True Size of the Home One

[Impaler]

The Home One has always been recognized as the Rebel flagship at Endor and was acompanied by a large number of 'conventional' MC80 cruisers which are recognized to be 1200-1300m long. But while many source claim the Home One is ALSO this size their is substantial evidence that Home One (and possibly one additional ship, the one the Death Star shoot first) were MUCH larger.

The most well know analysis for Home One's size is an article from Force.net https://theforce.net/swtc/mcc.html#dimensions which claims a size of ~3800m. I found a number of gross errors in this analysis and endevoured to show that the true side of the ship was infact just ~2400m. Still a very large ships in the range of twice the volume of an ISD but far from the monster Force.net claims.


Force.net analysis rests on photometrics of 3 key scense, the full length exterior fly by, the shots of the Tyderium shuttle leaving the hangar bay, and most importantly the interior hangar shot matt painting. These are then combined with known model measurements to extrapolate the full ship size. I will adress each one in turn. Force.net analysis used the first two shots to establish minimum sizes which then butress the final hangar interior scaling which is the core of their argument.

FLYBY

This was the bit which initially set off alarm bells for me when reading Force.net. In it they create a photo composite of the full Home One fly by as can be seen here.



The technique they use is sound, in that an object of known length that if foreground of an unknown object can establish a MINIMUM length for the unknown object. The problem is that the foreground ship being used was misidentified as a 150m CR-90 when it is obviously a 90m Brahatak gunship. This caused them to create an erroniously high minimum size of 3100m. When corrected this drops to just 1800m. This is thus consistent with the final 2400m size I argue for while also establishing that Home One is indeed larger then a normal MC80 even if only modestly.

SHUTTLE

Force.net analysis used two shots of the shuttle at the moment it is crossing the threshold of the hangar.




I am immediatly sceptical of any use of the Imperial shuttle as a yardstick for measurement, because it has always been one of the most slippery and unreliable vehicles sizes. This came from having to build janky wooden half-ships for characters like Vader and the Emperor to walk out of, while all shots that show the full ship landed were done with matt paintings which leave us trying to compare their sizes with people or other small objects, lastly the true filming model used for all exterior shots is quite large well over a foot tall and thus all exterior shots are green screen composited together with with a shot of the thing it is flying into/out of and their is no guarantee that scaling was consistent.

Force.net utilized a heght of 22.25m which comes from their own extensive anaysis of that ship which I won't go into other then that it looks to be derived mostly from drawings and I think it is highly aggressive and represents the absolute maximum size the shuttle could be. Also I do not belive they account for retration of landing gear which should take off a meter or 2 from the vessel in flight. Ultimatly they derive an upper and lower bound of 27m and 39m for the height of the hangar opening, though it is not at all clear to me how they also derive a width from these shoots as angle clearly preclude taking it from the photo and they do not list measurement ratios for the holes height on the model which would allow this to be directly calculated when combined with the widths where are mentioned later.

Their lower bound of 27m is thus in disagreement with my own clearance height for the hangar which I put at 17.5m so this is the weakest point in my argument as is demands you reject the 22.25m height of the Shuttle in order for it to even fit in the hangar bay, though you do not need to trim it to much less then ~16m as the interior hangar shoot we will look at next really makes it loook like the shuttle is practically scraping the cieling of that hangar. The two prior exterior shots though sugjest copious clearance so their is yet again inconsistency with the shuttles size.

HANGAR BAY

The Hangar inteior shoot is the lynchpin of both the Force.net and my own analysis. For context this shot is created with a matt painting with holes in it which looked out over a stage where the walking people are filmed, this process nessesitates a carful attention to the scaling between the filmed and painted elements so anaysis of this shot should tell us atleast what they intended the size fo the hanger to be and from their we can try to size the whole ship off that, assuming that the model makers and hangar scene makers were on the same page.

This horribly low resolution (400x205) and grainy image is what Force.net works from



Their method of utilizing the parrelel converging lines of the floor is calibrated with foreground objects is sound, BUT as I will show they again use incorrect inputs and derive overly large sizes. Their key measuring stick is the width of an A-wing fighter which they claim to be the jaw dropping width of 6.4m, you would have a hard time convince me that a A-wing is even that LONG let alone that wide. I have no idea where they get this value from but erroniously high A-wing numbers have been floating around for decades so it's not that surprizing, I suspect they used a length value for the A-wing without realizing it. Still Force.net seemingly dose a due diligence sanity check on this value by then extrapolating a size for a human(oid) figure (litterally nothing but a grey blob) that is standing on a stool right next to the A-wing and state that this comes in a 'just under 2m'. This is suspiciously vague and no raw pixel counts are provided. So I checked their own image and found the their own brackets on the man come to 14 pixels and the A-wing is 42-44 pixels based on exactly how much of the fuzzy arrow tips you count and even at smallest this would make the man (presumably a wookie) just OVER 2m.

