How Much Would It Cost To Build The Death Star?
February 15, 2012 in Editorial, Top
Building a massive space weapon is all very well, but you have to find the materials to build it with. It's easy to say that "sure, the Death Star would be expensive" but is there actually enough iron in the Earth to make the first Death Star? Centives decided to find out.
We began by looking at how big the Death Star is. The first one is reported to be 140km in diameter and it sure looks like it's made of steel. But how much steel? We decided to model the Death Star as having a similar density in steel as a modern warship. After all, they're both essentially floating weapons platforms so that seems reasonable.
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Name: HMS Illustrious Volume: 28,591.2 m3 Mass: 22,000 tonnes |
Scaling up to the Death Star, this is about 1.08x1015 tonnes of steel. 1 with fifteen zeros.
Which seems like a colossal mass but we've calculated that from the iron in the earth, you could make just over 2 million* Death Stars. You see the Earth's crust may have a limited amount of iron, but the core is mostly our favourite metal and is both very big and very dense, and it's from here that most of our death-star iron would come.
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Name: Death Star Volume: 1,440,000 kilometres3 Mass: 1.08 x 1015 tonnes |
But, before you go off to start building your apocalyptic weapon, do bear in mind two things. Firstly, the two million death stars is mostly from the Earth's core which we would all really rather you didn't remove. And secondly, at today's rate of steel production (1.3 billion tonnes annually), it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work. So once someone notices what you're up to, you have to fend them off for 800 millennia before you have a chance to fight back. In context, it takes under an hour to get the steel for HMS Illustrious.
Oh, and the cost of the steel alone? At 2012 prices, about $852,000,000,000,000,000. Or roughly 13,000 times the world's GDP.**
But then again, you can just take out a loan from the entire planet and then default on them in the most awesome way possible.
(For the record when converting between iron and steel, Centives assumed a medium steel of 99.5% iron)
*Centives erronously reported this figure as 2 billion, not 2 million. Our thanks to commenter Shaun for pointing out this error
**Centives erroneously reported this figure as $8,100,000,000,000,000, which was off by a magnitude of 100. We'd like to thank commenter Ianvl for pointing this out. Despite our original error, the cost of the death star still comes out to be 13,000 times the world's GDP as we originally reported. Sincere apologies for the mistake.
Enjoyed reading this? You might also like our look at the practicalities of mopping the Death Star floors, or the market value of a human soul. You can find those and other interesting things in our Editorials although if you want a selection of our most popular check out the Greatest Hits. And be sure to stay in touch:
I came here by accident – I stumbled here. I have always thought that most of the Internet was trivial and pointless but this page is the epitome of pointlessness. A hypothetical discussion about the present day cost of building a fictitious future artefact. I am overwhelmed by the number of levels on which this is nonsense and amazed by the number of people who have responded taking this seriously. Here’s a suggestion for a new discussion: How much of the current US military budget would have to be given up to guarantee the end of world hunger?
Whats the point? We cant travel faster than the speed of light so it would sit around our orbit until we blew ourselves up with it. To get anywhere worth annihilating, it would take centuries, if not millennia. Besides, who do we even want to blow up with a Death Star? As of yet, there are no alien species that has pissed us off bad enough. Or even said hi.
[...] if you can imagine quite a bit, Centives, the economics blog of students of Lehigh University, says it would cost [...]
Financing the Death Star (Stage One): https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/become-energy-producer-building-one-million-6-megawatt-wind-turbines-over-next-10-years-and-selling/JC63gjkl
why don’t we just hijack Vesta and pull it into near earth orbit and start carving
I can’t believe this – the premise is all wrong. As my Dad (a corrosion chemist, actually)pointed put to me when we saw the original movie in the theatre way back when, the walls would need to be quite thin, which is why the Princess (I can’t believe I’m writing this) knew she could laser through the wall.
So what is the Death Star made of? Air, mostly. Flimsy plastic in the middle, except for occasional stronger sections to seal off in case of emergency. (Forgot the term.)
The whole issue is the weapon anyway. Doesn’t matter what it’s housed in.
Besides, can’t you just destroy all life on the planet – which is the goal, after all – with a few H-bombs with carbon filters? Or is that old thoery disproven?
Actually there are a few other mistakes.
First its not steel or iron. It’s synthetic carbon fiber, the same high strength, stronger than steel but produced like pkastic. For the filler. Second. It costs almost nothing for a company like DSI (deep space industries) to fish for steel in asteroids. If you knew what you were doing you could build a manufacturing plant and do it for under one mil.in space. I bet that guy who owns virgin and their space program could do it for the cost of renting s mining vessel.
Has anyone considered converting the moon into a heavily modified death star? The amount of iron required would be cut down massively. Most of the construction cost would be devoted to hollowing out the myriad areas beneath the moon’s surface required to house the power source, living spaces, control spaces, defensive systems, etc… Either way, likely cheaper that creating the actual death star.
