Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from House
Speaker 1: toff Works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer here
Speaker 1: at House to Parks and I love all things tech
Speaker 1: and welcome to Part two of How the Death Star Works.
Speaker 1: In this episode, I'll talk about the main purpose of
Speaker 1: the Death Star, which was to act as a super
Speaker 1: weapon to keep the systems in line. According to grand
Speaker 1: Moff Tarkins cheerful strategy, sometimes called the doctrine of Terror
Speaker 1: or slightly less dramatically, the Tarkan doctrine. This reflected Tarkan's
Speaker 1: belief that fear and domination would keep the more rebellious
Speaker 1: systems in the Empire in check, and the Death Star
Speaker 1: would be the ultimate tool to bring about that fear
Speaker 1: and domination. The Death Star was no slouch for weaponry.
Speaker 1: For one thing, it had multiple vehicle bays with everything
Speaker 1: from Thai fighters. The original Death Stars supposedly had twenty
Speaker 1: Thai fighters ready to take off at a moment's notice.
Speaker 1: It also had a T E T S or ad
Speaker 1: ADS if you prefer, and a T S T S.
Speaker 1: In fact, according to the Death Star Technical Companion from
Speaker 1: West End Games. The station house some seven thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred starfighters total, four strike cruisers, three thousand, six hundred
Speaker 1: assault shuttles T eight s and an equal number of
Speaker 1: A T S T S and one thousand, eight hundred
Speaker 1: sixty drop ships for troops, which is a lot. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to talk just about one of those because
Speaker 1: it's my favorite vehicle in Star Wars. That's the Thaie
Speaker 1: Fighter or a twin ion engine fighter that was the
Speaker 1: standard starfighter for the Empire during a New Hope and
Speaker 1: in several films after that. It was the basis for
Speaker 1: future starfighters and bombers like the Thai bomber of the
Speaker 1: Tie advanced the Thaie Interceptor. According to various source books,
Speaker 1: your standard Thai fighter measured about seven and a half
Speaker 1: meters or twenty five feet tall. It was six point
Speaker 1: four meters or twenty one feet from side to side
Speaker 1: and six point three meters or a little less than
Speaker 1: twenty one ft front to back. In the world of
Speaker 1: Star Wars, the Thai fighter is all about performance as
Speaker 1: an attack vehicle. The ships have no shields, there's no
Speaker 1: hyper drive, so they have to be carried in larger
Speaker 1: ships for interstellar travel. They don't even have life support
Speaker 1: according to some source books, which is why the pilots
Speaker 1: are in those big, fully enclosed suits. But we have
Speaker 1: seen characters inside the cockpit of Thai fighters who are
Speaker 1: not in fully enclosed suits pilot them. They're able to
Speaker 1: breathe without the aid of a special suit, so I
Speaker 1: suspect that idea of them being without life support is
Speaker 1: not completely cannon. They also had no landing gear or
Speaker 1: any moving parts at all. The end universe explanation for
Speaker 1: that is that it made the ships have less mass,
Speaker 1: which made them more maneuverable and made them cheap to
Speaker 1: turn out on a mass scale. The lack of shields
Speaker 1: also gives insight into the Empire's philosophy regarding the expendability
Speaker 1: of its military force. Now, in our last episode, I
Speaker 1: talked about ion thrusters and how they work. Such an
Speaker 1: engine could move around the starship like a tie fighter,
Speaker 1: but it would be a really poor choice for a
Speaker 1: starfighter due to the very slow acceleration rate. It would
Speaker 1: take a long time VERTI fighter to accelerate to attack
Speaker 1: speed if all it had to rely upon where ion engines.
Speaker 1: This comes down to simple physics shooting out sub atomic
Speaker 1: particles or or even atomic particles or molecular molecular particles
Speaker 1: that only transfers a tiny amount of momentum to something
Speaker 1: the size of a StarCraft, so you're not gonna get
Speaker 1: up to speed very quickly. Back to the Death Star,
Speaker 1: the station itself was really well armed all on its own.
Speaker 1: Part of the exterior of the Death Star is the
Speaker 1: big concave section that houses the stations super laser emitter.
