I’ve never understood how it traveled through the galaxy. But it made it from Alderan to Yavin just behind the Millennium Falcon. It’s a space station shaped like a planet, not a starship.
Did it travel like the Tardis? Or perhaps just more evidence that Lucas was clueless.
Space is a vacuum so it doesn’t matter how your ship is shaped, and yes the Death Star was equipped with a hyper drive that lets it travel faster than normal propulsion.
I join the other poster who seem relatively undisturbed about this - if the Idea of the Death Star moving is what made you think “hey this seems a little unrealistic” - then - oh - I don’t really have a rest of that sentence.
That’s one thing that bugged me about ROTJ: the Emperor may have said that the station was “fully operational”, but it wasn’t, really - it certainly couldn’t generate its own shields, and we can pretty much assume that its hyperdrive wasn’t working yet, either. The sole fully operational part of it was the main gun, and even there, the only thing we saw it destroy was a cruiser. There was nothing to indicate that it was capable yet of taking out a planet.
It’s called a station because it’s freaking huge and perhaps was intended to mostly sit in one place, but it clearly has a hyperdrive – how else would they get it to the latest rebellious planet that needs to be blown up as a warning to others?
He was trying to convince Luke to come to the Dark Side. His pitch wouldn’t be as effective if he admitted that much of the Dark Side’s military power wouldn’t come online until it was installed on Tuesday.
I read that as, “As far as being able to incinerate an attacking force is concerned…” It did look a bit silly using the planet-destroying gun to swat mosquitoes, though…
Technically, he says that it is “fully armed and operational”. He means that it has all of it’s guns and they are working. The “fully” is modifying “armed” not both "armed’ and “operational”. The point being that the Rebels attacked when they did because the Emperor let them believe that the station was helpless beyond the shield.
The line is ambiguous then. He could have meant either “operational and fully armed” or “fully armed and fully operational.” But in the context of his monologing, I suspect he meant the latter. A little premature hyperbole.