At this point I concluded the any analsis off this base image was going to be garbage and endevored to redo everything starting from a better image. I was able to find one at 1000 pixels wide which also has the benifit of showing a few seconds earlier as the two men walk towards the A-wing and are thus more reliable measured as the Force.net image has them standing on top of a short stoop. Constructing the same convergent parellel lines and using the men as yardsticks give me more reasonable results. I estimate the men 27 pixels tall and the A-wing at 74 pixels wide (measuring out to the blasters not just the hull). If the men are 1.7m tall (these are mostly likely british extras and that's more typical of a British mans height at that time) and I get a A-wing width of 4.25m (once acounting for the depth difference) which I consider far more reasonable and which actually agrees fairly well with official values of 4.47m. Taking a horizontal line at the mens feet (thus minimizing distortion) across the width of the whole bay between the converging parrelel lines that form the edges of the ledge give 828 pixels wide and that puts the ledge at 52m wide. Using the two central parrelel lines give the same result to within 1m. Force.net estimates that distance to be 83m, which would make the men 2.7m tall, clearly an absurdity.

I further sanity check this value by looking at the other vessels in the hangar. The X and Y wings are the best bench marks as their sizes are well agreed upon. If the ledge were 83m wide then a full 6 and a half 12.5m long X-wings nose to tail would fit along it. Visually we can see this looks wrong which would imply these X-wings are much larger, at 52m it will require just a hair over 4. Likewise the Y-wing would be huge, just it's visible portions alone would exceed 20m long by the Force.net hangar sizing. Neither ship is able to strongly confirm my size estimate partly due to their skew angles and or being obscured but I think they provide good evidence that a significant downscaling is correct.

From here on out my extropolations of larger objects follows the same pattern as Force.net, just with my number proportionally reduced by the ratio of 52/83 or 62% of their values. This plugs directly into their 3800m size to downscale it to 2380m. And that number is in VERY close agreement with a 1/1000 ratio for the whole model which is said to be 239 cm long acording to Force.net, though their is conflicting evidence of it being 244 cm as well (presumably the two Mon Cal models had these two sizes respectivly, they use 239 for Home and and 244 for the 'other' ship which apears in winged and unwinged forms to give us the generic MC80) this would also be within reasonable error margins to conclude the scale is 1/1000 and thus put the full length at ~2400m.

[FVBonura]

Suffice to say, we have a systemic scaling problem with the RPG. Almost everything needs to be bigger. George Lucas‘s powers of illusion allowed him to produce smaller assets to create larger spectacles for the silver screen.

As I have discussed in the ship of riddles thread, it is possible that the millennium falcon is even bigger than Robert Brown had proportioned. The falcon may be as big as 40 m long or maybe slightly larger.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13ymrsgzfysHHlk-17QBVEnjHdna_OpUj/view?usp=sharing

West End games official length of the a-wing at 9.6 m is also problematic because they built the model and then decided to put a larger pilot in the cockpit. If you look at the artwork in the various source books where they have all the fighters on the same page, you will see that the a-wing has a massive cockpit as compared to other rebel fighters.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wssiMvB6Qwm-w4Z8Z7veKquFwiTlpyWb/view?usp=sharing

One of my technical advisors found the frame where a-wing crashes into the bridge of the Executor and the pilot’s head is slightly larger than the imperial officer who’s running for his life who is closer to the camera. I suspect that the a-wing is somewhere between 6-7m long, a rarity in the scaling issues of the franchise.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xd-RkWeiKVvSXF-oXKr6yNJUE8gpa8m0/view?usp=sharing

Inquiry: have you considered the Falcon must exit the hanger and how big it is at 40-41m long?

I’m sorry to dump nightmare fuel onto this discussion but many of the objects you were trying to estimate hanger size are still in flux. In spite of this, I applaud your scholarly efforts and will follow your work with interest.
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