PLUS
Has anyone considered the gravitational effect constructing the death star would have on the earth? It would need to be built well away from both the earth and the moon, further complicating and extending construction time. As opposed to creating it by hollowing out the moon, which, while having dire consequences on the earth’s tides, etc, would still be more cost effective and timely than the actual death star.
What is it with the gravitational effects people keep mentioning? For the gravitational effect on earth, let’s do a quick reality check: It’s *tiny*! The diameter reported above is 140km compared to the moon’s 3500km. That’s exactly one 25th… (how handy). The volume is a multiple of the diameter to the 3rd power, so the volume of the moon is 15,625 times larger than that of the death star (earth vs. death star: ~750,000).
(unless it’s in low orbit maybe…)
In addition, the average density of the death star would likely be lower than that of the moon… Iron/steel is not even three times heavier than the moon’s material, but of course it wouldn’t be (anywhere close to) solid.
So the gravitation of the death star would probably be between 1/20,000 and 1/100,000 that of the moon – unlikely to cause tidal waves on earth
Yeah, transforming the moon might be easier than building the death star “from scratch”, but it would have its own challenges… it would be hard to navigate… and a “stationary” death star is no fun… also, as you change the moon’s mass (assuming you do), it would come closer to earth or drift away… and given the masses mentioned above, it would be hard to do anything against that…
Also, I thought we’d want to use the death star not against earth, but against other planets so it would be good if we could move it. Maybe I’m naive…
no manches mugres gringos locos mejor deberian aventarse unos tamales
bueño mexicali ….los gringos soys vosotros americaños nosotros gallegos,,,
a) all very well, The first one is reported to be 140km in diameter and it sure looks like it’s made of steel.?
steel is iron and carbon….you can make a SPHERE of pure nano robots of C….or paper or rubber and take the iron of
and you paint all with gray pidgeon ink….
But how much steel? We decided to model the Death Star as having a similar density in steel as a modern warship….no a warship in the sea needs armour plating and in space you have a electromagnetic one or what shit is…ergo a thin armour is needed
less than the two or five inche’s of naval ships
one armour plating uni molecular …only one layer of molecules you know
After all, they’re no gravity in free space except the death star gravity
Scaling up to the Death Star, this is about 900,000 tonnes of steel.9 with six zeros.
a colossal mass like yours have a heavy gravity near the center of the death star 140 km’s below
remains the technology to make nanotubules of steel
but if you have nanotubules of pure carbon in you….is only a question of time
one 1,000,000 years or two hundred millenia
the volume…see avogadro number see the density of cast iron or steel
and put 20% for internal compartimentation
Connectivity and compartimentation of the death star accounts for 10 to 30% of total mass
and you can walk over magnetic fields……the connectivity and compartimentation can be made of electrical fields
With that much mass in a Death Star, one wonders if today’s steel, or steel in general, can actually hold up to the gravitational pull that ensues in this sphere.
But money-wise: would not it be cheaper and quicker to just build a 600m-diameter Borg Sphere?
For modern warships, the cost of the hull structure (mostly steel) is only about 10% of the entire cost of the ship, including engines, systems and weapons. The actual cost of the Death Star would be therefore be ten times the reported value, in other words about $9 quintillion in today’s money.
Even more, because we’re talking about getting all this stuff into space, which today cost’s about $10,000 per pound to do, according to NASA.
“In today’s money” being the key item. Since this will take nearly 900,000 years, at a rate of inflation of 3.5 (the average rate of construction inflation over a long period of time) the actual inflation-adjusted cost would be 14,000 times higher (escalated to the mid-point of construction) by the end of the project, or 126 Sextillion. Still would be 13,000 times the earth GDP as that rises that same 3.5% per year as well.
Umm… too bad this post is wrong both in the math and the reasoning… First: We really don’t care about the cost in some 900,000-years-in-the-future prices… I really doubt we’ll still have dollars by then. The “number on the bill” really doesn’t matter – what matters is purchasing power and that is best expressed in today’s dollars because those are the ones we know best… so basically, if anything, you should point out that it would be *less* in today’s dollars if it’s spend over a long timeframe.
Then, 900,000 years of 3.5% inflation doesn’t mean prices increase by a factor of 14,000 (they do *that* in less than 280 years), they increase by a factor of 10^13,500 (10 to the 13,500th power, i.e. a 1 with 13,500 zeroes… I’d like to write down the actual number, but it’s not even worth starting with that, it would fill the screen! Yes, 900,000 years is a long time…). It’s hard to convey the size of those numbers… people think you’re off by a factor of 4 or 4,000, while actually, you’re off by a factor of 10^13,495…
And that would *not* still be 13,000 times the earth GDP because that increases by 3.5% PLUS inflation (i.e. in “real” terms). If GDP increased exactly as much as inflation, we wouldn’t gain anything… IF GDP continued to rise like that, the pure dollar amount would be pocket change in 900,000 years. Might seem weird, but think back 900,000 years… value of just 1 pound of steel (in the right shape…)… or just about any item you can buy for 1-5 dollars now…
Last but not least, I think it’s safe to assume none of the above will continue for the next 900,000 years… But hey, you started the math…
The amount of power generation and fossil fuels needed just to power the ray would be insane. I’d like to see you guys come up with the required power source, batteries, etc. calculated out! That would be hysterical.
