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And that's not even the largest ship!note 

"The ship is too big. If I walk, the movie will be over."
President Skroob, Spaceballs

Your starship is big, very big. Now how do you get this across to people? By stating how big it is in miles or kilometers. It may be a Starship Luxurious or so packed full of people or machinery that the interior resembles that of a submarine. These ships are generally too massive to land, so they're built in space and stay there; in case they do see the interior of a planet's atmosphere, it's usually because something's gone horribly wrong — usually emphasized by the very agitated crew bracing for impact.

Often, mile-long starships are considered to be "harder" than small ones, partially because a slower-than-light ship would need to be huge to carry all the fuel and supplies needed for a decades-long voyage.

The most realistic designs—the ones that are very clear how lethal most high-powered spaceship engines are—tend to be very long, specifically, in order to maximize distance between the habitat section and the engine. In order to minimize mass (since mass is proportional to volume and one dimension is already determined), long ships will often be very thin.

No one knows how big ships will be when/if humankind takes to the stars, but it is worth noting that big spaceships do make sense if you are dealing with Generation Ships — the occupants will want and need space to run around. And because space is so vast it is even called "space," the only limits to single spaceship size would be structural strength and propulsion capacity.

Has nothing to do with long-distant fanmade romances. Supertrope to Planet Spaceship. See also The Battlestar, Big Dumb Object, Cool Starship, Generation Ship, and Unnecessarily Large Vessel.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Macross:
    • The eponymous Super Dimension Fortress Macross is a city-sized alien spaceship which crash lands on Earth, which is then used by humans to go into space. 1,210 meters (3,970 feet) long.
    • The assorted sequel series introduce the New Macross Class colonisation ships separated into 'Battle' sections that are at least the same approximate size of the original SDF-1, attached to massive 'City' sections which are exactly what the name suggests, massive, space going cities.
    • Zentraedi ships are even bigger, since their crews are 9 meter giants (except when they undergo "micronization" to human-size). A Nupetiet-Vergnitzs flagship, for instance, is about 4 kilometers long, and a Thuverl-Salan cruiser is 2300 meters.
    • Within the setting's background, the original builders classified the design as a small capital ship with the primary purpose of being a mobile Wave-Motion Gun... and not much else. This is why the Zentraedi, who possessed true battle fleets, had larger warships. The New Macross vessels, more or less, demonstrate that humans adapted the class to their original function: though they retain humanity's Transforming Mecha technology.
  • In Gunbuster the Earth evacuation ship-turned-warship Eltreum is said to be 70 km long.
  • Gundam contains multiple large ships although large ships tend to be rare
    • The Jupitris-class which first appeared in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam are 2km long tankers that bring Helium-3 from Jupiter to Earth to be used as fuel for Nuclear Fusion.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam 00 features the Celestial Being mothership, which measures roughly 15 km in length.
    • Though not technically "ships" per-se, space colonies in all Gundam series that feature them are roughly 6.4km in diameter and 36km in length, because they are historically based on a Gerard O'Neil's Island-3 design. O'Neil's The High Frontier was one of the chief influences on Yoshiyuki Tomino when he first conceived the series. However we do see Colonies being transformed into proper space ships: The first is in the Victory Gundam Gaiden manga where a group of newtypes leave the Solar System in the Dandelion, a colony ship and the second is Liteiria in Gundam Astray where they put a giant thruster on the Colony to travel to Jupiter.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam Wing's Peacemillion is a Mile-Wide Ship; 3 kilometers wide, to be precise. Since it's intended to be a deep space exploration ship with facilities to accommodate a civilian crew (including what looks like a food court), it presumably needs plenty of room for quarters and supplies. The space fortress Libra (which is supposedly a Peacemillion-class vessel, despite the fact that they look nothing alike) is also three kilometers wide.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has the Cathedral Terra, later named the Super Galaxy Dai-Gurren, is a big-ass ship that was the moon for a while. It's roughly half the size of earth, and it is piloted by Simon, piloting Gurren Lagann, that pilotes Arc-Gurren Lagann. It also transforms into its own giant robot. This is taken even bigger, reaching the point where galaxies are used as throwing stars. And that's not even the limit.
  • When we first see the alien ship in Project A-Ko, careful blocking makes us think it's about the size of an Earth battleship. (Specifically, the Yamato, which it deliberately resembles.) then we see the whole thing. The "battleship" is little more than a figurehead, on a ship the size of a city 6,500 meters in length.
  • Aldnoah.Zero: The Landing Castles used by Orbital Knights of Mars are some two kilometers in length. Unlike most examples of this trope, they - as the name implies - are designed to land on planets. (That is to say, Earth.) As this "landing" involves simply dropping down from orbit, the impact is powerful enough to generate a practically nuclear-level blast. The Castle itself - presumably protected from the crash by Aldnoah-related technology - then unfolds, allowing the Knights and their forces to begin the invasion in earnest.
  • While its exact measurements are never given, the supplemental materials for Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS estimate the Saint's Cradle—the flagship and mobile palace of the Ancient Belkan Saint Kings—to be "several kilometers" in length.
  • In Hunter Ă— Hunter, there is a nautical ship that's enormous in size, built to traverse the long journey to the Dark Continent. This thing is so large, from the perspective of its passengers, it functions more as a self-contained city than a vehicle. It includes several dining areas, a courthouse, and even what appears to be a shantytown that popped up on one of the lower decks, and, when the journey begins, it carries about 100,000 passengers (though the number may be higher due to there being many stowaways).
  • In Girls und Panzer, the all highschool carrier ships are pretty much "cities floating on the sea". While the series itself gives a rough image of the Ooarai carrier's size, the third OVA and other supplementary materials go in length about it. Ooarai carrier is a self-sufficient city with population about 30.000 people. The distance between the waterline and its main deck is 400m, and is around 7.5km in length depending on the definition of the main deck, whether it's from the lower deck or just the surface deck. The carrier is so large, there's a phenomenon of urban decay in its bowel. Also, Ooarai is one of the smaller schools; all other schools with the exception of Maginot (which has a submarine as their school ship), are larger than Ooarai. Black Forest Peak is said to have a population of more than 100.000 people.
  • One Piece:
    • Thriller Bark is a megalithic ship that serves as an entire island (in fact, it's an island retrofitted into a ship). It's so big, there's an entire castle, forest, graveyard, and mansion on top of it, and it's very difficult to see the entirety of it from the ground, to the point the fact it's a ship isn't apparent at first.
    • The Noah is a gargantuan wooden ship located near Fish-Man Island built eight-hundred years ago for an unknown purpose. It's half the size of Fish-Man Island itself and built to be pulled by multiple Sea Kings, since even the entire population of the island pulling on its chains at the same time don't have to strength to budge it even a single millimetre. Vander Decken IV is able to use his Devil Fruit powers to lift the ship in an attempt to perform a Colony Drop on Fish-Man Island with it.
  • Heroic Age: The main ship, the Argonaut, is around 10km long. It is noted to be one of the largest warships the human race has ever built, but even their standard battleships aren't that much smaller. To say nothing of their mobile artillery weapons, which dwarf the Argonaut multiple times over, but 99% of their bulk is made up of a single gigantic energy cannon.

