On the implausibility of the Death Star's trash compactor (2002)

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/on-the-implausibility-of-the-death-stars-trash-compactor

by EndXA • 2 years ago

36 53 2 years ago

loris307• 2 years ago

But what about the gravity of the Death Star? Wouldn’t the trash just land back onto the Death Star if they decided to release it into space?

zdyn5• 2 years ago

Not if they eject the trash above escape velocity

smallmancontrov• 2 years ago

Charge up the electromagnetic trash cannon!

iampivot• 2 years ago

Did anyone calculate the expected gravity of the death star, based on it's estimated mass?

ooterness• 2 years ago

Calculation time!

Key assumptions. Wookiepedia lists 120 km for the diameter of the first Death Star [1]. Density of steel is around 8000 kg/m^3 [2]. As a wild guess, I'll assume a uniform sphere with about 1/4 that density (i.e., rho = 2000 kg/m^3), to account for open space etc.

Surface gravity [3] is given by g = (4pi/3) * G * rho * r = 0.03 m/s^2 (i.e., about 0.3% that of Earth).

Escape velocity [4] is given by v = sqrt(2 * g * r) = 60 m/s = 134 mph

This is faster than I would have guessed, but I would expect that to be in reach for a good trebuchet. It's reasonable to assume the compactor is required to load compressed trash into such a device.

[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Star/Legends [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel#Properties [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_gravity#Relationship_o... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#Calculation

op00to4• 2 years ago

Do you think whatever artificial means they use to create gravity on the Death Star would affect the escape velocity?

nwiswell2• 2 years ago

While most of this is valid (how dare a space opera expect me to suspend disbelief!), I think there is a basis for such a compactor to exist in the first place.

It stands to reason that a smaller vessel like a Star Destroyer, it is not logistically challenging to move the trash to an airlock for ejection.

On something so enormous as the Death Star, however, it might be so difficult to move the trash around that it's significantly more efficient to compact it before transport to the surface.

bombcar• 2 years ago

Also, a ship as small as a Star Destroyer doesn’t have to worry about issues that a Death Star might - it might make sense that the weight and balance of the Death Star has to be carefully controlled or it could get lopsided; meaning they don’t eject trash and instead compact it to be put on supply ships that just dropped off equal weight.

dclowd99012• 2 years ago

My biggest question that I don’t think has any plausible answer is the same as his first question: why is the trash system connected to the (presumably unobstructed) in-station ventilation? There is no feasible explanation.

nwiswell2• 2 years ago

Because it's on the detention level. It's part of the punishment, clearly.

dudeinjapan2• 2 years ago

This is why a disgruntled waste/exhaust port engineer leaked its blueprints to the rebels.

a_gnostic• 2 years ago

Manny Bothans, presumably?

djaouen• 2 years ago

This is like, a really stupid thing to nitpick lol

TaylorAlexander• 2 years ago

Yes I believe the point is to have fun.

krapp• 2 years ago

I mean... they have a superlaser with enough power to vaporize an entire planet, so why don't they just... burn the trash?

Y_Y• 2 years ago

The environment!

RandomBK• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure the Death Star undid several eons of environmental conservation efforts on Alderaan.

crabmusket• 2 years ago

It's beyond the environment, it's not not in an environment!

ttfkam2• 2 years ago

Or perhaps Star Destroyers dump their trash because they are simply mobile warships that must resupply at bases.

The Death Star on the other hand is a base. The sheer volume of material it must go through boggles the mind. A compactor would be a first step toward recycling and reuse, separating solids from fluids. Not much arrives and not much leaves.

If the Death Star had to resupply constantly, the resources required to shed waste and transport a small moon's worth of resources would be astronomical.

We only saw the relevant military aspects of the station. There very well may have been enormous sections dedicated to foundries, growing crops, schools (a million folks stationed there and not even a few of the staff's kids accounted for?), etc.

Remember that in the US military, for every front line soldier, there are dozens of supply personnel, support operators, etc. Why would we believe the Empire including the Death Star to be any different?

op00to4• 2 years ago

It’s a fully armed and operational BATTLE STATION. Does language mean nothing anymore?!

ttfkam2• 2 years ago

Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea

Not democratic, for the people, nor a republic. Does language mean nothing anymore to authoritarians?!

lazystar• 2 years ago

Pearl Harbor was (is?) a fully armed and operational naval base in 1942, but the stories from individuals that survived the attack, did not come from soldiers alone. Officers have wives and children; government contractors require civilian lodging; owners of bars and leisure establishments need local banks, accountants, distributors, and legal representation.

clintonb• 2 years ago

I like these nerdy takes. After re-watching Jurassic Park for the first time in years, and with more software engineering experience, I’m curious to read a post-mortem of Jurassic Park.

aftbit• 2 years ago

The main engineering lesson of Jurassic Park is to consider whether fail safe is actually deadly. It depends, are you more afraid of a fire or rampaging "velociraptors"?

dclowd99012• 2 years ago

In the case of housing dinosaurs, there really isn’t a fail safe scenario, apart from marooning TRex to some sort of canyon, much like how lions are often housed in zoos.

jerf• 2 years ago

The main lesson of Jurassic Park is that the park designers are morons, incompetent to an actionable degree, over and over. Despite what Hollywood thinks, containing large animals is actually very easy. You "just" did a sheer trench around them. The larger the animal, the more afraid of heights it has to be.

Take a look carefully next time you are in a zoo. No active electric fences, lots of very dangerous animals, all contained. Dinosaurs would be almost no different.

It's a clear case of "but then the movie wouldn't happen".

As a bonus round, note the strange absence of guns as a final fallback and the blitheringly idiotic reasons deployed that they don't exist, can't be used, or don't work somehow. Granted, you need more than a .22 in case of emergency but this has been a solved problem for over a century.

