props - it came from WEG. I figure that the 13.4m figure by contrast comes from the movies.

Most notably, the Owners Workshop Manuals fixed the notoriously oversized 9.6m A-Wing - bringing it down to 6.9m.

 

I think you're correct, I remember Pablo talking about this years ago.

Though they still called the Rogue One model X-Wing the T-65C-A2 to explain the differences from the ANH T-65B.

 

It wasn't till the Owner's Workshop Manual, that the T-65B officially became the same length as the T-65C-A2 in Canon. Before that, they were two slightly different sizes.

However - in Legends the T-65C-A2 was introduced in Complete Cross Sections, to represent the ANH X-wing - and was the same length as the T-65B - 12.5m.

So correcting the T-65B's length made sense - if both near-identical ships are the same length in Legends, both ships should be the same length in Canon.

 

It skews a little more Zentraedi than Mon Cal to me, but that's a fine line anyway.

 

Don't you recognise a Yuuzhan Vong spycraft when you see one?

 

Lol, if aliens truly exist and are capable of space travel, they are smart enough to stay away from Earth. Because in order to achieve the technology, their entire species would've moved past pettiness and self-interest garbage like what we have on Earth.

Yeah, aliens are smart enough to leave the solar system alone.

But it is a neat object.

 

So..basically what you are saying is...Earth is the neighborhood they roll up their windows and lock their doors as they fly by??

 

speaking of which, been meaning to point out that (K)Night Hammer seems to be a Vengeance-class based on its description in Darksaber-- it's never said to be the same class as Executor, merely as big, and the upper hull is described as a "sweeping metal plain." Coupled with it being heavily automated with a stripped-down crew I think Vengeance-class fits it better than Executor.

 

To be fair, Callista relies on the plans of the Executor when it comes to targeting the Knight Hammer.

 

This is a really nice thread to come here and randomly pick up on. Explains a lot, and why Pellaeon regards this one ship as something comparable to the unique Executor rather than the usual 8km SSD...

She reflects that she'd "once studied skeches of darth vader's flagship Executor" - doesn't exclude this being a non-standard design, as that's the best she has to go on...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Okay okay, so....keeping track of the length debate again. 8 km comes from Raymond Velsaco and is then repeated by WEG. 19 km comes from just fans eyeballing the scene in ESB, and it's eventually canonized by James Luceno, right?

 

I prefer 8 km long Super Star Destroyers myself.

 

I forget that people don't get the in-jokes...

For the record, the idea that Ex is uniquely 19km and the other SSDs are the 8km length they're specified at in page canon is one I'm rather fond of, but isn't any sort of official canon, and I deliberately didn't push my opinion very hard in the planning for WARFARE - we did a lot of discussing in committee, but wanted to avoid any pointless bickering...

Not quite...

We begin with the introductory reference in the ESB shooting script, establishing that Vader's ship is "larger and stranger than the five Imperial Star Destroyers that surround it"; the Empire Strikes Back Official Poster Monthly, published in 1980 in conjunction with the movie's release, rephrased this to state that the ship was "larger and stronger than five ordinary Star Destroyers", which is the ultimate source of the 8km length.

As the earlier Poster Monthly for the 1977 movie seems to have had direct access to ILM for VFX info, this idea may come straight from the production.

Velasco's Guide to the Star Wars Universe simply rephrases this information, and says that Ex is "approximately five times larger" than any other Star Destroyer; WEG's 1989 Imperial Sourcebook converts this into a hard figure of 8km, by multiplying 1.6km five times.

The perception that the Ex was much larger originated with fans eyeballing the movies; the idea being that the bridge-towers were the same size, and the known 1.6km length for the ISD would thus give the "true" length of the Ex...

... but there's a problem here, because unlike the idea of the SSD being five times larger, which may actually go back to the movie production... the 1.6km length for the ISD does seem to originate... wait for it... in Raymond E. Velasco's Guide to the Star Wars Universe!!!!

There's also some uncertainty about exactly how reliable the bridge-tower measurements for Ex actually are:

* SWTC, using measurements for the Ex provided by LFL's David West-Reynolds, calculated a length of 17.4km-17.8km, i.e. approximately 11 times the size of the ISD; but quite apart from using Velasco's length for the ISD, the bridge-tower size was derived from using orthogonal photos rather than the studio model, which may not be completely reliable.

