Star Wars the Executor?

[Philistine]

To be fair a lot of that crew could be redundancy. If you have the space and nothing better to fill it with then you might as well throw in an extra 100 bridges, power plants, water reclamation plants, etc. and the crew needed to run all of those other 100 sets of systems.

Granted if it was me I would massively automate and reduce the size of both the crew and the vessel drastically. A naval ship is ultimately just a weapons delivery system. It's job is to get the most powerful weapons payload to the battle and ensure that said payload survives the battle.

Actually, I agree with that. There's just no real mission for something as big as an Executor - it doesn't do anything a squadron of ISDs couldn't do just as well, and for much less cost. It would be different if the SW setting included an analogue to really big guns, but the closest real world analogue for Executor would be a 60,000t battleship with 200 5" guns. It's a powerful ship, but in many ways it's less powerful than the same weight of armament spread over ~20 separate hulls. In fact, I'd scale down the ISDs, too, for the same reasons - there's no good reason for them to be as large as they are, given what appears to be a hard upper limit on weapon size in the setting.

...

Hang on. What was the quote manpower requirement for the Death Star? (The first one, the second wasn't complete.) I'm doubting even it required 48million crew.

To run the station? It's quoted as ~755,000 (station crew, officers, support & maintenance, and gunnery crews), plus 400,000 droids. Plus 600,000 troops, 157,000 pilots for the various starfighters and smallcraft, and room for 800,000 passengers.

This also sounds ridiculously low - the station has an internal volume around 2 million cubic km, and supports a population of only ~2 million people? No wonder Han, Luke, & co. were able to run all over the place inside the station - it only had only one crew member per cubic kilometer!

Besides, size isn't all that counts. A large chunk of that is taken up by power systems and internals.

Yes, but the same applies to everything else too. And IRL at least, powerplant and internal structure tend to take up proportionately less weight and volume in larger ships. Meaning even more of Executor would be... empty space, apparently? (Well, it does have that humongous hangar bay...)

(I mentioned before that the modeling crew at ILM did a good job - it probably goes without saying, but my good opinion does not extend to some of the clowns who've written in the setting. )