    Arts 

    Comic Books 
  • The whole story of Pouvoirpoint takes place on board the Entreprise-2061, a starship so big that it extends beyond the frames and we never see the full picture.
  • Star Wars: Legacy: Ships of super star destroyer scale are seen as Awesome, but Impractical in this time period (without a galaxy-sized tax base they cost too much to operate - a small SSD requires a crew of a quarter million people to run) and are no longer in use. The Fel Empire's warship of choice is the Pellaeon-class star destroyer, which is about the same length as a movie-era Imperial-class but more massive (taller profile). But when Darth Krayt seizes power, his Empire introduces the larger Imperious-class (exactly how it compares to the previous era's Super Star Destroyers is uncertain, but it's bigger than any contemporary warships)… and the Alliance promptly steals the first ship from him.
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye:
    • The Lost Light is mentioned to be 15 miles long, although this is probably due more to Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale than anything else given the resulting size implications for some of the much bigger spaceships.
    • While scales aren't given often (and when they are, they are seldom reliable), the Galactic Council ship Benign Intervention and the various Titans both dwarf the Lost Light. By way of justification, the Lost Light is crewed by giant transforming robots, the Benign Intervention is crewed by aliens even bigger than the giant robots, and Titans transform into entire mobile cities scaled for giant robots.

    Fan Works 
  • The Butcher Bird: Prometheus, the second Nightmare ship, is a whopping 603 meters at the waterline. For reference, that's about twice the length of the Gerald R. Ford class supercarrier in real life, and over three times the length of the Marine battleships of the One Piece world. This escalates still further as it eats the wrecks of the ships it kills, until it's over a kilometer and a half long Mechanical Abomination.
  • Mass Effect: Clash of Civilizations: The UNSC and Covenant ships, whose scale astounds the Council team sent to investigate them, especially the Covenant supercarrier they dub "the Leviathan".
  • Fractured: The Trans-Galactic Republic has the Revenant-class Star Dreadnaughts that measure 35 kilometers (21.748 miles) from end to end. The Mass Effect races have their large ships, but they're typically smaller due to being more realistic with known physics and lacking Applied Phlebotinum that lets Star Wars ships grow so astronomically huge. A regular capital ship from the Trans-Galactic Republic Spacelane Protection Forcenote  actually is larger than a Reaper but it's considered "ordinary." Later on, ships derived from Eridian/Forerunner technology are seen to reach 4 and 32.5 kilometers in length respectively.
  • The Next Frontier gives us the Starfarer 1. It's not a mile long, but an overall length of slightly under 300 metres is quite something for a society whose technology is 20 Minutes into the Future relative to contemporary Earth. She has to be that size to carry enough fuel and other consumables for a multi-year interstellar mission.
  • Civil Wars, Whistleblower Tactics, Schematic Drafting, and the Finer Points of Sith Adoption: The Essential How-To Guide for the Engineering Jedi: The canonical Executor Star Destroyer is stated to be so large that it has multiple rail stations just so people can get around in a reasonable timeframe.
  • The 260-kilometer "Ultra" Star Destroyer SDSD Freudian Nightmare, which in the attached account of the maiden voyage took six days to tour, had the crew forming tent cities at their stations, and the chief engineer declared himself "Chief Marshal of the sovereign nation of Ree'Ak'tor" and started a war with the infantry detachment.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The ISV Venture Star in Avatar is stated in some sources to be about 1500 meters long (almost a mile). The same is true for its 11 sister ships of the Capital Star class. In fact, the length is considered ''small' and is only possible with the use of Unobtainium. The original ship sent from Earth to Alpha Centauri was 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long in order to make room for massive refrigeration units for the magnets keeping Anti Matter contained.
  • The Final Countdown: USS Nimitz is introduced by the camera traversing the length of the ship. While not actually a mile long, it's a a real vessel, and all the more impressive for it.
  • In Independence Day, the "city-killer" Flying Saucers that detach from the mothership are about 15 miles in diameter. The mothership itself is a Planet Spaceship at several hundred kilometers in diameter.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The opening scene of Saturn 3 features an enormous spaceship, meant to visit outposts on various moons and planets in the solar system at sub-light speeds.
  • Spaceball One in Spaceballs has a similar scale, justified by the fact that it needs to be capable of storing the entire atmosphere of an Earth-like planet. The movie opens with a shot of the ship flying past the camera — and it takes almost two minutes to pass, with the shot functioning as an Overly Long Gag. And it's still not as long as Mel Brooks originally wanted it to be. There's also a number of jokes about how big the ship is, such as:
    Colonel Sanderz: Prepare ship for Ludicrous speed. Fasten all seatbelts, seal all entrances and exits, close all shops in the mall, cancel the three-ring circus, secure all animals in the zoo...
    President Skroob: [out of breath from having run from his quarters to the bridge] Ship is too big. [pant] If I walk, [pant] the movie will be over.
  • The Star Trek films, being generally larger in scope than the TV shows, have provided a few examples:
    • The all-powerful V'Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture is possibly the most standout example; the Enterprise is an insect next to it, and cut dialogue places its length at 48 miles while non-canon sources have gone as high as 60 (making it roughly three times the size of Manhattan). note 
    • The mysterious whale probe from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is almost as long (fitting since it was probably built by a race of alien whales).
    • Star Trek: First Contact features the return of the famous Borg Cube mentioned below.
    • And of course the entire Kelvin timeline owes its existence to the Narada, which has been officially stated to be 5 or 6 miles long and dwarves anything Starfleet can throw at it. It's a mining ship, which partially explains its size but not its bizarre appearance.
    • Star Trek Into Darkness gave us the USS Vengeance. Khan calls it "twice the size" of Enterprise; given how much bigger the latter ship is in that universe, this puts the Vengeance at just over a kilometre and a half. Which makes one wonder how Kirk and Khan managed to walk from one end of it to the other in just a few minutes, but that's a discussion for another page.
  • Star Wars:
    • The infamous Imperial-class Star Destroyers are 1,600 meters long, or approximately one mile, while Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer Executor was 19 kilometers. As a real-world comparison, this makes Executor roughly the size of Manhattan. Literally. Then we come to the sequel trilogy and Supreme Leader Snoke's personal flagship, the Mega Star Destroyer Supremacy, which is a whopping 60 kilometers, or thirty-seven miles, from port to starboard, meaning it would span the exact width of Rhode Island.
    • Certain Rebel ships match the Star Destroyers in length: Admiral Ackbar's flagship Home One is about 1,300 meters long, though as Mon Calamari Star Cruisers are custom-built they vary pretty widely in length. The most common variety (the "winged" cruiser exemplified by Liberty, the second Death Star's first victim) are 1,200 meters long.
    • The Last Jedi: Snoke's Mega-class destroyer Supremacy is - outside the Death Stars - if not one of the largest then the largest ship ever built. The ship is about 13.23 kilometers long, 60.54 kilometers wide, and about 39.75 kilometers tall. The ship served as the capital of the First Order, had a crew of over two million, and could dock with up to 8 Resurgent class Star Destroyers. That is, until, she was rammed at lightspeed by a Mon Calamari cruiser and the damage was so severe she was evacuated and scuttled.
    • The Star Wars Expanded Universe adds many more examples, some of which are found under Literature.
  • Dark City is revealed to be set on a city-sized spaceship.
  • The Black Hole: The USS Cygnus is stated in supplementary materials as being one mile long.

