The Death Star would't be that expensive

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/death-star-surprisingly-cost-effective-weapons-system

by sutterbomb • 14 years ago

69 65 14 years ago

Building a Death Star out of steel is probably as good an idea as building it out of wood.

I agree. The baddest weapon in universe certainly requires Unobtainium. And with the current market prices of Unbotainium and availability forecasts the way they are all the estimations are off by at least two orders of magnitude.

I mean one cannot compromise architecture. Thats why smart architects use Unobtainium and Oracle databases if they are Software Architects.

zacharyvoase• 14 years ago

I hate to be a pedant but Star Wars was actually set in the past...

dsr_• 14 years ago

In a galaxy far, far away. Nobody in that movie is a human, so estimating economics based on a few centuries of progress is as reasonable as anything else. (Repulsors? Whatever-the-heck a lightsaber blade is? Hyperspace? Mystic magic-wielders in robes? Star Wars is fantasy.)

ThaddeusQuay25• 14 years ago

"Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones."

Yes, politicians and the politically-oriented are those of us who best understand space, the technologies required for use in it, and the costs related to the same. They've already shown us the greatness of their leadership abilities in this area of human endeavor. Sign me up for Death Star, v0.9Beta.

badboy• 14 years ago

So let's start some fundraising right now.

stevejalim• 14 years ago

Kickstarter's first $852 quadrillion project?

granitepail• 14 years ago

I can't help but feel as though this article was a massive waste of time. I know it's certainly not the point of the article to be thorough, but the claims are all utterly baseless and not even remotely applicable to... anything.

mechanical_fish2• 14 years ago

It's a Fermi problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

An absurdly whimsical and fairly basic Fermi problem, but, hey, why should physicists and engineers hog all the fun?

As for the practical applications of this problem: Any game which a) encourages people to estimate costs in terms of percentage of GDP and b) makes the point that GDP per capita tends to grow over time is a useful educational gambit.

ThaddeusQuay25• 14 years ago

It's also a Kardashev problem, and a BDO, and kind of like Ringworld.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dumb_Object

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

rplnt• 14 years ago

Author could've wasted some hour on it. Doesn't matter. What matters is that it is on the front page of HN and will probably accumulate dozens of wasted hours from people reading this. This has to be the most pointless thing I've ever seen here.

But maybe I just don't get something about it.

rayiner• 14 years ago

I think it's an interesting point. World GDP has increased 200x in 500 years. That makes a lot of things possible that would've been fantasy back then, even accounting for technology.

wisty2• 14 years ago

Why calculate it based on volume? That's what the students did. Surely, the Death Star is hollow, and surface area (times some thickness factor, because it's probably thicker) would be better.

zanny• 14 years ago

It isn't very hollow, the star wars nerd books I have read / seen about it make it out to be a few thousand stories tall skyscraper built in the shape of a sphere in space.

Only the reactor in the center and all the piping for the laser / exhaust is open unused space for the most part. And the docking facilities for spacecraft. Besides that it is office space living quarters etc. It is meant to hold a million troops constantly.

timwiseman4• 14 years ago

Skyscrapers are mostly hollow.

wisty2• 14 years ago

OK, it might be better to come up with some scaling law. Frigates, Battleships, and Carriers will have different volume/weight ratios.

Zimahl3• 14 years ago

If we assume that the second Death Star is built similarly to the first one, it is no stretch that the first one is quite hollow. Lando flew the Millenium Falcon inside of the second Death Star (along with Wedge, who was in an X-Wing) and they ended up coming to a very large area within the Death Star before subsequently destroying it and racing to get out.

graywh• 14 years ago

    First off, the technology of the Star Wars universe is well in our future. How
    far into our future? Well, Star Trek is about 300 years in our future, and the
    technology of Star Wars is obviously well beyond that.

Well, ST has teleportation and SW does not. And I'm not sure the comparison is so easy.

    Let's call it 500 years.

In the SW universe, galaxy-wide space travel has been around for millennia.

pavel_lishin7• 14 years ago

Don't forget replicators; I don't think SW had those.

Both seem to have an abundance of cheap AI, however, that is oddly underutilized. The average Star Trek hologram character seems smart enough to pilot a starship, and that doesn't even take into account the contributions of Noonien Soong and Lewis Zimmerman. In Star Wars, droids more resemble Asimov's robots - capable, but limited, and yet clearly are capable of human-level and beyond intelligence.

timwiseman4• 14 years ago

Yes, my impression is that Star Trek technology is well beyond Star Wars technology in most ways. Replicators and transporters have no equivalent in Star Wars. Similarly, if we go to TNG and beyond, there is no comparison for holodecks,a nd medical technology in Star Trek seems better.