you could us a fusion reactor that would give more than enough power
Let us not forget a little thing called gravity. How big is this thing? The size of the moon? Well it wouldn’t have to be very big for it’s own gravity to crush it. So in order to have any cavities or quarters inside of it we would need some sort of force field or anti-gravity technology. Possible, but this is several hundred years into the future before we’ll have anything like that…
Why is everybody so obsessed with gravity?? The gravitation of the death star would probably be between 1/20,000 and 1/100,000 that of the moon (see just a few posts above). Actually, a little gravity would be quite handy on a spaceship…
And seriously: “Well it wouldn’t have to be very big for it’s own gravity to crush it.” – is that so? Does the earth’s gravity crush anything we build except for cardboard houses? Is it impossible to have any cavities or quarters under the surface??
There are several things wrong with your comment, respectfully. I’ll try to break them down one by one. First, where did you come up with your estimate of the gravity of 1/20,000 that of the moon? I’m not going to scour the comments above to look for it. Whoever said it was wrong… So that’s why I asked the question of just how big is this thing going to be? If it’s about the size of the moon, or larger, which is the indication in the movie, then yes, it’s own gravity would crush it. If you put a cardboard house 3,000 miles beneath the surface, yes, it would be crushed by all the rock above it. And metal is more dense than rock…
So you know that there are several things wrong with my comment but you haven’t even read the article we’re talking about? And you know that some comment is wrong without knowing the numbers it’s based on? I just mention that respectfully, of course
And you cannot be bothered to check the comments above, which are FOUR (plus replies), btw… I can recommend Ctrl-F…
but oh well, back to the topic: The article we’re talking about says “We began by looking at how big the Death Star is. The first one is reported to be 140km in diameter”… Far from the moon, which is 3500 km in diameter. So the volume of the moon would be 15,625 larger than that of the death star. Sure metal is more dense than rock, but the moon is solid and the death star most certainly would not be.
Even without doing any math on your own, the article says that the metal in the earth would be enough to make 2 million death stars… that alone tells us a lot about its gravity…
Actually, it’s a simple force of gravity calculation. F=Gm1m2/r^2=m1g where m2 is the mass of the death star, r is the radius, G is the gravitational constant, and g is the acceleration due to gravity. Since the volume is given, using V=(4/3)pir^3, we can find the radius of the death star to be 182033-m and 1.08 x 10^15 tonnes is 1.08 x 10^18-kg.
Plugging this all in, g would be somewhere around 2.17 x 10^-6. Gravity on Earth would be about 4.5 million times greater than it would be on the Death Star, i.e. gravity would be mostly nonexistent.
One question that no one has answered is how many toilets are there on the Death Star? Or is there just a communal trough ( Or was that the Equatorial Trench ) that fed into the 2m exhaust point?…
Ok, Deathstar? Its maybe a bit to much? But still a one Battlestar like Galactica will be possible. It has just a one million tons, like ten aircraft carriers. And have classic weapons, missiles, guns and some nukes. Just need FTL drive but we can still build a body, like Chinese with aircraft carrier, they token about 20 years to build it complete…
Since the petition reached over 25.000 signatures now, I think we can expect the construction of the star to begin shortly. Great! I would be willing to pitch in 50 bucks for the funding if that helps to speed things up.
Well, the White House isn’t going to build a Death Star, but they did link (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking) to this blog.
Transported to GTO by SpaceX (54 Million for 10692 lbs) the price for the transfer of the needed steel to orbit would be 10 Trilliarden Dollar. So better build a space elevator. Or build it from asteroids – theres only enough coal on earth to makethe coke to produce 568 billion tons of steel – not nearly enough for the death star.
The transport cost would be 10*10^21, i.e. 10 Sextillion Dollars, (“Trilliarden” is German for 10^21)
Well, thank you for your research, but I think we’ll have to think outside the box here.
If the project[1] goes ahead as planned, we’ll have to begin construction by 2016, so we’ll have to change some variables…
[1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/secure-resources-and-funding-and-begin-construction-death-star-2016/wlfKzFkN
Make a death star.. put giant ass solar panels on the surface.. place it between earth and mercury. Make the Death Star into a profit.