    Literature 
  • The colony ship Intrepid in Aeon 14 is thirty kilometers in length and carries a crew/population of millions of Human Popsicles, and can carry its own multi-hundred-meter defense fleet ships docked internally. The ship has robot-tended farms and entire forests with game animals that produce food for the crew: protagonist Tanis Richards often snacks on BLT sandwiches with bacon from Intrepids own hogs. And it's not even the biggest in the setting: besides Intrepid's sister I-class ships (built later based on Intrepid to be war-winning motherships), terraformer worldships are significantly larger and used to rearrange planets. The series also features a number of orbital mega-structures with populations in the hundreds of billions: a 1600-kilometer Space Station with a population topping a hundred billion, seen in book four, is merely average by Richards' standards.
  • The mothership Aniara from the poem cycle of the same name. Justified because it is meant to be an "arc ship", carrying a good bulk of humanity towards a new home.
  • Mikhail Akhmanov's Arrivals from the Dark: In Invasion, the Bino Faata starship is a cylinder several kilometers long. It's actually The Mothership for hundreds of large combat units (each 3 times the size of a human cruiser) and thousands of smaller units. In the sequel, the new human-built cruisers are a kilometer long. For bonus points, it takes only 6-7 years to build five of these. And that's only 30 years after humans get access to the technology required.
  • Chakona Space: Captain Neal Foster's ship Folly is described as being something like 2 km long.
  • Some of the starships in Iain M. Banks' The Culture novels are quite large — a GSV (General Systems Vehicle) can be 25 to 200 kilometers long, with millions of passengers and enough on-board manufacturing capacity to match a planet in production. Consider Phlebas shows the megaships of Vavatch, which are massive oceangoing city ships that are at least 4 kilometers long, and are so massive that it takes years for them to accelerate to their max speed. The megaships use enormous cruise ships as tenders. One scene taking place on a GSV contains a throwaway observation by one of the characters of a megaship being neatly tucked away for storage in one of the GSV's smaller storage bays.
  • In Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind story 'Golden the Ship was, Oh, Oh, Oh!', there was the Golden Ship, a megaship 1 AU (93 million miles) in length, and reputed to be the most dangerous warship in existence. It's all a bluff - the 'ship' is an immense shell with a small single-operator cabin at the center, designed to intimidate and distract the enemy forces while the real attack comes from somewhere else.
  • Dune has Heighliners, immense ships that are the primary means to transport everything in the known universe, as they are piloted by Guild Navigators who can navigate and teleport the ship to planets lightyears away from each other. Then there's the No-ships, which are able to transport a full grown Sand Worm (200 to 400 meters long) in their cargo holds. The prequel series Prelude to Dune reveals that Heighliners are manufactured underground. Specifically, in the vast caverns under the surface of Ix. How does the ship then get into space? Why, a Navigator simply folds space right from the cave. Immediately after that, the workers start laying down the framework of the next Heighliner. The contract for building Heighliners keeps switching between Richese and Ix, the only two planets with enough technology and industry to build them.
  • In Earth Unaware the Formic mothership is at least a kilometer in diameter. Except at the end it's revealed that the "mothership" is just a scoutship. The real mothership is much larger, although the Formics are busy cannibalizing it to build an armada while on approach to the Solar System.
  • The Eldraeverse has several multi-kilometer ships, such as the 2.3 km-long Hurricane-class drone carrier, 3 km Leviathan dreadnought, and 1,600 km Iced Fire-class antimatter transport.
  • Foundation Series' "The Mayors": The ancient two miles long Imperial battlecruiser is described as single-handedly out-massing the entire Anacreonian navy, the largest navy in the Four Kingdoms. It is implied the Foundation has the theoretical knowledge of how to make ships like that, but lacks the resources (Terminus, being a single world lacking in metals, has to build small and efficient, while the Galactic Empire, having at its height the resources of the entire galaxy, can afford to build in massive scale). By the time the Foundation does have such a large domain that it could afford to build ships like it, they've developed miniaturisation and efficiency far enough that there's no point.
  • In Voidskipper this is a Justified Trope; achieving safe Faster-Than-Light Travel requires a very large and expensive power plant and a very sturdily-built ship, meaning that for operating a Voidskipper to be economical it needs to be huge.
  • In Sergey Lukyanenko's Genome, the main character notices a Taii ship, a Moon-sized sphere, patroling their ancient borders (which now belong to younger races). Subverted in that this ship is a relic of bygone times. The Taii ship is escorted by a tiny human destroyer that can incinerate the giant sphere with a single volley.
  • According to the website of the author of The History of the Galaxy series, ships in that 'verse tend to be fairly large, almost absurdly so, especially since the stated crew complement is very small (although that could be justified by mass-produced AI modules that can be used to replace crew). The largest warships of the Standard Sci-Fi Fleet, flag cruisers, are 7 kilometers (almost 4.5 miles) long... with a standard crew of 150. Slightly justified by a fifth of the ship being taken up by its Anti Matter Wave-Motion Gun (it's almost never used and really only serves as a deterrent). The first human extrasolar colony ship, the Alpha, was even larger. However, the Alpha was built before the discovery of Hypersphere and was supposed to have been propelled by three massive fusion engines. A large chunk of the ship was devoted to the engines and their hydrogen fuel. Even then, half the colonists/crew were supposed to be kept in stasis at any given time, with shifts rotating every couple years.
  • Ships in the Honor Harrington series are usually denoted by their tonnage rather than their length, but one book had a diagram that showed their main warships as being 2 kilometers in length for a battleship to 3 km for a Superdreadnought. Then two programmers for the Saganami Island Tactical Simulator couldn't make the models work with the specs they were given. They found at the current scale they were only as dense as cigar smoke. After this revlation, Weber re-scaled them so they top out at just over 1500 m for an SD and 1200 m for a battleship. This is known as the "Great Resizing".
    • It's stated that, over the course of the conflict between Manticore and Haven, both sides have steadily increased the sizes of their ships without reclassifying them (classification here is more based on tactical and strategic role than tonnage): late war Light Attack Craft (similar in role to fighters or gunboats) are nearly as big as prewar destroyers, the better to carry a spinal graser worthy of a battlecruiser. This doesn't really come into play until later, when the Solarian League Navy realizes that Manticoran destroyers should by all rights be classified as cruisers in terms of size, mass, and firepower. Like much of Honor Harrington, this loosely follows real-world evolution of naval architecture: modern US Navy destroyers are as big or bigger than pre-dreadnought battleships, though lighter-weight.
  • In Mark S. Geston's Lords of the Starship, the eponymous fake ship is 7 miles long and almost 1 mile in diameter, and has HTOL wings with a span of 3 miles. It's designed to con people into thinking it will carry millions of people away from its Crapsack World.
  • While Perry Rhodan is no stranger to big ships, things like Terran 1500- and 2500-meter diameter respective super- and ultra-battleships look positively modest compared to many other examples on this list. At least until one takes into account that (a) yes, these vessels are basically spherical and correspondingly massive next to more slender designs elsewhere and (b) they're also still entirely capable of extending landing struts and setting down on planetary surfaces. More extreme to outrageous examples exist, but are either singular vessels (such as the fourteen kilometers long BASIS) or sufficiently advanced alien technology like the Cosmocratic "spore ships" that at a diameter of 1,126 km are both very much the size of not-so-small moons and, for all that they're very high-tech and were intended to help spread life and sapience throughout the universe, could well be summed up as "just" glorified freighters.
  • Starships in H. Beam Piper's "Terro-Human Future History" are invariably described as spherical. In Space Viking the starship Enterprise (no, not that one) is described as a "two thousand-foot globe"; assuming this is the ship's diameter, this works out to a circumference of over a mile. In the short story "A Slave is a Slave" (set in the same universe, but several centuries later) an "Empire ship-of-the-line" is explicitly described as being "almost a mile in diameter"; in terms of volume this works out to being well over a hundred times bigger than the largest building ever constructed (the Boeing aircraft factory in Everett, Washington).
  • When Peter boards the alien ship in book #3 of Bruce Coville's My Teacher Is an Alien series, he's told that the name of the ship is "New Jersey". Not because the aliens have any particular fondness for the Garden State, but because the ship is literally the size of New Jersey. Part of the rationale is that the ship is essentially a travelling outpost of the Interplanetary Council, and needs to house species with very different physical needs.
  • In Chindi, part of Jack McDevitt's Priscilla Hutchins series, the alien ship known as the chindi is over 16 km long, and apparently uninhabited, but still intent on its unknown mission.
  • In Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, Rama is a mysterious cylinder entering the Solar System that is over 50 km long and 20 km in diameter. Rama II is the same.
  • Alastair Reynolds has:
    • Lighthuggers in the Revelation Space Series are roughly 2-5 kilometers tall.note  Most of the space is taken up by vast cargo holds, cryogenic sleeper vaults, hangars, and weapon systems. The Nostalgia For Infinity's engineer knows of at least 1050 decks, almost all of which is abandoned and exposed to vacuum or rogue defense sentries. A Lighthugger is shown "landed" in an ocean in a later novel, with most of it sticking straight out of the ocean.
    • In Reynolds' standalone novel, House of Suns, the ships are even longer - the protagonist's ship is 50 kilometers long. Most of the mass and length is taken up by the slower-than-light propulsion systems, but the ship still has room for an 8 mile long cargo hold which carries smaller interstellar ships inside. The novel also briefly shows moon-sized ships, though their mass makes them agonizingly slow, especially for the already slow, non-FTL interstellar travel.
  • In the Rings of the Master mega-novel by Jack Chalker, the small band of rebels who oppose Master System are based aboard the Thunder, a former colony ship that's fourteen kilometers long.
  • Ringworld: The Kzinti of the Ringworld, who live in the Map of Kzin, a life-sized replica of their homeworld in the Ring's immense oceans, live in a united society ruled from the Behemoth, a 1.6-kilometer-long seagoing vessel driven by hydrogen power.
  • Skylark Series: In Skylark of Valeron, the Skylark was a sphere over 1000km in radius and has a crew of four, it needed to be that big to contain the navigational instruments necessary to cross intergalactic space.
  • Star Carrier by Ian Douglas: The eponymous vessel America is a kilometer long and not very wide, while the railgun cruiser Kinkaid is of similar size or bigger, given the barrel for main weapon is a klick long. There are also several Turusch vessels built from hollowed-out asteroids that are several times larger. H'rulka vessels are an interesting version: they initially look 20 klicks long but are actually several single-crewperson ships docked together that are individually several klicks in length (the creature flying it is a 200-meter colony organism that finds itself cramped by the "small" vessel).
