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.
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Man,it’s a good thing Dick Cheney never became president….this project would have been built by Halliburton.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
does NASA know about this?
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.
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.
Don’t you have something more interesting in your life ?
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.
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.
Duh? It’s Droid!
But is it the Droid they are looking for?
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.
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 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.
I read your comment.
me 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 if the person posting didn’t take the time to read what others had already said. Maybe it’s just me, but knowing what’s been said already is important.
And my two cents:
Building a death star might possibly be good for the economy, but it might also lead to civil unrest. Even more so than now. All I know is I wanna work on building the thing if they ever decide to do it.
Regarding civil unrest, the easiest way to prevent that is to ensure that every Imperial world gets a piece of the contract for manufacturing one of the components of the Death Star. It also would ensure that the project will never get cancelled, never get held to budget, and never be required to prove it actually works.
Oh, you left out a bunch of stuff…
First of all, you have to grease the local for the sudden zoning problems that always come up.
Then there’s the kickbacks to the carpenters.
And if you plan on using any cement in this building Im sure the teamsters would like to have a little chat with you, and that will cost you.
Don’t forget a little something for the building inspectors.
There’s the long-term costs, such as waste disposal.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with who runs that business, but i assure you its not the boy scouts.
now if you will excuse me, I have to cancel a check to Kurt Vonnegut
Nicely done!
From one film-nerd to another; Kudo’s on incorporating Thorton Mellon’s business 101 from the “Back to School” film! Rodney Dangerfield rocks and would have made an awesome Dengar in my opinion! (See ESB, bounty hunter scene)
So – what part of malevolent Empire is unclear?
Darth Vader: “Chief Inspector, did it pass?”
Chief Inspector: “No way – your project planning and over site sucks!
<> ((Thud!))
Vader: “New Chief Inspector, did it pass?”
New Chief Inspector: “Yes, sir, with flying colors!”
Historical Reference – See: Great Wall of China – Ming Dynasty
Oh you left out a bunch of stuff…
First you got to grease the local politicians
First of all, you have to grease the local politicians
for the sudden zoning problems that always come up.
Then there’s the kickbacks to the carpenters.
And if you plan on using any cement in this buildingIm sure the teamsters
would like to have like to have a little chat with you,and that’ll cost you.
And don’t forget a little something for the building inspectors.
Then there’s the long-term costs,such as waste disposal.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with who runs that business, but I assure
it’s not the boy scouts.
Now will you excuse me? I have to cancel my check to Kurt Vonnegut
So nice he had to say it twice.
ah…that was a FAIL on my part. i didnt hit refresh the first time and thought it didnt post. so i had to retype it
This article is full of crap on so many levels, of which I will mention only a few on this forum.
1) There is no way that it would take 833,000 years to build the first Death Star because it was constructed within a single generation, as Darth Vader (formerly Anakin Skywalker) was a young man when construction began and in his mid-to-late forties when it was finished.
2) Titanium is lighter and stronger than steel.
3) Who in the hell made up the 140 km figure and how did they arrive to that conclusion? Since Luke and the gang seemed to cover the distance quite quickly, I have serious doubts about the final figures.
4) I doubt the effects of a proton torpedo veruses steel or titanium were considered.
5) You dudes need to get laid-BIG TIME.
5) You dudes seriously need to get laid-BIG TIME.
P.S.
The second Death Star was built in only six years.
well for starters, the empire had waaay more than one planet that they could simultaneously mine for resources, this considerably shortens the time needed for construction. along with this there are more people available simultaneously to construct it.
2. that has no application to this at all
3. there isnt a real figure, all the dimensions are based off of conjecture but 140 is about the middle of the spectrum
4. the proton torpedoes never hit the actual metal, the went straight to the reactor core, causing the explosion
5.quite possible
5.redundant but quite possible
Actually if you know your lore, it was only 4 years from the end of ANH to the beginning of ROTJ
If you know your lore, the Endor deathstar was started during the construction of the first one. (they weren’t built sequentially)
These numbers of cost/time to build a Death Star is based off of what we have here on Earth. Obviously it is easier and faster to build the Death Star when you have an inter-galactic empire at your disposal. Millions of planets and floating rocks to tactically acquire such resources. Lastly, it’s a movie. Until someone makes an actual lightsaber, then maybe I can belive someone can make a Death Star faster than 800,000 years.
Wait, are we talking union workers? If so, the cost just went up another 130 x GDP and the timeframe extended another 1-2 centuries.
Explain how to construct a Death Star and/or why Star Trek is the better franchise to me, and I’ll explain what a vagina feels like to you. Tit for tat, so to say.
Geek girl vagina is sooooo much better than bar skank vagina, so I’ll pass.
if you really think the spectrum of poon is limited to geek-girl vaj and skank vaj, you have not experienced the many wonders of the world my friend
So you touched your little sister when you were both little tykes – big deal. I can tell you how one TASTES, recently.
Heh – amazing that three decades into the high tech revolution someone still believes tech geeks can’t get laid
The best part of this article is the comments. Star Wars is fiction, geeks!
There are so many unknowns, such as the actual main weapon itself, the power-core design, and the interface between them.
Also, the density figure could be refined by comparing shots form Star Wars revealing the interior of the Death Star, to shots of the interior of an aircraft carrier. We may find that the Death Star is indeed less dense, and actually less equipment-laden than a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.
By reverse engineering the weapon based on the discussion of it’s destruction-potential in Star Wars, we can take those figures and, with modern laser technology, find out what we would have to build, at minimum, to actually destroy a planet. That would help w/ the weapons system. Then the power system would follow in a similar way: what is the probable crew count, based on what we see in the movies/book? What is the average power consumption per person, assuming very efficient lighting? What is the requirement going to be to kep the weapon in standby mode, or provide the weapon with power enough to fire? All while powering the base? This will help give a ballpark estimate of the required power system size/cost.
