The Death Star might not be the biggest ball, but it has the hardest... energy beam

[@HBHaga]

Jack O'Neil holds up the Death Star: THIS is a weapon of TERROR. It is designed to *intimidate* your enemies. Jack holds up a massive Star Destroyer fleet: THIS is a weapon of WAR. It is designed to *kill* your enemies.

[@G-Forces]

That's from the episode where they're trying to give P-90's to the Jaffa rebels right?

[@leonpeters-malone3054]

@@G-Forces It is. Season 5 I believe. The Warrior or similar in title.

[@jlvfr]

And that's all you need. :)

[@richarddickjohnson516]

Honestly, best SG-1 reference ever lol

[@justanotherstanczyk]

This is sooo true across all of sci-fi.

[@enoughothis]

The DS-1 Battlestation aka Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin's crippling inferiority complex.

[@MonkeyJedi99]

Poor, misunderstood Grandma Tuffkin...

[@VGM00021]

Which, it turns out, is the stolen crippling inferiority complex of another man.

[@Echowhiskeyone]

And he's got big balls and she's got big balls. But the Empire's got the biggest balls of them all.

[@stvdagger8074]

But they are inferior to Spaceballs!

[@kdarkwynde]

Imagine the size of the potato sacks on the pilots who attacked it in snubfighters..

[@kyriss12]

Some balls are held for charity and some are held for dress, it’s when balls are held for pleasure they’re the balls that I like best.

[@MarkoDash]

i'm sure with the tech/industrial level and penchant for megastructures in SW, someone somewhere has made a Dyson Sphere, we've just never heard of it.

[@Typhonis007]

Turbolasers =16-inch guns. Light turbo lasers = 5-inch guns.

[@matthewwinans3068]

Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.

[@gamerfan8445]

More like a 8 inch

[@MarkoDash]

the way i've always seen it the Blaster-Laser-Turbolaser are just different scales of the same thing, to quote myself from a few years ago explaining it to someone who knew nothing of SW... Blasters: Small arms-light autocannon range, from tiny derringer-like pistols to Ma Deuce equivalents like the E-web, some light vehicles mount blasters (AT-ST, etc) Laser Cannon: Main armament of ground vehicles and Starfighters, range from autocannon to tank cannon equivalents. tend to come in two flavors, light and heavy. the turrets on the Millennium Falcon and the guns of the TIE fighters are light laser cannons, the long guns on the end of the X-wing's wings and the main guns of the AT-ATs are heavy laser cannons. Turbolaser: main starship and heavy vehicle armament, range from heavy AAA equivalents to battleship main guns. are separated into light-medium-heavy-superheavy categories. The ISD is covered in hundreds of light and medium turbolasers, but the main armaments are the 64 heavy turbolasers in the eight octuple-mount turrets on the sides of the superstructure. edit: to answer @SacredCowShipyards question at 5:40 light turbolasers seem to pick up immediately after the heaviest varieties of laser cannon, it's close enough that for example the AT-AT can be upgunned from heavy laser cannons to light turbolasers without needing a new reactor or othersuch modification, probably just took a Rof hit in exchange for the extra per shot damage. as to 22:45 while i agree that the Empire would have been better served with using the resources of the DS1 and DS2 on more ISDs, SSDs, and better TIEs. a lot of planets had shielding capable of stalemating an entire fleet, turning what could have been a surgical strike into a long siege and ground combat. Notably on Hoth, the reactor taken a Republic era 4km long Praetor-class battlecruiser was given the sole purpose of powering a shield generator, and could defend the base from the 5 Imperial class star destroyers and one 19km Executor-class Star Dreadnought, forcing the Empire to land ground forces.

[@briancox2721]

If it wouldn't get the dock master nuked from orbit by copyright claim, this would have been the perfect video to mix some AC/DC into the into.

[@TCMcBiscuits]

I don't get this reference, as I am ever upper-class high society.

[@AustinSmith-gq5gc]

The hit song big balls

[@briancox2721]

@@TCMcBiscuits God's gift to ballroom notoriety?

[@MisterHavoc]

Death Star: Remains on the SCS for more than 24 hours... Policy says cube it... Not a Cuberator in the 'verse big enough for the task... A sphere it will remain... Dockmaster: **INCALCULABLE FRUSTRATION**

[@serineaaskold8428]

If it can dock, it can be cubed

[@ian5395]

Oh, she'll cube. *Galactus enters chat*

[@assemblyrequired7342]

*Erects a massive force field around the Death Star, and alerts the Rebel fleet* "Okay, if I can't compress this fucking, massive ball into a fucking cube, then *I'll have it blown it into a billion fucking pieces*, at the owner's expense!!!

[@MogofWar]

You apparently have not seen the shear scale of Sacred Cow Shipyard's compression rigs, or the mindboggling sophistication of its underlying compression technology. How it extrapolates and interpolates infinite dimensionality within the Higgs field itself, blurring the very lines between physical and platonic space in the process... Doesn't matter how big, how weirdly shaped, how many dimensions it projects into, after that rig has operated upon an object, you will have a roughly 3 centimeter cube that weighs about half a pound... That can be easily transported and later decompressed into its original form... At the owner's expense. The cubifier, it's more than a threat. It's an important service.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

"How do you eat an elephant?"

[@classicforreal]

We are Borg. We reject the inferiority of the ball. Except for that one thing.

[@Attaxalotl]

The original Death Star had a 24-hour recharge time on the big gun, very imprecise power settings (The Jhedda/Scarif shots were about as low as it could go) and no real way to actually aim the thing beyond "front towards enemy" The Death Star II could actually aim; and had much better power controls, it could one-shot a capital ship every two minutes.

[@vonfaustien3957]

Wasn't the death star 2 also an order of magnitude larger?

[@Attaxalotl]

@@vonfaustien3957 Nope, it's diameter is only 40km bigger.

