Actual size of the Droid Control Ship in Star Wars

[Yora]

The Droid Control Ship in Episode 1 is always listed at a size much larger than a Star Destroyer at various conflicting lengths (2425m, 3170m, 3357m), And every time I see it I feel that this has to be wrong. Someone came up with that number without comparing it to the established sizes of other ships.

From the close up shots in the movie with other smaller ships close by, can we estimate how big that ship seen on the screen would actually be relative to other ships? The ship with which the Jedi land is supposedly 115 meters long, which seems reasonable based on the windows. The queen's ship is 76 meters, and the Naboo starfighters 11 meters.

3170m seems to be the most commonly cited number. That would be 28 times the length of the red ship, 42 times the length of the silver ship, and 288 times the length of the yellow ships. Can that be true based on what is shown in the movie?

Supposedly the brown droid dropships are 370m wide, which means the hangar ring has to be about 400 meters wide as well. But when the republic transport lands, which can't be more than 40m wide, you can clearly see that the hanger can be nowhere near that width. The size of the droids walking around adds to that. I would say 200 meters at the most.

[hamishspence]

The 3+ km figure is fairly consistent with TCW at least. In one episode (first episode of the Ryloth arc of Season one) we see a Republic Star Destroyer collide with a battleship (Control Ship without the Droid Army controlling modifications) and it's a lot bigger than the Republic Star Destroyer is.

There's scenes in AOTC too, with the Core ships (central sphere) docking with the rest of the ship, and scenes in ROTS with battleships exchanging fire with the Republic fleet.

[GloatingSwine]

All very rough estimates:

Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's ship is supposedly 115m long and looks to be about 2.5x as long as it is wide, making its width something like 46m.

It appears to be about 1/3 of the width of the hangar opening at the point we see it closest to crossing the hangar mouth. The angle of the hangar mouth is offset from the camera and the jedi ship a bit though so the actual width is probably closer to 160m. The hangar opening itself takes up about 2/3 of the width of the end of one of the "arms" of the ship, and the arms are about 1/4 of the diameter of the circular shape.

That makes the diameter of the ship more like 1km (about 960m).

Nowhere near three.

Now, the droid dropships are a bit of an issue for that if they're actually 370m wide, but it's quite possible they're smaller than that.

When we see the ground transports leaving them they're about half the width of the body of the transport, and they're about 2/3 as wide as they are tall. They're about 5x the height of a battle droid which are about 1.9-2m tall (scaled against Liam Neeson) That puts their width at something like 6.5m, meaning the body of the ship is about 13-14m. The body at its widest point is about 10% of the width of the wingspan, which means that the droid dropship wingspan might only be about 150m, which fits comfortably in the hangar that scales to the size of the republic ship (remembering that a droid pilot won't need much safety margin to fly out).

1km makes a lot more sense.

[lt_murgen]

wookieepedia, which is about as official as I get, lists it at 2425 m.

[Nerd-o-rama]

It's also worth noting that this particular model of ship is one smaller core ship (the sphere in the middle) with a modular attachment that can be used for hauling cargo or, in the case of this particular model, weaponry and droid landers.

I don't want to call it a semi truck with guns strapped to it, but it's basically a semi truck with guns strapped to it. It's bigger than many other capital ships of the era but it's designed as a cargo vessel, which is why it's more fragile and of a rather wonky shape for interstellar warfare, and why a group of them have their blockade breached by a yacht.

[Mando Knight]

It's also worth noting that this particular model of ship is one smaller core ship (the sphere in the middle) with a modular attachment that can be used for hauling cargo or, in the case of this particular model, weaponry and droid landers.

I don't want to call it a semi truck with guns strapped to it, but it's basically a semi truck with guns strapped to it. It's bigger than many other capital ships of the era but it's designed as a cargo vessel, which is why it's more fragile and of a rather wonky shape for interstellar warfare, and why a group of them have their blockade breached by a yacht.

It's more (exactly) like a container ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship) with the cargo space replaced with hangars, flight decks, and gun turrets. The largest IRL cargo ships are much bigger than even the US's supercarriers (CVN-60 U.S.S. Enterprise being the longest warship ever afloat, with the Nimitz and Gerald R. Ford classes being overall larger but several meters shorter) and could possibly make for obscenely powerful Q-ships (at least relatively speaking) with extensive refitting, but weren't designed to bear weapon and armor loads, making them less effective per ton than a purpose-built vessel (and unlike the supercarriers run on conventional power rather than the unlimited range of naval nuclear reactors).

[hamishspence]

wookieepedia, which is about as official as I get, lists it at 2425 m.

On a Legends page. The canon page lists it as much larger:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lucrehulk-class_Droid_Control_Ship/Canon

That Legends page is also something of an outlier - other Legends pages suggested a larger ship:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lucrehulk-class_LH-3210_cargo_freighter/Legends
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lucrehulk-class_battleship


Wookieepedia isn't an official site itself - it's only a fansite - sometimes the writers overlook things when they pick and choose which source to take as "most valid". The source that gave the small figure was a magazine rather than a book.

[Yora]

All very rough estimates:

Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's ship is supposedly 115m long and looks to be about 2.5x as long as it is wide, making its width something like 46m.

It appears to be about 1/3 of the width of the hangar opening at the point we see it closest to crossing the hangar mouth. The angle of the hangar mouth is offset from the camera and the jedi ship a bit though so the actual width is probably closer to 160m. The hangar opening itself takes up about 2/3 of the width of the end of one of the "arms" of the ship, and the arms are about 1/4 of the diameter of the circular shape.

That makes the diameter of the ship more like 1km (about 960m).

Nowhere near three.

Now, the droid dropships are a bit of an issue for that if they're actually 370m wide, but it's quite possible they're smaller than that.

When we see the ground transports leaving them they're about half the width of the body of the transport, and they're about 2/3 as wide as they are tall. They're about 5x the height of a battle droid which are about 1.9-2m tall (scaled against Liam Neeson) That puts their width at something like 6.5m, meaning the body of the ship is about 13-14m. The body at its widest point is about 10% of the width of the wingspan, which means that the droid dropship wingspan might only be about 150m, which fits comfortably in the hangar that scales to the size of the republic ship (remembering that a droid pilot won't need much safety margin to fly out).

1km makes a lot more sense.

That's around the scale I would estimate from looks alone. For the same reasons.

[hamishspence]

I'm not sure why Incredible Cross Sections: TPM picked the size they did. The salient part is that the setting continued to show very big Trade Federation Battleships (Droid control ships without the antennae) - at least for TCW.

The Republic Star Destroyer is just over 1 km long.

Here, we see it collide with a Trade Federation Battleship

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/File:Defender_Venator.png