Today’s contribution to I Made It So I Might As Well Share It. Might be interesting or useful to someone else as well.
A selection of some of the most iconic Star Wars ships at the same scale, with their respective volume in Traveller tons. (Traveller calls a volume of 14m³ a ton for interesting but annoying reasons. It’s the unit for designing space ship interior deck plans.)
As the eagle-eyed have already spotted, this image does not include Star Destroyers as they would reduce anything else to small smudges of grey pixels. But I did calculate their volume, and the classic Imperial class Star Destroyer would be 5,000,000 tons, and the much less ludicrously scaled Victory class 900,000 tons. On the end of the scale, both the YT-1300 Millennium Falcon and the Airbus A320 passenger plane are about 40 tons. (Much to small to have a hyperspace jump drive in Traveller.)
The rapid increase in volume compared to only slight differences in exterior size may seem off, but that’s a simple optical illusion by the brain just not being any good at comprehending the relationship of length to volume. Cones in particular look like they should be similar in volume to a cylinder with the same base and length, but is only a third of that. And the Strike is much more of a cylinder compared to the Dreadnought being almost rectangular with rounded corners. And the Saturn-V rocket has 85% of its volume in the thickest section that makes up two thirds of it’s length. That’s how you can easily fit three of them into the considerably shorter but more than double as wide GR-75 freighter.
