The Deathstar thread

I know that they took out alderaan , but that sounded like it was a normal M class planet, taking out a jovian might have caused problems of its own. At the very least it may have allowed some sort of evac, even if it was just the few people and leaders that they could have thrown on shuttles. A huge debris field may have had them hold their fire till they seen the whites of the rebs eyes.

Declan

Power sources in the SW universe must be quite absurdly concentrated, by our standards - the Death Star going Boom on destroying the reactor is understandable - what’s a bit of a mystery is why other things like light sabres don’t go Boom when they are severely damaged.
Droids too - some of those do go Boom, but maybe not as much as they ought to.

I still like my pet theory that that unnamed pilot was some clever Imperial agent making a sneaky getaway in all the confusion.

I misremember-how did Leia get the first plans?

Tell me about it.

For that matter, do we have an in-universe explanation of why you couldn’t just aim a ship at the Death Star, then jump to hyperspace? It seems obvious enough, and I know little enough about FTL travel in the SW universe, that I imagine someone’s come up with something official by now on why “blowing a wormhole though something at 50x c” wouldn’t work as a combat strategy.

I don’t think its out of the question that the Death Star doesn’t have the power to blow up a gas giant. Assuming Yavin is the size/mass of Jupiter, and Alderaan is Earth, Yavin is ~315x the mass of Alderaan and 11x the radius. The superlaser also might have issues with the huge layer of clouds and liquid hydrogen outside the ‘solid’ section; going through tens of thousands of kilometers of atmosphere would likely dissipate the laser’s energy a lot more than a few hundred km of atmosphere. Finally, the size might present an issue when Yavin blows up, since there’s a bunch more stuff flying around to damage the station (even if it has shields, they can only take so much).

Granted, the Empire has weapons capable of destroying stars, but the Sun Crusher uses a solid projectile to disrupt the star’s reactions, not a beam susceptible to dissipation.

Bothan spies. Here’s the more complete version though.

I believe she “entertained” an imperial technician, if you know what i mean.

God forbid.

Would a nuke have had any effect whatsoever? We don’t actually know what the Death Star is made of or what they were firing at it. For all we know, those blaster shots that could just barely destroy surface installations were actually matter-antimatter charges carefully shaped to focus virtually all of their detonation energy into the target upon impact.

Wait, wait, wait, so are you telling me that the species the “It’s a trap!” guy belongs to is called the Moncalamari? Seriously? Who’s fucking brilliant idea was it to call the squid lookin guys calamari? I literally loled when I slowly figured out who the hell you were talking about. Was this in the movies is or is it an expanded universe thing?

I think you would have to read the new BSG threads on nukes in space. Nukes would have localized blast effect with no radiation that a planetary ground strike would.

Make big craters but no outright destruction.

Declan