  • Star Wars Legends adds enough of these that it seems kilometer-plus is fairly standard for heavy capital ships in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, particularly in the Imperial and post-Imperial eras. These are just some of the biggest examples.
    • "Super star destroyer" is basically a catchall term for ships following the star destroyer design philosophy and larger than about three kilometers. The Empire built many of these, but most were one-offs and only the Executor-class went into (relatively) wide production with around a dozen known.
    • The Eclipse-class star dreadnaught from Dark Empire is 17 kilometers long, outmasses the Executor-class, and mounts a superlaser capable of cracking a planet's crust. This won't destroy the planet, but the seismic effects will depopulate it quite handily.
    • By the New Jedi Order series the New Republic saw the need to have a counter for Super Star Destroyers and the like, and the Mon Calamari supplied the 17 km Viscount-class battleship. For their part the Yuuzhan Vong had their koros-stronha or "worldships", 10 km in diameter and primarily colony ships but quite capable of defending themselves against GFFA capital ships. They also had a couple different types of kor chokknote  of similar size that served much the same command-and-control/heavy battleship role as super star destroyers.
  • In Hayven Celestia by Rick Griffin, the White Flower II is basically a mobile stargate three miles in diameter with the habitat modules for the ten thousand crew wrapped around the outer edge of the ring.
  • In John Ringo's Troy Rising series, Troy, Thermopylae, and Malta are mobile battle stations 9 to 13 km wide, each using rapid-fire 50-megaton nukes to power their Orion Drives and carrying an entire fleet of cruisers, fighters, and millions of missiles. They make the Rangora (the enemy aliens) Assault Vectors (which are pretty impressive battleships in their own right) look puny.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • In Ciaphas Cain: The Emperor's Finest the space hulk Spawn of Damnation is said to be about five kilometers in diameter. As space hulks go that's fairly smallnote , but one of Amberley Vail's footnotes comments that it's "quite big enough under the circumstances."
    • Forges of Mars: The archaeotech Mechanicus Ark Speranza is large enough that its hangar bays can accomodate kilometers-long Imperial warships, the training bays have room for Titans to freely maneuver, and mag-lev bullet trains are needed to move between compartments.
  • In Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence universe: the Xeelee Nightfighter. The cockpit is small, about the size of a room, but its wings stretch out for kilometers in either direction, like vast sails. The purpose of these wings are never made evident, as the ship itself travels via teleportation.
  • Kate Wilhelm's "The Mile Long Spaceship": Although implied by the title, only one line in the story indicates the size of the titular ship; "the mile-long spaceship in his dream".
  • Laszlo Hadron and the Wargod's Tomb: Plenty appear in this novel:
    • The SNV Orion, flagship of the Solar Navy, is thirty kilometres long.
    • The Ouroboros is a space station that completely encircles Earth.
    • The Wargod dwarfs the Orion, at three hundred kilometres long.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In the Babylon 5 'verse, jump capable ships tend to be massive due both the size and power requirements of jump drives. Some specific examples:
    • The spinoff Crusade had the Excalibur, which was 3000 meters in length, and had an internal rail line (similar to that on the Babylon 5 space station) running along its length for transportation within the ship.
    • Also, the Babylon 4 station, which preceded Babylon 5, had a propulsion system (unlike its successor), so it could serve as a mobile base-ship and carrier that was 6 miles in length (Babylon 5, meanwhile, was 5 miles in length).
    • There were also the Explorer-class vessels. Their task was to travel to unexplored systems, identify those worth permanently occupying, and deploy jumpgates. At 6.1km/4.8 miles long they're about three quarters the length of Babylon 5 itself, making them by far the largest ships operated by EarthForce and significantly larger than any other ship seen in the show not operated by one of the First Ones. They are so large that the pylons of the Babylon 5 jumpgate had to be moved apart to create a jump point large enough for one to pass. We're told that they're incredibly rare, mainly because they're incredibly expensive to build and operate, and those that do exist will spend most of their time out in the furthest reaches of explored space. Even most EarthForce officers will never see one in person.
    • Minbari Sharlin-class war cruisers are about the same size as a star destroyer, though that's in height, not length (they're taller than they are long).
    • The largest ships to date are Vorlon Eclipse-class planet killers. Estimates put them at 26-36 miles in diameter (they're circular). And they're definitely visible from planetary surface as one partially eclipses the sun when it briefly arrives over Centauri Prime.
    • Pretty much every major EarthForce warship measures around a kilometer, with the Omega-class destroyer breaking the mile barrier at 1700m, it's successor, the Warlock-class making over 2000, and the Poseidon-class supercarrier being of similar length to the Warlock but much wider.
    • One of the smallest jump-capable ships known is the Asimov-class luxury liner, at 600 meters. Due the power requirements it only mounts small anti-fighter weapons.
    • As stated above, jump drives are generally massive and are power hogs anyway, forcing jump-capable ships not built by the First Ones to be large (the Vorlon have been able to build a jump-capable ship the size of a Cessna, showing the massive technological disparity). Aside the First Ones, only Vree, Centauri and Minbari have shown the ability to manufacture jump drives for ships smaller than the Asimov, and given the power requirements the Vree and the Centauri are limited to barely armed transports. Only the Minbari can make jump-capable practical warships, and even they prefer either small non-jump capable warships or large jump-capable ones for anything but recon duty.
  • The Battlestar Galactica was over 1.5 km, the Pegasus over 1.7 in the 2003 series.
    • In the 2003 series, the Battlestar Galactica is 4740 feet long, while the Battlestar Pegasus is 5872 feet, making it more than a mile long and the largest battlestar class in the series.
    • Word of God from Glen Larson is that the original Galactica was "a mile long". A collector of the series props and costumes worked out, using screen grabs and the known size of the full-scale Viper mock-ups, that the ship was 6080 feet long, which is one nautical mile (or was before the unit was revised to 1852 m). There's obviously a huge margin of error in this because of the large amount of extrapolation required, and similar calculations using other screenshots have led to smaller figures around 4100 feet (approximately 1250 m), which is very close to the length of the 2003 version as quoted on merchandise. Against that, early pre-production and merchandising for the original series had the Galactica as being 2000 feet long, though this is generally considered to have been superseded by the later, larger figures.
    • Even the scale model used in the Classic series was over 6 feet long! 76 inches, in fact.
  • Doctor Who: In "World Enough and Time" the TARDIS lands on an unnamed ship that's 400 miles long and 100 miles wide. The bridge is caught on the edge of a black hole and is trying to reverse back out but that's a lot of ship to move. Meanwhile the top levels are undergoing Time Dilation compared to the lower levels, for every minute that passes on the bridge years are passing for the people further down.
  • In The Expanse the LDS Church commissioned the Nauvoo, a two-kilometer Generation Ship, to take them to the next "promised land." In season 2 the Outer Planets Alliance commandeered it to knock Protomolecule-infested Eros into the Sun, but missed. They retrieve it in season 3, and refit it into the solar system's biggest warship. Though the engineers doubt it could actually hold its own, it just looks intimidating.
  • In the show Lexx, the Lexx itself is an insect-like ship that is 10 kilometers in length. The cast use dragonfly-like helicopters to get around inside it. On several occasions they were boarded and it took multiple episodes before anyone noticed.
  • The Red Dwarf is 6 miles long, 4 miles tall, and 3 miles wide, according to the novels. The TV show states "5 miles long" repeatedly, but we might assume this refers to the ship's habitable volume, and the 6 mile figure includes the ram scoop and main engines at the front and back of the ship respectively. It originally had a crew complement of 169. Then in series 3 it was retconned to 1,169.
    • Of course in most series it has an organic crew complement of "two", plus several robots, the ship's computer, and a Virtual Ghost, none of whom use anywhere near all of the ship. So the inconsistencies might be excusable.
      • The first Red Dwarf novel, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, isn't limited by a BBC cast and effects budget and gave the original crew size as 11,169.
  • Stargate-verse:
    • The Ori warships in Stargate SG-1 were established by ancillary materials as 1.1 kilometers long.
    • Wraith hive ships in Stargate Atlantis were described as roughly thirteen times larger than an SGC Daedalus-class battlecruiser. This gives a ship around 2.9 kilometers long. The super-hive that appears on the series finale is much larger, making it the largest known starship in the setting. Meanwhile, Ancient city-ships such as Atlantis are about 3 kilometers in diameter.
  • Star Trek:
    • The Deep Space Nine episode "Valiant" provides a Jem'Hadar battleship described as twice as the size of a Galaxy-class starship. A quick calculation based on the DS9 Technical Manual results in a ship just under 1.3 kilometers long. Another Jem'Hadar capital ship that is similar but much larger is seen during the Battle of Cardassia in "What You Leave Behind" (though this may simply have been a scaling error in the special effects: the Defiant herself changed size practically every other shot).
    • Borg cubes are generally built around 27 cubic km. (That means 3km for all twelve edges) The Borg Tactical Cube shown in one of the final episodes of Star Trek: Voyager is five times larger.
    • Star Trek: Enterprise:
      • "Azati Prime" has Captain Archer being taken through time and brought on board the USS Enterprise-J. Due to time constraints with making the episode, the designer of the ship admits that they only had a couple of weeks to flesh out a concept, which is only very briefly shown in a fuzzy holographic computer display in the episode itself. The ship was never shown from the outside in the episode, so supplementary material filled in for that. The Enterprise-J was built as a generational ship, capable of folding space to instantly travel to other galaxies. It is so large that its turbolifts are replaced with site to site transporters, and it features massive parks and even an entire university on board. Its saucer is roughly 26 miles in diameter.
      • "Countdown"'s script describes the Xindi-Aquatic cruiser as five times the size of the NX-01. This puts it in the ballpark of 1,125 meters (official sources put it around 1800 meters).
    • The Romulan D'deridex class warbird is slightly over a kilometer in length. Most of it is empty space though.
    • Even Starfleet is close to the trope, with the Enterprise-D and -E being close to half a mile in length.
    • The Voth city ship shown in Star Trek: Voyager beamed the entire titular ship into its cargo hold, which has plenty of space for dozens of such ships. It's no wonder some EU material suggests the Voth might make good allies against the Borg.

