A few years ago I made a size comparison of the various classic Star Wars ship types in GIMP. But I only compared the ships against each other.
Yesterday, I was trying to get a sense of scale for ships in Traveller, as they are not usually measured in length but by volume. The CR90 corvette from Star Wars is fairly easy to measure for a volume estimate, having the volume of 9,000 tons of liquid hydrogen. (Relevant xkcd joke here.) With the Patrol Corvette from Traveller being 400 tons, and the tables for ship design in Cepheus Engine only going up to 5000 tons, that had me wonder how small ships in Traveller are. And how big even the smaller ships in Star Wars actually are. So I made this scale comparison for the CR90 corvette, the smallest big ship in Star Wars.
Those are big.
The A380 might not have been a good size comparison, as these planes are gigantic. It makes a Saturn V rocket look somewhat unimpressive. So today, I made this size comparison too.
The Iowa class is one of the biggest warships ever build. Even slightly longer than the Yamato, though not nearly as thick in the hips. Even the flimsy looking Nebulon-B frigate that disappears in the background in battles between the big hitters in Star Wars is bigger than that.
The A320 is by far the most common plane for passenger flights inside Europe. It’s the only plane I’ve ever been on, and when you look out the window at an airport terminal, almost everything is either an A320 or equivalent size. It’s volume can be approximated as a cylinder 37 meters long and 4 meters wide, plus let’s say +20% for the wings. Which comes out as 40 tons of liquid hydrogen. That’s only 40% the minimum size for a ship to install even the smallest possible Jump Drive. The classic Free Trader is a 200 ton ship. Five times as a big as an A320.
I also calculated that the Millennium Falcon would be 160 tons. That’s 4 times the volume of an A320. Can that be right?
It indeed does check out. It’s a bit sad that we never got any wide shots of it with people crawling under and over it (probably because that would be much more expensive to film), but it is a pretty big ship.
Just judging by the cockpit of the Millenium falcon and the A320 the size looks about right.
The Falcon is a freighter so likely most of that space is for cargo, which gibes with the apparently small amount of living space seen in the movies.
Are these vessels still entirely out of scale if you compare them to waterbourne vessels? Like, how does the Falcon compare with modern cargo vessels, and how does the CR90 corvette compare to naval corvettes used during and since WW2?
The Light Transport ship type works well as a hero ship, but really doesn’t make much sense commercially. Their capacity seems to be more like a truck with perhaps a second trailer than a cargo ship.
The standard intermodal shipping container (2-TEU) is about 70m³, or 5 Traveller-tons. Assuming half of the Star Wars freighters is cargo capacity, that would give the GR-75 150 containers of cargo space, and the Action V 250 containers.
The smallest container ships today seem to start at around 150 containers. But the truly big ones are 5,000 to 10,000 containers or more.
As seen in the second image, the Nebulon-B frigate is bigger than a World War 2 battleship. Quick and dirty guestimate, it’s about three CR90 corvettes, which would be 25,000 Traveller-tons. One rough estimate I made yesterday about the German Brandenburg-class frigates from the 90s, with a crew of 220, would probably be around 1,000 Traveller-tons in size.
Comparing Star Wars ships with the real ships they are based on is off by an order of magnitude.
It seems worth pointing out that Star Wars ships mostly do not exactly make efficient use of that space. Lots of big open spaces in the Death Star, Star Destroyers, even the CR90 has large open corridors and rooms. Notably, if you look at how many consumables a lot of them store, it’ll be years worth for larger ships, which seems to suggest it’s expected that people are going to be shipboard for longer than people are shipboard on terrestrial ships. Given that, the increased space is likely intentional, at least in part. Things like maintenance crawlways and the like in the larger ships also tend to be very big. It seems likely a lot of it is storage and armour.
Personally I find submarines are better for size comparisons, being conveniently-shaped and having some design considerations in common with starships (where do we want the environment? Outside, and only outside).
Well, Star Wars ships are so spacious so that you can have multiple actors in the same widescreen shot and have somewhere to put the camera crew and lights and stuff.