Speaker 1: In addition to this massive laser, which I'll talk about
Speaker 1: more in a bit, the Death Stars armament included tractor beams,
Speaker 1: turbo lasers, super blessed or nine twenty, laser cannons, and
Speaker 1: ion cannons. And I think starting at you know, looking
Speaker 1: at all these different ones would be really helpful. So
Speaker 1: let's let's take them turn by turn. I'm gonna start
Speaker 1: with ion cannons first. These are a cool idea and
Speaker 1: ion cannon in Star Wars fires out charged particles a
Speaker 1: k A ions. So an ion is an atom or
Speaker 1: molecule that holds a net electric charge because it either
Speaker 1: has more or fewer electrons than it has protons, So
Speaker 1: electrons are negatively charged subatomic particles and protons are positively
Speaker 1: charged subatomic particles. So if you have an equal number
Speaker 1: of each in an atom or a molecule, your net
Speaker 1: charge is neutral. But if you have more electrons than protons,
Speaker 1: the particle will have a negative charge. If you have
Speaker 1: more protons than electrons, then you get yourself a net
Speaker 1: positive charge. So in star wars, ion cannons fire off
Speaker 1: beams of these charged particles. Whether they're positive or negative,
Speaker 1: I don't know, And the intent is to disrupt the
Speaker 1: electrical systems at the target. So ion cannons do not
Speaker 1: cause direct physical damage typically, rather they disrupt electrical systems
Speaker 1: like shields, which allows other weapons to do the heavy blasting. Now,
Speaker 1: this isn't that different from something that does happen in
Speaker 1: the real world called an electromagnetic pulse. There are actually
Speaker 1: electromagnetic pulse weapons or e m p s. Now e
Speaker 1: MPs don't have to be weapons. There there are natural
Speaker 1: phenomena out there that will generate electromagnetic pulses, but they
Speaker 1: are also created through stuff like nuclear weapon detonations. We
Speaker 1: didn't know this necessarily when we were first building nuclear weapons,
Speaker 1: but we found out about it. These pulses can overload
Speaker 1: electronics with a voltage surge from electromagnetic energy, which effectively
Speaker 1: can fry electronic circuits if the force is strong enough
Speaker 1: and the circuits are not protected. The larger the circuits
Speaker 1: you're using here, the more likely you're going to see
Speaker 1: an impact. So if you're talking about a relatively simple,
Speaker 1: small circuit, it may not have enough of a voltage
Speaker 1: surge to cause any damage. Also, if it's an operation,
Speaker 1: it's more likely to to be damaged than something that
Speaker 1: has turned off. So any MP blast over like a
Speaker 1: power grid could cause massive damage that. That's essentially one
Speaker 1: gigantic circuit, and you've got a lot of big conductors there,
Speaker 1: and a powerful e MP blast would definitely cause a
Speaker 1: massive surge through that system. Now, we don't have ion
Speaker 1: cannons in the real world, though there have been experiments
Speaker 1: with particle beam weaponry, which would fire charged particles at
Speaker 1: high velocity at a target. Such weapons would have been
Speaker 1: tested with the possibility of using them in anti missile
Speaker 1: defense systems, for example, with the intent of rendering missiles
Speaker 1: useless or blowing them up before they reach their intended target. Essentially,
Speaker 1: these weapons deliver billions of charged particles at high velocity
Speaker 1: to targets to disrupt their atomic or molecular structures. It
Speaker 1: technically delivers kinetic energy to the target, which is the
Speaker 1: same as a conventional weapon like a gun or a rifle,
Speaker 1: only the bullets in this case are on the atomic
Speaker 1: or molecular scale. There are some challenges to designing these
Speaker 1: since they tend to fire charged particles and particles with
Speaker 1: a similar charge will repel each other. So inside a
Speaker 1: particle accelerator, for example, you've got these really powerful magnets
Speaker 1: that generate a magnetic field that keep those charged particles
Speaker 1: focused in a tight beam. They can't wander because you're
Speaker 1: using this other very massive magnet to keep them in line.
