Starship Size Follies

I recently noticed starship dimensions changed during the run of the Space Opera RPG. Took me long enough, it’s only been out for three and a half decades.
In book 2 of the Space Opera rules, on page 54, a starship ton is defined as 3 cubic meters or 100 cubic feet. (That’s an old maritime standard.) Further, a deck will have a height of 2.5 meters.

Several example hulls are listed. The largest is a million tons, with dimensions of 700 x 95 x 45 meters.

The Problem

Those examples are big enough for a Star Trek ship but too small for a Star Wars Star Destroyer. Too small for many of Doc Smith’s ships. Skylark 3 was a cigar two miles long and 1500 feet in diameter. About 18 billion cubic feet! An Imperial Star Destroyer is half as long, 80 percent as wide and all pointy and flat.Call it 2 billion cubic feet. These are a heck of a lot larger than 100 million cubic feet.

That’s significant since the foreword specifically calls out Star Wars and Doc Smith’s books as material Space Opera is intended to emulate. If it can’t “do” big enough ships, it can’t emulate the source material.

The Solution

We can either Change the Genre or Change the Game

Three “Seldon’s Compendium of Spacecraft” followed. The first one kept the same dimension rules. Seldon 1 covered smaller ‘civilian’ and ‘police’ ships. The Spice Runner is a reasonable knockoff of the Millennium Falcon.

The next two Seldon Compendium books covered military ships of the Space Atlas same setting. Seldon 2 covered four major Human-centric Star Nation’s space fleets. Seldon 3 covered four more Star Nations dominated by aliens.These books included a stealthy rule change. A Starship ton now equal 30 cubic meters or 1,000 cubic feet. There was also an example of a ship bigger than one million tons. An Imperial-class Star Destroyer was now statistically possible.

Good enough for Space Opera, in it’s original Star Atlas game setting.  None of the Star Nations is rich enough to get into the Death Star building business.

A problem with this change is some of the existing deck plans were distorted. The Nike and Nemesis class ships are in both Seldon’s 1 and 2, with the same deck plans. We can simply “stretch” the scale from feet to meters, and height and width are taken care off. But the ships have the same number of decks. The suggested vertical spacing even shrinks a little. It’s a good thing most Space Opera ships with deck plans don’t have side or front views. They’d look as flat as pancakes.

But

There are also the even larger Death Star and the Skylark of Valeron. And the Dahuk. 
But let’s not get crazy here. I’m already ignoring Skylark 3 weapon range is 50 million light years. Not even Space Opera can handle something like that.

Besides, if I have to re-read Skylark of Valeron, I might puke when I get to the scenes where the Naked Galactic Rebel Princesses use Richard Seaton for eugenic experiments. With Dorothy's full approval. 

SF Writers Know their Fans.