How did you think the Deathstar was arranged?

Cafe Society
1

Think back, to the dawn of time, or at least, 1977. When you first watched Star Wars, how did you originally think the Deathstar was arranged?

Were the decks flat, top to bottom, like a building? Or in concentric spheres, like an onion? Was “up” towards the hemisphere with the weapon, or was “up” outward?

Did you think the habitable areas ran all the way to the middle, or only covered a small percentage of the volume?

How big did you think it was?

Me, I thought it was arranged like a building, with many circular floors around a central sphere core. I thought it was between 2 and 20 miles in diameter - definitely a “small” moon, not some 200-2000 mile monstrosity.

And, is there an official canonical answer to this question?

2

Say hello to my leedle friend!

3

Or, on the cheap–

4

I have seen Death Star schematics in (non-canon?) non-fiction Star Wars-universe books as early as the mid-1990s. I am sure that the schematics were at least a decade older.

Here are two images from more recent books (sorry, don’t have the titles, but I’ve thumbed through both of these at bookstores in the recent past). Both seem to me to treat the Death Star as much more a “spaceship” and much less a “space station” – for instance, living quarters, cafeterias, bridge, offices, etc. are not marked.

5

My thoughts are impure, since in RTOJ the Deathstar V2.0 was clearly a layer-cake arrangement.
But, even before I saw that, I thought the DS V1.0 was arranged the same way. The portholes had a stacked appearance, rather than the mirror-ball arrangement one would expect from an onion-type layout.

As for size - I had no idea how big it was when I saw the movie, but I remember trying to figure it out based on the height of the Millennium Falcon and the size of the hanger door. I don’t remember the figure I came up with, but it was much less than 100 miles.

In terms of space, it must be mostly generators and engines - just think about how much office space you could fit in that thing if it was all personnel areas! An entire planet’s worth of people could easily live in it.

6

When I was a kid I assumed it was vertically stacked like a building.

The movie visually supports either interpretation. When Millennium Falcon is brought into the Death Star it does so head on and lands on a flat landing platform, perpendicular to the vertical axis of the Death Star. It’s like it landed on the middle floor of a really big building. Everything around the landing area is oriented the same way.

But later, when we see fighters zipping around the Death Star’s surface, there appear to be structures that are like buildings unto themselves, oriented vertically away from the Death Star’s center.

Given how cheap and easy artificial gravity is in the Star Wars universe, and how big the Death Star is, why can’t it be both?