[@vonfaustien3957]

@Attaxalotl In terms of volume that's still a bloody huge increase for a sphere

[@ThunderClawShocktrix]

@@Attaxalotl wrong that may be with Disney says but in legends it was way way bigger

[@TheGenericavatar]

Warning: Star Wars nerdery ahead regarding material covered in the video. The original Death Star was 100Km in diameter. The 2nd Death Star was 160Km in diameter. The original Imperial Star Destroyer seen in the opening of A New Hope is 1600m long for scale. Darth Vader's Sweet Ride in The Empire Strikes back was 14Km long. In the West End Game's Star Wars RPG (WEG D6 Star Wars) had several scales of equipment/weapons: Personal, Speeder, Star Fighter, Walker, Capital, & Death Star. So damage caused by 'light' & 'heavy' weapons are relative to both each other within a scale category and between the scale categories of the vehicles they are mounted on. Blasters (plasma weapons) are basically shorter range weapons with a high rate of fire. Turbo lasers (laser capacitors?) are longer range weapons with a slower rate of fire, Hyper-Drive multipliers are linear, at least according to the WEG D6 Star Wars materials (a Class 2 hyperdrive took twice as long to get somewhere as a Class 1 hyperdrive). And since George Lucas had to approve every single RPG book & supplement before they could be published by WEG, those books have/had de facto Canon status. Planetary grade shields could canonically defend against pretty much any orbital bombardment. A planet spanning planetary shield required special means to defeat. Before the Death Star, the Empire had several mobile space stations called 'Torpedo Spheres' which had a battery of 96(?) capital scale proton torpedo launchers which would all fire at the same location and time at a calculated 'weak point' in a planet's shielding (which could take weeks of scanning and analyzing to determine and prepare to exploit since it moved around) and then followed up with a single turbo laser shot that would then fire through the very short lived shield hole the torpedoes created to destroy a (the?) planetary shield generator. Thus making the planet ripe for whatever the Empire wanted to do to the planet and the sapients thereon. End nerdery.

[@leechowning8728]

Dahak, from the Empire from the Ashes, is listed as 3,323 KM in diameter, but that series is based on an extended galactic war, not a "police action" to terrify planetary targets. The Death Star was the Emperor's ace in the hole, a singular weapon able to destroy most of their own fleet, because like all Sith he feared the rebellion of his apprentice and the fleet following him. That is why the weapons are entirely designed for defending against MASSIVE fleets.

[@jlvfr]

@@leechowning8728 that series is _insane_ . When one reads of fleets of those ships, the brain just goes "wth how nope" :D

[@Briskyyy]

Torpedo sphere my beloved

[@anticlaassic]

I hate to do this, but Darth Vaders sweet ride was actually 19kms long

[@Briskyyy]

@@anticlaassic tbh the executors length has changed so many times it's pretty easy to get it mixed up

[@kennyholmes5196]

I mean, orbs are literally one of the most pressure-resistant shapes, and the shape that matter clumps into when gravity is allowed to have its' way. They're also VERY useful for when you want something to be able to move in any direction. There's a reason why they're called _ball_ bearings and not _cube_ bearings, after all. Not only that, but they're also the most material-efficient shape for storing objects in terms of things-stored-per-unit-of-material-in-the-container.

[@jakeaurod]

They are also the most thermally efficient shape, which is good if you want to stay warm, bad if you want to stay cool enough for squishies to live.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Cube master shape.

[@randybentley2633]

The reason the Death Star's Super Laser was necessary was because of planetary shields, like the one around Scarif. As was seen in SW: Rebels, even a single planetary shield generator can withstand the barrage of a small fleet of Star Destroyers for a time, so an integrated and fully vested shield system could hold off a not-so-small fleet for a long time, thus the need for the Super Laser.

[@Miradarm]

Hence why Vader had to do a ground Invasion of Hoth instead of bombarding it with his super star destroyer and its escorts.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Vader just didn't want to take the time. Doesn't mean he couldn't have burned through.

[@lordfrostwind3151]

​@Miradarm really puts the time frame in perspective, even if the army/stormtrooper contingent was standing by organizing and preparing a ground invasion even with something organized like a Marine Expeditionary Unit with armored elements into an extremely harsh environment can't be a "fast" process. Either that or General Veers was fully expecting some BS like this to happen and got everything ready in transit on the hunch they were going to be hitting the surface in force.

[@PopeMetallicus]

Speaking of anime stupidity, I would LOVE to see the Dockmaster have an aneurysm over the Veritech fighter

[@vonfaustien3957]

I want to strap him down and make his watch Gurren Laggan. I'm sure his reaction to throwing galaxies as shurikina would be hilarious

[@IRMentat]

In fairness on the novelisations it was rationalised way better handing the original series or the robotech localisation. NGL those robotech novelisations are order of magnitude better told than the core anime. Humans had some corpses from when the SDF crashed so they designed space capable vehicles capable of taking on those foes in flight or in trenches and coridoors (all the risks of high speed space combat AND the dangers of being a front line lightly armoured humanoid mech with underwhelming defences. thus the veritech tanks featuring prominently in SDf southern cross, planes couldnt survive the point defence turrets of the crashed/landed ship or absurd guardians with their excessively effective blue plate specials, but mostly the point defences (I never got on with genesis climber, I got the theme but the exo pilot-interface-suit-bikes vs giant dumbass space cyclops crabs never quite settled for me. . . Very little of the anime and wider setting was actually translated rather than “localised” so most of that lore is behind a language and cultural wall

[@boobah5643]

@@IRMentat It wasn't translated at the time. In the early 2000s there were translated DVD releases for _Macross_ and _MOSPEADA._ Memory suggests that there was also a _Southern Cross_ release, but I don't have a copy to prove it.

[@IRMentat]

EVERY time Star Wars says “laser” I mentally substitute it with “plasma”. Makes a LOT more sense that way. Lightsaber? Plasma “chainsaw”/gyro embedded in a containment field. Laser canon, plasma canon.