The first movie I still enjoy even so. I don't let this interfere with my enjoyment of a cinematic classic, and rich eccentrics hiring the totally wrong people who overconfidently do everything wrong I can track with. The sequels, especially the ones with more parks, I have a much harder time with. Jurassic World really should have worked just fine, at least up until the volcano hit. And I don't mean worked fine as-is, as it is also disastrously misdesigned. I mean, a real, correctly designed park is certainly not "easy", but well within reach for a modern corporation even remotely concerned about liability.

hobs• 2 years ago

A lot of what you said what right, but fwiw they do have shotguns they go for during the raptor scene "clever girl" and all that.

RodgerTheGreat• 2 years ago

I agree with most of your points, but one detail worth keeping in mind is that the "dinosaurs" depicted in the film are not necessarily reflective of their original species at all; InGen focused exclusively on producing animals (and plants!) that aesthetically matched the expectations of park-goers. The book offhandedly mentions failed prototypes exhibiting all kinds of problems, like tendencies to scratch their own skin off, and plants and animals are haphazardly juxtaposed from vastly different time periods and climates. Even following best practices from zoos would not necessarily prepare InGen to deal with accidentally hyper-aggressive faux-dinos that are not the robust products of natural evolution.

Maken• 2 years ago

All the problems arised from very poor credentials management.

ianhawes• 2 years ago

There is a scene in the book where, IIRC, a program is run periodically that counts the number of dinosaurs in each paddock based on some sort of dino-scanner.

The program was written in such a way that it expected a certain number of dinosaurs in a paddock and returned a successful result when it reached that number. However, once it reached the threshold, it did not count more dinosaurs. Once modified, the program outputted the correct total, thus identifying that the dinosaurs were producing offspring in a single sex environment.

storyinmemo• 2 years ago

I mean yeah, none are missing if you have them all. Excellent optimization!

dudeinjapan2• 2 years ago

People will say "Just put the dinosaurs in a lowered pit." But I ask you this: have we learned nothing from the tragic death of Harambe?

deaddodo• 2 years ago

Why does the trash compactor compact trash so slowly and with such difficulty once the resistance of a thin metal rod is introduced? Surely metal Death Star pieces are one of the main items of trash in need of compacting. It thus stands to reason that the trash compactor should have been better designed to handle the problem of a skinny piece of metal.

Did we watch the same film? It doesn't appear the metal rod did anything, as far as I can see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u3QInIMVME

dgoldstein0• 2 years ago

Agree on this. Clearly the compactor is designed for slower crushing with high torque

uobytx2• 2 years ago

Yeah, the rod did nothing. I also think it would be odd to assume that this thing is single-phase.

As other have suggested, compaction is potentially needed to transport waste from the deeper parts. But there are several security considerations of just ejecting trash as-is from a high security area. I imagine a trash compactor is also a way to destroy the trash to prevent the old “spy tosses a data device into the prisoner cell block waste chute and have his allies follow the death star to pick it up during ejection”.

didgetmaster• 2 years ago

How do we know that the Death Star didn't use the compacted trash to power up the laser thingy that destroys planets instead of ejecting it into space?

The environmentalists may be right, trash may one day destroy Earth.

waltbosz2• 2 years ago

Tangential, but I have a similar sardonic rant about some occurrences in Rouge One.

1. Their data storage system where hard drives are retrieved by a manually operated claw machine game.

2. Their data transmission system that requires one to use a Wi-Fi link placed on a dangerous aerial catwalk with no safety rails.

3. Their seemingly lack of off-site backups evidenced by the confidence that destroying the data center will ensure the only copy of the death star plans are erased. Which begs the questions of how did they build the 2nd death star so quickly without the original plans?

P.s. did anyone else, while watching the scene where the heros were searching the Empire computers for the secret file name, think of the line from the Simpsons where Homer says, "I've heard how this ends, it turns out the secret code was the same nursery rhyme he told his daughter!"

antonvs• 2 years ago

Rouge One

That’s the most common kind of rouge, but really rouge two or three are where it’s at, because they’re much redder.

rKarpinski• 2 years ago

did you learn that from channel number 5?

waltbosz2• 2 years ago

Ha, good one. I never was a great speller. In fact in 6th grade, I wrote a program to do my "write your spelling words 5 times" homework for me. The teachers would let us type it on a computer, and this was in the days before copy/paste was well known.

jvanderbot• 2 years ago

Why do we believe that every square inch of the star destroyer is so well planned? Most arguments here assume a design. It could be more "Warhammer" in that the system evolved, in a hive city kind of way, making use of whatever was around. A parasite that lurks in the trash compactor would be just the sort of thing a Warhammer novel would introduce and I love that it's there.

Wasn't star wars supposed to be a gritty counterpart to high fantasy high space operas? Or star trek?

schneems• 2 years ago

I feel this last paragraph accidentally explains it all

Please understand, gentle reader, I am all for creating hassles and headaches for the Empire. I just doubt that the Empire would have created so many for itself.

The world of the empire in the 9 films seems orderly and well orchestrated. The version seen via Andor is more like what a real authoritarian technocracy would likely operate like. It strives more for the appearance of competency and control than actual positive results. The reason for this thing? Someone assumed it should be there, so it was.

dTal• 2 years ago

The world of the empire in the 9 films seems orderly and well orchestrated

I'm curious what you mean by this, since we don't actually see a whole lot of the civilian day-to-day running of the Empire. In the original trilogy, the only planets we see have little to no Empire presence, and the prequel and sequel trilogies take place before and after the Empire respectively.

On the implausibility of the Death Star's trash compactor (2002)

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