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.