But one area where SW has a huge advantage is travel speed. In expanded universe material SW talks about travelling from the very edge of the Galaxy to the core in a few weeks, and that fits nicely with the few vague references in the movies. In Star Trek though it takes decades to go from the center of just one quadrant of the galaxy to the center of another (Voyager was entirely about that).

Also Star Wars has the force and Star Trek only has a few species with limited telepathy (unless you count Q of course).

Jach• 14 years ago

I decided some years ago that it really boils down to the name differences. Star Wars outclasses Star Trek in firepower and speed by far, it's a warlike place. Why launch a planetary invasion when one can just destroy the solar primary? Star Trek has a ton of underutilized technologies, they could optimize a lot but there's a general sense that the trek is more important than the end result. (As just one example, the Federation being perfectly okay with limiting warp speed to factor 5 when they found out warp was killing the fabric of space-time.)

Then you have the various Stargate series, which fix up a lot of the underutilization problems of Star Trek. Teleporting nukes into the enemy ship? Of course! Replicators replicating ZPMs, a non-Deathist attitude toward life, and in the late Universe series they had finally explored aliens that don't speak English!

LaGrange• 14 years ago

The only issue is, the sun won't power economy that big: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-gro...

kijin4• 14 years ago

An empire that consists of 10,000 planets (as the article assumes) could probably commandeer a few thousand stars for its energy needs.

jaysonelliot2• 14 years ago

The main assumption that seems wrong to me is the idea that a massive energy weapon is even a good idea when it comes to destroying planets.

All you really need is a big enough rock to throw at it (apologies to Robert A. Heinlein).

A planetwide extinction event could be triggered with an asteroid just a couple dozen km in diameter. With a really big rock, say 400km across, you could boil off the oceans, according to Charles Cockell: http://books.google.com/books/about/Impossible_extinction.ht...

I imagine that even if a hyper-advanced Evil Empire wanted to vaporize a planet completely, it would be more efficient to push it off its orbit and into the sun than it would be to build a steel planet with a massive energy beam. And that's still ignoring all the other problems physics has in store for a planet-sized object that can be steered through space, enters other solar systems, and gets close enough to a planet to blow it up.

vadman• 14 years ago

Or a smaller rock moving really fast. "The Killing Star" describes it well, here is an excerpt: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Rela...

ufo• 14 years ago

Only evil bugs would resort to primitive tactics like that. Humans are more... civilized.

http://starshiptroopers.wikia.com/wiki/Meteor_attack_on_Buen...

jerf2• 14 years ago

In context, that is not true. In the Star Wars universe, planets have planetary shields, which are extremely powerful and able to take a lot of abuse. An asteroid strike is wildly less powerful than what the Death Star can inflict on a planet; ten+ of orders of magnitude, and I mean that fully literally. An asteroid strike may be enough to wipe out an unprotected civilization, but it hardly affects the planet underneath. The Death Star delivered enough energy to the target to undo the entire binding energy of the planet and completely disassemble it, and do it quite quickly. That's the difference between a very large nuclear strike, let's say 10^20J for roundness [1], vs. the binding energy of a planet, call it 10^32J, plus a great deal extra kinetic energy to blow the planet apart at a sufficient speed to satisfy Hollywood's need for instant spectacle.

For that matter, the canon specifications for a single turbolaser strike are on the order of what we'd associate with a very large nuclear event; if a planetary shield can withstand sustained bombardment by multiple Star Destroyers, moving an asteroid around isn't going to matter.

(One could discuss accelerating an asteroid to kinetic kill speeds, but if you can build a Death Star, it is certainly a lot easier to control and deploy.)

In real life, of course, with no plausible mechanism for anything like "shields" to exist, you are of course correct. If you're patient one can completely destroy all life on a planet with distressingly small investments of energy not entirely dissimilar to what we could produce today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent , I'm spec'ing out a ~20 gigaton strike here.

[2] http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/02/the_physics_of_...

jaysonelliot2• 14 years ago

I love this debate.

afterburner• 14 years ago

You missed something: you can simply pulverize the asteroid with a ground based laser cannon. No need for shields.

Zimahl3• 14 years ago

"I imagine that even if a hyper-advanced Evil Empire wanted to vaporize a planet completely, it would be more efficient to push it off its orbit and into the sun than it would be to build a steel planet with a massive energy beam. And that's still ignoring all the other problems physics has in store for a planet-sized object that can be steered through space, enters other solar systems, and gets close enough to a planet to blow it up."