quiet weird how i end up here i was working on similar project
project is:We need to create new pay system as TIME(money)it is means we need to get rid off all money currencies, sample of TIME ERA if you work 160 hours a month any where in the World its means you will get to your (time account)160 hours, or any hours you work for-in this World all prices will be priced on (hours,minutes,seconds)sample bread cost 1 working second, water 1 working second, house 500 working hours, energy 3 working minutes and so on…All of us live in the moment which last only 70 or 100 years(remember what you buy what you own it’s only a moment when you die 95% of us saying we want that our children to have better future so after death we leave everything for them is important then to leave for our new generation good back ground or modern time system where the future generation can look forward in money-less system on which can improve even more) at present hard money system everything you work and live for, restricting your big ideas all ideas at present comes to budget, it makes you wonder how energy resource been used from our Earth which belong to all mankind not big corporations who decide price. As soon as possible we need to write off 50 trillion Worlds debt, make United World, all army needs us protect from asteroids which can strike the Earth no more wars as wars just speed up human death compare to natural human death. All of us we need create strategy for future generation to leave planet Earth as time running out and soon Earth will be not habitable to live, Buy creating time system all of us can rebuild complete new World system change the way we think (about money)and calculate how much is our life moment worth and start living science time with massive science and medicine projects with future education for life which able to humankind to live new era of space time. Remember first money was shells from Seychelles and our human minds progress them or made thousand years later to 50 trillion debt. Our human conscious is bigger than universe and faster than speed of light so do not tell me is not possible to live without money everything is possible but all of us on this have to work together… cybermind-Episode 1- if we build 100 km space ship it will be enough work for all planet as space ship will be round like” atom hydrogen” , earth pressure energy collectors from core will help easy to lift 100km anti gravity space ship…
floating factory in space, attracting asteroids for source, delivering water and oxygen or even producing from reactions in space.
Its could be even few times cheaper.
I’m giving about 1000 years for humanity to be capable to do death star, even 100 to start the saturn moon or our(joke or not as you will), I mean take look how big progress we have made in over one century, its just mind blowing.
I greet
I think the Death Star would cost a whole lot more, because its made of more then just steel flooring.
The first Death Star took between 20 and 30 years to complete.
And that was organized by a galaxy spanning government with hyperlane infrastructure, in a culture that had mastered FTL space flight for like 8000 years.
If you where to build a DEATH STAR use it to blow up the star the planet it orbits around. It would cause much more damage. ☺☻☺☻☺☻§§
Ever heard of the Sun Crusher?
If you drink coffe/tea/soda, you are using amphetamines to help your work.
Coffee does not have any amphetamines in it. Amphetamine and Caffeine are different classes of stimulant.
13.000 times would be if you’d pay it at once. But if you can spread the cost over 800.000 years, it’s just 1.5% of the worlds GDP / per year. And think about all the people that would have a job. No more ppl without a job for 800.000 years.
Lets’ start building one tomorrow.
13,000 times the GDP I guess these are not union workers. Sounds more like the real cost of Obama Care
hahahah funny =)
or just half of the US debt…
I have figured out how to fund this! Apple has more money in there reserve than the US, steal all Apple’s money and we are good to go!
Hollow out the moon to use as a Death Star so we can legitimately say, “That’s no moon, that’s a space station.”
Man,it’s a good thing Dick Cheney never became president….this project would have been built by Halliburton.
Why has not anyone thought of this. The Empire controlled mulitudes of planets in countless star systems right…then why in the hell are we concerned about Earth.. They have all the resources they need to accomplish this daunting taks
How about we colonize Mars first and use its iron. Hasn’t anyone thought of the fact that the red planet is red because of the ridiculous amount of iron there?
Excellent idea, plus the lower gravity will require less energy to lift the iron into orbit.
u could also use iron from aseroids
More importantly Mars has a very thin atmosphere so getting loads off the surface is much, much easier than on Earth.
Now we can build a Death Star with Ludicrous speed!
REI is great if you can get a deal.
All these figures are wrong, according to Wookieepedia, the 1st death star was 160 km in diameter and the 2nd was 900km in diameter.
Most of it will be for housing the reactor for hyper drive and laser.
So I believe using weight or mass to scale up cost is wrong.
I think volume will be better.
It will definitively not be made of steel.
I propose carbon fiber.
To scale up lets use the volume of a f-18 (most it is for the engine and made of carbon fiber).
Thus
Volume Death star = 2+e16 m3
volume F-18 = 355 m3
equivalent to 5.6+e13 F-18 @ $50 millions each.
cost of Deathstar = $2.8+e21
Let me see if I can get a loan.
I like your idea. We need to get this going.
i shall back you! i have $25 in my piggy bank, and with a little ingenuity, we can get $30! ah HA! watch out (princes Laus home planet) here we come!!!!
>:)
Dude an f-18 isnt 355*355*355 m big that is a HUGE frickin plane
355*355*355 is 44738875 cubic meters because of math. 355 cubic meters is a 7m x 7m x 7m cube. sounds about right.
Could you share the calculation on how you found that the Earth could be used to make 2 billion death stars. I am getting a different number.
Here is how I am finding my number:
1 Earth Mass = 5.9742 × 10^24 kilograms
According to your source, 36.4% of the Earth is iron
http://www.worldofmolecules.com/elements/iron.htm
36.4% of 1 Earth Mass = 2.1746088 x 10^24 kg
By your own calculations, the death star is approximately 1.08 x 10^15 tonnes of steel (iron)
I believe you divided these number to get 2 billion. However, we need to convert kg to tonnes.
