The Executor has a length of 19 kilomters. Well over ten times the length of a normal Imperator class star destroyer. By far the largest ship in all of Star Wars, excluding the death stars which were battlestations. there is never anything as large as them shown in the whole of the movies. And yet it does not carry larger weapons than the smaller ships, simply many more of them. Thus the Executor is simply a normal star destroyer, but at a much larger scale. Therefore it is safe to assume that the ship is not meant to battle other ships of her size, if they exist.
Some have put out the idea that the ship was built as a instrument of fear to cower entire planets in line. But this is just stupid. I mean why send just one massive ship into a star system when an entire fleet of dozens of kilometer and a half regular star destroyers could be built instead. And furthermore even if you assume that the ship was built to terrorize the galaxy she is ultimately just one ship. And there are many millions of worlds in the galaxy. You would never be able to put down every revolt. Meaning you would send regular star destroyers anyway.
But what if the Executor had another function? One that would justify the ships tremendous size?
For starters the ship is plenty large enough to host a rather large army aboard. Perhaps she could be a planetary assault ship? But then if she was built for planetary invasion why does Darth Vader make her his flagship? And why is she commanding the Imperial fleet at the battle of Endor if her holds are loaded with troops?
Then some think she might be a carrier intended for fleet defense. And that makes a certain amount of sense. Until you consider that you never see the numbers of fighter around the ship that would justify it. She should be able to carry several thousand TIE fighters, but when you consider that a normal star destroyer already carries seventy fighter, more than enough to cover itself and a fair sizedsquadron it begins to loose credibility.
And that is pretty much it for the ship. She is not meant as an instrument of fear (Any more than any other warship) nor is she meant as a planetary assault ship. Ditto for being a carrier. But then why build the ship? Well the simple answer is that George Lucas wanted Darth Vader to have a distinctive ship for the Empire Strikes Back, and wanted it to be more terrifying than any ship shown before. But what about the in universe explanation? Well I think I have an idea for that. And it involves communications.
You see in Star Wars there exists a think called the halo net which acts like the internet in our world. You repeatedly see characters use small handheld devices to speak to others on distant planets. You see it most notably in the Empire Strikes Back, phantom menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. In order to communicate over such distances there exist Hyperspace relay stations which take signals and beam them through hyperspace to other stations. These stations form a vast network and allow near instantaneous communications through much of the core regions of the galaxy.
However the farther from the core you get the less dense the number of relay stations. And less and less systems are tied to the galactic communications network. Imperial garrisons become more and more isolated from eachother. Unable to call for help in the event of a mass uprising. And it becomes more difficult for the empire to govern as there developed a lag in communication. This is especially true of systems like Tatoonine which appears largely free of any sort of Imperial occupation force.
The amount of hyper relays you would need to build to connect the whole galaxy would be to expensive for even the empire. So what is to be done? Well what if the Executors are built so massive because they hold a full size hyper relay to allow someone like a Grand Admiral to communicate with the rest of the galaxy? The executor of course!
Think about it for a minute. With a ship that size fitting a few reactors and power feeds should still leave plenty of room for a huge crew and massive amounts of starfighters. Plus in the movies there is plenty of evidence for this. When the Imperial fleet is chasing the Millennium falcon through the Hoth system asteroid belt the ship must leave the belt in order to get a clear transmission. We know for a fact that Hoth is really isolated (Hence no hyper relay stations) and that the Emperor rarely leaves Corusant, meaning that is probably where he is.
The ship then leaves the belt and Darth Vader has a chat with his master before the ship departs for Bespin with the rest of the fleet. In no other scene do you see something like this happen (Though in the phantom menace transmissions are recieved from Naboo, meaning some hyper relay must be in the system) meaning the ship must have a hyper relay.
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