EP#46: First Annual MacroFab Star Wars Christmas Special: PART A

Podcast Notes

• Part A 
  • Vehicles of Star Wars 
    • Tie Fighters: Twin Ion Engine. This tech exists but its super low power but efficient.
    • Hovercraft and levitation. Land speeders, Pod Racers, Repulsor Lift technology. Magnetic levitation?
    • Power: Fission batteries? A AA battery weighs around 23g. Convert it all to energy e=mc^2 and you get 2 quintillion Joules of power. 2,067,136,911,094,680,572 Joules to be precise.
    • 16 Teslas to levitate a frog. This consumed 4MW of energy according to the paper. A “common frog” weighs 22.7g. Compact car weighs about 1200kg. So that is 211,453 and some change MW or Joules per second. 8.4million Teslas.  This is 211,453,000,000 Watts. A Fission AA battery could power this for 9,775,869seconds or around 113 Days.
  • Weapons of Star Wars 
    • Death Star 
      • Cost of Steel alone would be $852 quadrillion which is 13,000 times the worlds GDP.
      • How much steel  required to make it? It is 160km in diameter and they modeled the Death Star to have a density similar to a modern warship. Which gives us 1.08×1015 tonnes of steel. World wide production of steel is 1.3 billion tonnes a year which will take over 800K years to make enough steel.
      • Thats no moon. Speaking of the size. Earths moon is 3,474km. Smallest moon in our solar system is  Methone which orbits Saturn with a diameter of ~3km.
      • How much energy would be  required to blow up a Planet? Earth would require 2.24 × 10^32 Joules to blow apart the gravitational binding energy of the Earth if you consider it a uniform sphere. In 1 second the Sun generates 3.8 x 10^26 Joules. Which means in 589,473 seconds or about 6.8 days worth of energy. Gives a reason behind Star Killer Base.
    • Star Killer Base 
      • Its not as silly as people make it out to be in comparison to a Death Star.
      • Energy gathered from a Sun? How would that work?