Death Star Support Systems

May the Fourth be with you. This episode is originally airing on May fourthen sometimes known as Star Wars Day for the whole May the fourth pun and on May nineteen seventy seven, Star Wars later known as Star Wars Episode for a New Hope hit the theaters, and that movie introduced a massive weapon capable of destroying planets, and it was no moon. It was a space station and

it was called the Death Star. So in honor of May the four, we are going to take a look at the Star Wars mythos around the Death Star and compare it to what it would take to make some thing like that for real, Zase. And this is part

one of a two parter on the Death Star. Because there are a lot of different systems to cover in this episode, I'm gonna be looking mainly at support systems aboard the Death Star, and in part two we're gonna look at the bim Bam boom bang Bangs, also known as the weapons aboard the Death Star, not to mention a particular flaw that for a long time people said was the result of Imperial oversight, and later on as the movies came out, it was revealed to have been

a planned vulnerability in the Death Star design. We'll also talk a little bit about the Death Star to sequel to Death Star, and of course Star Killer Base. So for those of you who aren't Star Wars fans, first of all, this episode is probably not gonna mean a whole lot to you, but if you want to listen, I would love to have you along for the ride. But the original Death Star appears in three films as

an actual thing in progress. Those three films would be in chronological order of release, Star Wars For a New Hope, Star Wars three, Revenge of the Sith, which of course came out decades after Star Wars four did, and Rogue One, a Star Wars story. But there's also a hologram of the Death Star that appears briefly in Star Wars two

Attack of the Clones. Then there's also the second Death Star that one appears in Star Wars six Return of the Jedi, And there's the Big Brother to the Death Star a k a. The Star Killer Bass, which shows up in Star Wars seven The Force Awakens, and I'll chat about all of them in these episodes. Now, before I jump into this, I need to talk a little bit about cannon versus expanded universe. So Star Wars is

a peculiar thing. There are movies, There are television specials, there are cartoons, there are comic books, there are novels. There ton of different forms of media that all tie

into the Star Wars universe. However, if you want to go with absolute canon, as in the stuff that is the only really concrete cannon in the Star Wars universe, you have to go with just the films, which means that stories, characters, and even established facts created and other Star Wars media can be contradicted by the films and that's that. So you could have a very popular novel series that creates a whole mythology around Star Wars and

then the next movie comes out and contradicts that. Well, the movies trump everything else, So just keep that in mind. Now that being said, we're gonna look at some expanded universe sources because the movies, while they are canon, do not go into exhaustive detail about how stuff works, because that's not what the movie is about. The movies are adventure stories. They're really they're more like epic fantasy set in a science fiction setting. Then they are a hard

science fiction film. So they concerned themselves with the story elements, the hero's journey, that kind of stuff, not the particulars of how the technology works. So a lot of the stuff I'm gonna talk about comes from expanded universe sources. Just know that a future Star Wars movie could come out and they say, well, it turns out that the Star Wars Death Stars laser was powered by elves. Well, that's gonna contradict everything else. But if that's what the

movie says, that's what that's what it means. I don't think that will happen, but just need to say it. Within the canon of Star Wars, the design of the Death Star came from a race of creatures called the Genosians, who were working on behalf of a separatist group attempting to splinter off from the Galactic Republic, or at least appearing to. These are the events that happened in the

prequel trilogies. So Star Wars one, two, and three, and the Genosans were working on what they dubbed the Ultimate Weapon Project, and they entrusted their plans to Count Dooku, who appeared to be the leader of the separatists. Dooku was in reality Darth Tyrannis, a Sith lord a k a. A big bad guy who passed the plans along to his boss, Darth Sidious, also known as Chancellor and then

later on Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine was essentially controlling both sides of this galactic conflict, both the Galactic Republic and the separatist group. He was manipulating both sides, and he was orchestrating the whole thing in an attempt to grab power. He was able to use that conflict to convince the Republic side to fund the construction of this space station. He was able to play on fears that the Separatists, who you got to remember he was also controlling, they