That would make for a particularly funny episode of Futurama. I could see some race destroying planetary systems using big planets and gravity to sling other planets into their suns. And only the Planet Express crew could stop them --- and maybe Zapp. <Kiff sigh />

ZachPruckowski2• 14 years ago

It could take months or years for an asteroid strike to render a planet fully uninhabitable, and in a universe with large spaceships and hyperdrives, that means a reasonable survival rate via evacuation. So now you've committed to months and months of blockading the planet to prevent evacuation. At that point, why not just blockade the planet in the first place and wait until they run out of some sort of vital food/medicine/defense goods or the population just capitulates out of war weariness?

timwiseman4• 14 years ago

I agree with your core point, but a blockade would not work to destroy most habitable planets. Most habitable planets in Star Wars are at least capable of self sufficiency. You would hurt their economy certainly, but most could produce enough food and other necessities to maintain a (possibly diminished) society.

Coruscant is likely an exception. That one has been turned almost entirely into one city and has virtually no farmland, certainly not enough to support even a fraction of its population.

pavel_lishin7• 14 years ago

I think that the Death Star was more of a Statement with a capital S than just a weapon. If you've read "Old Man's War", it's the evil equivalent of the orbital tether around Earth - not so much a convenient way of doing something (murdering a planet/getting into space) as a way of showing off.

ndefinite• 14 years ago

From an economic standpoint it's not inflation you need to factor in it's the reduction in cost of production over 500 years (assuming away any issues with the time scale the author presents). Also known as deflation which is in fact a good thing (sorry Chicago School, more for less is a good thing).

Over time advances in technology and increases in capital (capital defined as production goods here not cash) tend to dramatically reduce the cost of production.

Not to mention the insane decrease in the cost of raw materials once you start collecting from asteroids (again assuming we're 500 years out and can build a moon sized ship we can certainly snag an asteroid or two for materials).

openyogurt• 14 years ago

Right. I thought it odd that the price of steel and labor would remain constant for 500 years.

maaku• 14 years ago

As expensive as that steel may be to buy at first, destroying even one planet scatters many times that much metal in easily minable chunks from the planet's mantle and core. It'd have one heck of a ROI without resorting to taxes or outright extortion.

kijin4• 14 years ago

Only if the destroyed planet has a large metallic core. The Earth is the densest planet in the solar system due to it metal content. Many small planets and large satellites are primarily made of rock and water ice instead. That would just cause the Death Star to rust.

ZachPruckowski2• 14 years ago

OK, but there's like 20 million planets in the Star Wars galaxy or something. Plus large moons orbiting gas giants, etc. All you need is a few dozen solid-core planets that it's too much effort to terraform and you're making your money back.

pavel_lishin7• 14 years ago

You need oxygen to rust, and there's not that much of it in space.

NickPollard• 14 years ago

In the expanded universe canon, this is actually given as the back story for how many of the brightest scientists were convinced to work on the project - they were told it was a huge mining station for uninhabited worlds.

VonLipwig• 14 years ago

If a Death Star takes a couple of decades of build wouldn't be obsolete by the time its finished?

Also, I am not that into Star Wars but I understand that the Death Star is big? Like a small planet right?

Wouldn't it just be cheaper to take a shovel to one of Saturn's moon. Mount a giant cannon and nail on some fairly large booster engines?

I mean.. the whole idea of building a planet sized space craft from metal seems silly when there are plenty of large space objects ready to be commandeered and turned into very large space vessels. Should also be noted that a moon has a long track record of surviving very large impacts. A metal structure? Perhaps not so much.

jerf2• 14 years ago

"If a Death Star takes a couple of decades of build wouldn't be obsolete by the time its finished?"

Most evidence would suggest that in the Star Wars universe, physics and technology have basically been fully explored for thousands or tens of thousands of years. What's left is style and what exactly is done with it. In the extended canon it is revealed that the Death Star isn't even particularly special and that various superweapons of similar capabilities have been developed off and on in the past several thousand years, determined more by the political environment of the time than the tech environment.

As for the rest, wild handwaving. We don't know how the physics of their space travel works, so it's possible that a moon can not simply be turned into a hyperspace-capable ship any easier than it is to simply build one.

Incidentally, while we're on the topic, here's some relatively-well founded handwaving: http://www.theforce.net/swtc/hyperspace.html

freehunter• 14 years ago

>If a Death Star takes a couple of decades of build wouldn't be obsolete by the time its finished?