    Podcasts 
  • The first season finale of Mission to Zyxx sees the crew visit the Delegator, flagship of the Federated Alliance.
    Commander Voltor: The Delegator is the pride of the Federated Alliance, one of the most incredible ships we have at our disposal... Should anything happen to this vessel the Federated Alliance would feel a crippling blow.
    Dar: Is that part of every entry speech?
    Voltor: I say that to everyone who comes in. Why wouldn't I? It's an incredible ship.

    Radio 
  • In The BBC's Earthsearch, the starship Challenger and its sister ship Challenger II is 10 miles long and capable of terraforming entire planets. Pity it's ruled by a pair of psychotic computers.

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech: The Clans have the largest ships in Inner Sphere, such as the Leviathan, Black Lion and Potemkin. Even ordinary JumpShips tend to be over a kilometer in diameter, though that's just the "sail" used to gather solar energy, the ship proper is usually around half a kilometer long, with the bulk of that being the jump drive- the actual part of the ship that the crew stays on is considerably smaller.
  • Hc Svnt Dracones: Capital ships are listed as ranging from 5,000–6,000 feet in length. They're also the only ships that can't land on planets, or even dock with space stations. ~Half-mile "large" ships can land, in water, but can't maneuver in atmosphere unless made by Pulse.
  • Star Fleet Battles: There are two monsters, The Planet Eater (Based on the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek: The Original Series) at kilometer in size, and the Juggernaut, an automated giant ship over 1.6 km long capable of wiping out small fleets. The largest regular starships are under 500m
  • Warhammer 40,000 loves this trope, given its habit of exaggerating almost everything.
    • GW eventually gave the exact measurements of several ship classes in the Rogue Trader books. As it turns out, even the smallest sloops are almost a kilometer long and have crews numbering in thousands. Escort ships, such as destroyers, raiders, corvettes and frigates, usually do not exceed 2 km, and light cruisers are usually between 3 and 4,5 km. Heavy and battle- cruisersnote  are somewhere around 5 km, and grand cruisers are about 7,5 km. There is no canon specs for Battleships, Battlebarges and Mechanicum Arcs, but they must be around 8 kmnote . Other races' ships have comparable sizes. One of the Horus Heresy books from Forge World refers to a Mechanicum transport designed to carry Titans; this transport vehicle is a giant slab of metal measuring 2 km long.
    • Less confirmed is information about Gloriana-typenote  (20–28 km long), various Xeno ships (i.e. Interex) that were 2-3 times bigger, Eldar Craftworlds (Depending on the Author and on exact craftworld, they might be the size of a planet or "just" 40 km long), the Rock (size of a city and accompanying bedrock), the Phalanx (small moon sized) and World Engine (planet made into spaceship).
    • Bigger than even the Gloriana-class Battleships is the Imperator Somniumnote , second flagship of the Emperor after the Bucephulus. For some context, the largest Gloriana was the Invincible Reason at 28 km.
    • The Abyss-class battleship, created by the forces of Chaos in preparation for the Horus Heresy was said to dwarf the aforementioned 28km long ships, being mentioned as rivalling the Phalanx in size and firepower.
    • Then there are Space Hulks, which are a random collection of asteroids, comets, planetoids and various spaceships and stations (some of which may count as mile long ships in their own right) which fell into the Warp, ran into each other, and fused together instead of smashing apart because of the strange properties of the Warp. They frequently get used by Orks as spacecraft in their own right.
    • One rumored Ork ship is also a planet, which moves around as needed. It is also a massively overgrown Ork, since the species in theory never stops growing.

