By SSD you mean the Executor, right? The books I have state 8,000 meters (In The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, text by Bill Smith, Schematics by Troy Vigil)
This is wrong. It comes from the Sourcebooks for the old West End Games Star Wars RPG and was based on a misinterpretation of "Five times as powerful" meaning "five times as LARGE." The EGVV (editions 1, 2, and so on) are just repeating the same bad information, and introduce all SORTS of problems of their own (their schematics for most of the ships are just plain WRONG. If you go by their schematics for the E-wing, the cockpit area is no more than three feet wide!)
and 12,800 meters (The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, text by W. Haden Blackman)...
Also wrong. This was a half-assed attempt to "fix" the error after enough people called them on it.
...and (I believe in one of the Rogue Squadron series, though I don't recall which book exactly) it was supposed to be 10 times the size of an Imperial II.
I'll have to double-check, but I believe the quote came from X-wing Book 4: The Bacta War, and the officer said
11 times, which is the 17.6km length I indicated above. Been a while since I read it, but I remember that the quote nailed the length exactly.
The Eclipse-class SSD is, however listed as being 17,500 meters in both books. As we can see, no two sources always agree on these things, but could there have been a mix-up?
I have EGV v1, and it places the
Eclipse at 16km.
As far as differences in the sources, you have to look at the overall context.
The first published size statements by West End Games places
Executor at 8km long. This is contrary to not only ILM information, but visual "yardsticking" using the Imperial Star Destroyer in all scenes where the two ships are shown side-by-side (one in particular shot from ESB shows an ISD behind
Executor that is clearly at LEAST 1/11 the size of the smaller ship. A second ISD is in front at nearly the same scale. ALL SUBSEQUENT STAR WARS MATERIAL was required by the licensing agreements with LucasFilm to abide by the West End Games data.
Later editions of the Sourcebooks attempted to fix the discrepancy by slowly bumping up the size. The new Wizards of the Coast game further worked to correct this, unfortunately the damage was done.
A few authors like Stackpole recognized these mistakes and fixed them, although they had to do it VERY subtly to slip past the licensing police.
I'm not sure if the site is still there, but look for the Star Wars Technical Commentaries by Curtis Saxton. He did a VERY in-depth analysis on this. The "Size of the SSD" article is the most valuable thing on the site. The rest you can pretty much ignore, as Saxton puts a lot of his own politics and ego into it. I, and others, have pointed out flaws in some of his arguments (naval terminology on the whole and as relates to Star Destroyers in particular--he consistently ignores the fact that Star Destroyer is a proper noun, not a "destroyer" in the traditional sense--and pretty much every shred of "evidence" he claims is in the RotJ film that proves the Ewoks were wiped out by the Death Star explosion is actually heavily forced and truthfully non-existent) but unfortunately, Mr. Saxton likes to wave his astro-physics degree in everyone's face, despite the fact that outside of actual FUNCTIONALITY that really doesn't lend much to analysis of the ships themselves.
Also, as a bit of shameless self-promotion, I wrote this up a while ago:
Starfighters of the RebellionI only got as far as a general survey, and the specific page on the X-wing before I lost interest. It's pretty old, though.
It looks best if you download this font:
StarJedi
