Especially when you consider that the Death Star’s core used large amounts of exotic, ultra-dense matter as reactant. The thing was the size of a small moon, but it probably massed as much as several large planets.
This thread reminds me of a SW fanfiction I started to write once but never finished. Here"s the plot:
At the edge of the galaxy is a remote scientific station devoted to extra-galactic astronomy. The facility houses a team of astrophysicists and engineers tending a giant parabolic reflector used as a telescope. One day the researchers are startled to see a Super Star Destroyer task force drop out of hyperspace. The admiral commanding the fleet informs the researchers that their parabolic reflector is being requisitioned in the name of the Empire, and the chief engineer in charge of tending it has been summarily pressed into Imperial service. The researchers have little choice but to obey, and the chief engineer, the daughter of the senior astronomer, says her farewells. The fleet takes the parabola in tow.
She ends up at Endor where the Death Star II is being built, and the parabolic reflector is to be used as the bowl of the main weapon. Working with other conscripted engineers, they whisper about how billions of innocent Alderaans were casually murdered and how can they stop it from happening again. The young engineer gets involved in a plot to warn the Rebel Alliance that a second Death Star is being built, going so far as to sacrifice herself to order to get the word out. But in the end we discover that it’s all part of the Emperor’s plan to leak word to the Rebel Alliance to trick them into attacking the (they think) not yet operational Death Star II.
Does anybody seriously believe that the Evil Galactic Empire would actually need to purchase the probably rare and therefore expensive materials required to build the Death Star?
More likely they would simply have a Star Destroyer drop by a planet, blast a fair-to-midsized city to its component elements, then nicely ask the planetary government to please hand over the rare metals.
Tremendous cost savings over actually having to shell out Imperial credits for the stuff.
You fool, you’ve mixed in the construction costs of a Battlestar!
A Bothan is one of hte many species of aliens in SW.
Bothan spies were the ones who found out about the second DS, remember?
“Many Bothans died to bring us this information.”
Actually, gravity wouldn’t be any good at all at keeping the black hole centered, since an object in the center of a spherically-symmetric shell is in neutral equilibrium (the equilibrium is unstable if the shell is not spherically symmetric, so that’s no improvement). However, a black hole can be given an electric (or magnetic, but let’s not go there) charge, so it’d be possible to keep it centered electromagnetically.
Incidentally, a black hole can also be used as a power source by extracting the gravitational potential energy from objects dropped into it (this is what powers quasars). This isn’t quite as efficient as the Hawking process (you can get a maximum of half the conversion energy from your fuel), but you can use a hole of any size, and you don’t have the delicate balancing act of feeding it at exactly the right rate, like you do with Hawking radiation. Either of these methods is vastly superior to anything we have now, and could be a suitable power supply for a large space station.
Yeah, I had forgotten about that.
Weren’t they both built by Dykstra?
However, this is also incorrect, as epees, like rapiers and foils, are stabbing weapons, while lightsabres are obviously used for slashing. Considering the fact that Jedi and Sith alternate between a one-handed and two-handed grip, the correct term would probably be “lightbastardsword” (or “lighthandandahalfsword” to purists).
Gotta love “light bastard-sword”, although one can understand why Lucas was loathe to use that term.
In estimating costs for the Death Star, one must remember that it is being constructed by a Government. Thus, if you are a conservative, your estimates are all too low by a factor of many hundred. If you are a liberal, the question is meaningless, there’s no cost to the construction because it’s done by government.
(If it would be funnier to reverse the terms “conservative” and “liberal” in that last statement, feel free to do so.)
Nah, you’d need waaaaaaay more than one city to do this. And then you’d have to go pick it all up and sort it, and all the whining proles out there… just not worth it. They probably toasted a few asteroid fields instead.
The weird thing about the sabers is that Lucas himself often slips and says “laser-sword” which is more accurate, I suppose, but disconcerting for some reason.
Anyway, back to the death star, I don’t think it would be heavier than several planets as SPOOFE said. Like Chronos said, it’s hollow. I’m gonna say lighter than the small moon.
Perhaps the aircraft carrier is the wrong model. Anyone want to extrapolate the numbers from the ISS? That’s more like it: in space, built by government contract.
(And BTW, we don’t yet have conclusive proof that the Stormtroopers are clones. The Clonetroopers could be the precursors to some as yet unknown process for making Stormtroopers.)
If anything, that’s probably an even worse comparison than the aircraft carrier. The biggest cost for the ISS is the cost of getting the materials into orbit, but in the Star Wars universe, access to space is cheap. And the next-biggest source of costs for the ISS is all the international politics and diplomacy, which the monolithic Empire wouldn’t have to worry about.
And I think it’s safe to assume that the Death Star has mass far less than that of a planet, since it’s described as orbiting around Endor (itself only a moon), and not vice-versa.
Perhaps not. However, its hollowness is well balanced out by the density of the various reactants that it carries. The fuel would be so dense as to be orders of magnitude heavier than the rest of the station itself.