Speaker 1: But if you were to fire the beam outside of
Speaker 1: those magnetic fields, then the fact that you have all
Speaker 1: these similarly charged particles, they're gonna push against each other
Speaker 1: and the beam would spread out rapidly, and that would
Speaker 1: reduce its effectiveness. Plasma weapons are sometimes referenced as a
Speaker 1: possible alternative when it comes to energy based weapons, but
Speaker 1: these come with their own restrictions. Plasma is a conductive gas,
Speaker 1: meaning there are free roaming electrons in the gases. The
Speaker 1: most plentiful form of matter in the universe. It's typically
Speaker 1: low density stuff and at very high temperatures it's it's
Speaker 1: the stuff of stars. But it's not ideal for any
Speaker 1: sort of distance weapon, as the gas will expand and
Speaker 1: disperse outside of containment. If you have a high pressure
Speaker 1: plasma gas and you release it into the general environment,
Speaker 1: that high pressure is going to cause the gas to
Speaker 1: expand as it enters the lower pressure environment, and it
Speaker 1: starts to become less cohesive. It starts to lose energy rapidly,
Speaker 1: so you would have trouble finding a way to direct
Speaker 1: the plasma to a target at a high enough speed
Speaker 1: and coherence for it to actually do anything. Plasma does
Speaker 1: work great in short range applications, such as plasma torches.
Speaker 1: We can use powerful electrodes to ionize gas as it
Speaker 1: passes through a nozzle and create a very powerful cutting
Speaker 1: tool this way, but it's not going to become the
Speaker 1: new long range weapon for space. Now I've got more
Speaker 1: technology I want to discuss before I hit the really
Speaker 1: big topic lasers, and that's tractor beams. The tractor beam
Speaker 1: plays a big part in a New Hope, as the
Speaker 1: Empire uses it to immobilize and capture the millennium falcon.
Speaker 1: So could such a thing actually exist? While I'll tell
Speaker 1: you right after we take this quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor, So what exactly is a tractor beam? While
Speaker 1: a tractor beam is some form of energy that can
Speaker 1: draw objects closer to the source of the beam, which
Speaker 1: defies common sense as typically if you send anything out
Speaker 1: toward an object, it tends to push that object away
Speaker 1: rather than pull the object closer. But we do have
Speaker 1: experiments that mimic the tractor beams we see in science fiction,
Speaker 1: but they only work on a teen Italianese scale. So
Speaker 1: optical trap traps and optical tweezers are kind of in
Speaker 1: this category. They use beams of light to immobilize or
Speaker 1: manipulate very small objects such as individuals cellular components, in
Speaker 1: a noninvasive way. So if you needed to move things
Speaker 1: around within a a an organic cell, but you didn't
Speaker 1: want to cut into the cell, you might use optical
Speaker 1: tweezers to isolate a particular part of the cell and
Speaker 1: move it to where you needed it to be. But
Speaker 1: these methods are more about pushing a particle around, not
Speaker 1: pulling it towards the source of the energy, so it's
Speaker 1: really again, tweezers is the right term for it. It's
Speaker 1: not like you are magically latching on and harpooning it
Speaker 1: and pulling it towards you. But there are some that
Speaker 1: are closer to the concept of tractor beams. Bessel beams
Speaker 1: can draw a particle towards the source under specific circumstances.
Speaker 1: A bessel beam is a type of laser beam that,
Speaker 1: rather than forming a single coherent beam, manifests as a
Speaker 1: series of concentric circles surrounding a central dot. So think
Speaker 1: of your typical bulls eye target like in a dartboard.
Speaker 1: The center the bull's eye is the dot of the laser,
Speaker 1: and then the concentric circles around that dot represent the
Speaker 1: various circles of light around that laser dot. So the
Speaker 1: light of the dot is not diffracted, and diffraction is
Speaker 1: the spreading of waves around obstacles. This happens with sound, light,
Speaker 1: and other electromagnetic radiation, as well as with subatomic particles
Speaker 1: in motion because they display wave like properties. But the
Speaker 1: dot in a vessel beam comes from those concentric circles.