For purposes of realistic build-potential… we could calculate the cost of building a DS one one-hundredth the size, which could be put into orbit around our planet, using our latest laser technology, nuclear power technology, and space technology. This mini-DS would provide elation to nerds, a quick-strike potential to hostel nations or incoming asteroids, and a steppign stone to the real deal.
One final thing- the statement that it would actually take that long to extract the necessary iron should not put us off from the goal… if the world agreed that we needed a Death Star… Iron Ore would see unprecidented extraction rates as nations united to develop/ship as much as possible to the build location (china). If the mini-DS were completed first, then nations could be forced to unite in the material provision for such an undertaking.
The main difficulty is getting all systems to integrate well. Again, the mini would help pave a way for something that could possibly scale up. Assembly would be difficult, and getting the components into space would require such a massive effort. One method would be to construct a machine that turns large iron slugs into beams… and send it into space. Then, design a railgun capable of sending slugs of iron into space. Predict the path of the round and use electromagnetic power to draw it to the receiving bay where it is transferred into an iron beam or some sort of component… just a thought. A nuclear-reactor powered electromagnet would do the job, along with a nuclear-reactor powered railgun of proper size, with advanced telemetry instruments, all of which we basically have or have the means to produce.
The way I see it, the cost is not in the materials but the construction. It would realistically take enslavement of nations to produce the weapon in a timely manner (under 300-1,000 yrs) through various full-time space programs… but not until the means of construction have been designed, prototyped, tested and proven (another 100 yrs)…
and then what? then the richest nerds would draw straws to see who gets to be darth vader… a new world order emerges, rebels take control of the railgun and start punching holes in the deathstar in an act of rebellion, and the death star cannot shoot back with full force for fear of destroying the earth that supplies it’s many commodities, troops etc…
It amazes me that no one actually understands the construction techniques and materials involved.
The DS is actually a balloon made of super-elastic-metal-plastic. It is expanded using the flatulence of 1.089×10^24 invisible pink unicorns. The required gas is “harvested” by having “little people” gently squeeze the abdominal area of the unicorns.
As we all know super-elastic-metal-plastic is easily manufactured using common household chemicals. Please see our website at http://www.rentaunicorn.com for details on bulk unicorn rentals and sales.
According to the calcualtions of my scratch-built quantum computer (see “How to build a quantum computer using tinfoil and Llama spittle” on wikipedia), the total cost of construction is equal to the annual GDP of Greece or US$ 6.98 for those of us not yet on the metric system.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/?p=689
It’s useless weapon to begin with. There a lot easier ways to destroy a planet than building a large slow moving target like the DS, especially one that was easily destroyed by a simple shot through an obvious porthole weakness. P**s poor engineering and design, I’d say.
Hell, in Star Trek Capt. Kirk killed a planet killer that was far more effective than the DS, it could travel at warp speed and fueled itself on planetary rubble so it could theoretically could go for centuries. It Kirk could could kill a successful planet killer using a wrecked starship, he’d of made short work of the illconceived Death Star.
Besides, for the price you could build a massive fleet of Constitution class Starships the would be far more effective. If the Death Star was such a great idea, the Klingons would have thought it up long ago.
Yes, another example of George Lucas’ crappy writing and plot construction and why Star Trek is superior to Star Wars.
Flame away.
And Why Star Wars has made so much more money and had so much more impact on society than Star Trek? But thank you for playing.
How much each franchise made is irrelevant. The article refers to the cost of a machine. Since the tactical use of such a device is relevant to the discussion, so within the context of the Lucas films, it is salient to point out the cost versus efficacy of such a weapon, which even according to the Star Wars films in which they appeared, they were hugely expensive and mostly ineffective. A waste of resources.
Sorry you missed the entire point, but I am happy to direct you back to the issue at hand.
If your desire to discuss the relative quality of a film as it relates to its box office receipts, I’d point out that ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Metropolis’, ’2001: A Space Odyssey’, ‘Alien’ and even ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (to name a few) were far better written, acted and filmed movies than Star Wars but were not as financially successful. I think the difference here is Star Wars appeals to a vicseral crowd that likes to see things blow up and buy toys as opposed to folks who appreciate good film.
Your comment clearly identifies which you group you belong to. Have a nice day.
Yes, Star Wars has made more $$ – much more, I believe. Cool, happy for George. But Star Trek has proved to be almost prescient with the tech that first started on the show and has since become reality. And that is still ongoing, as tricorders are being worked on and are almost here, for example.
Happy to have them both.
The cool thing about the original 3 movies was that it didn’t try to explain that which doesn’t need to be explained. It was a sword and sorcery adventure in space – merging two tired and creatively moribund genres together to form something new and exciting.
Startrek was in many ways the opposite: trying to explain every little thing with pseudoscientific sounding bull poopie, even where there is no need for such explanations to advance the story: a soap opera in space. Detected quantum fluctuations in the space-time manifold? Reverse the polarity! (This criticism applies much more to the next generation et al than to the original series).
But then along came the midichlorians. Ah well.
This doesn’t make any sense, it’s a work of fiction, genius. Lucas didn’t construct the DS himself.
I only commented on the thing in the context in which it appeared. If you want to throw barbs at folks for taking the time to note the absurdity of such an object, you’d be better off ripping the good folks at Centives and Lehigh University for taking the time to calcuate the costs of the Death Star.
In fact, Lucas did construct the thing in terms of writing and film making. And yes, it is fiction, as is the idea that George Lucas is a good writer.
Sorry, I like star trek but the only reason the ds was destroyed was because a Jedi used the force to make an otherwise impossible shot. So unless Jim or jean Luke Target wamprats back home and have the messiah of the jedi for a dad their probably not gonna do to well. Plus, the enterprise really wasn’t what you would call a warship and would probably be the first to go… If you wanted to stand a chance your best bet would be a tag team Klingon/romulin full frontal assault, and good luck with that…
It astounds me that people exist who believe they have to explain that 1.star wars is a work of fiction and 2. Lucus didnt build an actual death star. I bet the little kids love you around Christmas.