were just a puppet group. But he was trying to convince the republic people, but the folks who were in charge of the purse strings for the Galactic Republic, that the Separatists were already working on building a space station of similar capability, so there was gonna be a space station app so it's kind of like an arms race in a way, and so that was kind of the selling point. Palpatine goes to the Galactic Republic with he says, we need to build this thing. You need to be

able to give me the funds do it. And that's where the initial funding for the Death Starter took off before the Chancellor became the Emperor, and once he became the Emperor, he pretty much had to. Boy, he got the right to boss everybody around and get the money no matter what. Now, by the time of the Revenge of the Sixth storyline, construction had progressed to the point that the basic form of the Death Star was taking shape.

Is kind of the framework for the Death Star. It would apparently take nearly twenty more years to finish, as Rogue One takes place nineteen years after the Revenge of the Sith, and it's in Rogue one that a group of spies attempt to steal the plans for the space station so that the rebellion can look for a possible weakness, and then in a new hope, the rebellion blows it

all up. Specifically, Luke sky eye Walker blows it up by firing a weapon called a you know or torpedo weapon down a ventilation shaft that sets off a chain reaction within the station's reactor core, leading to catastrophic failure. Now, one thing I should mention that's a conflict between Cannon and the former Expanded Universe is that some works had established that the Death Star was constructed in orbit around

a planet called Despair. Because Star Wars is subtle, Despair is spelled d E s p A y r E because that's how clever people writing for Star Wars can be. But Despare was populated by slave labor and criminals. They

were all working for the Empire. And further, the Expanded Universe goes on to explain that the Death Stars Commander Grand mof Tarkan chose to test a not yet fully capable super laser against this planet Despair, blowing it up after hitting it with three blasts from the super laser, which conflicts with other accounts of the Death Star's history. Rogue one tells us the Death Star was moved from Genosia to our Genosis rather, I should say, to a

planet called Scariff, rather than to despair. So the whole despair backstory that was created for the Death Star appears to have been contradicted by later films, And that's an example of what I was talking about earlier. So there there are branching pathways of the history of the Death Star, and they do can contradict one another in some versions. The Genosis version of the Death Star was actually a prototype space station and not the actual first death Star.

But there's no official Cannon explanation that really lays it out and says definitively this it's this version, not that version. Anyway, let's talk about what it actually is. The Death Star is a space station. It's spherical in shape, and it's called the size of a moon. People refer to it as I mean, that's the big line from a New Hope is that's no moon, that's a space station. That particular detail is not terribly handy, however, because moons do

not come in a standard size. They vary in size. So for example, the moon around Earth, our moon is three point seven times smaller than the Earth. It has an equatorial circumference of six thousand, seven hundred eighty three and a half miles or ten thousand, nine d seventeen kilometers,

and it's also not as dense as the Earth. The surface gravity on our moon has an acceleration of one point six to four meters per second squared, compared to Earth's surface gravitational acceleration of nine point eight zero six six five, or we usually say nine point eight one per second squared. But the Earth's moon is only the fifth largest in our solar system. The largest moon in our system is gay Mead, which is one of jupiter

As moons. It's just two point four times smaller than the Earth, so it's equatorial circumference is ten thousand, two hundred seventy three miles or about sixteen five thirty three kilometers. It's actually larger than the planet Mercury. So the only reason it's a moon and not a dwarf planet is because it's in orbit around Jupiter rather than orbit around the Sun. So saying the Death Star is the size

of a moon is not super helpful. The films don't really give any details about the Death Star space station or the star Killer base. We don't really learn about the specs from them. From the movies. Necessarily, we see they're huge, but we don't really get much of a frame of reference as to how huge they are, but there have been plenty of books and supplemental materials that have attempted to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. So while it may not be pure canon, we have

to have some reference for our discussions. So we're gonna go with some information supplied by official Star Wars supplemental sources, such as the Ultimate Visual Guide for Star Wars Rogue one that comes in pretty handy for the Death Star in particular. According to that guide, the Death Star is a hundred sixty kilometers wide. Now that also is a