Speaker 1: So let's say you've got a very tiny object, and
Speaker 1: the object's size is actually smaller than the larger of
Speaker 1: the concentric circles in this vessel beam, and you direct
Speaker 1: a vessel beam towards this object, you would think that
Speaker 1: the little dot on the center of the vessel beam
Speaker 1: would just touch the the surface closest to the beam,
Speaker 1: and that would be that. But in fact what will
Speaker 1: happen is as long as there's at least one concentric
Speaker 1: circle that's larger than the object, the dot will actually
Speaker 1: reform on the back side of that object rather than
Speaker 1: on the front side of it. Uh, the considering circles
Speaker 1: will allow for this to happen, and you can actually
Speaker 1: use that to pull or manipulate an object to come
Speaker 1: toward the source of the energy to Physicists named David
Speaker 1: Grief and David Ruffner demonstrated this back in by using
Speaker 1: a pair of vessel beams and a lens that caused
Speaker 1: the two beams to overlap, and that way they could
Speaker 1: generate enough power to actually move stuff. They could direct
Speaker 1: the beams at an object and use a strobe like
Speaker 1: pattern of turning the beams on and off, and that
Speaker 1: doing this would cause the dot to reform on the
Speaker 1: back of the particle and create enough force to push
Speaker 1: the particle towards the source of the beam. So could
Speaker 1: we ever build a vessel beam big enough to tow
Speaker 1: a spaceship? No, and that scale the lasers would require
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of energy, more than what we could
Speaker 1: easily generate. And if we could generate that force to
Speaker 1: create or that inner g rather to create a vessel
Speaker 1: being powerful enough to do it, it would just burn
Speaker 1: up the target. It would be such an intense laser
Speaker 1: beam that the the energy it would be imparting to
Speaker 1: the object would actually cause it to catch fire, as
Speaker 1: opposed to pulling it toward you. If it did pull
Speaker 1: it towards you, you would suddenly be pulling a an
Speaker 1: object that was currently on fire towards you, which is
Speaker 1: not ideal. It turns out, if if there's an object
Speaker 1: on fire, my first advice is don't go toward it.
Speaker 1: Move further away. Now, if we found a way to
Speaker 1: create a similar device using a different energy intensive source,
Speaker 1: a macro sized tractor beam could be possible. In theory,
Speaker 1: other options would be to create some sort of gravitational
Speaker 1: or electromagnetic pull on the object, But to use a
Speaker 1: gravitational beam would require warping spacetime itself, which we can't
Speaker 1: yet do, and which would require again enormous amounts of
Speaker 1: either mass or energy in order to warp this face
Speaker 1: time matter or spacetime continuum sufficiently, and that's not something
Speaker 1: we could do. Electromagnetic fields would be easier to generate,
Speaker 1: so you could create an electromagnetic field to attract spacecraft
Speaker 1: towards you, but it would also be pretty easy to
Speaker 1: avoid because if you just made your spacecraft I'll stuff
Speaker 1: that wasn't magnetic, you wouldn't really be affected, though your
Speaker 1: electronic systems might be at least temporarily affected. So if
Speaker 1: it were a normal permanent magnet kind of approach, it
Speaker 1: wouldn't really affect your electronic systems too much. But if
Speaker 1: it were an alternating current approach where you've got a
Speaker 1: varying electromagnetic field, it would be back to that electromagnetic
Speaker 1: pulse issue I talked about earlier. Now this brings us
Speaker 1: to lasers. The Death Star has tons of lasers. Most
Speaker 1: of them are for the purposes of defense, but there's
Speaker 1: the really big one that's for the purposes of blowing
Speaker 1: up planet's real good. So how do these work? And
Speaker 1: would such a super weapon really be able to blow
Speaker 1: up a planet. Well. First, lasers are devices that create
Speaker 1: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. That's what laser means.
Speaker 1: To create a laser, you first need a special substance
Speaker 1: to serve as your lazing medium. This can come in
Speaker 1: lots of different forms. Some lasers use crystals, some use
Speaker 1: special types of glass, some use certain gases. But in
Speaker 1: any case, you have this lazing medium and then its
Speaker 1: job is to absorb energy, typically from either a powerful
Speaker 1: electric current or from another laser. So as you direct
Speaker 1: this energy toward this lasing medium, the electrons inside that
Speaker 1: medium get excited. It's a party. They begin to push
Speaker 1: out from their normal energy state around the nuclei of
Speaker 1: their respective atoms, so they start to occupy higher energy
Speaker 1: states that normally they wouldn't be able to be in.
