Why Are These Things So Huge?
"Something on your mind, Commander?"
"The scale of the ships and bases around here… they're just way too big."
"…Ah. Yes."
What shone down like a single ray of light upon my withered, desolate heart and mind was nothing other than the long-forgotten size settings of this game — the sheer, ridiculous scale of everything in it.
Of course, I wasn't digging through the wiki tab for that.
So our clan leader pulled a battleship and I went to check it out, right?
No thoughts, no plan — just figured I'd hop down onto the deck and take a look around myself.
But why the fuck does the bridge never get any closer?
I've been walking for six hours already and the ship just sits there like a mirage, never getting any nearer.
And I left my comm unit on the shuttle, so I've got no way to call anyone.
If any Avalon clan members happen to see this, please tell them to come pick me up.
I've been screaming my head off on the deck and nobody can hear me. Fuck. Save me.
That completely random "I'm lost" post — and one of the comments under it — must have struck a nerve, because some veteran player decided to step up and explain the scale settings to the community himself instead of just pointing them at the wiki.
Saw the post about some guy getting lost on the clan leader's battleship and figured I might as well write something up.
For the record, this game surprisingly doesn't give you precise ship size data. It just vaguely alludes to things the way a certain other franchise does, so players either make up their own headcanon or extract the models and compare sizes themselves.
The problem is the devs — probably for file size reasons — half-ass the modeling on the 250mm CIWS mounts on the super-capital ships, or some systems don't even show up in the model but still work in-game. There's so much hand-waving that every player had a different story.
But that doesn't matter anymore, does it?
Anyway, cutting the rambling — the only thing in this game with a "detailed" size setting is the basic standard corvette that every player starts with. So of the five smallest ships in the game, only the tiniest one actually has hard numbers.
Hull length, excluding the rear antenna and any weird structural protrusions — pure bow-to-stern-nozzle — is 1.2 km.
The turret ring alone is 100 meters across. Yeah.
And if you use that corvette as a measuring stick for everything else… you start to see just how completely unhinged this game's scale is.
Oh, and fair warning up front: gacha ships are excluded from everything I'm about to say. Their sizes are all over the place, so I'm only covering standard player ships and NPC faction vessels.
First, the relatively higher-tier frigates average out at roughly 1.5 times a corvette or more. Most factions land somewhere between 1.5x and 2x.
Destroyers run 1.2 to 1.5 times a frigate, with outliers up to 3x. The reason they're so inconsistent — unlike the corvette-to-frigate jump — is that the monster faction's destroyer-equivalents are wildly irregular in size, the Earth Federation builds ones three times a frigate, while Xenobia's are only about 1.2 times, and so on. It's a mess.
On average, though, you're looking at about 1.5x each step. Yeah.
But once you hit the destroyer → light cruiser → heavy cruiser progression, the scale suddenly balloons so hard you start wondering what the hell the designers were thinking.
I'll cover that in the next post. This one's already way too long. Yeah.
Hey, I'm back.
Anyway, ditching the small talk and picking up where I left off.
Cutting to the chase — the reason cruisers and above get the so-called "capital ship" treatment is this:
You already know from the last post that a destroyer is at minimum 2.5 times a corvette. Park a light cruiser next to one of those and the size suddenly more than doubles. Meaning it jumps to five or six times a corvette overnight.
And that's just light cruisers. Heavy cruisers start at three to four times a destroyer. Even that is pure hull length only — antennas, gun barrels, and every other protrusion sticking off the exterior don't count.
Then you get to battlecruisers and battleships, and those are at least twice a heavy cruiser again. More precisely, battlecruisers start at 2x minimum, while battleships prioritize bulk over length so they're shorter than battlecruisers — but they're still fucking enormous.
That's roughly everything I've been able to pin down so far. Nobody's pulled anything larger than a battleship yet, and the players who do have them aren't answering my messages, so no confirmation there.
Also, some ships don't follow the formula above. Take the Overseer that Icarus was running — the one that was all over the boards recently. It's classified as a heavy cruiser, but in actual size it's basically a small battleship.
Oh right. That was a thing.
Reading through the gallery posts, I flinched the moment my name got dropped out of nowhere, bracing for another round of becoming the board's favorite regular — but thankfully it was just a passing mention. I nodded to myself, satisfied.
This was exactly why people like him were necessary.
The moment Bach — a veteran regular — dropped those two little lore posts, the gallery users latched onto a brighter, healthier topic instead of the already-exhausting discourse about me, chattering away with genuine enthusiasm.
Of course, plenty of players still shook their heads at the mindless scale inflation — but that was only natural.
Arguing about whether SF is "realistic" is kind of tryhard to begin with, but
isn't this size jump completely unhinged?
Everything just multiplies by 2–3x at every step until a battlecruiser is dozens of times a corvette.