Starfleet Jedi

We noticed how the latest word in scaling the first Death Star brought the old 120 km figure to 160 km.
Well, here's an interesting bit in the novel Death Star:

Death Star, p. 126 wrote: Teela Kaarz wasn't much of a drinker. [...]
But here she was, in this cantina, listening to a young woman on the small stage playing a stringed instrument, something classical and quiet, barely audible over the sounds of people drinking, laughing, and talking. She was here because she had won a bet-one of the other architects had doubted her ability to redesign a dining hall to a specification change suddenly required because somebody had mistranslated a measurement system. Whereas the specs said the room's floor was to be nine hundred square meters, whoever had written the blueprint had somehow used the Trogan meter instead of the Imperial standard meter, and the difference could not be made to fit in the available space, since there was a 25 percent variation in the measures.

25% of 160 is 40. 160 - 40 = 120.
I wonder if Trogan is a nod to some production crew member from the first film, or someone from the old WEG team...

The first appearance of "Trogan" is in Timothy Zahn's "The Last Command". It is a planet. Beyond that there doesn't appear to be a person by that name in the WEG sourcebook credits. It is kind of interesting to see yet another instance in this novel of "Let's Make Both EU Sources Right and Make Everyone Happyt" by having the scaling discrepancy due to a mistranslation in measurements.
-Mike

Mike DiCenso wrote:The first appearance of "Trogan" is in Timothy Zahn's "The Last Command". It is a planet. Beyond that there doesn't appear to be a person by that name in the WEG sourcebook credits. It is kind of interesting to see yet another instance in this novel of "Let's Make Both EU Sources Right and Make Everyone Happyt" by having the scaling discrepancy due to a mistranslation in measurements.
-Mike

It really is a good catch, though, and there's something subtler in the wash. The 4:3 ratio is seen in another scale ratio.

The official length of the ISD is 1600m. The official length of the RAC - which, at the end of the movie, lose their bright colored paint jobs and evoke the image from the OT - is 1170m. But what if they're measured using different meters? Then they'd be practically the same size. Miles and kilometers are subject to the same issues as well, along with all other in-universe measurements.

On top of that, it's impossible for us to know whether the Trogan meter or Imperial meter - or neither - correspond to the "real" meter. It's a reasonably nice thing to say from an in-universe perspective, but for quantitative VS debaters, this opens a small can of worms.

Huh, got to say something about that Trogan scale. The excerpt is a bit complicated to understand as to which unit is the bigger one.
So let's go through it, since some clarification is required.

Death Star, p. 126 wrote: She was here because she had won a bet-one of the other architects had doubted her ability to redesign a dining hall to a specification change suddenly required because somebody had mistranslated a measurement system.
Whereas the specs said the room's floor was to be nine hundred square meters, whoever had written the blueprint had somehow used the Trogan meter instead of the Imperial standard meter, and the difference could not be made to fit in the available space, since there was a 25 percent variation in the measures.

"She was here because she had won a bet-one of the other architects had doubted her ability to redesign a dining hall to a specification change suddenly required because somebody had mistranslated a measurement system."

That's the mistake. Someone didn't properly translate a measurement system.

"Whereas the specs said the room's floor was to be nine hundred square meters,"

The floor was to be 900 m² according to the specs (the data sheet of the project before the blueprints were made). Logically in IS meters and square meters, and that's 30 by 30 for a square.
Sidenote: Is it a mere coincidence that this number also happens to be the DSII's largest figure? :)

"whoever had written the blueprint had somehow used the Trogan meter instead of the Imperial standard meter,"

The architect or designer drew the plans by using the Trogan meter. Although he/she didn't mention it, and then those who read it thought it was the IS meter.

"and the difference could not be made to fit in the available space, since there was a 25 percent variation in the measures."

What the dining hall layout should have been couldn't fit inside what was actually built according to these plans.

The final floor area was too small, and that was due to the blueprint being thought out in Trogan meters.

So how do you get that kind of mistake?

Answer: by having the Trogan meter being superior to the IS meter. Thus, when indicating a length of ten Trogan meters and handing the document to your random Imperial citizen, that guy will assume a ten IS meter length.
If your Trogan meter is thrice an IS meter for example, the designer who thinks in Trogan meters will believe it's going to be big. So for his square, he indicates 10 by 10, knowing that by the IS meter, it's actually 30 by 30.
But he forgets to specify that he's using Trogan meters.
Then the Imperial works leader reads the plan, sees "10 meters" a side, says OK, we got to build a 10 by 10 square (in IS meters).

That said, it doesn't tell much about the Death Star's size, since the Trogan could actually be 25% greater than the IS meter: if we make the comparison against the 120 km figure, the Trogan figure would be 150 km, not 160.

The book establishes, on the first pages, that when done, "the battle station would be 160 kilometers in diameter." The author is describing the evolution of the Death Star project and Tarkin's thoughts.

Now could it be that the station was planed to be 160 km wide, but actually ended being only 120 km wide?
It's interesting to note what would happen if the designer who drew the master plans for the skeleton frame was used to think in Trogan meters. He'd read 160 Imperial standard kilometers, would make the conversion, which by virtue of the factors between both meters, would turn 160 IS kilometers into 120 Trogan kilometers, continued to work with the Trogan unit and left it that way on the blueprints, and thus the workers would pick the plans and read 120 km.

That's certainly paramount stupidity here, but it's also a funny way to explain both figures in universe. Of course it also makes the DSI 120,000 Imperial standard meters wide "only".

Well, we're told that there's a 25% variance, but we're not told with respect to which baseline. So we could have a 100:75 (4:3) ratio or a 125:100 (5:4) ratio, depending on whether the other meter is 25% larger or 25% smaller.

4:3 fits exactly with the "retcon" explanation, because then you have a DS that's 120,000 of the smaller meters in diameter and 160,000 of the larger meters.

Jedi Master Spock wrote:Well, we're told that there's a 25% variance, but we're not told with respect to which baseline. So we could have a 100:75 (4:3) ratio or a 125:100 (5:4) ratio, depending on whether the other meter is 25% larger or 25% smaller.

4:3 fits exactly with the "retcon" explanation, because then you have a DS that's 120,000 of the smaller meters in diameter and 160,000 of the larger meters.

Actually it would be 120 km in the bigger meters - the Trogan ones - otherwise 160,000 of the longer meter would actually turn into a greater number once translated to the shorter meter unit, and then, depending on the ratio, you'd get a 213,333 meters wide DS or one that's 200 km wide.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Actually it would be 120 km in the bigger meters - the Trogan ones - otherwise 160,000 of the longer meter would actually turn into a greater number once translated to the shorter meter unit, and then, depending on the ratio, you'd get a 213,333 meters wide DS or one that's 200 km wide.

Right, right. That was what I meant to say. It's a mess.

Actually, now that I think of it, RPG sourcebooks and the like will probably suggest that the Imperial standard meter is the "real" one via the heights of human characters, but even then, average heights of human populations do vary considerably.