1 kg = .00110231131 tonnes
This means that the iron in the Earth is 2.1746088 x 10^24 kg x .00110231131 tonnes/kg = 2.22487075 x 10^21 tonnes
dividing this by the death star measurement gives us 2,060,065.51 death stars
Please let me know if I am missing something. I would like to share this with my students.
ur on crack
Dude that is my math teacher
Dude, don’t be saying ppl r on crack. That’s just rude, and 2, he’s also my math teacher!
Come on man! Don’t go around saying people are on crack, ESPECIALLY not MY math teacher! He’s got a way better comment than yours. Let’s not bring drugs into this.
google paul erdos. he was notorious for his amphetamine use to help his work.
Yo! that my teacher! Don’t call people like that! That ain’t cool!
He said that it was 2 million and not 2 billion and it was a mistake.
ehm….
1t = 1000kg
==> 1kg = 0,001t
Why are we using steel from the earth’s core. It seems that something like the death star is best built in orbit, and while we are imagining construction of a giant battle station, why not use the iron and heavy metals located in our asteroid belt? Seems like a lot less work than most heavy steel from earth into orbit.
The asteroid belt is VERY far away (betweeen Mars and Jupiter).
Well, yes it is far away. But it also avoids the problem of having to lift that iron to orbit, and, for bonus points, if an asteroid is moved to a near-sun orbit, it can be smelted much more inexpensively with some (very) large reflectors.
Alas, I don’t think it could be spin-cast, nor blown like a glass vessel.
In any event, there would be definite effects of scale involved.
also as you lift the iron up into orbit you’r making earth that much lighter….
I’m not sure I would take the iron from the Earth’s crust. There are plenty of Metalic Asteroids, which would actually be easier to use because it’s already up in space and wouldn’t have to be lauched. And the energy could come from the sun, which would mean you’d probably produce it a different place, which would be good for gravitational reasons. The great trick would be getting enough coal in space. We have lots of it, but getting it up there would be expensive.
I also disagree with the use of a warship’s statistics. The death star had large amounts of open space inside, whereas a warship is pretty tightly packed. I’m not sure about the hull densitiy, but there would also be no need to make the inside walls particularly thick.
As for why bother with the calcuation, BECAUSE IT’S FUN!
If living a Resource Based Economy, we could have less trouble. Why to build a Death Star in a RBE, anyway…
Sorry about the English.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/film/article14415029.ab
I found this blog-post by reading this article on the biggest newssite in Sweden. This was acctually one of the few times I discovered something useful there….
I thought it would be really interesting to estimate how many workers the Death Star would require. If one uses the same comparisons you do( with HMS Illustrious) and relate the amount of workers to operate that ship, I would say that it would require more staff to manage the Death Star than now currently living on earth. Am I totally wrong here?
I don’t know I got a pop of 33 to 34 trillion which seems way too many. But I checked it with both pop/ton of steel and pop/volume calculations. Can’t tell what I may have done wrong. What did you get? Anyhow aside from that I would say that in “reality” the population density wouldn’t be analogous based on volume from and aircraft carrier to a deathstar. I think the pop density of the latter would be less. Even though it is so much larger I don’t think there would be an equal increase in things such as sensor arrays, communications etc based on logic of necessity and surface area/volume from a carrier to a deathstar. I mean the surface areas would be manned but what possible jobs could exist for the vast interior spaces other than some reactor personel and maybe hanger bays.
In the SW realm, there are tons of worlds and systems to take materials from. It doesn’t all need to come from one planet there. Empire used slave labor as well, and they built the thing out in space – no need to “launch it” to get it out there.
Robot labor. Robots mine and refine steel from the asteroids. Robots build more robots. It scales itself up exponentially.
The cost is more about management and defense of the shipyards and the initial investment to start the work. The longer it takes the more it costs because the people who can manage a project of that size and complexity are really expensive and it will take a lot of really smart and motivated people to get a job that big done right.
Probably have to get a gigantic mining lease too, to get permission to extract that much ore from the system where it is built. So it’s not like the materials are free even if they do come from the asteroid belt, someone wants to get paid for them if you remove them from their system forever.
why go through the trouble of building a death star? the same technology to propel the death star can be used to propel the earth through space.once you got the reactor beam and deflector sheilds working,use the proplusion system to move the earth through space and start destroying planets.
LOL
Well, you have to encase the earth so we don’t all freeze to death after we depart our orbit around our solar heater (the sun).
PWNing planets would be fun!
i like this guy!
once you destroy just one planet you could use the materials from the destroyed planet to build a whole fleet of Death stars, and you would have defenses for the capitol planet (Earth) in the Galactic Empire! MAWHAHA!!>:)
That’s pocket money to me
Sent at 10:50
Hey – who are you…Bill Gates?
