So, suppose you are Joe Alderaan, living your ordinary life on the peaceful planet of Alderaan. Unknown to you, events are transpiring in space nearby and --poof–, your planet becomes an uncharted asteroid field.
What do you suppose this might have been like? Did the planet suddenly disappear beneath you? What if you were on the side of the planet farthest from the Death Star? The destruction would have propagated up from the ground rather than down from the sky. Would any of the Alderaan chunks left floating around for the Millennium Falcon to find have any bits of technology, people, etc. on them?
What about religion? Every religion has some sort of doomsday story. Suppose a religion on Alderaan says that the world will end when a small moon (is that a space station?) appears in the sky. This moon will be the harbinger of the end times. It will rain down fire upon the people and the world will be no more. Wouldn’t Leia, having been brought up in the Alderaan’s native religious traditions, have known about this and been especially fearful of boarding the Death Star? Suppose the end-times story were different. Imagine how shocked Leia was when she saw the end of the world happen completely differently than foretold.
What about other Alderaanians who were off-world? I would think that seeing the end of the world happen exactly as foretold would be a pretty powerful endorsement of one’s religion. Conversely, if it were not at all related to the end-times story, it would be a powerful repudiation of one’s religion.
Was the destruction of Alderaan a good idea from the Empire’s point of view? Would it instill fear in wavering worlds, as Tarkin believed, or would it have galvanized opposition to the Empire?
I am sure the laser coming into the atmosphere at such a high velocity, coupled with the total circumference of the actual beam (any laser experts out there??) I am sure a lot were just incinerated with the incoming heat, and the ones who weren’t were probably incinerated by the heat of the exploding planet.
You wouldn’t have felt a thing. The total destruction of the planet, from intact to kibble, took less than 2 seconds. Given the acceleration at which the component pieces were flying outward, anything on the surface that wasn’t disintegrated in a millisecond was molecular paste on a new asteroid.
The sadistic Grand Moff Tarkin had arranged for a broadcast to Alderaan (just prior to the Princess arriving on the bridge) announcing to the people that the huge, black moon-sized thingy that suddenly appeared out of hyperspace to orbit their home planet was, in fact, a resettlement ark in the wake of a failed Clone Army II experiment: the Empire intended to dump several hundred million Ewok/Wookiie hybrids, which they’d hoped would turn out to be tiny but ferocious warriors useful for Special Ops, but instead turned out to be huge, droid-worshipping hunter gatherers.
Well, that was sensed through the Force; given that some Force users can last indefinitely as Force ghosts, perhaps in the Star Wars a normal person upon death produces one that lasts for a few seconds.
Obi-Wan: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”
Obi-Wan: “A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.”
Obi-Wan is full of shit, and you shouldn’t believe a word that comes out of his big fat lying liar mouth, cause it’s dripping with lie sauce.
It would have been a great idea- IF the Empire had not shortly thereafter lost the doomsday weapon responsible. “Fear will keep the systems in line”. IIRC, it was the very completion of the Death Star that prompted the political gamble of disbanding of the Senate. To give a terrestrial analogy, imagine secretly developing nuclear armed ICBMs, announcing a world dictatorship, and nuking a major city to prove you mean business… and THEN having your entire nuclear arsenal destroyed in a daring commando raid. The destruction of the Death Star was a stupendous loss for the Empire: all the moral outrage and none of the deterrence.
I rather doubt a sphere the size of the Death Star (160 kilometers sez Wookiepedia) would appear to anyone on the surface of Alderaan as anything more than a bright “star” or planet in an unexpected location, though I’m guessing it would be bright enough to see from the day side. The Death Star was probably at least as far away from Alderaan as the Moon is from Earth to avoid getting caught in the debris from the explosion, so it wouldn’t have looked like the “full moon” sized 2nd Death Star from Endor. So surely most Alderaanians who were looking out a window or where outside probably would have noticed “something” but would not have been able to guess it was a space station/weapon.
Can you imagine how awesome it would have been if Lucas had put a little cut-away to Yoda in the original 1977 release? Yes, I know, yes, I know, but still.
“What was the deal with that green dude?” would have been the mystery of the decade.