    Video Games 
  • First Strike, a Battlefield 2142 mod, prides itself on modelling all Star Wars assets to scale — from 300 metres long corvettes and other small ships to the immobile, but very heavily armed 1600 metres Imperial Star Destroyer. To get a sense of how big this is, a BF veteran can consider that BF 2142 maps were typically one to two kilometres in length.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Reaper capital ships like Sovereign and Harbinger are around two kilometers long and so massive that their kinetic barriers are severely weakened while they're landed in Earth-like gravity (due to the mass effect field strength needed to reduce their mass to the point where they don't crumple under their own weight). Citadel dreadnoughts vary by race, but average one kilometer. Ditto the much more common and expendable carriers. Ships of that size are justified by the setting's reliance on kinetic weapons: a longer ship means the spinal mass accelerator can be longer, meaning it can fire its slugs with greater energy. The yield of the gun at the scale of warships is implied to scale more or less linearly with length, as the codex directly states "a dreadnought's power lies in the length of its main gun" and the description for the Thanix cannon in 2 reveals that even a frigate canonically has enough power generation to power the main gun of a cruiser a hundred times its volume. For these reasons, massive dreadnoughts are used like self-propelled artillery pieces, remaining at the rear line of a fleet battle and exploiting their greater muzzle velocity to take down targets while smaller, lighter ships either screen their flanks or maneuver in around the enemy's flank. (At least, that was the idea. Nobody apparently told the VFX artists, who in Mass Effect 3 showed Citadel dreadnoughts engaging Reapers well within visual range.) Cruisers, the main combatants, are basically just down-scaled dreadnoughts (500-700 meters instead of a kilometer).
    • Mass Effect: Andromeda has the Remnant ships. A good sample of their scale comes with the one crashed on Elaaden. It's halfway submerged in sand, and it still looms over everything around it. The regular colony ships (Arks) in Andromeda are also pretty big at 1.7 kilometers long and 17 million tons in mass; the Nexus is technically a ship as well, being capable of self-propulsion and FTL travel, even if the characters call it a space station instead. It's 15.47 kilometers long and 5.3 kilometers in diameter, and weighs probably tens of billions of tons. All of this was built with funding from a set of niche corporate donors.
  • X:
    • The series doesn't explicitly give lengths for its ships. However, in 2009, a forum member in this thread scaled their in-game models and determined that the largest destroyers average 3 kilometers, with the ATF Valhalla being the outlier at 5. The Valhalla's sheer size makes it wildly impractical to use normally, because its engine nacelles will impact the rim of a jump gate upon exit, causing it to get stuck inside the event horizon. This is fixed by the expansion pack X3: Albion Prelude, but it still has size-related problems with its turret firing arcs. Our page picture is the more manageably sized Teladi Phoenix, which is approximately 4 kilometers long. The games also features some truly enormous space stations, such as the Terran Military Outpost, a station so large that the entirety of Rhode Island could fit within its bulk, or the Torus Aeternal, a station large enough to wrap around the Earth.
    • X: Rebirth: Mile-long ships return in force, where the humble Space Trucker trading ships have been largely replaced by massive freighters that operate independently of the Highway system. The Arawn battleship is large enough to have two hangars — one landing pad on the front for the Albion Skunk, and an internal hangar for URV drones which is large enough to have internal point-defense turrets.
  • The capital ships in Elite Dangerous are all several kilometers long, including the Federation and Imperial battlecruisers, various megaships, and the player-owned fleet carriers. Most of them are equipped with frameshift drives, though these operate differently than those of smaller ships, opening a stationary hyperspace portal and then moving into it. None of them can be piloted by players directly.
    • Some very few starports, city-sized space stations many kilometers in diameter, are also fitted with hyperdrives in lore, though they have almost never been known to move in-game.
  • Escape Velocity Nova:
    • Aurora Carriers are 1.2 km long, compared to the Federation Carriers which are only 500 m long. Note they carry many more fighters than their counterparts and the Aurorans love their railguns.
    • Polaris Ravens are 1.2 km long and about 1 km wide making them the biggest playable ship in the gamenote . Strangely, they have a crew of less than a hundred.
    • Deimos-Class Colony Ships are approximately 3Ă—3Ă—3 km, as the hypergates they traveled through had to be reconfigured to form wormholes with a diameter of 5 km.
  • Titan class ships in EVE Online can be as long as 18 kilometers. Other ships (Battleships and larger), while only a fraction of the size of a Titan, are still in excess of a mile long. The exceptions are the Force Auxiliary carriers and the Naglfar dreadnought, which are in stead several miles tall.
  • The Mothership from Homeworld, which the fluff says is somewhere between 7 and 15 kilometers "tall."note  It has a major case of Units Not to Scale in-game, however, but still measures a good three in-universe kilometers... Or rather "kloms", whose relationship to an Earth kilometer is never mentioned. The Progenitor Mothership, whose remains are discovered in one mission of the second game, is utterly huge. The "Dreadnought" that the Hiigarans recover from the remains was actually once stored in the Progenitor Mothership's cargo bay. Then again, everything the Progenitors did was on a massive scale.
  • Halo:
    • The trope becomes evident as early as the final level of Halo: Combat Evolved when one of the waypoints during your escape from the Pillar of Autumn is over a kilometer away. The Autumn's official length is 1.17 km. It's considered a large capital ship; something like 80-95% of the UNSC's shipsnote  are the much smaller (though still big) corvette, frigate, and destroyer classes, which are 500 meters on average. The colony ship Spirit of Fire from Halo Wars is 3.5 km long (which is justified as it's actually a civilian ship that's been hastily retrofitted), and the experimental vessel Infinity is 5.7 km long, with the latter capable of carrying an army and ten internally docked frigates, as it was meant to be Plan B if Earth was destroyed (again, justified; it took decades and half of the Navy's entire budget to build this thing). Human ships' main weapons are magnetic accelerator cannons (read: coilguns), so the trope makes sense for similar reasons as in Mass Effect.
    • Covenant capital ships are even bigger; their corvettes and frigates are around a kilometer long with similar tonnage to the UNSC's capital ships, while their actual capital ships are each over a mile long and outmass their UNSC counterparts by an order of magnitude or more. The shining example is CSO-class supercarrier that appeared during the Battle of Reach (Halo: Reach), an utter behemoth at just under 29 kilometers long. Notably, despite being comically huge, one good MAC round from UNSC frigate or destroyer can usually destroy it (as the rounds really are that powerful)...once you get through the shields.
    • Then there's the Forerunner Fortress-class vessels, which are 50 kilometers long. Later, in the Forerunner-Flood war, Fortress-classes reach new height with 100 km long vessels, pushing them into Planet Spaceship territory. There's also the Forerunner Keyship/Dreadnought from the original trilogy, which is "only" 11.41 km long.