[@EGRJ]

No More Heroes had a "Beam katana" that's an actual beam. It has a start and end, like a fluorescent bulb housing. Well, until the second game.

[@cooper10182]

Makes the most sense since blasters all the way up to turbo lasers require tibana gas.

[@robertfaucher3750]

20:56 this is an excellent point considering, in canon, Star Destroyers can bombard and essentially nuke the surface planet of all life. They've done it before. So having 7000 of them is actually much better than a death star because if you wanted to, say, destroy like 20 planets in a single day you totally could with that amount. It'd take you less than 20 years to build as well

[@thecommander9137]

A fun note, Grand Admiral Thrawn, who is the empire's greatest strategical mind, (don't look at the rebels' series) when he finally saw the death star project he scorned the project as a useless waste of Imperial resources, noting as you how many star destroyers they could get for the cost of a single Death Star.

[@Revkor]

hence why in rebels he was in charge of the defender project

[@ChristopherJohnson-np4dv]

He also noted that the real tragedy of Endor was the loss of the Executor, premier flagship of the Imperial Fleets to which all the most promising mid-level officers (i.e. ones likely to be promoted to higher commands) were assigned. The loss of vessels at Endor were comparatively trivial to the Empire as a whole... but losing a quarter million of your best officers coupled with Palpatine having deliberately engineered the bureaucracy to be unable to function without him set off a logistical chain reaction the Empire just couldn't recover from before the Rebel Alliance was able to exploit and seize control of three quarters of the galaxy in just five years (in the EU/Legends... no idea what happened in the SW equivalent of the Kelvin timeline).

[@adjoran4789]

The main reason the superlaser was needed is to get through planetary shields, which are VERY strong in SW. A planet with a full planetary shield network can withstand a almost indefinite length of bombardment from a conventional fleet. Even the limited one on Hoth was so strong that the fleet command immediately declared it strong enough to "resist any bombardment " (from a SS destrayor and crew of normal ISD). The DS could punch through it in a instant, making resistance untenable.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Oh sure. But Thrawn was able to nearly starve out Coruscant by /faking/ tractor beam launches of cloaked asteroids that never existed. How long could the average planet hold out?

[@arthurmoore9488]

@@SacredCowShipyards Playing devils advocate, Earth has been holding out pretty well for a few years now without galactic trade.

[@thomascarpenter8177]

So the quote that comes to mind would either be "big bada boom" or "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here! Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM!" The other joke we used to make, was the one hidden jedi on Alderaan yelling "if this works I'll be famous!!" As he tries to defect the planet killing laser, then the death star technician trying to explain the 0.000001% of the beam being deflected😂

[@Krahazik]

Ivanova had some great lines.

[@dmcarpenter2470]

Main Batt. Secondary Batt. Tertiary Batt. But wait! There's MORE

[@jlvfr]

_all the batts_ !

[@KLanio-lr8yv]

he never seen. the Balls of the Perry Rhodan universe

[@jamesbilger]

Came for the intro, stayed for the spheroid rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go move my ship before it's considered abandoned.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Good choice.

[@Sephiroth36977]

Dockmaster: It is a single station that can shoot at one planet at a time. JJ: Yeah, so I made it able to shoot at 7, maybe 9 planets at once! Dockmaster: This is also an example of "not how lasers work"...

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Correct!

[@merafirewing6591]

The 501st Legion weren't very happy that the rebels took out the murderball that is the Death Star.

[@IRMentat]

Especially as they had to find then play 3 dimensional crane game with their “I no longer think spinning is a good trick” force leaders damaged ship.

[@daindreska8206]

Considering the size of the death star, these defenses are actually fairly sparce. You got to that, I spoke too soon

[@bryancorrell3689]

And the rebels triumphed just by kicking the Empire's balls.

[@tarmaque]

Not to contradict the Dockmaster (may his hydraulic fluid never leak out) but I have to point out that squishies require an atmosphere, and the strongest vessel for containing an atmosphere is in fact a sphere. So on that level they make sense. Then again, The Death Star has so many structural anomalies like pointless trenches and docking bays and blaster ports, the sphere shape no longer has enough structural integrity to really justify its shape. Not to mention, where the hell are its engines? This thing must have engines because we know it's light speed capable. Unless they simply use their main gun as an engine, which I think we've talked about before. Shoot one way, the Death Sphere goes the other way. Matter of physics.

[@assemblyrequired7342]

I remember the Essential Guide to Vehicles listing the engines along the equator. So maybe there are just massive engines there, and they fire depending on whichever way the Death Star wants to go. I doubt it'd be quick at sub-light speeds, but then, I think the whole point of the Tarkin Doctrine was to scare the shits out of beings to the point of panic, not to kill them as quickly as possible.

[@AdamTehranchiYT]

One of the most frustrating things about Star Wars is that it's cannon that DS-1 took decades to build, DS-2 took years, and even incomplete was better than 1, but never used that knowledge afterwards (Ignoring the planet destroyers that proliferate in the IP). Where are the mega structures built like a DS? Where are the colony ships built like a DS? Where are the mobile space stations that could replace destroyed planets? If the internal schematics are anything to go by, with countless horizontal levels and several concentric, one could make a Dyson Swarm and skip the forever war that the GFFA seems stuck in with just one of the silly things. Great video BTW just thought I'd share 👏🏻

[@emilsinclair4190]

There are unarmed versions of the death star gifted to people palps liked. Colony ships for what? Sw has very few new colony stories since the known universe has lots of empty space. And it kimda makes sense that the fall of the facist leader and the split of the empire into multiple groups would have destroyed the supply lines and industries that made the death star posisble

[@echoalpha9935]

POV: THE DEATH STAR REMAINS ON THE DOCK FOR MORE THEN 24 HOURS Random human dock worker: welp this this is to big for the compactor " hay John get the plasma cutter cut the bastard in half im gonna go get a beer"

[@SacredCowShipyards]

"How do you eat an elephant?"