discrepancy with other sources. Some of them put the death stars diameter at a hundred twenty kilometers and some say a hundred forty kilometers, But the most recent response I could see was a hundred and sixties. So that's what I'm going with. Hundred sixty kilometers is about nine miles,

all right. So if we use the handy formula that circumference equals two times pie times the radius, not the diameter as I initially calculated this figure, we get a figure of about five two kilometers of circumference, or three hundred twelve miles around the equator of this sphere. So in other words, that's less than one the circumference of Earth's moon, and that's going with the larger of the measurements for the Death Star, so it's the size of

a moon, but a pretty small one. The original Death Star had three D fifty seven levels as in floors and it according to at least one source book, the number of people aboard the space station varies depending upon the source you're looking at. One suggested that there were around two point twenty five million people aboard, and another set it was more like one point one six million people. So I guess the answer ultimately is there were a

lot of fictional people aboard that space station. And uh some say that even up to a billion people could have technically fit on the station. I don't know if that's true or not. I haven't actually run the geometric calculations to find out how packed it would be if that were happening. I also don't know the full density of the Death Star, so it would be hard to do.

But there you go. According to the house Stuff Works article on how the Death Star works, the interior sections of the space station consists of twenty four zones, with half of them in the northern hemisphere of the station and the other half in the southern hemisphere. And each zone has six sectors which include General Command, Military Security, Service, and technical sectors, Officers overseas sectors, and Zone captain's overseas officers.

And the Death Star commander is at the top of the food chain on the station unless the Emperor himself is on board, and in the case of the original Death Star, that would be the Grand mof Tarken. And because this wasn't just a weapon, but also a battle station and a movable base of operations, there need to be plenty of space for crew quarters, vehicle bays, and

recreational facilities. As it turns out, it also had a detention block as seen in a New Hope, because that's where they put Princess Leiah after Darth Vader catches her. Spoiler in a Moment will look at some of the basic systems aboard the Death Star, will explore how they work within the mythology of Star Wars, and we'll talk about if there's any connection to what we call reality a figure. We can start by talking about the death Stars artificial gravity, how do that do well find out

right after we take this quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, most sources I find try to reconcile the discrepancies we see in the Star Wars movies by explaining that the Death Star actually has two different artificial gravity systems aboard it. So imagine that the Death Star is a big old orange and the peel part of the orange is a layer that has artificial gravity pulling down towards the center

of the station. It would be like surface gravity like you would experience if you were on a normal planet or moon, except it's also artificial gravity because it's meant to give you the sense of gravity you would have on a planet like Earth. We we assume that it's about one G of gravitational force on the Death Star because people move around like it's on Earth because that's where they shot the movie. But we're assuming it's one G. So, uh,

everything is being pulled in towards the center. But because of the size of the Death Star it's mass, there's no way it has enough mass to generate one G of gravity on its own, so it has to be artificially boosted just logically speaking, So the way we feel when we're on Earth is technically the surface we are

on pushing back against us essentially. So if you are in one of those levels that's in this outer layer of the Death Star, the peel of the Orange, you would stand as if you were on the surface of a planet, so your feet would be pointing towards the core of the plant, your head would be pointing towards space, essentially, except that doesn't seem to work based upon what we've actually seen in the movies, because if you watch a New Hope, when the Millennium Falcon gets captured by a

tractor beam and pulled in toward the Death Star, it enters the equatorial trench that separates the station into northern and southern hemispheres. So it's like a belt right around the middle of the Death Stars this trench, and the Millennium Falcon is clearly coming into the trench into a vehicle bay, and in that sequence you see people standing in an orientation that's in line with the north and south poles of the Death Star, where the north pole