You an evil despotic egomaniac bent on ruling the galaxy… Slaves… You are going to build your weapon with slaves working long hours, with little food, and privileges for the overseers who will keep the rest in line. This will greatly reduce your costs. Plus the iron will be mined from asteroids that no one owns. The only real costs would be the engineers and guards along with any fixtures and fittings that coud not be built by your slave labor force that you actually have to pay for. Slaves, a huge cost reduction benefit, just ask Apple.
You forgot the best building material of all,,,, Unobtainium.
lol
Nazi Death Star
So the First Galactic Empire’s grand scale weapon might be beyond our grasp, but how about the earthly Third Reich of yesteryear. If pop culture has taught us anything, it’s that if the Nazi’s didn’t build the craziest, most sinister and weird stuff first, you can be damn sure it was at least on the drawing board: http://www.shockandahh.com/2012/02/even-nazis-had-death-star-almost.html
Why not building an entire storm of Executor (Darth Vader’s Big Dreadnought )??If you consider the quantity of Iron, commodities, troops and energy needed for Ds,building them will be very less expensive because of scale size production, very useful considering the warp-mode, and as destructive as DS. So build more with the same resources…more powerful spacefleet
A better method of estimating cost is to use a similar structure then scaling it to the new project. The closest structure to the Death Star is not an Invincible-class light aircraft carrier, rather a Nimitz-class supercarrier.
Thus, with rounding to make the calculations simpler:
Death Star: 1.0e15 tonnes
Nimitz Carrier: 1.0e5 tonnes
1 Death Star = 1.0e10 Nimitz Carriers
Nimitz Carrier Cost = $4.5e9 ($4.5 Billion) or $45,000 per tonne
Death Star Cost = $4.5e9 * 1.0e10 = $4.5e19 = $45,000,000,000,000,000,000
Original Estimate: $852,000,000,000,000,000, about 50 times less than scaling a Nimitz Carrier.
This estimate is for the Death Star only and excludes support fighters and crew costs.
wouldnt technology advance enough to just build the deathstar-nano? If you build it smaller you wouldnt have to waste so much steel and you can even include an mp3 player etc
This is the very best comment so far.
does NASA know about this?
They don’t need to
Admittedly I gave up and didn’t exactly read all the comments, but it seems obvious that the Death Star was built largely out of polymers and composites.
The Death Star was built primarily of permacrete and durasteel.
This is all very good and well, but I think the fundamental error in all of this math resides in the use of today’s GDP analysis and steel prices. It is clearly stated that all of this happened a long long time ago.
Also, it wasn’t anywhere near here. :p
I really don’t get this at all… Why build the death star when the world is already scared to death that the polar ice caps might melt and drown us all. Wouldn’t it make more sense to calculate how much it would cost to build the “Laser” from the movie Austin Powers and then threaten to melt the ice caps in a couple of weeks? The cost to terror ratio would be far greater in this instance. Not to mention the thing looks like a gigantic penis so you could possibly find several congress members to allocate ear marks for the project as modern art before they realized what it was really going to be used for. You might also get sponsorship deals or naming rights from Virgin Galactic and Trojan as well. The irony of such a weapon would be legendary.
You just can’t beat the thrill of blowing stuff up.
Well put…
So is this just the cost of the steel? What about lifting it into orbit (currently reported as $8800 per kg)? I suppose that as you dismantle the core the gravitational force will be reduced, but let’s be serious(!) for a moment:
You’re going to get your steel from the asteroid belt, not from the bottom of a gravity well. You’re going to smelt it in a solar furnace, not in an Earth-bound foundry.
So what was the point of this?
do something with your life Star Wars is just a movie just to let you know
obtain an imagination and don’t read things you don’t care about. problem solved.
You are typing on a personal computer, which is the product of the imagination of someone about 50 years ago. Connected to other computers all over the world, which again was imagined by someone about 45 years ago. Star Wars, Star Trek, the writings of Asimov, to name a few of the tens of thousands of fictional works out there with a science subject matter inspired nearly all the stuff you take for granted now. So perhaps YOU might should get a life by reading a book or two.
Luke actually said this..? :]
Don’t you have something more interesting in your life ?
Yep
Its shoving light sabers up peoples who name is lukes’, ass 
. But that will have to wait. Right now, All I care about is reading through the logical comments of gravity wells vs. asteroid/lunar mining, GDP and steel prices, kilograms current rockets can lift to LEO, (btw, its volume you really need to worry about), and potential designs for power generation. I am sure you interesting thing to do is sit in front of the computer with one hand in a fried chicken bucket and the other on your dick. Ours is engineering, computers, and logistics. Please go back in your corner you friendless pity creating human being.
This is silly the Iron isn’t the problem the carbon is, where are you going to get 5400000000000 tons of carbon & if it’s just made of steel wont it just rust away.
There are other problems like the cost of licensing the technology.
You wall also have the MAFIAA trying to take control of it like they are trying to take control of the Internet today.
Bovski… do you know what rust is??
There is no oxygen in space. It cant rust.
Also I’m guessing that its probably not just regular carbon steel. More likely it’s some kinda star warsy space steel. Who knows what kind of alloys you can make once you’ve colonized thousands of star systems?