[@arcticbanana66]

I seem to vaguely recall one of the old Expanded Universe novels implied that Palpatine/the Sith somehow knew about the coming Yuuzhon Vong invasion. I remember one character mentioned that it would have been handy to have a Death Star or two to combat the Yuuzhon Vong's worldships.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Yeah, that's one of the explanations, but I can't say I was ever fond of it being inserted into the storyline.

[@arcticbanana66]

@@SacredCowShipyards Yeah, while some of the old novels were actually pretty great, a great many of them were, to put it lightly, "not very good".

[@gadzilla6664]

23:16 The Dockmaster has been studying Night Lord's battle tactics: CONFIRMED. 😂

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Effective is effective.

[@gadzilla6664]

@@SacredCowShipyards Indeed. Ave Dominus Nox. 😉

[@reecewestmoreland6137]

Now all i can picture is Darth Vadar saying to Tarkin "Let's try spinning, that's a good trick"

[@SacredCowShipyards]

... I mean...

[@accywacky2699]

Unicron is known as a planet eater, from the movie we see how it eats planets, by using massive traktor beams to pull matter into its maw while using a giant set of pincers to tear and rip up the planetary body to speed up the process. We also saw Unicron make a snack out of Cybertron's Moons, the deathstar meanwhile is always compared to the size of a moon... So while its not exactly accurate to precise measurements, that sets a decent basis for which is the bigger spaceball.

[@madrabbit9007]

To glass a whole planet I think it would require strategically targeting fault lines to cause planet wide tectonic upheavals and volcanic blast around the planet. Once it settled down you send in the new miner.

[@jamesk370]

17:46 Darth Vader and Grand Admiral Thrawn approve this message.

[@thatstarwarsnerd6641]

“But we can’t turn back, fear is their greatest defense. I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Aquilae or Sullust and what there is is most likely directed towards a large-scale assault”

[@jamescrawford8232]

I think it's safe to say that the Empire had balls of steel 😅

[@tirirana]

"My Humies bring all the junk to the yard!"

[@the_unrepentant_anarchist.]

The Haynes manual for a Death Star would undoubtedly be one of- if not *THE-* largest books in *any* galaxy, no matter how far away or how old it was. 🍄

[@jlvfr]

but it's still a great book.

[@the_unrepentant_anarchist.]

@@jlvfr A Haynes manual gives you a diagram of *every single part* involved in the construction of whatever the manual is about, and also a detailed description of the part's function and placement within the construct. Every. Single. Part. Of a structure with a diameter of a hundred miles, and an internal volume that's hard to comprehend. It would take a dozen lifetimes to read. And it would have to be a mile across, two miles down, and fifty miles thick to contain all the information necessary to build and maintain a Death Star. So not a practical read then.... 🍄

[@edwinmartin9120]

@@the_unrepentant_anarchist. haynes manual on microfiche might work with a free slide rule corrections and updates are extra

[@edwinmartin9120]

Janes is the publisher for naval and military aircraft they might have a printing press on board 😐😑😶 or they might use microfiche 😎😎😬

[@the_unrepentant_anarchist.]

@@edwinmartin9120 Now *that* would be an impressive press! Not sure about the microfiche though, all those little spools and frames would make the part you're looking for nigh on impossible to find- it would take weeks, and an aircraft hangar to store all the little spools in! I wouldn't want to find the page that told me which spanner I'd need to loosen the three-eighths Gripley's which are currently jamming the doors to cargo bay 11 NE Quadrant Equatorial Trench Lv 38. Nightmare,.. 🍄

[@widgren87]

The sheer stupidity of the Tarkin Doctrine is enough to give people a head ache... I do wonder at times what the most effective Scifi Space Fleet is but I haven't read or watched enough to know. And now I wonder what the Dockmaster's favorite Star Wars ship is...

[@MonkeyJedi99]

And destroying habitable planets is idiotic. Even with the huge number of habitable planets in the Star Wars galaxy, they are a finite resource. Drops rocks on cities, strafe towns, send in troopers to cleanout remaining concentrations, use the planet as you wish.

[@jlvfr]

all proper dictators love to build giant things; Hitler with *Germania* and the Maus tank, Stalin with the never build *Palace of the Soviets* and some of his naval designs post war...

[@thatstarwarsnerd6641]

I think the actual Tarkin Doctrine itself is a good idea, it’s just that most of the attempts to implement it were terrible

[@GummiArms]

I think the Tarkin Doctrine was a clumsy attempt to solve an unsolvable problem, in a sense. The Empire had inherited vast swaths of territory but didn't have an effective means of controlling that territory. Space is, in fact, very very big. It might have been more sensible to cede control over rim territories, and focus their efforts on the core and industrial sectors instead. But that would have given rise to other star nations, and not wanting that competition was understandable.

[@CptJistuce]

​@@MonkeyJedi99 That depends. How good is terraforming tech in Star Wars? I assume there's nothing so conveniently magical as a Genesis bomb, but also that they do have the capacity to turn a dead rock into something livable given enough time. Granted, melting the GD crust is going to impede that timeline significantly. ... At least they weren't blowing up suns and permanently sterilizing entire star systems at once? *The Sun Crusher and Starkiller Base enter the chat* Oh, come ON!

[@42meep13]

From my understanding "light turbo laser" is basically Star Wars speak for "we don't want to specify the caliber of the weapons but do at the same time". As far as I can tell, you've got the blasters, which are infantry weapons, blaster canons, which are like, an anti-material rifle/heavy machine gun that you see on some light vehicles and for anti-infantry work on larger vehicles. You have light, medium, and heavy laser canons which are your big ground vehicle and starfighter main guns, and starship secondary weapons, and then your light, medium, and heavy turbo lasers which are your big battleship guns. And then there's superlasers which are superweapons. Like most of Star Wars though, you just gotta kinda squint your eyes and not look at anything too closely and just enjoy the flashy laser lightshow.

