How Huge Are Those ‘Star Wars’ Spaceships, Anyway?

16 hours ago

X-Wings and TIE Fighters weave and dart in a beautiful but deadly ballet. The enormous bulk of a Star Destroyer overshadows an escaping Rebel corvette. The Millennium Falcon gracefully navigates through an asteroid field: The Star Wars movies are full of amazing sequences showing spaceships of all sorts darting, diving, and cruising amid asteroids, planets, and armadas of other vessels.
But it can sometimes be tough to get a sense of the scale of the events unfolding on screen. How big are all those different ships, exactly? We know the Death Star is no moon. But what about the rest of those ships zooming around the Star Wars galaxy? Here’s how they compare, based on information from StarWars.com’s own Databanks and Wookieepedia.

Tantive IV (Corellian Corvette): 126.68 meters

(Image: StarWars.com)
It’s the very first vessel we see in the original Star Wars trilogy: the Tantive IV, a a consular ship — a Corellian Engineering Corporation CR90 corvette, to be exact — on which Princess Leia Organa is attempting to escape with the Death Star plans. The ship is sizable: A hair under 127 meters in length, it could nestle down right within Coors Field, home to the Colorado Rockies (which runs 415 feet from home plate to the center field wall; the biggest major league ballpark, Houston’s Minute Maid Park, is just slightly longer, at 435 feet). But as we all know, the Tantive IV finds itself immediately overshadowed by a pursuing vessel…

Devastator (Imperial Star Destroyer): 1,600 meters

(Image: StarWars.com)
When it first pulls onto the screen, chasing the Tantive IV, it seems impossibly large — and then it just keeps on going. It’s the Devastator, an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer, the backbone of the Galactic Empire’s navy. Bristling with weaponry and a full complement of 72 TIE Fighters, the Imperial I-class Star Destroyer measures an impressive 1600 meters long. If you landed one of these things in New York City, it would stretch almost the length of the Brooklyn Bridge (which measures 1825.4 meters). (And it would probably cause one heck of a traffic jam.)

Executor (Super Star Destroyer) — 19,000 meters

(Image: StarWars.com)
In the Empire Strikes Back, the venerable Star Destroyer gets a taste of its own medicine as a fleet of the capital ships are suddenly cast in shadow by the even more substantial bulk of Darth Vader’s flagship: the Executor. The eponymous first of the Executor-class Star Dreadnought line (and also known colloquially as a Super Star Destroyer), it dwarfs its predecessors, running 19,000 meters in length — that’s 11.81 miles, more than ten times the length of a normal Star Destroyer. Were you to land it in New York City, it would occupy most of Manhattan (which is 13.4 miles from top to bottom). For a real-world comparison: The largest aircraft carrier in existence, the under-construction USS Gerald R. Ford, is “only” 337 meters long.

X-Wing/TIE Fighter — 12.5/8.99 meters

(Image: Wookieepedia)
While capital ships trade broadsides, most of the head-to-head space combat of Star Wars is conducted in starfighters. On one side are the distinctive split S-foils of the Rebel Alliance’s Incom T-65 X-wing; on the other, the equally iconic hexagonal radiator panels of Sienar Fleet Systems’s Twin Ion Engine/Ln (TIE) fighter. At 12.5 meters and 9 meters respectively, both are bigger than the largest living land animal (the African Bush Elephant, which on average is between 6 and 7 meters long) but slightly smaller than a modern-day jetfighter like the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is just over 17 meters long.

Millennium Falcon (YT-1300) - 34.75m

(Image: StarWars.com)

She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts. Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon can make point-five past light speed (which no doubt helps when you’re trying to make the Kessel Run in a somewhat nonsensical twelve parsecs), and it’s fast enough to outrun Imperial cruisers. Its relatively small size helps: This heavily modified Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 Light Freighter is just 34.75 meters long. That’s small compared to a Star Destroyer, but outstrips even the largest animal on Earth, the 30-meter long blue whale. And unlike the pretty slow cetacean, she’s the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.