We do know that’s a fan edit, right?
Meh. I don’t think the Death Star was much of a doomsday weapon anyway. Or, rather, that a lone DS could keep the entire galaxy quaking with fear. Sure, it could technically hyperspace, but slowly, and the trip from one system to another could take weeks if the *Rebellion *video game is to be trusted as source. And that’s for nearby systems, going from one side of the galaxy to the other is more like a year or two trip.
One death star is just a Manhattan Project : nice symbol, little actual threat. Which the rebels would have capitalized on just as much. One Death Star per star system, or a week away however ? Yeah, I’m not rebelling. That’s crazy talk, and I’m going to have to report you to the local garrison, sir.
Not to mention, of course, that the Empire actually hurts itself should it atomize planets willy nilly - that’s just so much tax money, mineral ressources and potential army recruits sent down the drain. Killing dissenters might be a sustainable long term policy, nuking them and salting the scorched ground ? Not so much.
Alderaan was gone in seconds. Most people wouldn’t have even had time to notice the new star in the sky. Even if the Death Star were visible in the daytime sky (Alderaan’s surface was sunlit at the time), almost nobody would be looking up to see it.
I don’t think Grand Moff Tarkin bothered with threatening Alderaan. The scene on the Death Star shows he just isn’t interested in communicating with them. It’s not like they have something he wants. Leia is the focus of his interest.
The other consideration is if Alderaan has any type of defense system or sensors for incoming vessels. You would think that even a “peaceful” planet would have some way of knowing when vessels are incoming. Do they have automated beacons? A traffic control system? Rely on incoming messages to be alerted? So it’s possible someone in the government noticed something and some puzzled communications were going on within the hierarchy. Maybe Grand Moff Tarkin directed his people to ignore incoming messages - they are irrelevant.
I just can’t see the Alderaan goverment sending out some sort of emergency broadcast. What would they say? “Alert, alert, incoming Imperial space vessel of impossible size and unknown designation, refusing to communicate. I suggest you take shelter and prepare for invasion. It’s not like it’s a dozen Star Destroyers, so they can’t possibly destroy the planet. Stay calm.” Technically, they are part of the Empire, and are nominally compliant. There’s no reason to suspect widespread destruction, or even invasion. They might be worried that some Imperial honcho is coming to corner Bail Organa for his awareness of his daughter’s affiliations or something, maybe some sort of investigation of the seat of government that might even lead to a change in governorship, but nobody had any reason to suspect their planet was about to be pulverized.
“Man it’s hot today. I’m sure glad I have an office job, and am not one of those techie dweebs stuck servicing the utility repair droids. Ditch diggers have sucky jobs.” BOOM
Nothing living would have survived that blast. Even unicellular organisms would have been severely jellied. (Maybe that’s what Kenobi heard - all those midichlorians crying out in pain. 
) There might conceivably be some bits of metal or other small objects that were recognizable. There just wasn’t time for the atmosphere to be substantially heated.
As far as any surviving Alderaanians and their religious views, hard to guess. Any legends of destruction coming from the skies might have found a few new faithful, but then again, claims of destruction coming from “the Gods” could have been less successful in retaining adherants.
Kobal2 said:
I don’t know that I would necessarily take it as all that canon. It was likely cobbled together after the fact to make for an interesting game, rather than having much connection to the facts of the movies. Although Tarkin does say that Dantooine is far too remote and will take time to get to. Still, I would guess the Death Star to be as efficient as a Star Destroyer in hyperspace. Not sure what the real qualifying factors there are. We see it takes several hours for the Millennium Falcon to travel from Tatooine to Alderaan, so it isn’t instantaneous space warping. I suppose we can postulate a similar relationship of travel for engine size vs vehicle mass vs thrust, but it’s all guesswork. How big were the hyperspace engines of the DS? Wouldn’t you want that thing decked out in huge-ass afterburners?
I’m not quite following your assertion that the Manhattan Project was little actual threat. Sure, it took time, and WWII was wrapping up before they reached full results, but the outcome of the MP was our entire nuclear arsenal.
But I do agree that without rapid deployment ability, one DS may be able to keep a handful of close planets in line, but the bulk of the Empire?
Then again, planetary bombardment was always an option. Park a Star Destroyer or 2 just out of orbit and you could slag the surface of a good-sized planet fairly easily. So the DS was just an exaggeration of that to ludicrous levels. “Not only will we fry your entire populace and glass over your planet, we’ll turn it in to rubble so nobody else can reclaim it later.” That might hit a few people on a religious level.