would be up and the south pole would be down. So, in other words, imagine that the Death Star is a ball that has a top and a bottom and corresponding gravity. Now, the sources I looked at suggests that below this outermost layer, below the peel of the Orange, the Death Star is made up of floors that are in that orientation, this top bottom orientation, with north pole being the top and south pole being the bottom, and gravity just pointing towards

the south pole side of the station. This would mean that once you get past that outermost layer with the UH the orange peel section, the orientation of gravity would change unless you were standing at the very north pole of the Death Star, in which case the two fields would be aligned. I imagine transitioning between one field of gravity and another would be really disorienting to go from where your feet are essentially facing out or are facing the core of the planet, to where your feet are

facing down with respect to the south pole UH. I don't know how you would make that transition in a way that wouldn't totally mess you up in the process. I think it would be very disorienting. However, a lot of sources suggest that this is the way it has to work based upon the design of the Death Star as we see it in the films. The contradiction doesn't really matter in context with the story of Star Wars, but it does make it darn tricky to explain how

stuff actually works aboard this space station. The movies again don't concern themselves with this, that's not what the purpose of the movies are for. It falls to fanboys like myself to try and justify it. So we see gunners manning cannons that are mounted on the surf of the station itself, and they appear to be oriented in such a way that it's similar to a normal planet's surface gravity, and yet everything else seems to suggest gravity has that

specific north south orientation. So how would we create artificial gravity if we wanted to do it in real life? Well, since we still don't have a full understanding of the nature of gravity, we can't harness it in any meaningful way. But we can create a system that simulates gravity through rotation, except it would manifest as something very different than what

you see in the Star Wars movies. So imagine you have a death Star sized hollow sphere, So it's the exact same size of the Death Star, but there's nothing inside it. It's just a big hollow ball, and you are inside that hollow ball. You're standing on the inside of that sphere. If we rotate the sphere, it will create a velocity that will curve around in a line

along that rotation. It's a rotational velocity. This, in turn will create an acceleration pointing inwards a nine degree angle from the velocity at any given moment toward the death stars center. Your mass and the acceleration into the center of the death star creates a virtual force, which we refer to as a centrifugal force. Now, remember I say it's a virtual force, it's what would feel like weight.

This is what would hold you to the interior wall of the hollow death star, so your feet would be closer to outer space and your head would be closer to the core of the death star. So the opposite of what the various sources suggest for the death Star. Because again this is just one way we could simulate gravity is through this rotation and the creation of a

virtual force and centrifugal force. Now, to create enough of that virtual force to simulate the gravity that you would experience on a planet like Earth, you need to spin to create an acceleration of one g. Now we'd use the formula to that would be acceleration equals velocity square divided by the radius, and the radius in this case

is the radius of the Death Star. Now, we know that the radius of the death Star is eighty kilometers if we're working off the most recent version of the Death Star spec since others suggest it could be seventy or sixty kilometers, but we're going with eighty. And we know the acceleration that we want is nine point eight one per second squared, because that's the gravitational acceleration we have here on Earth and that's what we want to simulate.

So using that formula, we know it's nine point eight one equals velocity square divided by eighty thousand meters. Right, we take eighty kilometers, We multiply it by a thousand meters because that's a thousand meters to a kilometer. We get eighty thousand meters. We multiply both sides by eighty thousand meters, and we get seven eighty four thousand, eight

hundred meters squared by second squared. We take the square root of that to get the velocity, and we end up with approximately eight hundred eighty six meters per second. So within a minute in i'd this sphere. You're traveling fifty three thou sis in a circular motion on the inside of this death star. Now, in order to figure out how many revolutions per minute we need, we take

the circumference of the death Star. That's that five kilometers or five two thousand meters, and that means that we would need point eleven rotations per minute to simulate one g of gravity on the inside surface of the death Star, which means the death Star would have to rotate one full time every ten minutes or so. So a day on the Death Star would be around ten minutes long if it were a body orbiting star with that speed