* In addition, West-Reynolds' length for Ex is 277 cm, whereas Hidalgo says 282cm. No comment...

* I have no idea what the 19km number is actually based on. Possibly this is based on a more precise measurement of one of the ISD models.

* The small ISD built in-scale with the Ex implies that Ex is only about 8.5 times larger than an ISD, rather than the expected 11-12 times larger - if so, then presumably the bridge towers are not the same size...

Available production-era evidence suggests that Star Destroyers are significantly smaller than the 1.6km figure. Joe Johnston's scaling diagram indicates a length around 600m for the ANH version...



... and as to the ESB version, the kitbashed triple-greeblie on the front of the bridge tower:



... corresponds to the ~4.6m wide triple window on the modest bridge design conceived for a standard Star Destroyer, which as @Lt. Hija pointed out back in 2017 was what was seen in the movie aboard Tyrannic...





(... rather than the larger one used by Ex and Avenger...)

... which would suggest that the ESB version of the Star Destroyer has a bridge-tower width in the region of 175m, and an overall length of very roughly 1km...



... and of course, ~8.5 times a ~1km ESB-ISD gives us an ~8km SSD.

I'm not sure how serious you are...

I mean, I like my 1.6km ISDs, my 8km SSDs and my 19km Ex... but I'm not sure that's movie-canon!!

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Ah boys back to discussing their lengths... this feels like puberty all over again... kidding!

@Thrawn McEwok for the detailed rundown of the SSD length history!

For what it is worth, and this may be strange, I always felt that the SSD Executor bridge tower was actually smaller than that of a standard ISD! Not larger, nor same size but yub smaller! Not sure anymore if I based that on any visual angle or reference or not.

As you pointed out with the bridge windows, the model using the three windows (II in image below) seems to have a smaller bridge than some of the other Stardestroyers (III in image below) where the bridge section seems to be wider.

The SSD Executor where we clearly see the bridge windows on the tower model seems to have a larger tower if the bridge wideth is same as on regular Stardestroyer models and one can measure the tower size difference from that.

But what if Bridge wideth is not the same on all types of Stardestroyer as it varies windows-vise between images I - III! Interior bridge set wideth may still allow us to measure the outside of the tower.

 

Ohhh, so the physical model for the Executor is not actually that huge, it's just they use a bit of camera trickery to make it look like it is relative to the ISD...kinda like what Peter Jackson did to get the hobbits to look shorter than humans?

 

Wow.

You all are STILL debating the Super Star Destroyer length?

 

Eh, I'm not really debating...just trying to figure out the origins of the debate

 

Executor being 19 kilometers in length while its sister ships are only 8 kilometers, that's exceptable.

But ultimately, Executor and its three main sister ships -- Brawl, Reaper and Aggressor (all released within a few months) -- are 8 kilometers. Same with the others [except the Lusankya (the fourth sister ship but left on Coruscant, somehow...)] -- Whelm, Guardian and the other eight or ten (including Ravager) were launched after Endor but were largely incomplete when launched to combat the New Republic.

 

Speaking of which, was it ever mentioned whether Lusankya was complete when it fought the Rogues? I would imagine that a ship that's buried underground probably wouldn't be fully armed or crewed. Not to mention Isard didn't have the support of a bunch of other Imperial factions, so she might have had trouble getting Lusankya fully operational. If so, maybe that explains why it seemed to go down so easily over Thyferra?

 

Like the Guardian and other Super Star Destroyers?

 

As we fans well know by now, of course, you can find production documents or VFX to justify almost any size, by this point.
So I prefer hard data to work from, of course, wherever possible. Things like the exact ratio of the bridge tower width to the overall ISD 1 (91 to 91.44 cm) and 2 (259 to 259.09 cm) model lengths. And the shield/sensor globes, ratios, etc, and to the miniature Falcon model.
If anyone could give conclusive answers, to those, would be a great help!

But overall, most of this kind of thing comes down to emergent consensus, over what a ship is SUPPOSED to be, what's it capable of, and how much can be crammed in it, be it an ISD with a CR90 inside, or a Venator with hundreds of fighters, and a belly launched Consular-class (wink)
Hopefully, this can be much easier and more consistent, in an era of archived CGI animator data and 3d mesh models, even if some details, like windows and hangars, do get fudged, initially.