Speaker 1: But when you stop pumping energy into the medium, that
Speaker 1: allows those electrons to return to their normal rest energy state,
Speaker 1: the lowest one that they would occupy around their respective
Speaker 1: nuclei under normal conditions. However, all that energy you pumped
Speaker 1: into the medium has to go somewhere, right, you have
Speaker 1: to have the law of conservation take effect. Energy can
Speaker 1: be neither created nor destroyed, but it can be converted
Speaker 1: from one form to another. So you pumped this lasing
Speaker 1: medium full of energy, the electrons have taken that and
Speaker 1: they've gone into higher energy states. You remove that source
Speaker 1: of energy, the electrons come down. They have to give
Speaker 1: off that energy somehow, So in this case, those formally
Speaker 1: hyperactive electrons release all that excess energy in the form
Speaker 1: of photons, the basic particles of light. The type of
Speaker 1: medium will determine the color of the emitted photons. So,
Speaker 1: for example, ruby lasers amid a dark red beam, no
Speaker 1: big surprise there, Helium cadmium lasers will blast out blue beams.
Speaker 1: Green beams might come from a neodymium doped atrium aluminum
Speaker 1: garnet laser. What the heck is that, Well, it's a
Speaker 1: crystal in which a small amount of triplele ionized neodymium
Speaker 1: replaces about one percent of the utter um ions in
Speaker 1: a host crystal. And the reason I bring it up
Speaker 1: is that the super laser of the Death Star is green,
Speaker 1: although they don't use that as their lasing medium. See
Speaker 1: in the world of Star Wars, special weapons like lightsabers
Speaker 1: and the Death Stars super laser depended on these fictional
Speaker 1: materials called kaiber crystals, which are attuned to the force,
Speaker 1: which is that mystical power that binds all things together.
Speaker 1: So the Death Star super laser is kind of magic,
Speaker 1: I guess, But like I said in the last episode,
Speaker 1: Star Wars is really more of a fantasy than a
Speaker 1: science fiction story. The Death Star uses eight lasers aimed
Speaker 1: at a focal point to create the super laser. It's
Speaker 1: the combined laser that the Empire uses to blow up planets.
Speaker 1: And how powerful is that laser? According to Dr Patrick Johnson,
Speaker 1: who wrote the physics of Star Wars, it would have
Speaker 1: to be a real whopper. Now. Dr Johnson does not
Speaker 1: calculate how much energy the laser would need to destroy
Speaker 1: a planet, because real world physics don't work the way
Speaker 1: we see the events unfold in Star Wars. Hitting a
Speaker 1: planet with a laser, even a super powerful one, would
Speaker 1: not make it explode, as if the entire planet were
Speaker 1: made out of T and T. You could heat up
Speaker 1: the planet considerably, effectively killing off all life on that planet.
Speaker 1: And if you kept a powerful enough laser on a
Speaker 1: planet long enough, you could start to melt the planet,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't cause it to explode into a billion pieces,
Speaker 1: and that makes sense. It's similar to how you can
Speaker 1: burn wood using a magnifying glass and sunlight. It takes
Speaker 1: a little bit to heat up the surface enough to
Speaker 1: start the process, so it doesn't instantaneously happen. If you
Speaker 1: have a really powerful magnifying glass and you have a good,
Speaker 1: uh good angle on the sun, you can start burning
Speaker 1: wood very quickly. But even then you're talking about heating
Speaker 1: up a substance to the point where it starts to burn.
Speaker 1: Even a super powerful laser would not instantaneously cause a
Speaker 1: planet to explode. Now, Dr Johnson did say that if
Speaker 1: you wanted to create a laser capable of packing the
Speaker 1: same punch as the most powerful collision we know about,
Speaker 1: you'd have to match the blast that Jupiter received when
Speaker 1: fragment g from the Shoemaker Levi comet hit the planet's surface.
