When building the ships of the Hellas Shipyards line, I was initially targeting A Billion Suns for the various ship classes, so I adhered pretty closely to the size guidelines that Mike Hutchinson posted to the ABS blog.
To help me in determining a scale, I created the following diagram to help me visualize the size variations between ship classes across sci-fi universes. As you can see, the variation is quite dramatic! Halo’s UNSC Infinity Super Carrier is 3.5x the length of the Star Destroyer so I couldn’t even fit it onto the diagram.
I did a bit of research to find the lengths of various ships from popular sci-fi universes to compare against to see if I could derive a scale that would work for my ships. Dropping my designs into the following diagram allowed me to adjust the sizes to try to find something reasonable.
Due to the realities and constraints of tabletop miniatures such as level of detail, weight for flight stands and ease of identification across the table, I found that my ship sizes would not vary in size as much as many other established sci-fi universes. Thus, I ended up choosing a scale that’s bigger than Star Trek Federation vessels but on the smaller side of Halo and Star Wars capital ships.
So, after going through this exercise, I arrived at a scale of 1:6000 for my capital ships. For the strike craft I had to upscale them to 1:2000 scale, otherwise they would be too small to feasibly print.