I wonder if Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas ever met. The Death Star may have been a rip-off of an early Borg prototype.
Effective? Nope. Practical? Hardly. But then Star Wars is a Flash Gordon-ish space opera filled with canyons that exist for no reason other than for our hero to swing across with the damsel in distress and Flying Castles in the air and kung-fu monks with laser swords and all manner of crazy shit.
And you can bet OSHA will be there telling you what you can & can’t do.
Also, what are the permitting costs for a project this big? Even after it’s done you will still have to wait two weeks for the building inspector to show up to give you your C.O.
You could use an easy loophole here, though. Space is outside of OSHA’s jurisdiction. Done and done.
Who says we even need to make it out of steel? I mean .. it’s not like anyone else would have something to counter attack it, well atleast not for long. Let’s just make it like a hyundai and stuff it with plastic.
I could get through the 124 comments and counting… What I did see was very strange approach to the scale of this creation. You are looking at it all wrong. There would be no contracting disputes, labor worries and supplies shortage as we would know it. This is the EMpire we are talking about. They have installed Imperial Govenors in every sector. They don’t just have a few ships they have hundreds of thousands of ships. The simple fact is because the empire is building this it would get done with little knowledge and without interruption. Whole systems would be dedicated to building this station… WHole systems would be mined to build the station. Don’t look at this as an enterprise of a free market. Look at it as if Nazi Germany had built the Death Star. Since George modeled the Imperials off the Nazi’s it is quite easy to use them as a scaled down model of what would happen.
Lots of good ideas about how to do it here… I just hope we invest in good exhaust port covers.
Can you imagine if the the public service was asked to build the deathstar.
First of all open tenders for construction, would go to the cheapest manufacturer, and then your problems start.
Sorry we can’t get the laser operational until we get a laser safety certificate, we don’t want anyone injured. Its a frikken laser that is supposed to injure people.
The issuing of pass cards to get on board for the sub contractors, Sorry we can’t let you on board, because we need to do a security safety check. Subbies employed who aren’t getting paid, dodgy Baklavian labor that are underpaid, don’t speak english and leak green goo everywhere.
As for the operational software /shudder. “Prepare the laser, FIRE ALL WEAPONS”!! “sorry, the weapon system is off line for tuesday night maintenaince”. The interface software doesn’t talk to each other, and the turbo lift system software is 2 years date, because it doesn’t interface with the security software, the weapons system causes the communications system to crash, and the work around is only one system can be used at a time, as for the internal public transport ticketing, forget it.
the TIE fighter fleet, “LAUNCH ALL FIGHTERS”, “er we are waitnig for part number x442 sdf w-mark 2 which are on back order for 18 months from the corellian ship yards and we have been canibilising the fleet and have only 3 available, the mark 3′s are grounded due to a incident taht air services are currently investigating, the report should be available in 3 months.
public sector catering? death star canteen comes to mind.
Unionised labor, good luck with that.
Electricians, welders, plumbers that actually turn up.
It would be an administrative nightmare.
Not to mention the fine for safety infringment for not building a rail near the operation control, its a long way down…
What would be cool is if there was a working Death-Star necklace (I could just blast people that bug me!)
Beltbuckle! Then you could hip-thrust while blasting!!!
Nano tubes most likely would be used and the Death Star probably was created out of technology that we as a race have not yet conceived.
Lest we forget:
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….a great adventure took place…..”
OK technology that does not yet exist in this part of the universe
But I think we can deduct that at least the Death Star is created out of technology that we don’t have. A death Laser would probably melt steel when firing.
Big is not better. Just as current size of Aircraft Carriers is outdaed, so was the Death Star oversized for Drama. All you need are several small mobile stations with maybe a larger Mother Ship that is defensable and even able to move.
Smaller Robotic Drones controled from a mother ship with smaller but more powerful weapons is the future of warfare. The smaller the craft the easier it will be to move,conceal, and defend. Also the more you can produce.
The most important defense will be of your computer electronics. A strong nuclear magnetic wave that is not shielded could disrupt memory and electronics. Also, the smaller and lighter, the easier to maintain orbet.
If you want to maintain your free society, you best get to work on this or we will control you and your activities from orbet with the system that we are developing.
There are several assumptions here that need to be questioned. First of all, this assumes that private contractors will build the death star. I think this is probably wrong, because this has “government contract” written all over it — likely for job creation purposes as well. This means that there will be several cost over-runs at least 2x or 3x the original cost, and you will likely get a Death Planet or a Death Dwarf Star if your contractors are really good.
Secondly, you have to assume that in the time that the original Death Dwarf Star is getting built, private contractors will likely have built 200 Death Black Holes, rendering the technology and the iron obsolete.
Third, Galactic competitors will come up with alternatives that are faster, cheaper, and better, and cost less and our planet’s consumers will buy them and put all of our Death Dwarf Star workers out of work.
We haven’t even gotten to the engineering yet, the software systems, the weapons systems, the ongoing R&D, the faster-than-light drive (that’s a gajillion right there), and the funky humanoid robots.
Of course private contractors will build it … that’s what happens when government builds things anyway. 140km sphere of steel smacks of massive scope creep due to uncontrolled user requirements and a compliant contractor who sees every change as an opportunity to suck more tax dollars out of the Pentagon. Oops. Empire. I bet the original design was probably for something that could take an x- fighter down – maybe it was even meant to be the next model of the Tie fighter. JSF, anyone?
It was huge, not for drama, but because it was essentially a superstructure built around a hypermatter reactor to power the 64 different lasers that were eventually converged down to 8 main lenses positioned around the concave firing dish.
