Starfinder's Strange Starship Sizes


General Discussion


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Well. I haven't seen this thread yet, so please forgive me if I am beating the metaphorical dead horse, but it seems like Paizo managed to demonstrate the writers have no sense of scale.

I ran the numbers on a colossal ship and believe I did it right.

Colossal Ship: Length over 15,000 feet, Weight Over 8,000 tons

Smallest colossal ship:
Length: Feet: 15,000
Meters: 4572
Assume: Width = 400 meters, Shape is a cylinder
(Note: This thing would look narrow like a pencil)
Volume = (3.14) (R^2)(h) = 3.14 * 200 * 200 * 4572 = 5.74 * 10^8 cubic meters

How does 8,000 tons stack up?
Density of Air at 1 atmosphere: 1.225 kg / cubic meter at 15 degrees C
Weight of air: 7.03 * 10^8 kg
Convert to tons: ~775,000 tons

Density of Water at 4 degrees C: 1,000 kg / cubic meter
Weight of that much water: 5.74 * 10^11 kg
Convert to tons: 633 million

For more fun: the USS Enterprise (the real ship) was 1123 feet long, had a beam (max width) of 132 feet, and weighed 93,000 tons.

In other words, they are technically correct that it is over 8,000 tons.

The math for the ships one size category down is even funnier, because it literally seems to say the ships are mostly vacuum. It would be the only way those weights and lengths would work.


It's pretty easy to explain.

They took the weight on a low gravity planet or moon.

The mass is still appropriate though. You just have to back calculate.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
bookrat wrote:

It's pretty easy to explain.

They took the weight on a low gravity planet or moon.

The mass is still appropriate though. You just have to back calculate.

That they used weight instead of mass is a separate error.


The Doc CC wrote:

Well. I haven't seen this thread yet, so please forgive me if I am beating the metaphorical dead horse, but it seems like Paizo managed to demonstrate the writers have no sense of scale.

I ran the numbers on a colossal ship and believe I did it right.

Colossal Ship: Length over 15,000 feet, Weight Over 8,000 tons

Smallest colossal ship:
Length: Feet: 15,000
Meters: 4572
Assume: Width = 400 meters, Shape is a cylinder
(Note: This thing would look narrow like a pencil)
Volume = (3.14) (R^2)(h) = 3.14 * 200 * 200 * 4572 = 5.74 * 10^8 cubic meters

How does 8,000 tons stack up?
Density of Air at 1 atmosphere: 1.225 kg / cubic meter at 15 degrees C
Weight of air: 7.03 * 10^8 kg
Convert to tons: ~775,000 tons

Density of Water at 4 degrees C: 1,000 kg / cubic meter
Weight of that much water: 5.74 * 10^11 kg
Convert to tons: 633 million

For more fun: the USS Enterprise (the real ship) was 1123 feet long, had a beam (max width) of 132 feet, and weighed 93,000 tons.

In other words, they are technically correct that it is over 8,000 tons.

The math for the ships one size category down is even funnier, because it literally seems to say the ships are mostly vacuum. It would be the only way those weights and lengths would work.

Yeah, this is about the 10th time its come up, and its a known error at this point that is going to be fixed.


Yeah, there's a thread over here talking about it too. LINK

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