of rotation. Now, that would only really apply along the equator, I should add, because it's a right angle to the axis of rotation. As you would move away from the equator, things would get really wonky and along the outermost layer as well, because as you go up or inward in the death Star, you'd be on the floor that's technically moving at a slower of a locity than the floor that was below you or outer on the death Star. Because you're in a concentric circle, each circle makes the

same number of revolutions per unit of time. Right, if you're doing ten revolutions in a minute on the outside, you're still doing ten revolutions of a minute on the inside. But if the circle is smaller, you are traveling less distance but in the same amount of time, so your velocity is lower. This would also mean that your acceleration that you would experience, and therefore the centrifugal force you

would experience, would also be lower. So as you move towards the core, you would experience lower gravitational acceleration, and you'd feel lighter as you move towards the middle. So for a space station the size of the Death Star, this could work out pretty well if you had the means to rotate the station that way. With smaller space stations, you would run into other problems because smaller scales, this

method of simulating gravity presents other challenges. For example, once you get really small, different parts of your body are going to experience different gravitational accelerations. Because your height represents enough distance uh compared to the radius of the station itself that it will make a difference. You'll actually be able to feel it. The amount of gravity you experience

is dependent upon the radius of the rotating structure. So if you're tall enough for that to be in effect, you're gonna have these different forces or different magnitudes of force acting on you, and that's really gonna make it weird when you try to move around. Uh. Also, the

Coriolis effect can wreak havoc with our sense of balance. Essentially, this becomes a problem when we are moving inward or outward from the axis of rotation, so in other words, we're changing levels in the Death Star right, we're moving

up or down. Experiments have shown that at lower revolutions per minute this is rarely a problem, and the Does Stars rotation of point one one revolutions per minute is slow enough to probably slip below our ability to detect it, and therefore we wouldn't get space sick every time we

hopped into a lift. But other or wise, as we change that orientation, as we get closer to the center or further away from the center, than the amount of gravity we would experience would fluctuate, and that could really make us feel pretty wonky. Now, the film's never really

address how artificial gravity works. We only even know that there's micro gravity in the Star Wars universe because of the way ships move through stuff like debris or asteroids out in space, not to mention the Mary Poppins Princess

Leia sequence from The Last Jedi or General Leiah. I suppose I should say there's no real need to address it within the plot of the movies, and the challenges of making a movie involving space battles and micro gravity are such that having artificial gravity is really a thing of convenience for the sake of the plot of the films and the making of the movies. Next we'll learn about how the Death Star gets around round, get around, It gets around, But first let's take another break to

thank our sponsor. So the Death Star has two main means of propulsion, ion thrusters and hyperdrive, and we actually have developed one of those two things. Hint, it's not the hyper drive. So let's talk about ion thrusters. So, ion thrusters are a really interesting method of moving through space, and the ideas that you have an engine that can fire out positively charged particles at high velocity out of one end of a spacecraft using electricity in some way.

There are a couple of different methods, but the important thing to look at is just the principle of it, and because momentum within a system must be conserved, this creates thrust moving the spacecraft forward. Newton's laws emotion imply this concept. So momentum equals mass times velocity, and both

momentum and velocity are vectors. That means that they have a direction associated with their values, and the conservation of momentum tells us the momentum of a system in its initial phase must equal the momentum of the system and its final phase, assuming all external forces that could act upon the system zero out. In other words, it's an isolated system. So if you have other stuff acting on a system that changes things, we're talking about an isolated system.

So a spacecraft in spaces is pretty isolated. So before you initiate an ion thruster, let's say you've got a spacecraft. You are not moving with respect to space around you, at least not in any real meaningful way. You're just kind of hanging in space. There's no momentum here, right, The craft is not moving, the ions are not moving. But then you turn on the drive and the drive starts spinning out ions behind the spacecraft. That represents a

change in momentum. The velocity of those particles is very high and their mass is incredibly small. However, momentum must be conserved within the system, so your spacecraft represents it's the system. So that means the spacecraft itself has to move in the opposite direction of the particles you're shooting out the back. Now, the spacecraft's mass is way, way, way bigger than the particles that are flying out of the ion thruster, so that means the velocity of the