Only if there's something better in the meantime. Which there really wasn't in Star Wars. Also it can be built while it's in operation, like a supermarket remaining open during remodeling.

>a planet sized space craft from metal seems silly when there are plenty of large space objects ready to be commandeered and turned into very large space vessels.

Would a planet be able to retain its structural integrity while being carved out to house a million soldiers? Having to build structures on the surface would defeat the purpose of a Death Star.

Also the Death Star has defenses, so it doesn't traditionally need to withstand large impacts.

DennisP• 14 years ago

I figure technological advancement is probably an S-curve, and by the time you have a galactic empire, things have leveled off quite a bit. There's probably not much change over a couple decades. (And in Star Wars, things actually seem to be decaying a bit.)

Also you seem to be assuming that the Death Star is big just for the sake of being big. More likely, most of the mass is the actual planet-destroying weapon, as well as the engines for moving it around.

Shivetya• 14 years ago

One of the best series exploring this area is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman series. Weaponry was only useful; not obsolete; up until the enemy found out about it. In the environment he created you could pretty much negate or create something once you knew it was possible. As such they went to great extents to keep things secret.

In the end, the final solution was crashing light speed plus planets from alternate dimensions into your target planet, bonus points for negative matter planets

Anyone interested in science fiction should read these books but realize that they are a product of their time and it may offend the sensibilities of some readers.

ajuc• 14 years ago

Even now, on Earth, we are using airplanes that were built decades ago. We are also building new aeroplanes designed decades ago (F-16), that have only electronic upgrades (avionics, radar, etc).

Most armed forces around the world consist of vehicles designed in '80 or '90. And I think Death Star is more complicated than tank or plane.

timwiseman4• 14 years ago

When I served in the 82nd some of the NCOs told me that some of the vehicles we used had seen service in Vietnam. I never verified this, but I did verify that some of them were manufactured in the Vietnam era.

batista2• 14 years ago

If a Death Star takes a couple of decades of build wouldn't be obsolete by the time its finished?

No.

For one, it's not like the Galactic technology state of the art is accelerating in any major way. Looks like they have reached a plateau a lot of time ago.

Second, even assuming an accelerating technical rate, while parts could be obsolete (like the computing system and such), the major things that take time to build, namely, the construction part (skeleton, infrastructure, walls, etc) don't change that much, if at all. If it was delivered just today, would an '80s skyscraper, say, be "obsolete"?

padobson• 14 years ago

My problem with this article is that it seems to assume that every world represented in the Galactic Republic has the same GDP as Earth.

I could agree with Coruscant being even an order of magnitude more productive than Earth, but Tatooine or Geonosis seem to be more akin to the outer planets in, say, Firefly (that's right, I'm mixing my scifi franchises).

Those planets are more than likely still behind present day Earth.

But, with the cannonical number of Star Wars planets being 1.24 million, they still might be able to foot the bill.

I'm also a bit disappointed there was no technology multiple for the Galactic economy. A society able to achieve something like alchemy (seems within reach for the Galactic Republic) would be able to generate raw material like steel at a very low cost.

I'm mostly thinking out loud here, but I'd say this whole concept needs more brainpower poured into it.

Also, Hacker News should have a rule that we talk about Star Wars every Friday.

Zimahl3• 14 years ago

> Also, Hacker News should have a rule that we talk about Star Wars every Friday.

Seconded.

zach• 14 years ago

Just to let you guys know, Kevin Drum (the author) may be a political blogger but he's a smart, incisive writer that I think most Hacker News readers can appreciate even if you wouldn't otherwise visit the Mother Jones website.

I went to a Jeopardy! audition six years ago where a contestant named Kevin stated his occupation as "blogger". I chuckled to myself that "blogger" was the new "unemployed" and then he described what he blogged about. Wait, Kevin... Drum? I'd just read his blog a few days ago — that really is his job, I realized! He was obviously a sharp guy but unfortunately didn't made it on the show. I caught up with him after the audition and he was very personable and interested to know what other blogs I read. I introduced him to Marginal Revolution, which was little-known at that time.

If your political interests line up, his blog is a good add to your feed reader. Even if not, it's worth a visit for interesting graphs of the moment and random non-political content such as these recent items:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/chart-day-rise-mac...

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/federal-benefits-a...

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/people-have-surpri...

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/better-grad-studen...

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/my-memory-hazy-fog...

The Death Star would't be that expensive

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