Also, they did not calculate the cost of producing said lenses (they are huge) or the reactor itself, which are costs that have no frame of reference.
How many Fetts does it take to screw in a Death Star?
This article makes Special Education look like Mensa. The whole Death Star is not made of steel. Let’s talk about space-age materials for a change. And who said we would have to launch it into orbit?? AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA
Really?? You all have so little collective knowledge of logistics, mechanical engineering, and systems design that you can’t fathom a {relatively) realistic way to produce the Death Star. A degree really is meaningless in this country.
Assuming you’ve actually taken the time to design this thing (as opposed to just jettisoning the earth’s core into space and calling it a spacecraft), here’s how you start:
Step 1) Locate a small, iron-rich (or some infinitely more suitable material) asteroid or moon.
Step 2) Build the outer framework right on the surface. You can begin reinforcing this outer hull right away, to protect your project.
Step 3) As you work your way inward, you mine out the necessary materials, essentially turning the station into a self-consuming forge. This can be done fairly efficiently, because the process involves “siphoning” the molten metals out of the interior of the body, and directly into production centers.
This way you build on the stable foundation of a planetoid body, but when you are finished the station requires no launching. And the best part is that upon completion, you will have already destroyed your first heavenly body. Bravo!
This is from a performing arts drop-out.
Excellent envisioning from a performing arts drop-out. You’re hired!
I love it, it’s like eating turkey chili in a bowl made out of bread. Bread bowl George! First you eat the chili, then you eat the bowl!
There’s nothing more satisfying than looking down after lunch and seeing nothing but a Death Star.
DoodFace.. You basically just described a Dyson Sphere.. Larry Nivens Ringworld if you geeks wanna geek. Or Greg Baer Anvil of the Stars or Lucifers Hammer. And of Course A Mote in Gods Eye
Can you say Kickstarter project?
“After all, they’re both essentially floating weapons platforms so that seems reasonable”.
That one sentence tells me everything I need to know about this analysis. And then, you econo-nuts actually get the numbers wrong, too. Why does this not surprise me. A job in government is waiting for the lot of you, no doubt.
I’m more curious about how the electricians kept all the wiring sorted out when they were putting it together.
separate systems. Simple, really.
I’m in for $20. Now wait, just found another $3.17 in my other pocket. I’m in for $23.17.
This is the single funniest thing I have ever read.
Can we just build one 1/3 the size? It may still be able to blow things up and carry a military capable of invading some smaller distant moons or remote planets. If we privatize the effort and sold shares we could get it done fast! I’ll chip in!
That was called “Independence Day” and look were it got them.
I think you misunderstand the difference between Aerospace (and space) vs. Naval engineering. That death star would have to be lifted to orbit by rocket at $10,000 per pound (or so) meaning that 13,000x the world GDP = radical underestimate. Things are better if you use Aluminum and mine it from the moon. The moon also has other minerals – an iron core if you are looking for it [1].
One could argue anti-gravity technology for lifting, but if they are going to use ‘star-trek physics’ then why not feed a replicator with massive amounts of solar power (build near orbit of mercury) and compose the thing of sunlight?
[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070111-moon-core.html
We need to start thinking out of the box. We are missing one real possibility – to use the technology of the Star Forge. If Revan could build an entire fleet with it, why not as many Death Stars as one likes? Yes, I know it was destroyed but a piece survived and began to grow again. A decent chunk was found later on Nar Shadaa. By the time of Palpatine thousands of years on, it was probably huge again.
On using Star Trek physics, I would advise against it. Can you imagine the consequences if Dr. Moriarty got loose in the networks of a fully-armed and operational battle station?
Exactly. From the wookieepedia:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Forge
Nobody has yet studied the economic benefits of Force Sensitivity, but we learn from canonical sources that the price of robots and ships must have dropped to what would today seem like zero during the Old Republic. (Just think about how nuclear fission energy was called “Energy that’s not worth metreing” – and we have sent approximately 1 vessel to explore the solar system, not the galaxy.)
Also think about the Clone Wars, only 2 decades before the construction of the Death Star. The cost of the Clone Wars dwarfs the single-project Death Star, just as the total cost of WWII dwarfs the mere $45bn the US spent on Nimitz class aircraft carriers or paltry $50bn per stealth bomber. Again from Wookieepedia, we learn that
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Separatist_Droid_Army
If in fact they outnumber the clones by only 100 to 1, that would mean that there were tens of quadrillions of clones.
Now this may sound like a lot, but that’s because you’re not thinking on a truly galactic scale!
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_galaxy
(The 100 quadrillion life-forms number doesn’t include small stuff like lichens and bacteria; we have ~1 nonillion bacteria on Earth alone, so there should be more like a cattuordecillion life-forms that Yoda could meditate about. [American counting system])
We are talking about a war on a truly galactic scale here. Remember that these are people who jump into hyperspace on a whim and travel from one star system to another in an Augenblick. Earth might be totally destroyed in the course of the battle and that would only be a minor tragedy because there are so many other battles (300 billion star systems in the Milky Way).
Since their galaxy has 400 bn stars (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_galaxy) then the cost of the Death Star would only be $250 per planetary system. Come on, chip in, guys! This is going to be the Destroyer of Worlds!
Granted, only ten thousand worlds comprised the Separatist Alliance (confederacy) [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Confederacy_of_Independent_Systems#Astrography], but we’re not dividing $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 among ten thousand people, but ten thousand planets – and the quintillion-dollar figure assumes our planet’s benighted ways of obtaining iron and making it into steel.
