Let's get this out of the way. I am practically the poster child for this trope:
Sci-Fi Authors Have No Sense Of Scale
I’ll be the first to admit that the Bloodwind’s dimensions aren’t well defined. But this is what we do know:
1. Bloodwind's big, yeah yeah yeah.
2. It’s not small, no, no no.
3. The ship is split into three sections: The cargo/landing bay (a big rectangular box), a round middle section that has two additional docking ports on it, and a wedge-shaped front section that includes the bridge and crew quarters.
4. The cargo/landing bay is the largest of the three sections, taking up more than a third of the ship.
5. The cargo/landing bay holds two shuttles. Two parked shuttles take up about half of the bay. In a pinch, it could probably hold four shuttles, but it would be a tight fit. In any event, it only has landing clamps for two shuttles.
6. I’ve never explicitly described how big a landing shuttle is, but in my mind they’re about twice as big as a school bus.
7. The pirate ship in volume 1 lands in the cargo bay, and takes up more than half the bay. The pirate ship has a crew of about 50, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s huge. The pirates keep a cramped ship, with only enough beds for half the crew to sleep at a time, and with many bunking in the same room. I think it’s safe to say the pirate ship is about as big as four school busses, maybe a little bigger.
8. Which means the landing/cargo bay is probably about as long as 8 school busses.
9. However, when I measure in school busses, am I talking about total mass, or just length? Was the pirate ship wider than it was long? The book mentions that the pirate ship had “inverted wings,” am I including wingspan as part of its size?
10. Eh, forget point 9. The pirate ship was nearly four school busses long, so the landing bay is about eight school busses long. We'll also say the bay is as wide as six busses. No, eight busses wide. There has to be some empty space around the shuttles when they park. Which actually means you could park 64 busses in the landing bay, if you crammed them in there with no space in between. We’ll go ahead and say the room is about ten school busses high. Which gives you a total volume of 640 busses.
11. Where are you getting all these busses? Don’t the kids need them for school? Whatever you’re doing, I’m not sure I want any part of this.
12. Google tells me that the dimensions of a full-sized (72 capacity) school bus are: 35 feet (10.6 meters) long, 9 feet (2.74 meters) wide, 8 feet high (2.4 meters) high.
13. This means that the landing/cargo bay of the Bloodwind is about 280 feet (85 meters) long, 72 feet (22 meters) wide, and 80 feet (24 meters) high.
14. And since that’s slightly more than one third of the ship, we’ll say the entire ship is 800 feet (244 meters) long.
15. For comparison, a football field is 360 feet (110 meters) long, an aircraft carrier is about 1,000 feet (304 meters) long, and the Enterprise D was 2,103 feet (641 meters).
16. I'm sure I got the math wrong in there somewhere. If I ever release an official Bloodhunters technical manual, I'll get someone else to do the numbers.
17. But none of this blog post is canon anyway. The truth is, the Bloodwind is about as big as it needs to be for the plot to work.
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