[@lsswappedcessna]

To quote an old Australian rock song from the common era year of 1976, "We've got the biggest balls of them-alls!" That's the whole point. Cubes are more efficient for material storage and cost, the Borg got that one right, and triangles are more sturdy for purposes of taking a load and distributing the material stress evenly, but humans love balls and we love showing off that ours are the biggest and best. To give credit to the ball, however, a ball made of steel or titanium makes for a great pressure vessel (Gentlemen, don't try this at home) as far as strength against implosion. A massive space battlestation an efficient pressure vessel does not make.

[@DrNagi]

Bigger balls? Margok Worldship. From Andromeda.

[@vonfaustien3957]

The large spheres from the Culture books, founder shield worlds or really any of the the Dyson spheres scattered across scifi

[@The_Viscount]

Dockmaster, I am so glad you kept your intro. It's part of what gives your channel individuality. Incidentally, I just got off the phone with a friend who used to work for Blastech's weapons development department. According to him, the chief engineer of the project wanted to call it a "heavy repeating blaster cannon.". He was overruled by some pencil pusher in marketing. Unfortunately neither the designer nor marketing executive work for BlasTech at present. The designer quit while the marketing genius was liquidated. Based on the way it was said, I decided not to press further.

[@MaximusOfTheMeadow]

The funny thing is, the Death Star was based upon a dam, so dammmm You can have 1 DS, but A LOT of dams

[@shawn6860]

Balls are an all around great thing. Like the Dyson Sphere.

[@boobah5643]

If by 'great' you mean 'big,' then sure. It's got the problem that anyone who can get the materials to build one has already demonstrated they have no need for one.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

You can juggle them!

[@PoeticTwist]

The exterior of the sphere had all sorts of things. Towers, etc. The interior was actually smooth before they placed the levels, etc., inside. And the super laser. The drives were placed in trenches around the sphere, to maneuver the station from place to place. The hyperdrive outlet was the opposite of the super laser.

[@EGRJ]

>My Humies "What up, my Humies!"

[@millenniumf1138]

The Death Star wasn't just a weapon of terror, though that was it's secondary purpose and the one they advertised in the Imperial recruitment holos. The primary purpose was that independent militaries still had planetary shield generators, which were in multiple movies, including The Empire Strikes Back. The planetary shield that a small group of guerilla fighters could get on the black market to defend the base on Hoth was capable of holding off Darth Vader's personal squadron of star destroyers, including the biggest and baddest capital ship in the fleet at the time, and was said to be able to "deflect any bombardment". The only reason the Empire had to send in ground forces at all was because they couldn't annihilate the base from orbit and in the time it would have taken to blast away enough of the planetary surface around the shield to cause a problem for the Rebels, the would likely have evacuated. They had to send in slow-moving walkers, because the ice plains were too slippery for wheeled vehicles and shields apparently stop repulsorlifts (otherwise they would have sent in TIE Fighters and Bombers). When cash-strapped rebels can stop your top-of-the-line warships, you kinda need something so powerful that it can say "No" to their defenses. Now imagine how powerful planetary shield generators would be for a well-off planet, like one that was a manufacturing center or a mining planet that rakes in cash and can afford *multiple* shield generators that can completely encompass the world, like the one at Scariff. If the Rebel base on Hoth was an impossible nut to crack without special tactics, imagine how hard it would be to enforce order on a world that could afford to defend itself. Sure, you can take out supply lines and stop traffic coming to and from the planet, but they can still slip out occasional ships and call in reinforcements over the Holonet to potentially drive off your fleet, which makes the Empire look weak and unable to defeat its enemies, not to mention the possibility of ground-based defenses similar to the ion cannon on Hoth that disabled a significant portion of Death Squadron before the walkers even landed. The expanded universe even mentions planetary turbolaser batteries that could fire on orbiting vessels. Park an Imperial fleet above a world that has a shield *and* ground defenses like that? What, are you going to give the planet a pretty light show by blasting the shield and exploding your landing craft against it? By annihilating an entire planet - one that, being a core world, was likely in possession of at least a halfway decent one - the Empire said, "It doesn't matter how powerful your shield is. We're getting through it with our new weapon and there's nothing you can do to stop it". Since the Death Star's cannon could be tuned to release however much energy they needed to take out a shield, the Rebels were now effectively defenseless, as were any systems that were thinking about resisting Imperial rule. Now a system can't simply throw up a shield and stop an Imperial bombardment from space. THIS is the Death Star's true power. THIS is why it was not just desirable for an Imperial doctrine of fear, but *necessary* to defeat their enemies and crush any hope of resistance, and if the Rebels hadn't destroyed it, it would have been able to bend any planet to the Emperor's will by merely showing up.

[@Grimmance]

They had a second deathstar being built towards the end of the production of the first one, assuming they built a drydock for it I could see them trying to make enough to have an eternal parade, every year you get a new moon, and one helluva laser show. You dont need countless deathstars just enough to make their presence felt. You dont even need the super laser in all of them, because you might never know until its too late.

[@rainbowappleslice]

Kinda crazy that the empire went from using lots of fighters to take down separatists ships as the republic, to completely disregarding them once they went full empire

[@lordfrostwind3151]

I do love that the First Order at least in the lore learned a lot and did work to improve their own starfighter and capital ship anti air capabilities, unfortunately the writers in the actual movies seemed to keep forgetting those details so you have General Hux sitting there with a thumb up his arse while a bunch of slow moving bombers come blow up his big dreadnought while 3 flying fortresses full of missiles, guns and starfighters hang back and let them do their thing.