Also think about it this way: $1,000,000,000 trillion might sound like a lot now – but world GDP today stands at $62 trillion, which is only 14 doubling times away from being $1,000,000 trillion. If the Earth experienced GDP growth of 2% for the next . (And how long do you think it might take us to colonise not just nearby star systems, but to have republics and trade federations that stretch all the way across 120k × 1k light-years of the Milky Way? Then add another 25,000 years to that because the Republic was established in 25,053 BBY – already a mature space exploration society by that point. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_Republic)
If the Earth’s denizens grew the economy at 2%/year for 25,000 years (not even counting the time it took various planets to develop the technology to travel the galaxy, just the age of the already-mature Galactic Republic) then the world GDP would reach $14035922178528374107397703328409120821806021155655454250255643688895\
55231394382192264007935008343209192842427520010692106385097126013547\
71346028851171749783993777743156021874752453075102024782800374931976\
256881844391709.238 trillion! And that’s not even counting the gains from galactic trade! Just intraplanetary growth.
That’s a bit too large of a number to comprehend so just think about this one. The GDP of Cambodia today stands at $32 bn or $2500 [PPP] per capita. Cambodia’s economic growth has jittered and started between 4.5% and 9% during the last few decades. But let’s just assume 3% stable growth to be conservative. If Cambodia’s economy grew at 3% per year for only the amount of time Yoda was a Jedi master (800 years) then Cambodia would be producing $955,724,857.68 trillion per year, in other words in very short order a few million life-forms occupying .12% of the earth’s land mass could buy a few Death Stars every year and still have enough money left over for food and beverage. Again this is just a miniature of the changes in economics and warship financing we could expect to see as Earthlings expand their demand curves out into the galaxy over future millennia.
Back to the Wookieepedia, of course you remember the Banking Clan is on the Separatist side — how else would you finance these projects?
(22 BBY is 22 years Before the Battle of Yavin, in which the Death Star was destroyed. Everything has a weak point. Many Bothans died to find out what it was.)
What I take away from the Star Wars allegory is that we had better spend an equal amount of research studying the political economy as we do on space exploration technology. Let’s say we built a Star Forge and the price of robots dropped effectively to zero. Then we would be incredibly f*$#ed if we lacked an incentive structure that prevents even a sleuthy, sly, slick Sith Lord from destroying life on the colossal galactic scale.
This would be the case if you only consider using current technologies, but a venture of this size becomes it’s own economic force. The number of supporting and spinoff ventures (i.e. “pick and shovel” companies) that would develop would create an economic subsystem that would not only support an expanding population, but most likely inspire multiple spin-off verticals within the “Death Star Industry.”
WOT? AFRICAN OR EUROPEAN?
I’m interested in just 1 Death Star not 2 billion
Everyone is crediting the Death Star to Emperor Palpatine. But wasn’t it Grand Moff Tarkin’s brain-child?
Almost. Actually, it was the same guy that designed the TIE fighter that came up with the idea for the death star. He was friends with Tarkin, and gave the idea to him to present to Palpatine.
And on a side note…The first Death Star was 160km, not 140.
::begin uber-nerd
One thing I forgot to mention in addition to the fact that the diameter of the first Death Star is 160km, and not 140km is the fact that it’s made of quadanium steel, which contains…quadanium. I’m going to assume that’s on some remote planet we’ll be able to go to once we uncover the prothean mass relay that’s near Pluto.
Ferris Bueller you’re my hero.
160 km? That’s it? Thats about 100 miles. When they compare it to a small moon on the movie, they must mean realllly small. The Earth’s moon is about 2,000 miles in diameter. For more comparison, the mother ship on Independence Day is 1/4th the size of our moon, or about 5 times this size and it’s extremely mobile!
Raith Sienar http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Raith_Sienar
I think it would be a lot more appropriate to build it from wood and nails, with perhaps a few nails and glue to hold it together.
This would take the weight down by about 600000 million tonnes as well as reduce costs by around $400.
This is a completely logical build of the death star. The wooden frame would support the 10 trillion degree heat easily. And any planet that is destroyed would add to the comfort of…
DINOSAUR
You dummies forgot a couple things:
Energy production.
To think this think operates off of one of your green “technologies” (read: charlatry, or snake-oil), would be to assume your stupid “THE DEATH STAR’S MADE OF STEELLLL” is valid as well. The energy to drive this would be on the order of what mankind is capable of (from a SWAG statement) which is around 230TW. Remember, dummies, this is in Watts, so it is energy consumed, produced, lost. This would have to be increased, probably several orders, as it must command a station, as well as a gi-fuckin-massive death ray. [It obviously must be much, much more, as this station moved from one star system to another, yet Lucas provided no wicked proof of how this unit moves in ~43 minutes from Luke/Leia/Han/Carpet/gay-butler-robot left this galactic Winnebego, to the point Luke dueces the star]. This price would have to increase by ~$100Q USD.
Reason? The world’s econ is ~$50T USD. That is surface based. The star is volume base. Besides, the generator, like the one Lando destroyed, had to be union-made. Add another $100Q USD to facilitate that turd.
What about feeding these lifeforms? Beyond comprehension.
Nice you spent time looking at one sliver of a thing you attribute to our world, but it needs a lot more work.
Go back to the drawing board.
definition of the biggest virgin dork on earth
Yeah, they totally didn’t even consider the unique economy of the Death Star, as the implications of Big Government.
Idiot.
i reckon the death star moved from system to system using warp speed travel, maybe a super warp speed travel but yes i see your point about its energy consumption but seeing that all the star destroyers had fusion reactors on board to generate their power, power similar to that of a small sun, i dare say the death star had a much larger version of that
ERROR: the term millennia means thousands of years so in this case it would be 0.8 millennia
“Economics students .. have figured out how much (the) cost to build the Death Star”. The question is; is this price the standard model or are all options included? Drive Away-No More To Pay? Registration included? Tow Bar? Has this costing model created by the (US) university, considered any additional costing for Right-Hand-Drive variants for use in most British Commonwealth countries and dependancies? Is NASA interested? Does NASA really care? What about the real cost to run after leaving the factory?