Speaker 1: That impact was equivalent to one point one two times
Speaker 1: ten to the twenty seven power jewels of energy. One
Speaker 1: jewel is equivalent to one three thousand, six hundred of
Speaker 1: a what hour, and Dr Johnson points out that with
Speaker 1: one point one two times ten to the twenty seventh
Speaker 1: power jewels, you're talking more energy than all of humanity
Speaker 1: would be able to use over the course of three
Speaker 1: million years if you rely upon the use rates that
Speaker 1: were recorded in two thousand thirteen. So three million years
Speaker 1: of using energy the way we did in thirteen, and
Speaker 1: you would approach the amount of energy that was that
Speaker 1: was represented by this collision on Jupiter. And even that
Speaker 1: is not the same as what it would take to
Speaker 1: destroy a planet. Right, that's not even a full a
Speaker 1: full charge of this Death Star laser. It can't be
Speaker 1: if the if Jupiter still around, unless I checked it is.
Speaker 1: Then you would have to assume that whatever the Death
Speaker 1: Stars laser packs, it's got to be higher than that.
Speaker 1: So that means it's got to be more than the
Speaker 1: energy that we would use over the course of three
Speaker 1: million years. It's also equivalent, by the way, to the
Speaker 1: total amount of energy our Sun emits over the course
Speaker 1: of three minutes. And I don't mean the energy that's
Speaker 1: coming to Earth. I mean all the energy coming out
Speaker 1: of the Sun for three minutes. That's a lot of energy.
Speaker 1: So again makes the Death Star pretty unrealistic, but fine
Speaker 1: for a fantasy. So when we come back, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about the Death stars weak point and the super weapons.
Speaker 1: The bad guys built to replace the Death Star once
Speaker 1: it done got exploded. But first, let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. So ventilation shaft. What the
Speaker 1: heck was that about? Well, as we learn in Rogue one,
Speaker 1: one of the engineers who worked on the Death Star
Speaker 1: created this vulnerability on purpose. He was compelled to work
Speaker 1: on the station by the Empire, and he managed to
Speaker 1: sneak in a severe design flaw that apparently no one
Speaker 1: else Q aid during the entire construction process, which speaks
Speaker 1: poorly on the Empire's quality control system. I would say
Speaker 1: the engineering question was galen Urso, the father to jen Urso,
Speaker 1: that's the main protagonist of Rogue One. Galen Urso's design
Speaker 1: had a ventilation shaft running from the exterior surface of
Speaker 1: the Death Star directly down to the very core of
Speaker 1: the hyper matter power reactor, and a direct hit on
Speaker 1: the ventilation shaft would send energy down to overload this reactor,
Speaker 1: causing a catastrophic chain reaction within the reactor core, which
Speaker 1: would lead to the destruction of the Death Star as
Speaker 1: the reactor would explode in an uncontained massive explosion. This
Speaker 1: is similar to a nuclear meltdown in some ways, and
Speaker 1: a nuclear meltdown. You go with a controlled nuclear reaction
Speaker 1: which then turns into an uncontrolled one. Technically, that usually
Speaker 1: means that the dampening techniques you would use to restrict
Speaker 1: nuclear activity within a reactor would fail, and so these
Speaker 1: reactions would continue to happen and they would accelerate, and
Speaker 1: a nuclear reactor would then therefore get really really hot
Speaker 1: and a lot of radiation would be released. It typically
Speaker 1: wouldn't explode, but things might start to melt if it
Speaker 1: got hot enough, and uh, the containment system could fail,
Speaker 1: and that could release a lot of radiation in the process.
