>>Well, I guess that puts the kibosh on having Dahak from David Weber's
>>Mutineer's Moon novels, then.
>>
>>If 17 kilometers is too big, three thousand kilometers is
>>definitely too big.
>
>Why would anyone need a ship the size of a large country?

Their state of the art FTL drive WAS the size of a large country. And their power source of choice (the core tap) required a similarly sized installation - when they put one on Earth and kept sweating 'cause if the jury-rigged controls went it'd go 2nd impact on them. Plus their defensive perimeter was so big that one ship had to cover a big area on it's own - so it had to be capable of handling almost anything.

drakensisthered

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: "There is generally more than one side to a story." - Corwin, Roger Zelazny's 'Courts of Chaos'