As I'm working on developing a campaign for Starfinder for my group I was looking at the sizes of places in the Pact Worlds. Absalom Station is only 5 miles in diameter and Idari, the repurposed colony ship, is only 3 miles long. Compared to even a moon that's incredibly small. I'm curious why they aren't larger. It would seem that the colossal Vesk ship "the Tyrant" is just as big as Idari, which is considered a Pact World. Just some food for thought.
I hope everyone is enjoying taking in all the new knowledge and learning how to incorporate as much of this new setting as possible into your games.
Some quick bootleg math:
Until it was torn down, the most densely populated place on earth was The Walled City in Kowloon, Hong Kong (seen here: hxxps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/KWC_-_1989_Aerial.jpg ). It is estimated that the population density was as much as 1.2 million people per square km.
Absalom Station at that density would be 61 million people.
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Absalom has a five mile diameter across its radial arms. It doesn't mention how far down the spike goes. So it could be a five mile diameter hemisphere stuck atop a twelve mile long spike with a tapering radius. That adds a lot of volume for living space.
Being in space means you're not restricting your building capacity but the pressures of planetary gravity, atmospheric conditions (wind force etc), nor tectonic forces.
In other words, it's pretty pointless comparing real world cities to what is likely to be true in a sci fi fantasy setting.
Additionally, Absalom has a huge fleet of ships surrounding it. That alone will increase the living space potential.
I think the Idari is more about giving an entire race of creatures a chance at being included in the protections of the Pact World accords. In order for that to work they just assigned the ship as a planet so the legal stuff worked out. I can see whole political plots arrising because if it (Taxation rates for various planets are huge because they can produce a ton of stuff on planet. idari isn't taxed as much because it's not actually a planet. This causes tensions. "How come they're afforded the same protections as us when we pay a thousand times the tax they do?" Etc etc.)