[@Jeartozer]

0:44 lookin like the Star Wars Geonosis Spheres, if mempry serves, also the middle core of a Lukerhulk battleship

[@Serbobiv123]

Regarding blaster/lasers/turbo lasers: AFAIK, a blaster is essentially your standard plasma gun; a laser cannon isn’t a laser, it is a blaster with improved focusing systems for extended range (slower firing than a blaster for equivalent power due to needing more cooling); a turbo laser is a laser with a booster stage to pump up the plasma bolt's power (far slower firing than a laser but hugely powerful, needs a much larger power source/support infrastructure so generally only found on capital ships). Light medium and heavy is just general classification of the weapon’s power, so you can have a light blaster/laser/turbo laser which is like a smaller point-defence gun on a ww2 battleship, equivalent to like a 20mm gun, and you can have a heavy blaster/laser/turbo laser, like the 460mm guns on the Yamato. Its just that a blaster is like a muzzle-loading cannon (short range and not that powerful), while a turbo laser is like a multi-stage light-gas gun (good god, was that shell doing mach 5?!)

[@Clank_Clank_Im_a_tank]

I was watching a video on the M2 repulsor tank and they mentioned there was a large force of them on the Death Star. They apparently moved slong the outside of the station to fight off boarding actions.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Makes sense.

[@KertaDrake]

The insane thing about the Death Star is that if you managed to just rush in with a fleet of large ships and get past the slow-firing main weapon, you could just devastate a section of its defenses and just have your fleet slowly begin melting through the outer armor in a single spot at their leisure until you hit something deep enough to be vital.

[@STSWB5SG1FAN]

@18:30 Actually, the Death star was originally conceived by the Confederacy for Independant Systems (aka the Separatists), actually construction of the Death Star prototype wasn't started until after Palpatine declared the end of the Republic and the founding of the Empire, so the Republic was never involved in the building of the Death Star. And while the Death Star project had its supporters (Tarkin), it also had its detractors (Vader to some extent, but mostly Thrawn).

[@themanformerlyknownascomme777]

on your comment about just using turbolasers for the death star: I seem to recall that was the actual original concept by George Lucus with the original script describing how Alderan disintigrated under turbolaser fire falling on it like raindrops

[@Salty_Balls]

Confirmed, this human takes 2 balls with him wherever he goes.

[@KOZMOuvBORG]

0:25 it's a Jung-ian thing - the circle/sphere representing wholeness.

[@KOZMOuvBORG]

7:13 naming of weapons is as confusing as the sizing system used for olives - where small, medium and large are the bottom 3.

[@IAmTheAce5]

Oh balls…

[@Attaxalotl]

Ed Balls

[@tsamoka6496]

Dahak from Mutineers Moon is Best Ball, in my humble opinion. He (as Dahak is both a ship and the AI running said ship) is also one of the more terrifying space balls (LOL!) in fiction. As I recall, he had some kind of possibly FTL-speed missiles that he could lob at whatever he wanted, on top of various other types of gravity and/or antimatter weapons and numerous parasite warships. Yes, I said "warships" as in full-scale battleships. One of the two types of FTL drive he used could also potentially be used as a weapon itself, something that was demonstrated in the second book of the series by an entire star being blown up to wipe out an entire enemy fleet in one shot. And even with all of that, Dahak himself was about the size of Earths' moon (in point of fact, Dahak had actually 'replaced' the moon itself in the distant past of the story by outright destroying the moon and used the rubble to create a thin shell of rock around his hull, where he then sat in orbit waiting until the "modern day" of the story)...and yet was still considered to be on the 'small' end of craft of his type. If I recall, actual ships-of-the-line of his type were around the size of 'Jupiter'. It is my opinion that Dahak, on his own, could solo the entire Imperial Fleet from star wars and win. A full first-rate battle fleet of approximately 50-100+ Jupiter-sized battlemoons? They could take on every playable faction in the entire WH40K universe, 'combined'...and utterly crush them. =^x^=

[@redenginner]

Light,Medium, and Heavy basically refers to the overall size,fire rate,and output of the individual guns in the battery. The best analog is the real world 5, 8, and 16 inch guns used by the ww2 era bluewater navies.

[@Krahazik]

The Nuking worked because it was a demo and there was the threat that we had more planes with more nukes available. Not so much with the Deathstar. Which is where having a single Star Destroyer break apart a planet would be more effective as a demonstration deterrent with everyone knowing the empire had a lot more of those ships. I would also argue from a terror standpoint, you might want to slow down the destruction a bit to cause more terror, and maybe let some people escape to spread the story of how bad and terrifying it was. If everyone died in a wink, there is no one to tell others how terrifying it was from first hand experience, somewhat reducing the psychological impact.

[@patroclusilliad233]

Thing is Tarkin's interest in the Star Destroyer was a power play. Some even theorize he would eventually try to take over the Empire with it.

[@jon-paulfilkins7820]

10:55 or a square mile, because the Empire uses IMPERIAL units!... I'm a gonna get shot for that ain't I!

[@dmcarpenter2470]

When you suggested the Mk I be removed from the DS, replaced with turbo lasers, I was reminded of an Anime sphere(oid), the Comet Empire. Yes, the Megamorphinspacepowerdiscoballofdeath. IIRC, she had a rotating equatorial belt battery, which did for the moon.

[@kdarkwynde]

If you go by materials used instead of credit cost, it's even worse. Using the largest published figures I could find for Imperial-class destroyers and the SMALLEST I could find for the first Death Star, I calculated volumes for each. Then, because I had to make some educated guesses on the destroyer, I doubled my calculated volume for it. Assuming similar overall densities for both ships, for what it took to build the Death Star, the Empire could have produced more than FIVE MILLION Imperial-class Star Destroyers

[@26th_Primarch]

There's plenty of interesting details regarding the construction and operation of the DS-1 in the eponymous novel Star Wars: Death Star.

[@comentedonakeyboard]

Aproximately 1.2mio crewmen cry out in pain.

[@Wastelandman7000]

I think I can resolve the cannon designation for you. laser or ion cannon mounted on aircraft or tanks are rated differently than NAVAL cannon. The rotary cannon in the nose of an A-10 is still a cannon even though the 16" guns on a battleship are also technically cannon. They're generically designated naval cannon.