I find this part of the internet extremely difficult to masturbate to.
You have no idea how much you’ve made me laugh.
But not impossible?
You’re doing it wrong.
This is the funniest thing I have read in a long time!
Thank you Thank you Thank you FUNNIEST comment ever!
Why don’t we just make a Borg cube instead?
A agree! But then again, a cube actually has a far nigger mass by diametre than a sphere. And a cube is inherently structurally weaker. But what they hey
RACISM ALERT!
I think he meant “bigger.” The “n” is right next to the “b.”
Greatest typo ever.
Seriously…I laughed SO hard at this typo.
What if we built an econo sized (and massed) Death star like the traditional spoke wheel space ports, (only spherical) rather than just a single torus, use perhaps a hundred or so spoked tori at different angles then cover the gaps with solar panels to help keep our Mini Deathstar “Green”
keeping with the Green theory..
since aluminum is recyclable, what we first do, is take over all the beer companies, we drop the price to increase demand, then we collect the empties, and ship them to our moon base recycling center for processing into beams and struts for our Deathstar.
Our motto will be Have a Beer… Save the Planet! he he, little do they know Earth will be our practice planet!
So… this article is about making a hunk of steel the size of the Death Star, but what about everything else?
Like Obama’s stimulus, it will all sort of pay for itself somehow, eventually, I guess, more or less… maybe if they give all the stormtroopers unemployment pay when the droids take over, it’ll all sort of work out…
Actually, on second thought, this thread should be closed. If Obama learns he can buy a Death Star with taxpayer dollars, he’ll make that the centerpiece of his campaign.
Better spent on republican wars and empire building, right?
Well we better start now. At the rate Washington moves, it WILL take 800 millenia to build an interstellar empire, and we wouldn’t want to need this Death Star and not have it, now would we?
your sugar daddy Obama didn’t end the war. Remember that. We left because the Iraqi’s told us to GTFO.
Death star construction might be an effective form of stimulus for the US. It will keep countless low skilled workers in steel factories and associated industries until the year 835327. This is the one thing the Republicans might agree to since it caters to their two favorite things: the military industrial complex and environmental degradation and destruction.
as it stands, right now in the real world, there are 3.2 million unfilled jobs in America, most of which are in the skilled labor fields, such as steel factories and welders… so I doubt it. People just don’t want to do hard work anymore.
I don’t care if its Obama or someone else, if they have a Death Star, they get my vote.
If they have a Death Star, why would they NEED your vote?
so you also mean laying all the carpets and tiles and installing all the lights and air circulation systems and also how to generate the artificial gravity for such a thing, something we dont even have the technology for as yet, then theres the matter of dealing with all the sewerage…
A lot of people have commented on the Death Star creating it’s own gravity, but if we take the mass of 1.08 x 10^18 kg and the radius of 70000m as good estimates then the gravity at the surface of the death star is:
6.67×10^-11 x 1.08×10^18 / 70000^2.
I get 1.47×10^-2 ms^-2 or about 1/650th of the gravity experienced on the surface of the earth. Presumably inside the death star the net graviational force would be less, since some of the mass would be away from the center of mass, from the perspective of someone inside the DS. This would be especially true is the majority of the mass makes up the outer shell of the DS. In any case, the gravitational field of the DS is pretty much negligible, even at the 140km size. That might sound huge but is still only about 1/25th the size of our moon.
Planet mining in low gravity. In stead of lifting cargo from big planets like Earth, the logical step would be to tear an entire smaller planet apart in close to zero gravity and refine the stuff in space. Thats what I would do.
I only need to know if smaller planets might still contain iron and other heavy stuff?
That, or mining asteroids. I can imagine a big ship with a “mouth” at one end, refinery in the middle, an iron-pooping back end. All done in zero-G with minimal effort (relatively speaking, of course).
Don’t you need oxygen for the refining process?
Before spending 130 GDPs on building your Death Star, spend a little time on how you’d be able to protect your 140 km diameter planetoid from a swarm of nuclear-tipped missiles.
It’s not enough to stop most of the incoming missiles, you have to get them all otherwise you’ve got radiation problems at the very least.
Duh: deflector shields.
Why do you think we’ve spent so much on the Star Wars Missile Defense System?
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Wouldn’t it be a lot faster/cheaper (and, dare I say, borderline _practical_) to “just” snag a stray asteroid, hollow it out, and put up nice paneling on the walls?
And this is why star wars is stupid and gay…because once you start asking questions you arent supposed to you realize that moze of the shit they built was impractical
Which is precisely why its classified as science fiction champ…
It’s fiction…
Not real…
Idiot
actually, time for me to be a literalist dork… it’s science fantasy, not science fiction. The difference being Science Fiction generally has it’s roots in reality, just projected to the maybes that tomorrow may hold. Science Fantasy just uses science styled things instead of magic and monsters and the like, otherwise it’s just standard fantasy, with not intention of being based off of real life. It’s about the story, not the probability of it being realistic.
Look up the Eye of Palpatine
Seriously, have none of you read John Ringo’s Troy series? Laser calibrated mirror lenses with solar panels and Ion Drives. Small sat can melt out the necessary material for creating larger sats until you have a network of large enough sats that you can hollow out a nickel asteroid.
Pack the asteroid with ice, cap the hole with the material cut from the hole and heat the entire object evenly across the entire surface. Sufficient slow heat will cause the interior to turn to plasma and expand without explosion. A solid mass of metal could expand to quadruple the size or more and retain sufficient thickness to provide significant protection.
Cool it off, cut a door and build whatever you want inside using any materials you want. Call Martha in to decorate.
Take another asteroid and melt it into a huge spring and a giant dinner plate. Fuse the spring ends to the habitat on one side and the plate on the other.
Propulsion provided by tossing nukes onto the plate for a reaction drive.
