Starfleet Jedi

http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index. ... surements/

A brass Star Destroyer model was built to scale with the Executor for fleet shots, Pablo Hidalgo reveals in a Star Wars Blog post. The size difference of the two is about 8.5, meaning that the Executor length is about 8.5 times that of an ISD. So, if you go with a 1.6km ISD, you end up with a 13.5km Executor.

This corresponds pretty nicely with a shot showing the shadow of an ISD on the hull of the Executor, which apparently nobody ever looked at in depth before. But, doing some quick and dirty estimates of the shadow length on the Executor versus a side view of the Executor, I'd say that it is spot-on.

Here's the image, using Saxton's for speed's sake:
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/laserd ... logy06.jpg

Curiously, nobody ever really looked at the shadow shot before. Saxton references the brass model in his note about "Cronkite footage", but only glosses over it: "In 1980 George Lucas led a televised visit to the ILM special effects workshops. Among the important models that he demonstrated were the full-length model of the Executor and the larger scale model of the brim trench region from near the prow. Interestingly, there was a small star destroyer model sitting atop the Executor model off to one side. The size relationship between these two models matches that of the star destroyers seen moving over Executor's wing during the approach to Hoth and Captain Needa's shuttle scene. It seems very likely that this star destroyer model was made to exactly the same scale as the Executor for the purpose of making these shots. The relative sizes of these models are difficult to calculate from the television imagery, but they seem visibly consistent with the eleven-mile length reached via other methods. "

It is not clear why he never followed up with checking the shadow size against the Executor itself, which is surely the best way to get good scaling.

You can use the film to get a sense of the shadow size against the hull by working with the crash scene, e.g. http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/dvd/zs ... cdive6.jpg . . . or you can use some other side view, but either way that hugemongous shadow on the hull makes it pretty clear that the Executor was never 19.2 kilometers by intent.

And no, intent alone isn't sufficient evidence for me, since any intent of any one person (even Lucas) is filtered through every other person's intent to get to the final product, which is the canon . . . but nevertheless, this is one piece of intent that has revealed a most interesting datapoint.

Very intriguing.

Not only the 19 km length was absolutely ridiculous, but the formerly and generally accepted length of 17.6 km, based on the ratio of 11:1, turns out to be incorrect?

It is quite surprising that the figure of 12.x, which appeared rather late in fact (The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels), could have been one of the most accurate of all.
But why omitting the x11 ratio?
This one was sourced (From STAR WARS to Indiana Jones).

Looks like they're all having foggy memories of what was truly intended to be the final size.
5 to 6 miles long star destroyers anyone?


Oh and that one too:

The next source to weigh in on anything quantitative is The Art of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) which tells us, rather unhelpfully, that Vader’s Star Destroyer has “twice the destructive capability of any craft in the Imperial fleet.”

So when you consider the volume... that thing was severely under armed. Making the Executor smaller helps making this tragic lack of weaponry less gross.

Which reminds me of the most recent fan-fed CGi renders put into an official book, featuring a variety of barely seen star destroyer classes and their ludicrous amounts of weapons... basically exactly what a fanboy would like his ship to look like, same as "it's a X-Wing, but this one has 12 guns and triple the shields and double the speed!!1!" LOL.

In 1983, in The Empire Strikes Back National Public Radio Dramatization has Lando Calrissian eyeball Vader’s flagship to be about three times the size of Cloud City, a measurement that is no help given that Cloud City’s size is never specified. For those doing the math nowadays, based on how big we understand Cloud City to be, that puts the Executor at a whopping 48 kilometers in length, or 30 times the size of a regular mile-long Star Destroyer. Never trust Lando’s estimates, then.

They easily confuse length with volume. Bigness is about the overall one thing takes. That's how the DSII was "nearly twice as big" as the DSI.
Considering that the Executor is a flat dagger and cloud city a... a ... spintop?... making volumetric comparisons is like... hard, nah?

I'd also like to point out that in defense of Saxton (gasp!), I did spot the shadow as a potentially interesting yardstick some years ago, but it turned out that I couldn't find a good way to actually find proper points of reference that would make that shadow casting useful. The crappy resolution, the stretched form of the shadow, the lack of any clear information of the light source and the lack of any good edge to pick on the star destroyer itself just made the task even harder.
You couldn't even assume a convenient position of the SD relative to the Executor to use that to get a rough idea of the proportions. And the low resolution made a comparison of bridge towers impossible as well.
That shot has always been a total time waster.

http://st-v-sw.net/images/Wars/Episodes ... cutor.jpeg

There's a better version from broadcast HD.