[@sneezingidiot301]

Little surprised that the opening rant didn't mention the Lukerhulk think of all the space minivans you can fit

[@johnwillsea6600]

Just to help here (not defending the death star) In Star wars when if come to starfighter and space combat the difference between light and heavy is not in terms of power, but rather range. They switched in space combat to lasers so stray shots wouldn't continue until they hit a populated system (see the third season of starbalzers to see how that can be disastrous) but rather disappate over distance as the gas spread out. Thus a "light cannon" is essentially designed to run undergassed but also can faire faster like this since it doesn't require as high-spun plasma as a regular gun. Inversely, heavy blaster cannons are designed to run over gassed and hit further off, but take longer to aim and spin the plasma. This concept also hold true for Ion cannons and other space weapons, with the only difference being physical weapons (like concussion missiles). As for the reactor iginition situation in the death star, it used to be in old cannon that the Deathstar ran off Utopium (they used the symbol of a cow pooping for this), and that various chambers would be filled with this stuff. In normal use itd be slowly fed into the reactor, but when the superlaser was in operation theyd dump entire chambers in all at once. Now this would generate a lot of strain on the deathstar's reactor, but the excess energy could be vented to one of the emitter beams. Thus a single reactor emission would be just using one chamber. I am not sure if this holds in cannon however. Also this is what destroyed Durga's Darksaber, it was built so shoddily that the sheer strain on the reactor when they attempted to fire shook it apart. As for those tractor beams, their placement wasnt uniform, oddly they were only in yhe Deathstar trench and around the dish of the superlaser itself (i asked about the tractor beams once to the Writer of the New Wssential guides). His said this was because most of the cargo and ships came in that way and needed guidance. Yet the superlaser dish was different, they used the tractor beams to actually bend the light so it formed one beam. The only issue with this is you were essentially making unstable black holes to accomplish this. He said that from his disscussions this was not considered in the making of "A New Hope" and its best just to ignore it today. However the thought that instead of a laser they could just create black holes is terrifying to me. Makes me wonder if otherships like "The Star Hawk" might be capable of this? In any case i hope this helps, thank you and please have a wonderful day.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

There's... a lot of contention about the nomenclature.

[@Wastelandman7000]

The only way the Death Star super laser could possibly work is the use of force fields to hold the lasers into a coherent beam and focus them. I mean they've had light sabers for thousands of years, so its just an upscaled light saber. Its still silly. But, that would hold the beams together anyway.

[@Kirkmaximus]

Granted, I would of used the Galactic Credits on a massive fleet of TIE Defenders and it's supporting ships. However, my logic falls flat, as the Defender wasn't invented until far after the Death Star.

[@nicholashodges201]

The whole cost and size of the DS was because it needed someplace to keep the powerplant for that laser. Which is what made the RoS DS laser equipped fleet of star destroyers so stupid. There's just no way they could power them. Not to mention the strain they'd put in the engines just being there doubling the mass of the ship...

[@SacredCowShipyards]

In fairness, those weren't full-size super lasers, but they were still dumb.

[@FromMyBrain]

I mean this ball that ball.. no point in comparing when this ball comes in a pair.

[@IsaiahAmos017]

So basically the death star would have been a lot better if it was built more like The Venetour

[@SacredCowShipyards]

* stares *

[@somerandomjedi]

gotta love star wars lore inconsistencies, because in a new hope they do somewhat address the fact that bombing planets to bits takes alot of star destroyer's, when they hit the asteroid belt han makes a comment about how unlikely it is that the empire could have done it. but the broader point still stands that the death-star is a colossal waste of resources

[@Wastelandman7000]

Mind you, that's not any more silly than the "Blast Master" firing through a force field HOLDING THE AIR IN. Being crewed by people who are not wearing space suits. Knock the force fields out even for a couple of seconds and you wipe out the whole gun deck. At least the turrets are pressurized and armored.

[@emilsinclair4190]

I mean this is kinda believable if the technology is very error resisted. Like if you are in a house do you fear that it will collapse? No bc this does not happen normally.

[@terramas]

Death star's got nothing on the world throne from 40k

[@Iceflkn]

20:00 True, only one Death Star but remember, Emperor Palpatine (Darth Sidious) was aware of a looming threat far greater than the Rebellion-the Yuuzhan Vong. He knew they were already in the early stages of their invasion, and understood that the Death Star would be vital in defending the galaxy from their onslaught.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

There's a lot of vagaries about that, which even the EU was not specific about, so I deliberately omitted it, for a reason.

[@Hajile_Ibushi]

Oh! The channels back. Last i heard was a couple of years ago when the shipyard was going to move and haven't gotten any updates since. Thought it was gone for good until a minute ago. Subscribed and gonna have to go back and see what i missed.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

We've been back for a while, so you've got quite the backlog.

[@darth_dan8886]

When I hear about "a certain ship from Anime" in the list of potential future coverage, I just can't help but hope it would be the captain Harlock's Arcadia, especially in its 3d-reimagined glory... Though I fear it might be just about anything else.

[@petoperceptum]

In the ttrpgs as I recall (so cannonicity is debatable) hyperdive rating would multiply the time to complete a hyperjump. So a class 4 would take 4x as long to complete a jump as a class 1. This lead to some interesting things where a custom tuned hyperdive like the Falcon's was a class 0.5

[@firestorm165]

The sci fi setting I'm working on has a similar... I'm going to go with megacraft for want of a better term. The darn thing is so big that all it needs to do is show up in the target's star system for a half a day and it's orbit will be disrupted enough that in about 5 years the conditions on the surface will be unliveable

[@irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

I'm convinced you should cover the Tiqqun from IXION as it's quite the space station, especially with how realistic it really is in design. Of course could have a hard time with something like White Base instead.

[@19LG99]

8:40 jeah right, how much damage could a single proton torpedo possibly cause?... right?... 😅

[@Grimmance]

I'd still build a deathstar but instead of the laser beam Id fill the dish with heavy turbo laser batteries. If you desync the battery fire enough it'll look like a solid laser beam anyways, and will melt whatever it's pointed at. The fact that it can house a fleet is kind of the bigger benefit in my mind.

