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There's probably going to be some overlap. Going just by dimensions, a jetfighter would probably qualify as Gargantuan on the normal size scale, but is Tiny on the starship scale.
When you're designing a vehicle, think about the role it's going to play and assess it's size from there. Example: you have bad guys in a dropship, and they're flying around shooting at the party with machine guns from the side-door as the heroes run for cover in the streets below. Since it's not a ship vs ship situation, treat the gunship as a Gargantuan or Colossal vehicle. If the party is flying an interceptor then treat it as a Tiny or Small starship and use those rules instead.
I posted this once already, but I don't mind posting it again. Here are the overlaps for starship and creature sizes. Creature sizes are on page 256, in table 8-1: Creature Size. Starship sizes are on page 294, in an unnumbered table named "Starship Scale". As you can tell from the Oma, what matters is the volume, not the weight in 1-g, for correlating the two. Note that I will be using Colossal+ format: Colossal+ is 1 size category larger than Colossal, Colossal++ is two, and so on. In the actual game, creatures that large all count as "Colossal", no matter how big they are, because there are no named size categories that large. As you can also tell from the Oma, and the ships revealed so far in the APs in terms of internal layouts, starships are normally assumed to be long, for reasons the fluff has yet to explain - spherical ships, which would otherwise be relatively optimal in terms of what little we do know about the nature of Starfinder's space physics, are uncommon, if they exist at all.
Syntax: Starship Size: Creature Size of Corresponding Minimum Length Ship, Creature Size of Corresponding Maximum Length Ship
- tiny: huge, gargantuan
- small: gargantuan, colossal
- medium: colossal, colossal++
- large: colossal++, colossal+++
- huge: colossal+++, colossal++++
- gargantuan: colossal++++, colossal+++++++
- colossal: colossal+++++++, infinite
Let me know if you want more information along the same lines, like how much a ship of a given length would weigh if it were a creature, or anything like that.
There's probably going to be some overlap. Going just by dimensions, a jetfighter would probably qualify as Gargantuan on the normal size scale, but is Tiny on the starship scale.
When you're designing a vehicle, think about the role it's going to play and assess it's size from there. Example: you have bad guys in a dropship, and they're flying around shooting at the party with machine guns from the side-door as the heroes run for cover in the streets below. Since it's not a ship vs ship situation, treat the gunship as a Gargantuan or Colossal vehicle. If the party is flying an interceptor then treat it as a Tiny or Small starship and use those rules instead.
That's all well and good until one of the PCs opts to hop into a lone one-man interceptor to fight back, leaving the rest of the party on the ground.
The game does personal combat pretty well, and starship combat too, but its pretty terrible at mixing the two.
Star Wars Saga didn't have any problem mixing the two.
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The fact that a dozen of your characters died suggests a significant power differential, no?
Starfinder handles starship vs not combat in a pretty realistic way, IMHO. It's like if your gaming buddies came under attack by a F22...there's not a whole lot of recourse there without some very expensive and specialized equipment. As new books and material comes out, Paizo will give us rules for ground-based combat vehicles like mechas and tanks, I'm sure, but those will still be distinct from the starship category.
Anyway, this is distracting from the main point which is that at the upper end of the "normal" size categories and the lower end of the starship categories you can some creature/vehicle size equivalencies. Which might make for some awkward rewriting of the "starship weapons can't target normal creatures" rule. Why shouldn't you be able to dogfight against dragons, after all?
Vehicle combat already sort of exists, but not enough vehicles exist in the game. A tank or fighter jet really wouldn't be any different from just another vehicle, except it would have its own set of statistics with some form of mounted weapons. Really, there isn't anything stopping the players from just shooting at a flying jet or casting a spell on it like they would with just about anything else.
. . . aside from *range*, one must remember. A jet, or especially a starship of any kind, is almost certainly far beyond the effective range of any personal weapon or spell, under normal circumstances.
Or, you can't cast a spell on an attacking gunship, if your spell maxes out at 400' range and the gunship is shooting you from five miles up. Which it should be- as a rule of thumb, being close enough for infantry to fight back means either:
1. The infantry are in the vehicles "point blank, can't miss" range, in which case, they still can't fight back, because they are dead.
2. The infantry are *inside* the vehicle's minimum effective range, and the vehicle is pretty much screwed ( or at least subject to the people on foot turning things into a boarding engagement or such ).
Either way, there's not much "infantry vs vehicle" going on. Just a boarding encounter and firefight, or else clouds of plasma where PCs used to be who got hit dead on by starship-grade weapons.
A vehicles range would likely, like everything else, be minimized for the ease of play. Vehicles aren't starship scale and use normal rules, which means vehicles have to play on a normal grid. Even most snipers can't reach a mile until it's item level reaches the teens.
I have to say, constantly referring to the PCs as "infantry" is seriously underselling them and kinda makes no sense. This is something you say about CR 1/3 foot soldiers, not a group of PCs that can be a match for a 150' high, 20,000 ton Kyokor (in melee combat), or a machine-like titan devil that can wipe out entire fleets of starships by itself. If the game can balance these type of challenges, then why can't they do the same for something as simple as a fighter jet? This assumption of getting "dusted" by big metal vehicles, regardless of your level, does not match up to the assumptions and mechanics of the game whatsoever. Player characters, provided they are leveled enough, have been pancaking tanks and smashing jets as early as D20 modern. Considering the scale of challenges presented in the game already, it's apparent that it doesn't stop in Starfinder.