You have a perfect line for the port side of the ISD, and given the light angles you can ballpark it readily enough by just following the centerline from the forward point directly to the shadow's rear (where there's just a sliver of lit Executor hull) and call it a day. The ISD bridge tower obviously rides up toward the centerline of the Executor, so this is basically showing a pretty good side view shadow (with sun high and forward, but close enough for most work) against a nice smooth hull area of the Executor.

In short, it's a killer view, and even if it could be construed as being imprecise in its use . . . that is, even if researchers might find it difficult to get supremely precise values out of it . . . that doesn't make it any less an awesome example, since even an eyeball estimate would be useful.

Literally, when you have a shadow of one thing on another thing like this, it is the best possible evidence and worth every ounce of effort you put into it.

In my initial ballpark maneuver I simply checked the shadow against details on the Executor hull top and then compared those to the whole ship side view. When I have more time I'll have a go at a more exacting effort, but suffice it to say that shot just doesn't support an Executor that is close to 20km long.

Nice find there, Robert! This kind of puts another nail into the 17.5 km fallacy that was only based on one single quick shot that appeared for a few seconds in TESB. As you may recall from a very long time ago on the old SWars vs Strek forum, someone, Weyon, I think it was, discovered a shot from RoTJ with the Executor flanked by by two ISDs that pinned down it's size to around 8 km. Just running a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation... 17.5 km + 13.5 km + 8 km/3.... brings the average size to around 13 km for the Executor.
-Mike

2046 wrote:http://st-v-sw.net/images/Wars/Episodes ... cutor.jpeg

There's a better version from broadcast HD.

Oh the juicy shot and miracle of HD!
Mmm... I might give it another try.

You have a perfect line for the port side of the ISD, and given the light angles you can ballpark it readily enough by just following the centerline from the forward point directly to the shadow's rear (where there's just a sliver of lit Executor hull) and call it a day.

The ISD bridge tower obviously rides up toward the centerline of the Executor, so this is basically showing a pretty good side view shadow (with sun high and forward, but close enough for most work) against a nice smooth hull area of the Executor.

In short, it's a killer view, and even if it could be construed as being imprecise in its use . . . that is, even if researchers might find it difficult to get supremely precise values out of it . . . that doesn't make it any less an awesome example, since even an eyeball estimate would be useful.

Literally, when you have a shadow of one thing on another thing like this, it is the best possible evidence and worth every ounce of effort you put into it.

In my initial ballpark maneuver I simply checked the shadow against details on the Executor hull top and then compared those to the whole ship side view. When I have more time I'll have a go at a more exacting effort, but suffice it to say that shot just doesn't support an Executor that is close to 20km long.

Trigonometry nightmare ahoy!
First of all, the region of the Executor's hull where the shadow is cast is a double slope: forward and sideways.
Which results in a shadow which will be distorded in two directions.
This is a major complication because the shadow's size is not that of the ISD. There's a multiplier to guess here.
There's also the out-of-universe possibility that the light used was nothing more than one unique spot and not a wall of light, which would just completely screw the measurement of the shadow even more since even if the Executor had been totally flat, the shadow would still get upscaled once cast.
Using the shadow remains a massive mess. It's even worse because the tower's shadow makes the reading of any of the shadow's edges impossible safe for the portside side one... the portside which is on the other side of the ship, half masked by the ISD's very own structure. :/

The onlything we can safely consider is the relative position of the ISD to the Executor, by looking at where the stern ends on the Exe's hull, which as you said, if we ride along her hull, brings us to the tower. The ISD's tower is a bit lower than the Exe's (a quick casting of parallelal lines between each tower's globes tells us that), so basically the ISD is "inside" the Executor if we compared their up and down positions.

Thanks to the HD, I'm working on a wireframe solution directly using the ISD, assuming little scaling alteration due to perspective and distance, which will allow us to directly position the wireframe silhouette onto recognizable sections of the Executors. From there, measurements will be a piece of cake (I hope).