Saga Has anyone explained why the Executor has grown in length?

At first the Executor was 8km long, soon it swell canonically to 12.8km long and finally 19km long. So what lead to its size nearly tripling in length?

 

Puberty.

 

It's made of Lego, they just keep finding pieces and adding to it!

 

Curtis Saxton possibly. He publicised that the 8km Executor was far too short (in his Star Wars Technical Commentaries), and eventually, Lucasfilm continuity people (Leland Chee? Pablo Hidalgo?) got wind of it, examined the evidence he presented, and passed the message to writers to use the new figures.

 

Yeah I read that the model in ESB in relation to ISD models is supposed to be around a dozen kilometers long, and later the Executor length was corrected to that. What makes me wonder is the move to 19km length because that makes it even longer than the Eclipse.

 

The From Star Wars to Indiana Jones book (using the size of the Executor's conning tower as the same size as the ISDs) pegged it as 11-odd times the length of the ISD - 17.6 km. The 19km length was possibly intended to guarantee that it was as big as justifiably possible.

 

Bad research. In his ESB novelization Donald Glut described the Executor to be larger than the five Star Destroyers accompanying it which Velasco erroneously misread as five times larger than the Star Destroyers accompanying it and published this erroneous figure ("5 miles" assuming a standard Star Destroyer is 1 mile long) in his 1983 Guide to the Star Wars Universe.

Rather than verifying this figure the folks from West End Games just copied and pasted this information and it became a widespread popular assumption.
Further research by fans - assuming the conning tower of the Executor has the same dimensions as a standard Star Destroyer - yielded the 11 mile / 18 km figure based on the actual dimensions of the conning tower on and the VFX Super Star Destroyer model itself.

However, the large conning tower model built for ROJ came in two versions with a) a large command bridge balcony module seen briefly underneath a Rebel Star Cruiser during the Battle of Endor in ROJ (suggesting that Star Destroyer to belong to the Avenger Class) and b) with a small command bridge balcony module seen during the Tydirium shuttle approach and later during Green Leader's kamikaze attack (the latter one only in BTS ILM images).
According to this large conning tower model - cross-referenced with the known dimensions of the Super Star Destroyer's tower and overall length of the VFX model - the actual and overall "in-universe" length is rather 23 km / 15 miles.


According to ILM's chief model maker Lorne Peterson, the Super Star Destroyer was longer still, but perhaps he made the corresponding statement before the large conning tower model for ROJ had been built, which IMHO is the only reliable means to arrive at the accurate length figure of a Super Star Destroyer.