No oxygen? What do they all breathe inside the blasted contraption?
Space is a vacuum. There is no air. That’s why you need a pressurized space suit in space. But you can put oxygen INSIDE the ship. That’s how NASA does it fyi…
And guess what. Even with oxygen inside the ship, there’s this nifty stuff called PAINT. You might have heard of it. It makes your house and car all colorful. But it also prevents the metal on your car from rusting. There are industrial grades of paint that prevent the steel I-beams in buildings and factories from rusting. They use it on Naval ships too. That’s how they keep that aircraft carrier from rusting.
No oxygen in space= The outside can’t rust.
Inside is painted or coated= Inside won’t rust.
Obviously there isn’t much oxygen in the near vacuum of space. My point was that the entire inside of the Death Star is clearly filled with oxygen (and probably a lot of nitrogen.) The statement that it *can’t* rust is quite incorrect. The statement that it *won’t* rust is optimistic at best. Even with coatings, iron or steel will still rust, just much, much more slowly than without coatings.
What about copper there is gonna be miles of wire in this thing if it has lights and switches that crap costs 2.00 a lb or more
Holy crap. I wonder how much the paint costs? For that matter, what about the cost of floor coverings, furniture, light fixtures, tractor beam on/off handles (that sound is playing in your head now, isn’t it?), levitating syringe-laden torture bots, repairing blaster damage, fixing jammed trash compactors…
There are a lot of other problems with the scale of the Death Star. With an assumed diameter of 140 km, it would have approx. 3×10^9 km^2 of floor space, or about 20 times the land area of the Earth’s surface. Who is going to fill up all that space? I’m guessing it much be mostly empty. And even if only 1/10 of it is filled with air, that’s still 1×10^15 m^3 of air. The Earth’s atmosphere is 4×10^18 m^3, so filling the Death Star with air would require about 1/4000 of the Earth’s atmosphere. It seems to me it could be just as effective at a fraction of the size, and wouldn’t require billions of people to operate.
ERROR: the term millennia means thousands of years, so in this case it would be 0.8 millennia
He said 800,000 years
.8 millenia = 800 years, not 800,000
ERROR: You’re wrong and the article is correct, 800 thousand years = 800 millennia, which is what the article says. Fail.
Uh, no….833315 years/1000 years/millenia = 833 millenia. Learn how to use units
Using this logic, the cost of the aircraft carrier would be only something like $17,355,000 (i.e. the cost of the steel). Since the actual cost of a new aircraft carrier (we were using today’s steel prices, remember, so not the original cost of the HMS Illustrious) is in the ballpark of $22 billion (with a ‘b’), then perhaps the Death Star cost estimate might also be off by at least three orders of magnitude. Oh, and this is before you consider operational costs, which come in at something like half a million dollars a day.
It’s strange! ….I work for a satellite systems provider and we did a study on this quite recently. Thing is, the money isn’t really that much of a problem (where do you think all those losses in the financial sector really went !?). The real problem is getting the staff! Finding people who are ready to push buttons and bring on armageddon just isn’t as easy as it used to be (we did have a few ex-politicians apply though). The pay’s OK, if you don’t mind your Ferrari being disguised as an asteriod, conditions not bad (if you don’t mind the company of droid clones and C3PO bleating in your ear all the time). Last I heard, there was talk of offering out laser swords as an incentive but the guy behind the idea accidently sliced his legs off in a whilst making an enthusiatic gesture! Watch this space – one day it will be where the Earth was!
Windows or Mac?, What will run the Death Star.
Mac
Linux!!!
Solaris!!! What else for a star…
Damn right!
Illumos surely
I’d say that an entirely new OS would have to be written. None of those would be able to handle that system.
It would give a whole new meaning to “Blue Screen of Death….”
Chuck Norris
Windows ME. Duh.
It could be run on a 486dx. I mean, NASA’s made it to the moon and back with less.
No it couldn’t there are a whole lot more systems that need to be run like shields, main weapon, secondary weapons, power distribution, tractor beam controls, lighting, hyper-drive, sub-light engines, radar, weapon aiming, fighter fueling, and targeting systems
Duh? It’s Droid!
But is it the Droid they are looking for?
☺☻☺☻LOL§
OS/2 Warp, duh
If it was possible, if we had the tech. how much would it cost to build an actual TARDIS?
Nothing. Cause and effect have little significance when you can travel through time. If you spent money developing and building a TARDIS you could send it back to yourself before you spent a penny so it would be free or at the very most the cost of a cup of tea.
The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast intersteller distances in a mere nothingth of a second without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.
It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government’s research team on Damogran.
This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood – and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molicules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this – partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sort of parties.
Another thing they couldn’t stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually imposssible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particulary unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:
If, he thought to himself, such amachine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one, is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea … and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generater out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynced by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartarse.
Nice one
But you should cite the source, which is the Douglas Adams’ book The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To Galaxy.
