The true size of Trade Federation droid ships

[Yora]

The size for the Lucrehulk droid control ship in Episode 1 is usually given as something well over 3000 meters. Which is more than double the length of an Imperial Star destroyer. But when you actually look at the scenes in the movie, that number never looked even remotely right to me. If anything, they seem to be considerably smaller.

The main reason I always doubted that number are the size of the Republic passenger ship landing in the hangar, which also happens to be the best place to start with trying to get an actual measurement of what's on screen.
This image gives a very nice shot of the hangar entrance that shows two pipes or clamps at the bottom of each side, which appear like two teeth on the otherwise flat walls when seen from above. Based on that reference, I added this red ring to the top down view to indicate the size and position of the internal hangar space.



(This is a half scale version of the image I made so it fits on the screen here.)

The ring has a width of 128 pixels (in the larger version of the image). And we know that it's just the right size to park droid landing ships, which are given a width of 210 meters, resulting in a 1.64 meters per pixel scale for this image.

When we see the Republic ship come in for landing, it looks like you could get three of them through the hangar door side by side. It's given a length of 115 meters, and when you scale an image of it to 70 pixels in length respectively, you get a perfect fit of three ships side by side.

So I think we now have all three ships at the same scale. (1.64m per pixel.)

And when measuring the length of the Lucrehulk, we get 1188 pixels, which multiplied by 1.64 makes 1948 meters.

That's actually still longer than a Star Destroyer, and given the shape considerably more massive (though a lot of it is empty space). But it's almost half the length of what's usually stated, resulting in almost only one eighth the total volume.

I think from what we see inside the hangar, a width of 210 meters looks plausible. Certainly a lot more than 400 meters would.
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[Whill]

I appreciate this. Maybe it was supposed to be 2000 and they typoed, but it was never corrected. Either way, thanks for this analysis.
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[CRMcNeill]

Very cool. Loving the detail here. Writing up my own stats for the Separatist ships is very much on my list of things to do (converting Droid Crew stats to Humanoid Crew is the biggest stumbling block at the moment), but when I do, I expect I'll be using this length. After all, the 3,000+ meter length is from the same people that have made so many other demonstrably inaccurate statements about ship lengths in the SWU.
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[Yora]

Turns out I made a mistake. Those landing ships are actually meant to be 210 meters long, and really 370 meters wide.
When you use that number to measure the width of the hangar (and assume they can't fold in those gigantic wings), I can see how you end up with something in the mid-3000s for the Lucrehulk.

But the numbers for the landing crafts make no sense even by themselves. They are supposed to be 370 meters wide, 210 meters long, and 150 meters high.
That's simply impossible for the ship that we're shown. The ship is six times as wide as it is tall (which would be 60 meters high) and three and a half times as wide as it is long (which would be 123 meters long). So basically all the measurements we have for this ship are garbage.

The Droid carriers that go inside the landing craft are stated to be 13 meters high, which does sound plausible given the shots of them unloading battle droids. I think the landing craft is three droid carriers high, or about 40 meters. That would mean a width of about 240 meters. Which is really close to the 210 meters I used to calculate the length of 1950 meters for the Lucrehulk.

And the Republic Consular as an alternative scale reference does support that. There's a very good shot of it coming through the hangar door when it lands, and parking three of them side by side looks like what it takes to completely fill the space.
The length of 115 meters for the Consular is what you get when you assume the middle section is exactly the same size as in a Corellian corvette, and not only in a similar shape. (The much shorter engines result in the shorter length.) So I feel very confident that the 115 meters number is correct.

So my hypothesis is this: Someone somehow wrote down completely nonsensical numbers for the landing ship and someone else used those numbers to calculate the size of the Lucrehulk.
And garbage in = garbage out.

But despite all this, exterior shots of the Lucrehulk with starfighters and the Queen's ship zipping, by make it still look smaller. I feel that 900 meters in length seems more believable, but I don't have any scale references to support that. It's entirely subjective perception.
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"Adventure? Eh... Excitement? Eh... A Jedi does not crave these things."

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[CRMcNeill]

It’s hardly the first ship in the films to have contradictory evidence of its length, and 1,950 meters puts it nicely in scale with the most of the extant capital ships from both the classic and prequel eras.
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[thedemonapostle]

i have found that many who make scifi genre films dont know the difference between feet, yards and meters
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[ThrorII]

Thanks for doing all the pixel math!!

Long ago I was doing a 1st Ed. conversion of the Phantom Menace Galaxy Guide, and I eyeballed the Trade Federation Battleship as being much smaller than 3000m diameter. Like you, I used the Consular ship as my guide, and came to 'eyeball' size close to yours (but a bit smaller - i was only eyeballing it).

I also came to the conclusion that the landing craft was reported as way too big, and eyeballed it closer to 150 - 200 meters (again, smaller than your figures, but I was just eyeballing it).

Good job!
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