Made with solar power AND eliminates the world’s supply of nuclear weps. What’s not to love?
Presumably the Death Star is so huge because most of it IS the planet buster weapon. At which point, we don’t know whether it’s reasonable to guess that its density is that of iron. Not an especially fun answer I admit.
As another poster mentioned, the cost is hardly in the price of materials; it’s in creating such a highly ordered object. You’d probably get a better guess by proportionally scaling up the cost of the Illustrious, rather than just the cost of its steel.
There’s a number of technologies the Galactic empire could employ to reduce their cost. First being their apparent mastery of gravity field manipulation – gravity on their ships, floating vehicles. Second AI is clearly on an order well beyond our primitive computers so an orderly giant piece of tech shouldn’t be too hard for them to design. Third they have a seemingly endless supply of clones and or droids to slave away at the construction.
Their plan is not all that well thought out, plus does not include the cost of getting all that iron off the surface of the earth. A better i.e. faster and cheeper plan would be to use the moon which also has plenty of Iron is already in space. Moving people robots and initial supplies would be far cheeper. From a rough estimate including the technological advancements made during the extended time period plus that the project would after 500 years become self sustaining using robot labor and solar power, would be a little over 2000 years and 1500 years of Earths GDP.
Several D.S.s could built from the resources in the moon but it might be better to just turn the moon into a larger D.S. so it would not be necessary to escape the remaining materials.
M.
You Stupid Earthlings.
I am on my way there. It will take in a lot less than 13,000 years travel time before we meet.
Moo-Hoo-Haa-ha
And if one uses -where possible- ceramic materials, stone and/or wood? It is more abundant and cheaper. Scaling up may not be correct. You also need large amounts of water. A ship hasn’t got that. Scaling up a cell -consisting of 80% water- is not correct either but something in between perhaps. You also need large amount of soil to grow vegatebles. Soil is much cheaper than steel.
I think they needed to spend some more money on security… after all, blowing it up was no more difficult than shooting womp rats in a T-16.
Most importantly, who does the catering?
As a manager myself, I have to ask: In determining the cost, have you factored in the cost of all the additional infrastructure besides just the steel to construct the frame and hull? There would also be the following expenses to consider:
1) Wiring, conduit and ducting to transport power, data, air and water around the entire structure;
2) Electrics/Electronics (interior and exterior surveillance cameras, sensors, lighting, air conditioning, automatic doors, consoles, servers, routers, and associated IT infrastructure.)
3) Ordnance (missiles, ammunition, turret cannon, beam weapons and power sources for same, TIE fighters [which I assume might cost about as much as say an F-22A], tractor beams and other munitions.)
4) Services (hydroponics for food and air production, tools and equipment for workshops and maintenance, fabrication plant, internal transport mechanisms [eg turbolifts, monorail tubes etc], material for clothing, uniforms, bedding, medical supplies – the list here is endless.)
All of these require materials other than steel – you need silicon, copper, titanium and other transitional metals, and rare earths for the electronics. You need cotton or other fabrics for the clothing and such, chemicals for the hydroponics and medicines and so on.
There’s also labour costs involved, not just in construction but manning the thing once operational. Besides command and assault crew, you need maintenance workers repairing damage, running the hydroponics farms and plant, managing the IT systems, and so on. You’d need a working crew in the tens or hundreds of thousands to run and maintain a vehicle of that size.
Granted, you could use robots in many of those roles, but robots are also damned expensive, not just to build but to maintain. There would be some roles where robots would be economically viable but there would still be many roles where human crew would actually be cheaper and more effective than robots.
In the end, I can see this lot costing a sight more than $8,100 trillion, not just to build but also to run. I’d be interested to know what the quarterly budget would be just for running this thing on standard ops!
You can’t build the planet. Simply put:
The blueprints you have for the planet won’t meet the city’s code, so you’d have to change them. Then the city would say you were violating zoning ordinances by building the planet in someone’s front yard. So, you’d have to get a variance.
Then the Forest Service would require tree-cutting permits! Then the EPA would request an environmental impact statement concerning the work. And the Army Corps of engineers would want a map of the proposed planet!
Of course, the Equal Opportunity Commission would jump in claiming you weren’t hiring enough minorities. The FAA would refuse to let you launch because the planet was not marked by an identification number. And, to top it all off, the IRS would probably decide to seize all your assets, claiming you were trying to avoid paying any taxes by leaving the country!
And it’s 8.1 Quadrillion… not 8.1 Trillion…
Only a thousand times different…
Genius
Genius read again…
“In the end, I can see this lot costing a sight more than $8,100 trillion”
I don’t see where they said 8.1 Trillion? Clearly it was 8,100 trillion, which equals 8.1Q…
Real Genius
If they build it like they do an aircraft carrier they will just use all the salvageable inside’s from any available decommissioned ship… Cuts down a lot of the cost…
What if the Death Star allready exsist and we don´t know…
“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.”
So THAT’S what Greece has been up to!
Well, they are paying for a lot of military contracts with European partners…
no gravity in space. less dense than battle ship.
The death star had artificial gravity, thus it must be as dense – and more.
Even without artifical gravity, that amount of matter will create its own gravity field.
Density is measured as the amount of matter divided by the volume the matter takes up.
In short, gravity matters not.
Actually there is gravity in space. Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation states that all matter exerts a gravitational force on every other object in the universe. Also, the strength of that gravitational force is determined by the mass of both objects and the distance between them. If the Death Star is the size of small moon, then it will have a pretty significant gravitational field. Our own moon exerts a force of gravity roughly equal to 1/6 of that felt here on earth.
no gravity in space. Death star is less dense than battle ship.
How much to build a Tardis?
You could easily scale it down in my opinion. Is a 140km diameter really necessary? Scale it back to a 10 or 20km diameter and you’d still have a massive death star – which is more economically viable to boot!
It’d still be huge!