Most people reading this would probably know, but it’s just good manners.
NOTHING!!! If you actually have seen the show you would know that the TARDIS(s) are living.NOT machines!!! Id10t
Just my thoughts,
The cost of steel used is the commodity price, not the production price, I would imagine with the volume of steel involved in a single project a commodities market wouldn’t function and it would revert to cost plus. Also the time and cost of conventionally mined steel isn’t comparable to core derived steel. Putting aside discussions on the composition of the Earths core, it is, in effect ready smelted iron, you just need to tap it off, treat, roll or cast it as you wish. Once you had access to the earth’s core steel would be cheap and freely available.
I was also thinking that core iron could be considered an energy source offsetting some of the costs.
My final thought for the day was not on the feasibility of construction, but on manning. As you would live within the volume of the sphere you could get rather lonely at your station, assuming 4m between floors and also assuming half the area was taken up by equipment, you would still have a greater area that the entire land surface area of the Earth.
We are just talking about steel here. What about electrical components, plumbing, and not to mention the trash compactor. While I do appreciate the fun in trying to “recreate” the economics of a Death Star, I think the math took a ride on the lazy river here. I mean come on, did the HMS Illustrious just cost what the steel and iron cost? No. In addition to all of the missing components that the new Death Star would have to be retrofitted with, you would still have to launch all of the supplies into space and assemble them.
Yes, fair enough to all that. But I’m not sure the Evil Empire would build it using money of any sort. I reckon it’s a ‘things get done or else’ and so there might not even be a cost of steel, all steel being property of the Empire etc. However, trash compactores cost money, no matter how evil your empire.
You would be better-off using iron from a nearby body, like the moon, which has a much lower gravity. The technology is coming soon to be able to make atmospheric elevators to transport the materials outside of the gravitational field of the planet without using rockets. This would also be useful for getting workers up to the death star as it is being built.
I think the the focus on just the steel requirements served to illustrate just how bananas the idea would be to construct a Death Star. “If it takes all this just to come up with the steel, imagine how much everything else would cost!” That sort of thing.
After all, there’s the obvious stuff: sustainable atmosphere, artificial gravity, deflector shield, etc.
The real problem here is that the Empire had access to iron mined from the entire galaxy, not just one planet. If there is a higher supply of a product, the price will be less, if I’m correct. If we were using a galactic economy, the price of steel might be less. And then production would probably be mostly done by droids, with perhaps minimal human/organic supervision, greatly decreasing the cost of construction, and decreasing the amount of time required for construction (since you can always use a few million more droids and not have to pay any more money than before, aside from making the droids, I suppose, but yeah). Am I right?
Great fun and nice work guys!
Now I wonder when that will build real lightsaber. Then I see advantage!
I Don’t thing a Lightsaber could deflect a death star super laser!
I Forgot to add the k in Think
I know no one is going to read this comment.
HOWEVER… that will not stop me from injecting my thoughts on the economic climate of a fictional situation. At last I checked the Empire had a near endless supply of slave labor (clones) coming out the factory gates. Has a free labor source been factored into the cost of the DeathStar?? I mean you would have to feed them I imagine but lets be real, you wouldnt have to feed them that well, they’re slaves and worse, they’d be clone slaves!
The cost they discussed was only for the steel. So it would actually go way up if you factored in the cost of room in board for however many millions of clones.
you would not have to pay for room and board for slaves.
I read your comment.
me too
I READ YOUR COMMENT TOO!!!!!☺☻§§
How much for JUST 1??? Why does this article keep discussing 2 billions death stars?
You can just divide the number by 2 billion.
The cost *IS* for one, as are the time estimates. The 2 Billion only refers to how many Death Stars could be made out of all the iron on earth.
THANK you. That’s exactly what I was thinking. An interesting subject and all he talks about is raw steel cost and 2 billion death stars and how difficult it would be to get all that iron out of the earth. YOUR ONLY TRYING TO GET 2 DEATH STARS WORTH OF IRON OUT OF THE EARTH.
If you could use the moon as a foundation I think you could save some money.
What’s all this talk about steel? Advances in Lego technology will allow the Death Star construction to come in on time and under budget.
You are a bunch of negative nabobs bitching! We are talking about Darth Vader here! What DV wants, he gets!
Which one you value more, your ability to BREATH or your MONEY!? Yeah, you guys did forget that one, didn’t you
Plus he got hundreds of planets under his heavenly power, so if us bitchy earthlings won’t chip in, there are plenty of planets to choose from.
What you actually meant was “What Moff Tarkin wants, he gets!”
Actually.. What Senator Palpatine wants…
*runs*
I just wanted to say to everyone that is saying that the Death Star wasn’t practical, it was never meant to be. It’s a weapon of terror. Show up, blow up a moon or neighboring uninhabited planet, demand fealty. End of discussion. Who’s gonna say no when your home is literally getting bombarded with meteorites that used to be part of your moon?
I just find the number of comments made interesting. And a lot of them are redundant. Almost as i