It wasn’t until The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels that this size got bumped up to 12,800 meters in length, and the most recent measurements that came courtesy of later era cross-section books and published blueprints have settled on 19,000 meters in length.

He cites in the Guide as his sources for that entry The Art of The Empire Strikes Back and The Empire Strikes Back itself, but neither source makes that claim. To this day, I don’t know where Velasco got the five-mile length from, but he had to have good reason. Imperial Sourcebook and Star Wars Chronicles scale illustrations. So did the video games that followed in the ’90s, the size charts in the hefty Star Wars Chronicles book, and the first edition of The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels. West End Games, publishers of the Star Wars roleplaying game at the time had to adhere to this. This locks in the size of the Executor at eight kilometers long (five miles), and for years after that, it was the accepted length.

It says, quite firmly, that the Executor is five times the length of a regular Star Destroyer. Velasco and published by Del Rey Books in 1984. The first source to attempt to say anything definitive about a Star Destroyer length is A Guide to the Star Wars Universe, written by Raymond L. For those doing the math nowadays, based on how big we understand Cloud City to be, that puts the Executor at a whopping 48 kilometers in length, or 30 times the size of a regular mile-long Star Destroyer. The next source to weigh in on anything quantitative is The Art of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) which tells us, rather unhelpfully, that Vader’s Star Destroyer has “twice the destructive capability of any craft in the Imperial fleet.” In 1983, in The Empire Strikes Back National Public Radio Dramatization has Lando Calrissian eyeball Vader’s flagship to be about three times the size of Cloud City, a measurement that is no help given that Cloud City’s size is never specified. We can take it as canon that the Executor is indeed more awesome than a regular Star Destroyer, but specifics about size are lacking. The six huge ships are surrounded by a convoy of smaller spacecraft. It just says the following:ĭarth Vader’s Star Destroyer, larger and more awesome than the five Imperial Star Destroyers that surround it, sits in the vastness of space. Does the script say anything on how big the Star Destroyer is supposed to be? Alas, no. So we are forced to turn to text and see what’s been written about the Star Destroyer length. Han & Chewie would go on to endlessly debate this view.īut even here there are camera-based unknowns like lens-type and focal length that could affect how big the objects in the image appear.

Executor class star destroyer model