On Rise of the Resistance, the e-ticket attraction at Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and Disney
World, guests are brought aboard a Star Destroyer where the bulk of the ride’s action takes place.
Of the ride’s many visual spectacles, one of them is walking off your transport ship
and into a massive Star Destroyer hangar bay, complete with TIE fighters and a squad of
Stormtroopers waiting for you.
The question that one of my patrons, Panod, posed to me is if that’s the hangar bay
for the Star Destroyer, how big is the rest of the ship in comparison to Walt Disney World
and Disneyland?
So let’s find out.
Now thanks to the in-depth nature of fandoms when it comes to properties like Star Wars,
this is a pretty easy question to answer.
According to the story of the ride, the Star Destroyer in question is the Resurgent-class
Star Destroyer named The Finalizer.
It is the First Order flagship that General Hux commands in the sequel films up until
Rise of Skywalker.
In the last film he commands The Steadfast, and the reason for the change is actually
due to the events of Rise of the Resistance.
The ship is 2,916 meters long and 1,484 meters at its widest point.
So if we use the general area that guests enter the hangar bay as an anchor point, the
actual rest of the Star Destroyer would take up this much space.
At 497 meters tall, the ship would be about as tall as eight and a half Cinderella Castles
stacked on top of each other.
Over in Disneyland the ship would almost reach the Angel’s Stadium.
As for how crowded the ship would be, it’s said to be capable of holding 19,000 officers,
55,000 enlisted crew members, and 8,000 stormtroopers.
That means the stormtroopers that greet you in the hangar bay represent about half a percent
of all the troopers on board.
In total, it’s hard to compare to Disney since they keep capacity numbers close to
the chest, but it’s safe to say 82,000 people would be like a pretty packed day at the Magic Kingdom.
Part of why the ship is so big is because the Star Destroyers from the sequel trilogy
are much larger than the older models, which I guess isn’t a surprise since that was
the approach for a lot of the sequel trilogy.
Death Star the size of a planet.
Emperor the size of like 20 Emperors.
A fleet that’s just, like, a copy-paste of like a hundred Star Destroyers over and
over and over again.
For comparison, the Imperial Class Star Destroyers from the original trilogy are said to be 1,600
meters long, which would look something like this.
Even smaller are the Venator-Class Star Destroyers from the prequel trilogy, which are 1,137
meters in length and only 268 meters tall.
That would be about four and a half castles tall.
But for as large as the Resurgent-class destroyers are, they’re not the biggest models out there.
The executor-class ship from Return of the Jedi had no official size for a pretty long time.
It’s a ship from a film from an era where we weren’t getting companion books full
of measurements for fictional spaceships.
So the best people could do was try to eyeball the models used in the movies and guess.
However, LucasFilm eventually took a stance and settled on a ship length of 19 kilometers.
That’s a Star Destroyer that would span from Disney’s Animal Kingdom all the way
to Universal Studios Orlando, or from Disneyland all the way to Newport Beach.
Then there’s the Mega-Class Star Dreadnought, or as I like to call it, that big stealth
bomber-looking one from The Last Jedi.
This is actually shorter than the Executor-class, at 13.2 kilometers.
However, it obviously still needed to be bigger somehow, so instead, it’s the widest of the ships.
I don’t think you’d call it a wingspan since they’re not actually wings, but side
to side, this thing measures 60.5 kilometers.
That ship, starting at Hollywood Studios, would go past Orlando and just past Sanford.
Over at Disneyland that ship would cover the span of LA and end in Bel Air.
The First Order is definitely compensating.
In any case, the next time you’re at Hollywood Studios or Disneyland and you happen to be
lucky enough to grab a boarding group for Rise… and you happen to be lucky enough
to go on a day the ride is fully working, and you take those steps into that massive
hangar bay, just imagine it being part of something much much larger.