The Empire missed an obvious shortcut when building the Death Star. Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 Sam Howzit
The moon-sized battle station from Star Wars might be an effective weapon - but just how feasible is it ?
A symbol of the Empire's dominion over the Star Wars galaxy, the Death Star was a huge space station the size of a small moon capable of destroying an entire planet with a single blast.
From an engineering point of view however building something of this magnitude would be so complex and take so long that it is difficult to even imagine it. The logistics of the construction, coupled with the sheer quantity of material required, seem like insurmountable obstacles.
According to NASA engineer Brian Muirhead however, the Empire missed one obvious shortcut that could have made the Death Star's construction a lot quicker and simpler.
Instead of creating the entire thing from scratch and bringing all the materials up from other worlds, Muirhead has proposed that the battle station could have simply been built on an asteroid.
"It could provide the metals," he said. "You have organic compounds, you have water - all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star."
Whether we will see this idea being put in practice in Episode VII however remains to be seen.
To Mr Trumpet. USA Earth. Re Project Wall of Jerrico. Hello old man. I received your email the other day and your cheque. Thank you. You wished for some basic information on the construction of our Death Star lite model. We use 3d printing technology .volume of sphere = 4*pi*r*r*r/3 1 metre radius = 4.19 M cubed. Total volume roughly the size of Ceres. We'll be using a frozen comet like asteroid past uranus with a small moon. Most of the production equipment will be on the big one. The small one will act as a gravity anchor and also contain other production equipment. The death star lite would... [More]
If I were part of a Galactic Union, I would have likely been tasked to destroy something like that that threatens the safety of planets and moons and even stars and their evolutionary development. This kind of monstrosity is an ego trip and a waste of resources. We should more concern ourselves with building the Enterprise than a death star and appreciate the beauty of what God has created rather than destroy what God has created. If people only knew what it took to maintain just one planet. We should invest in life rather than death and in love rather than hate. Thinking about how to build a ... [More]
If I were part of a Galactic Union, I would have likely been tasked to destroy something like that that threatens the safety of planets and moons and even stars and their evolutionary development. This kind of monstrosity is an ego trip and a waste of resources. We should more concern ourselves with building the Enterprise than a death star and appreciate the beauty of what God has created rather than destroy what God has created. If people only knew what it took to maintain just one planet. We should invest in life rather than death and in love rather than hate. Thinking about how to build a ... [More]
Surely the first thing to do in building a Death Star would be to form an all powerful empire, controlled by an oldish man in a hooded robe, defended by a bloody large force of white armoured bad aiming troopers, and of course a chap in black armour with possible breathing problems? C'mon, with none of those elements, you wouldn't even have the thing in the first place! You do know that the Death Star is fiction and nobody is actually building this, don't you ? Oh that's right, just bring stark reality to this question!
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