    • All the above are topped in Halo 4 by Mantle's Approach, the Didact's personal flagship, which is vertically oriented and is a truly absurd 371.4 km tall, 142.7 km long, and 138.6 kilometers wide. The Visual Guide casually mentions that it isn't even the largest Forerunner ship.
  • Common in FreeSpace, in which any Destroyer-class or above ship is going to be at least 1.5 kilometers long. The Colossus and Sathanas measure in at nearly six kilometers long as the largest ships in the game. Fan-made expansions sometimes feature even larger ships (the current record-holder being the Gargant, at over 60 km).
  • In Ground Control, the CSS Astrid is a massive warshipnote  that contains enough men and materiel to lay siege to an entire planet by itself, and in the sequel, evacuate the majority of the populace of Morningstar Prime.
  • Star Trek Online:
    • The Borg Unimatrix 0047 Command Ships, hexagonal juggernauts roughly 20 kilometers in length. They're so big they don't even maneuver: they just sit there and spam various attacks at you.
      • The Unimatrix ships are based on the similarly large ship at the centre of the V'Ger Cloud, mentioned above, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in reference to the long-standing speculation of a relationship between it and the Borg.
    • According to an image in one of the devs' Twitter feeds, Voth Citadel-class dreadnoughts measure up at a bit less than nine kilometers long and nearly five kilometers wide, while the Bulwark-class battleship is just short of a kilometer. And then there's the Fortress ship in "The Breach", which is in Planet Spaceship territory, measuring in at 134 kilometers.
    • On a smaller scale, Klingon Vo'Quv-class carriers sit at around a klick in length and can deploy Birds-of-Prey instead of conventional fighters. Federation Odyssey-class cruisers are of a similar scale. Then there's the Romulan Republic's Ha'apax-class warbird and its kin, which are instead a couple kilometers wide.
  • Sunrider: The PACT super dreadnought, Legion, which is three kilometers long.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty's Arsenal Gear and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots' Outer Haven, although their exact sizes aren't mentioned in-game, are two impractically-sized warships.
  • Vector Thrust boasts the EOS-04-01 Leviathan arsenal ship, which measures at just over 1,500 metres long.
  • Xenogears has almost every ship beat, save those the size of actual planets with the 270 kilometer long colony ship 'Eldridge' which crashes in the beginning of the games ten thousand year backstory.
  • Star Citizen's Bengal-class carrier is precisely one kilometer long.
  • As players progress through Star Ruler's Lensman Arms Race, ships become progressively larger and larger. Starting with humble cruisers with sub-1000 crews, players can eventually build multi-kilometer long ships with crew numbering in the tens of thousand as their primary combatants. Planet Space Ship designs - both literal planets with engines and ships the size of planets - are generally reserved for flagships and as a Doomsday Device. The mile-long ships return in Star Ruler 2, albeit generally used as rarer, more powerful flagships supported by hundreds of smaller gunships and Space Fighter-esque escorts, rather than the dozens or hundreds of individual mile long ships of the original game.
  • StarCraft:
    • General ship size ranges are similar to something like later Star Trek, Mass Effect, the lesser factions in Halo, or prequel-era Star Wars. Standard capital ships like battlecruisers and Void Rays are around 600 meters, smaller support craft like Valkyries, Scouts, and Arbiters are under 200 meters, and standard capital ships are 1-1.5 kilometers. Protoss carriers, supercarriers, and the largest terran battlecruisers fall into the latter size range, though standard carriers are vulnerable in spite of their size because they carry no ship-to-ship weapons. Don't expect any of this to be apparent in gameplay, though.
    • StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void: The Spear of Adun, a 74 kilometer long arkship which serves as Artanis' flagship and base of operations during the fight against Amon. The size is a little justified by it being mostly empty space (it would probably be only about 50% that size if you squeezed down all the huge voids in its hull) and it being meant to carry the entire Protoss civilization in case of Homeworld Evacuation. Also, Zerg Leviathans which can reach the size of a small moon - though have no weapons other than smacking things with their tentacles or deploying fighters. They serve the role of massive transports among the zerg, along with the unseen Behemoths, as the zerg otherwise have no real ships (just swarms of Mutalisks and Overlords).
  • In the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Dr. Eggman's philosophy of building large vehicles is "go big or go home," though he is more likely to build airships that are miles long, such as Wing Fortress in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Flying Battery in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Egg Carrier and Egg Carrier 2 in Sonic Adventure, and Final Fortress in Sonic Heroes, than spaceships. If Eggman wants to operate from space, most of the time, he builds a space station instead. The series is also no stranger to enormously large ocean-faring vessels too: In addition to the Egg Carriers being able to travel by sea if needed, there is Huge Crisis from Sonic Rush and Haunted Ship from Sonic Rush Adventure.
  • In Stellaris, while it is ultimately up to the interpretation of the player, Battleships and especially the gigantic Titan ships are implied to be in the several-kilometer range.
    • Downloadable Content later introduced even bigger ships like Juggernauts, which are one-of-a-kind mobile shipyards packing serious firepower, and the moon-sized Colossus Planet Killer. Both are so enormous that only starbases with a special Colossal Shipyard upgrade can construct them. One loading screen shows a Juggernaut hovering over an alien metropolis, City Destroyer-style, with the ship taking up the entire width of the artwork despite being at least a couple kilometers away from the observer and being viewed at an angle.
    • The Leviathan-class Automated Dreadnought dwarfs any ship a player can build, including the Juggernaut. Weirdly, if you decide to rebuild it after you disabled it, it retains its look but shrinks down to about half its initial size.
  • The Mikasa in the Sakura Wars series is an 8,047 meter long airship, which dwarves the 131 meter long Skywhale.
  • In Sierra Ops, the UTV’s flagship Beerkelium is 800 meters long and one of the largest ships in the setting. It's so big because it was originally built to make regular supply runs to the fledgling Martian colonies, and was later retrofitted for warfare. In Episode 2, you learn that the Ares Confederation has secretly built an even bigger ship, the 1.2-kilometer dreadnought Leviathan.
  • Most of the capital ships fielded by the major factions in Warframe are this. A standard Grineer Galleon is just over 4 kilometers long, while Corpus Obelisks appear to be significantly larger. Once the player unlocks a Railjack and is able to travel to the Veil Proxima region, they can board Sentient Murex ships, which aside from being techno-organic, are big enough to make the Galleons and Obelisks look downright puny by comparison.
  • In Crying Suns, the player's default Excelsior-class battleship is 1.2 kilometers long according to the Steam trading cards. Other battleship classes are of similar length.
  • Information from third party sources indicates the USG Ishimura is 1.6 kilometers long in Dead Space.
  • The Rhodes Island landship from Arknights measures roughly 655 meters or 0.4 miles in length, judging from an official scale model. The first few pages of the spinoff comic Records of Originium - Rhine Lab really highlight just how big this is, with a convoy of trucks delivering supplies being utterly dwarfed in comparison and a logistics operator casually mentioning the ship has its own onboard network of shuttle buses.