Speaker 1: This has happened a couple of times, or radiation has
Speaker 1: been vented into various areas um or has otherwise been
Speaker 1: able to leak out from a nuclear facility. You still
Speaker 1: wouldn't see a massive explosion, really, You would just have
Speaker 1: a lot of very deadly radiation leaked into the environment,
Speaker 1: which is pretty darn bad all by itself. But the
Speaker 1: Death Star, of course, relied on hyper matter, which apparently
Speaker 1: is extremely volatile, So I'm going to give this one
Speaker 1: a pass. Now, some quick discussion about the successors to
Speaker 1: the Death Star, the Death Star to Son of Death Star,
Speaker 1: which we saw in Return of the Jedi was similar
Speaker 1: in many ways to its predecessor. Like other elements of
Speaker 1: Star Wars, there are major discrepancies regarding the death Star
Speaker 1: to size. I'm talking about huge discrepancies. So some sources
Speaker 1: state it had a diameter of a hundred sixty kilometers.
Speaker 1: That was the same size that I used when I
Speaker 1: was making all my calculations for the first death Star.
Speaker 1: And again there are other accounts that say the death Star,
Speaker 1: the original one had a diameter of a hundred twenty
Speaker 1: or a hundred forty kilometers, so that one also had
Speaker 1: a lot of disagreement. But other sources say the second
Speaker 1: death Star was much much bigger, at nine hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: in diameter. That would put the circumference of the death
Speaker 1: Star to at five thousand, six hundred fifty two kilometers,
Speaker 1: which means it would be about half as large as
Speaker 1: our moon, whereas, of course the first death Star was
Speaker 1: one the size of our moon, so it would be
Speaker 1: much much bigger if in fact those numbers are the
Speaker 1: official ones, but it's really hard to track down what
Speaker 1: the official official term was. So it had similar armaments
Speaker 1: and vehicle complements as the original Death Star, just presumably
Speaker 1: more of them. The new design did not have that
Speaker 1: thermal exhaust part of its predecessor. It specifically was designed
Speaker 1: to not have that same weakness. Instead, it was using
Speaker 1: millions of smaller ports all across the surface of the
Speaker 1: Death Star Too, and they were measuring just millimeters across.
Speaker 1: That would cut off access to the station's core from
Speaker 1: the outside once the station was completely built, but during
Speaker 1: the events of Return of the Jedi, the Death Star
Speaker 1: too is still under construction. So while there's no thermal
Speaker 1: exhaust port, there are these big honking gaps in the
Speaker 1: extern all hall of the Death Star that a ship
Speaker 1: the size of, say the Millennium Falcon could fly through
Speaker 1: to get access to the station's core. So the Death
Speaker 1: Star two's defense was boosted by a ground based shield,
Speaker 1: a deflector shield. The Death Star too was presumably in
Speaker 1: geo stationary orbit above the forest moon of Indoor, which
Speaker 1: had the Imperial Shield generator on it. Geo stationary orbit
Speaker 1: means that you are in an orbit high enough where
Speaker 1: you are consistently over the same point on the ground
Speaker 1: of whatever body you are orbiting. So if there were
Speaker 1: a satellite and geo stationary orbit above Atlanta. It means
Speaker 1: the satellite would always be directly above Atlanta even as
Speaker 1: the Earth continued its rotation, So we presume that the
Speaker 1: Death Star two was the same way in order to
Speaker 1: have this projected shield consistently wrapping around the Death Star.
Speaker 1: To shields, by the way and the star Wars universe
Speaker 1: are energy shields which use some sort of energy field
Speaker 1: to deflect incoming attacks. There were deflector shields that could
Speaker 1: deflect energy fire and others that could deflect physical or
Speaker 1: kinetic based attacks. A lot of ships would have both
Speaker 1: for energy attacks. That might be something similar to a magnetosphere.
Speaker 1: Earth has a magnetos sphere that protects us from much
Speaker 1: of the Sun's more harmful radiation. The magnetosphere deflects charged particles,
Speaker 1: which prevents them from hitting the Earth and causing massive
Speaker 1: problems for the biological critters we have here. When we
Speaker 1: send people to space, we actually have to include shielding
Speaker 1: to help protect them against such radiation as they travel
Speaker 1: outside the protective magnetosphere. Presumably, deflector shields are somewhat similar,
Speaker 1: though their specific mechanism hasn't really been explained. And then
Speaker 1: there's star Killer Base. We'll just cheat chat about this
Speaker 1: for just a moment. This is the super weapon that
Speaker 1: appears in the Force Awakens. It is an ice planet,
Speaker 1: a roving ice planet. It's actually mobile, and it serves
Speaker 1: as the housing for this weapon, which could send a
Speaker 1: powerful laser across the galaxy to destroy entire star systems.