That’s probably the greatest argument. It’s one thing to eliminate a rebellious populace that just won’t cower under. It’s quite another to pulverize the planet and all the inherent resources that could be put to other uses - from farming to supply your Stormtroopers with food to metals for building more Death Stars to land for giving out to loyalists as [del]bribes[/del] rewards. Maybe one or two dramatic shows to really get people’s attention, then more of a last resort than a frequently used weapon.
I think he said [a] but not **. How fast the DS could get anywhere is a perennial topic of speculative SW geekery.
Remember that graphic that showed the DS moving into position to destroy Yavin IV? I can’t remember what the DS had to clear, maybe Yavin itself, but it had to get around something before Yavin IV was in range/sight and it seemed like it took an awfully long time.
So, while I’m not sure about hyperspace, it seems like the DS plodded about during regular space travel.
The Death Star, like most space opera vehicles, travels at the speed of plot.
The Death Star dropped into normal space on the opposite side of the gas giant Yavin as the moon on which the Rebel Base was located. Of course, naturally, the only reason it didn’t pop back into normal space somewhere in clear shooting range of the moon was to provide a means for Our Heros to fight back. Obviously once it is out of hyperspace, the Death Star was moving relatively slowly, as the X-Wings & Y-Wings were able to cross at sub-light speeds to it in plenty of time to have a couple of runs at the trench.
I suppose there are plenty of fan-invented reasons why the Death Star dropped out of hyperspace where it did, but it reminds me of the same kind of overconfident military mismanagement that ended Admiral Ozzel’s career in Empire.
And add to that, The concern with Dantooine’s remoteness was not the transit time, but the fact that it would take forever for people to notice that Dantooine was gone.
Can’t curve around gravity wells in hyperspace. I would assume that between the gas giant, the star, the other two planets, and all the moons, you can only get so close at FTL. From there you have to move at subspace around the planet for a clear shot.
So… Death Star vs. the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek… go!
Wild Ass Conjecture seconded. Remember Han being all smartass about his ship’s hyperspace trajectories not running into stars as explanation for how long it took the Falcon to get into HS ?
ISTM, hyperspace is pretty much “going very fast in a straight line”, that is to say, if you want to make a turn, you have to drop out and plot another course. If the act of moving into HS takes a lot of power/resources in and of itself, then it’s not so silly to drop out “in the ballpark” and run the rest of the way in normal space. Kind of like how you pay the cab to drop you at a big intersection and walk home, rather than paying the guy all the way to your door (the fare including the three times he misses your street, and the end-around after he misses your house) 
ETA :
Yes, that’s my point : the Manhattan Project was proof of concept. But it took some time and a lot of infrastructure to take that concept into the realm of meaningfull/useable. Same for the DS. Considering it took 2 flicks to get even a half-built second DS…
Canon Star Wars mythos refers to the asteroid belt, formed from the remains of Alderaan.
Offworld survivors sometimes visit the system, & launch memorials (flowers & such) into the belt.
We might. And we might not. We are old school and we saw Star Wars thirty two years ago. We don’t go for any of this “New Hope” nonsense. And Greedo never got a shot off.
Which was totally exhausted after Nagasaki. Had the Japanese not surrendered, it would have been months before Tokyo (or whatever was next) got the same treatment.
^
There was an attack planned for the 14th, which was cancelled when Japan surrendered.
I think that the various Superman movies, in their depiction of Krypton’s demise, gives us a place to begin understanding Alderaan.
How much of a belt would a rapidly expanding planet sized mass of debris form? Not much I’m guessing.
Especially after the Empire’s mining ships were finished with it. Part of their Project Ploughshare, to turn weapons of planetary destruction into peaceful tools
The irony, it burns! It burns!!!
Nope. They had one more ready to go, and they were capable of manufacturing 3 nukes per month for the next few months at least. Cite (pdf). I’d assume that if they put more resources into it, they could have increased that rate, so we could have nuked anyone we damn well pleased.
Not exactly. Alderaan was obliterated in a fraction of a second. Krypton exploded due to an exponentially increasing chain reaction in it’s core. The Kryptonians had maybe five to ten minutes to see it coming, and they had probably been killed by seismic and atmospheric shock before the planet blew apart.