It would be HUGE in Haggerstown.
I am a little concerned that anyone would want to build this. It basically has one weapon and must be used at a relatively short distance. Why not build something that could fire a long range weapon (missle)?
Wasa messa saying, It’s a freakin death star, I want 10!!!!!!!
They wouldn’t use iron anyway.. and the output of the thousands of worlds in the empire would be more than enough to fund it and resource it.
Thanks for the information but I’m concerned that one thing wasn’t addressed.
How many Bothans died to bring us this information?
many.
Admiral Ackbar, please?
I believe that it is evident between Episodes 4 and 6 that they had been building a second one all along. Unless I’m mistaken, at the end of Episode 3, we see the skeleton of the Death Star, with a significant amount of construction already completed. It’s 19 years between the events of Episode 3 and Episode 4, and the Death Star comes online in Episode 4… the gap between 4 and 6 isn’t very long, so they must have been building a second one all along.
the first law of government spending. Why build one when you can build two for twice the price.
Not that it makes a difference, but $8,000 trillion is around 130 times the world’s combined GDP (around $62 trillion in 2010), not 13,000 times.
Thank you for pointing this out – we’ve updated the article accordingly. We appreciate it and apologize for the mistake, good math Ianvl!
Hi,
Think the reference “In context, it takes under an hour to get the steel for HMS Illustrious” is also incorrect.
At 1.3 billion tonnes annual production divided by 365 days, then by 24 hours and finally by 60 minutes is ~2.47 tonnes/min. In UNDER 10 minutes, there should enough steel to make one HMS Illustrious (22,000 tonnes.
Cheers.
under 10 minutes means under 1 hour, isnt?
But they use synthetic Durasteel in the empire so not so much. Plus, there’s lots of worlds to get materials from, not just one.
Yes, now it has been costed and an action plan drawn up, when do we get started, and where ?
This isn’t a reasonable assumption. Based on the reactor attack sequence in return of the Jedi, most of the Death Star is a large central void, so their density is probably much lower than an aircraft carrier.
But the second death star in Jedi wasn’t even close to completed yet. We don’t actually know how filled in the original death star was.
Is it scalable … can I have just one death “asteroid”
I have some corrugated iron and a wheelbarrow in my back shed that I am willing to contribute as seed capital
You don’t need nearly as much steel because the structure doesn’t ever see gravity and doesn’t need to be strong.
-dk
Won’t see gravity? Where in the universe would you build it?
You’d build it in space obviously!
Everything creates its own gravity, and it is directly in relation to its own mass. You can do an experiment by blowing bubbles in water which barely weigh anything and wait for them to eventually come together.
If you’ve come this far, then you could also question whether the deathstar platfrom has to come in a globe format at all.
All that surface covering ..for what ?
You only need the weapon support, protection for energy core, small defenses against X-wing attacks , a berth place for a number of tie-fighters… and presto, you can do with a lot smaller and denser space ship…kinda like ..a ..space craft carrier with a big gun on deck.
which brings us back to the first assumption of steel density of a naval air craft carrier.
There was a prototype Death Star that was built first at the Maw Installation that consisted of just the necessary parts for the superweapon and hyperdrive.
If you’ve come this far, then you could also question whether the deathstar platfrom has to come in a globe format at all.
All that surface covering ..for what ?
You only need the weapon support, protection for energy core, small defenses against X-wing attacks , a berth place for a number of tie-fighters… and presto, you can do with a lot smaller and denser space ship…kinda like ..a ..space craft carrier with a big gun on deck.
which brings us back to the first assumption of steel density of a naval air craft carrier.
Or just build an Eclipse class star destroyer that has a superweapon built into a super star destroyer.
Confusing – I’m interested in just 1 Death Star not 2 billion
Confusing – I only interested in 1 death star not 2 billion (looks like a big ship to me)
Given that some of the capital ships from Attack of the Clones could land and take off from planets, I’ve always assumed that they were made of something much, much lighter and much, much stronger than steel. But it’s definitely interesting to do the math on just how much sheer volume is contained within a structure of that size. 34 trillion crew members? Holy Cow!
When you have what appears to be complete control over gravitational forces and nearly-complete control over inertial resistance, the rest is just math.
Of course, you’d have to be able to control it both ways so you didn’t, say, create a gravitationally-induced toroid and blow a big chunk of atmosphere into space every time you took off.
What about the copper for the electronics. How much Copper?
They won’t use copper then, it will all be based on quantum lights. cost=1/100000 of copper
What about the copper for all the electronics. How much copper?
Take a look at the staffing requirements…Assuming the same crew per cubic meter yields 34 trillion crew members on a death star – I’d hate to be the paymaster.
Solution = Droids
And the steel for the droids?
Right, now you see why it’s so easy to sneak around the Death Star — it was a little under-staffed. (Really amazingly fast and large elevators, though.)
Hey DC, good maths there. I get the same number of crew per cubic metre as you do, but wiki reckons the *real* figure as being a quarter of a million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Star. So I guess I agree with Ryan; understaffed!
Depending on which schematic you prefer, a large proportion on the interior volume is filled with power generation and distribution equipment. This would reduce crew estimates, but change the cost estimates.
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/magazines/starlog/ds1tj2.gif
http://www.dk.co.uk/static/html/features/starwars/locations_gallery/images/12%20Death%20Star%20Cutaway.jpg
THIS is the solution to current unemployment woes, YES WE CAN
Yes, working holiday in space
You just need to find new ways to motivate them. The emperor is not as forgiving a I am.
nice read.. so when do we get started..
Awesome!
one small question…. it blew up… there was a rather large design flaw… why would you want to recreate it in the first place?
Did you math in the cost of a cannon of that freakin big hole that let the buggers in?
dumb
The second design corrected the problem – which is why the rebels went to blow it up before it got completed.
thats correct!!!!