2046 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 21, 2018 8:15 pm
The reference to buoyancy makes me ponder whether an ISD floating over a city would aim for any Cloud Nine effect. I'll want to modify these calcs later:
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com ... e-be-built
(I'm not suggesting that one could easily float with that alone, mind you, merely wondering if it would be worthwhile to shave some lift requirements off.)
That's about all I expected, the point at which those beasts actually would "float" in standard atmosphere represents a ridiculously effective gravity negation technology, but that appears to be the case anyway, and the possibility seemed noteworthy.
Perhaps not, I was always inclined to agree with your scaling on that too, but it was the insane size of Starkiller base and a number of other oddities that got me wondering about the DSII again. The odd lighting, viewing angles, the odd direction of the shield projector dish (if that's even what it is), the rebel fleet flying right toward Endor after the battle etc. started bothering me. An old reference to an Ewok apocalypse combined with new ideas about the use of standard orbits in Star Wars started me reevaluating the station.
A while back I started questioning the scaling reliability of a lot of scenes in outer space, taking
perspective distortion into account. The "dolly zoom" effect is a great visual example of the potential distortion, and even turned up in the CGI
Clone Wars cartoon for crying out loud. Ideally I'd assume any visuals represent a 1:1 example of what is shown rather than being subject to dramatic camera work, but that obviously isn't what we're dealing with. Of course, this could be useful too, for instance possibly eliminating some
superfluous BoP classes.
Taking something like this into account could make some of your scaling observations, while sound, a bit more flexible than previously thought. The other view of Endor and the DSII being distorted by hyperspace emergence isn't unreasonable, but wouldn't convince me by itself considering how long this view lasts after the ships were in real space, and since similar effects aren't noticeable in other hyperspace emergences. These views are from within ships cockpits however, greatly limiting the potential for perspective distortion, and quite possibly representing a more true eye view of the system.
I'm also not convinced personally that the docking bays used on screen are even in the equatorial trench. If the station is significantly larger, there would be reason to have additional docking facilities near the poles, and such a trench could be fairly difficult to pick out from a distance on a sufficiently larger sphere.
The biggest drawback is the distinct lack of curvature visible on the DSII surface during the Executer crash, which is probably the single most problematic consideration against the DSII having too small a diameter.
Having built up to this point, I casually flew into this mess:
LINK. The views are inconsistent, but with the ship moving and the camera angle changing within the cockpit, its not an obvious F/X glitch either. This is where I dumped the thing in my arrg-sort-it-all-out-later pile. This is probably also a good time to mention that a jumbo DSII isn't exactly high on my SW canon wish list, but rather that I suspect some flexibility in the scale of the station, as well as the exact size, gravity and length of day on Endor
might help tidy up some oddities in those scenes.