    Webcomics 
  • The cloud-shaped Zauther ships in The Redacverse come in varied sizes, but the Supreme Ship is by far the most enormous. According to the Zauther leader, it is 1 parsecnote  long and 1 light year wide. Only its front end is seen.
  • Leaving the Cradle: While it's definitely not planet-sized, the Dawn mothership is around the size of a small mobile city. Needless to say, it's very big. Just compare the human's satellite and shuttle to the mothership itself.
  • Schlock Mercenary: Let's just go in order of size, shall we?
    • The Sword of Inevitable Justice (which would later be renamed the Post-Dated Check Loan) was almost a kilometer tall, and looked to be about the same in both width and length. This seems to be a typical size for Ob'enn Thunderhead-class ships.
    • Battleplates are, well, giant plate-shaped ships a kilometer thick and maybe eight or so kilometers on a side. Too big to fit through a wormgate, they were originally intended for defensive purposes, until Kevyn's invention of the teraport allowed them to be deployed offensively.
    • Once Petey gets his hands on the core generator, he starts cranking out some truly massive ships. One of his earlier designs is called the "Extortionator" class, just the powerplant of which is nearly as big as an entire battleplate.
    • "Worldship" is the name given to a Dyson Sphere built around a white dwarf star that someone has attached a drive to. (The more literal choice of "starship" had already been taken.)
    • The Pa'anuri deploy an unnamed ship class that's the size of a gas giant. Though, since the Pa'anuri are themselves the size of a gas giant, it's debatable whether they count as ships or as powered armor.

    Web Original 

    Web Videos 
  • Parodied in one of CollegeHumor's Troopers videos where Lord Sinister repeatedly sends one of the troopers to a coffee shop on the far side of the planet-sized Dread Cruiser, only to change his mind when he returns three days later.

    Western Animation 
  • Primal (2019) has a three-episode arc set on board the Colossaeus, an absolutely immense pre-modern naval ship that is apparently home to an entire Ancient Egypt-esque kingdom. The ship's exact size is never stated, but in scale with the characters it seems to be at least a mile long, and probably much more, and even holds a fleet of smaller ships. The second episode shows that it's not the only one on the seas, as it comes under attack by a second, near-identical Colossaeus, this one populated by a kingdom inspired by the Sea Peoples.

    Real Life 
  • There are currently no Real Life examples of a mile-long space ship, but that doesn't mean that there aren't currently some impressively large ocean-going ships. In the US, football fields are often used as a stock unit of measurement of measurement for such ships, with a particular vessel being described as 'x' football fields in length.
  • For reference, the biggest ship ever built was the 650,000-ton supertanker Seawise Giant. She was 1,500 feet long (just over a quarter mile, or 0.46 km), 458 m to be exact. Meanwhile, the biggest military capital ships currently in use are the Ford-class supercarriers, which are a comparatively paltry 337m and 100,000 tons.
    • Seawise Giant possessed the greatest deadweight tonnage ever recorded. Fully laden, her displacement was 657,019 tonnes (646,642 long tons; 724,239 short tons), the heaviest ship of any kind, and with a draft of 24.6 m (81 ft), she was incapable of navigating the English Channel, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, or the Panama Canal, and incapable of entering the Baltic Sea. Overall, she was generally considered the largest ship ever built, as well as the largest self-propelled human-made object ever built. Her design approached the practical limit of ship design — larger ships than Seawise Giant are physically possible to be built, but they would be too impractical and uneconomical to use.
      • She ended her days as a permanently moored floating petroleum storage. Her draught and beam (68.8 m) were simply too much for passing the important channels, canals and waterways and calling important ports, making her economically unfeasible.
  • Slightly longer than the Seawise Giant, but not as massive, is the Prelude floating liquified natural gas facility—a ship that serves as combination of a drilling rig and a refinery for natural gas. It measures 1,600 feet long and displaces 600,000 tons, and is capable of processing enough natural gas in a year to power a city the size of Hong Kong.
  • There has been an apparently serious proposal made to build a mile-long floating city ship, known as the Freedom Ship. Buoyancy would be from a system of interlocking modules that would each have their own buoyancy tanks and propulsion units. This should allow a ship much larger than conventional construction methods would allow. (A normal ship in rough seas can flex to a degree quite alarming to those not familiar with modern vessels. The flexing limits the practical size of conventional vessels as well.) The project has been on and off with various financiers for nearly twenty years.
  • JPL scientist Robert Frisbee wrote a paper called How to Build an Antimatter Rocket for Interstellar Missions. His interstellar antimatter rocket involves a ship not merely a mile long, but 435 miles long (700 km). This is necessitated by the need for lots and lots of room both for storing antimatter and for a rocket fueled by it.
  • The International Space Station, our current largest spaceship (technically; its rockets are only to help keep it in orbit), is around a tenth of a kilometer wide, and around 1/14 kilometer long (according to The Other Wiki). This sounds more impressive than it is, due to the space station's shape (some of the length comes from the arrays of solar panels on either end). The living space has been described as a six-bedroom house.

 
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The Eldridge

The introduction of Xenogears, where The Eldridge is traversing until an unknown force impedes it.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (3 votes)

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Main / StandardEstablishingSpaceshipShot

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