[@Krahazik]

If I were to build something like the Death Star, I would build it as a giant carrier, a mobile staging base for as many Star Destoryers as I can fit as a regional base. It deploys to a troubles region of space, say about the middle point between a cluster of troublesome systems, then deploy enforcement assets to the systems in question to remind planetary governors who's in charge.

[@Grimmance]

@Krahazik oh I'd for sure make that the primary role, have Droid operated calorie farms, and fill it with as many light and medium craft as possible. Capital ships can dock/land on the surface.

[@CantankerousDave]

I found it hard to swallow a hyperdrive large enough to propel a 100-mile sphere. That, and how it’s treated as both a vertical stack of floors encased in a ball *and* an astronomical body that the X-wings fly along the flat surface of.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

So the interior structure is... vague. Its widely accepted that most of the floors of the Death Star operate like planets do - radially - but there's also the... possibility... of stacked floors in the core, but it's never specified.

[@hyenafur]

If you start deep diving into Star Wars lore, the Imperial Air Defense doctrine is heavily inspired by WW2 Europe and America. Basically (outside of Ching Lee), aircraft were an after thought as they were seen as a novelty rather than a tactical tool. It’s why naval air operations were far more effective in the early war compared to late war; not many had invested in AAA or had vessels with better AAA layouts in dry dock. Side note; Point Defense is not what you think. Point Defense means building up fortifications around a single strategic objective; nuclear power plants for example. You put concussion missiles around what you think is a strategic objective for the enemy and use them as SAM sites against any strike craft.

[@THEYEETER-pt8jn]

idk if someone already said this, but how the death star laser works is that it had 8 reactors specifically for the weapon, powered using kyber crystals, so a 1 reactor burst means the weapon is at ⅛ of its full power, as for the whole converging beam thing, my theory is it uses something similar to tractor beam technology to direct the beams

[@SacredCowShipyards]

There seems some disagreement even amongst the lore.

[@accywacky2699]

The factor that doesnt seem to get considered in the video is that most civilized planets, anyone considered fortified in any sense, have planetary shields they can slap up to protect against star destroyer bombardments. The temporary rebel base on hoth had a small planetary shield big enough to cover the base and some of the surrounding area and, as a result, bombarding the place from orbit even with a whole fleet of star destroyers was not an option. So yeah, sieging a given planet with many star destroyers and bombarding its planetary shield into submission over the span of months, years... possibly decades or centuries if the planet has the power supplies to keep the shield up (and its a Planet, they can probably scrounge it up!) Versus a big death star showing up and one-shotting not just a planet... but a planet with its planetary shield in moments. It's not just the one big ball of doom, it's the one big ball of doom that noone in the galaxy can actually survive a shot from, no planetary defense will save your entire species from losing everything they ever had from their homeworld in an instant. That's the kind of soul crushing terror the death star is meant to invoke.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Energy isn't actually the primary failing point of planetary shields, or how long planets can hide behind shields.

[@accywacky2699]

@@SacredCowShipyards True, but my point is that with properly fortified planets these shield systems can turn even a large fleet of star destroyers from a quick apocalypse event into a lengthy siege scenario. With the Death star that doesn't happen, no shield is strong enough and so even planets that thought themselves safe enough to skirt the empire's laws suddenly have to think about how comfortable they are with the possibility of looking up at the sky, seeing that grey ball of doom and suddenly only having minutes to say goodbye to their loved ones. Everything else about the death star, the armor, the massive size, shields and defense emplacements, even the troops onboard are there only to make the inevitable ambitions of those oppressed to try and take this thing down seem like a doomed cause. Which lets be fair, without exploiting that one weak spot it pretty much is.

[@Robovski]

Tarkin, he's only got one ball...

[@SaberusTerras]

New drinking game: Take a shot every time SCS says "bawls", "bolls", or "balls". Note: I am not liable for the damage caused to your liver.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Neither are we.

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

Come to think of it, putting point-defence weapons all over the Death Star is a bit like putting gun turrets on an E-3A - if the enemy is close enough for the weapons to be relevant, you've already made a lot of mistakes, the defence should've been more effective further out

[@boobah5643]

The original Death Star was meant to (and did) operate on its own. The defenses were obviously inadequate to the task since a couple squadrons of snubfighters (one of them obsolete) was sufficient to destroy the thing, but the planners didn't know about the weak point.

[@jtfbreedlove]

The tarkin doctrine had a weird relationship with point defense weapons, the ISD1 had better point defense than the ISD2. The Death Star was I think really meant to have a huge escort fleet, but Tarkin got impatient and decided to assault Yavin 4 without any ecsorts. On the subject of firebombing there was a funky weapon idea to use timed incendiary charges glued to bats to make firebombing more effective, tests indicated it would have worked.

[@aymann7234]

There is a logic to balls: Maximum surface area with minimum volume, and thus max armor. 4 (d ^3)/8 ~= (d^3)/2 volume and 12 (d^2)/4 ~= 3d^2for surface area, contrast to s^3 vol and 6s^2 surface for a cube (side s = diameter d, pi rounded to 3). So, you could fit Death Stars 1 and 2 in the same box. Other good geometries are hexagons for stacking friction/ making CP Grey happy, and "ball with legs" to fit the natural tendency of things to evolve towards crab.

[@johngz3413]

The biggest ball I can think of that has actually been represented physically in a sci-fi show and that is the Dyson sphere in TNG Relics where the enterprise D rescues Me Scott.

[@hikarihitomi7706]

In some space navies, point defense includes anti-fighter systems as well as anti-ordinance.

[@jon-paulfilkins7820]

Repurposed from an early 1940's folk song to the tune of Colonel Bogey... 🎼"Emperor, has only got one ball, the other is in the Albert hall, Tarkin, is somewhat similar, and poor old Vader, has no Balls at all!"🎶

[@StephenDaniel-p8l]

I recommend Dahak from David Weber's series empire from the ashes. That series of balls are a real tough nut to crack.