Speaker 1: The weapon would run on a dark energy that is
Speaker 1: plentiful and poorly defined, as is the want with star Wars.
Speaker 1: The planet would harness this energy using nearby stars and
Speaker 1: pour all the energy into the planet's core, which would
Speaker 1: continue to contain the energy until the weapon was ready
Speaker 1: to fire. They would essentially breach the containment field to
Speaker 1: allow this energy to escape in a big blast, and
Speaker 1: through the firing process it would be converted into something
Speaker 1: that they called phantom energy, which does not exist. But
Speaker 1: it could actually tunnel through hyperspace, thus traveling across the
Speaker 1: galaxy to its target, and even moving faster than the
Speaker 1: speed of light, because again it's using kind of a
Speaker 1: wormhole approach. It's not traveling the entire distance from Star
Speaker 1: Killer base to the target. It's using hyperspace to kind
Speaker 1: of leap frog to that position. And it was strong
Speaker 1: enough to destroy multiple planets in a single firing, which
Speaker 1: suffice it to say, is way beyond anything we can
Speaker 1: do and relies upon physics that do not exist in
Speaker 1: the real world. So there's not really any way I
Speaker 1: can tackle this except to say that we do have
Speaker 1: a concept about civilizations that are capable of harnessing all
Speaker 1: the energy coming out of a star, which comes from
Speaker 1: the Cardassi of scale. This describes civilizations by how much
Speaker 1: energy they can harness relative to their surroundings. So a
Speaker 1: Type one civilization on the cardasshe of scale would be
Speaker 1: able to harness all the power coming to its planet
Speaker 1: from its nearby star. So in our case, we would
Speaker 1: be a Type one civilization if we harnessed all of
Speaker 1: the energy that the Sun was shooting at us, specifically,
Speaker 1: like all the energy hitting the Earth. If we could
Speaker 1: harness all of it, we would be a Type one civilization.
Speaker 1: We can't do that. We lose a lot of the
Speaker 1: energy that is coming from the Sun. Uh. Some of
Speaker 1: it gets reflected off, a lot of it gets lost
Speaker 1: is heat. We're not harnessing all of it, so we're
Speaker 1: not truly a Type one civilization. Yet a type to
Speaker 1: civilization would be able to harness all the energy coming
Speaker 1: out of a star entirely, not just the stuff hitting
Speaker 1: our planet. So if we were a type two Kardashian
Speaker 1: of civilization, we would be able to harness all the
Speaker 1: energy coming out of the Sun, not just the stuff
Speaker 1: that's directed our way, and we would need something like
Speaker 1: a dicen sphere to do that. And I'll have to
Speaker 1: cover a dicensphere in a future episode and explain what
Speaker 1: that is and how that would in theory work. And
Speaker 1: then the types of the kardashi of scale civilizations go
Speaker 1: all the way up to Type five, which would be
Speaker 1: a civilization so powerful that would be capable of manipulating
Speaker 1: reality itself. And boy, how they would I like to
Speaker 1: see that happen. But I have a feeling if such
Speaker 1: a thing were even possible, it's nowhere close to ever
Speaker 1: being something that humanity is going to see. However, that
Speaker 1: does conclude our episodes on the Death Star, the most
Speaker 1: powerful weapon in the galaxy, and and the hubrists of
Speaker 1: the Empire that allowed such powerful weapons to be destroyed
Speaker 1: thrice over. And it was fun to look into this.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed being able to use Star Wars to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about tech and physics, and that's always
Speaker 1: a blast to be able to use some pop culture
Speaker 1: to talk about other stuff. If you guys have suggestions
Speaker 1: for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's an episode
Speaker 1: topic like uh technology or personality and tech, or a
Speaker 1: company in tech that I should cover, or maybe there's
Speaker 1: someone you would like me to speak with an interview
Speaker 1: of some sort, or maybe a guest host. Let me know.
Speaker 1: Send me an email. The address for the show is
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Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more
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