Further to my post on the Dark Heresy forums about famous vessels of the Calixis Sector, here's a comparative size chart for some of the vessels cited in the Rogue Trader Core book....
Rogue Trader vessels: comparative size chart
Very nice, that make a good tool, to represent the Scale of space ships.
Very helpful! Great job with that.
Like I said in the other thread Lightbringer, when you compare it to the largest naval ship in the world currently, the Nimitz-class supercarrier, and you see that a ship that small (small compared to even a Sword-frigate or a Raider) has almost 6000 people onboard... it suddenly makes the tens of thousands strong crews of a RT ship seem suddenly reasonable.
The crew sizes are perfectly sensible, even on the small side in some cases, given the existing canon lore about certain jobs and sections of Imperium naval vessels. Quite how you'd feed them all... ;¬)
if you want to throw people for a loop, just so they can get a better visual on just how enormous those ships are, put in say, the enterprise, and the super star destroyer, then people will truely grasp just how friggin huge 40k ships are.
So-called "Super Star Destroyer" sits at 5 km, so I suspect most Star Wars fans have a fair idea, actually. ;¬)
Actually, there's a long-running argument about the size of those ships with the top end suggestion being more like 19 km, so aye, 40K vessels are large but certainly not so massive as to be outside the experience of sci-fi fans. :¬)