spacecraft will be relatively low compared to the particles. However, if you keep the drive going, this will act as an accelerator for the spacecraft. It's not gonna accelerate quickly, but it will do so gradually, and eventually you'll start reaching very high speeds if the drive is on for the entire time. Now, with rocket fuel, you can create thrust until you run out of fuel, and then you're

essentially traveling at top speed until you hit something. But with ion thrusters, you can keep accelerating steadily for a much longer time, reaching a vastly higher top speed in the process. It just takes you longer to get to your top speed, but your top speed is going to be much higher than if it were a rocket based spacecraft. But the Death Star could also move at superliminal speeds, which means it could go faster than light, using a

concept in Star Wars called hyper space. Now we know this must be the case because the Death Star fires upon Alderan at the beginning of a new Hope and then moves into position to fire upon Yavn four at the end. Well, Alderon is a planet in the core of the Galactic Empire, meaning the core of the galaxy itself, whereas yaven four is a moon around a gas giant planet called Yavin that's in the outer Rim territory, so

on the outer side of this galaxy. To get a battle station that far from the center of a galaxy to the outer edge has to need some form of faster than light travel. In the Star Wars universe, spacecraft do this by tapping into an alternate dimension called hyperspace, which helps get around a big problem. Because if you talk to Einstein, well, it's gonna be pretty boring. Guy's been dead for a while, but his theories tell us that matter cannot travel as fast as light, let alone

faster than the speed of light. Light is the fastest stuff there is. It is the universal speed limit. Light through a vacuum is as fast as it gets. If you could travel faster than light, you could potentially travel to a destination fast enough so that if you turned around and looked at where you came from, you'd see yourself leaving from your starting point because you got there before the light did from the place that you left,

So faster than light travel would violate causality. In the Star Wars universe, you could have a situation where you're looking for a place to land on Alderan. Suddenly, i'll nowhere, a laser comes in from outer space, hits the planet, and plant done blowed up real good. So then you travel faster than the speed of light toward the direction that the laser came from, and you actually get to

the death Star before it fires the laser. That would give you an opportunity to stop the laser from firing and stop Aldon from exploding, which you have already actually witnessed yourself, which isn't cool because it violates causality. Generally, that means that effects follow causes, not the other way around. You shouldn't be able to have a cause come after the effect it makes because tim don't work like that.

Star Wars still has problems with the ramification of causality, but at least it gets around the issues of faster than light travel by using alternate dimensions. So instead of hitting a speed that violates Einstein's precious theories, you just decrease the distance between you and your destination. So in this case, you hop into a dimension that's sort of like a shortcut between two points. You're traveling at a

good clip, but well below the speed of light. However, your new route shaves off light years of distance between you and your destination, so you get there faster than if you had taken the scenic route, and a lot of people like to use this analogy, including me. Imagine you've got a big paper map, so you find Atlanta on the map, that's where I am. Then you find London on the map. That's where they shot a lot of Star Wars, and you draw a line between the two.

You've got a ruler. You connect the Atlanta to London using the ruler, and then you draw a line from Atlanta to London. Now consider that a virtual trip between the two cities. The travel time is how long it takes you to draw that straight line. Now, imagine you take an identical map to the first one and so it doesn't have a line on it, and you fold it so that Atlanta and London are touching each other.

When you have this folded map, then you poke a hole through the map at that point with your pencil, and it leaves a little bit of a mark both in Atlanta and London. That kind of represents this idea of using hyperspace. Uh in our universe, we would call it a wormhole to connect to dissent points in space together, you'd reduce the distance between your start point and your endpoint, but you're not moving any faster necessarily between the two. You might be going at your top speed, but you're

going at top speed in an alternate dimension. That just reduces the distance. It warps space time so that your destination is close to your starting point. Now, in Star Wars, that all has to do with a fictional stuff called hypermatter and fictional technologies called hyper drives. We obviously don't have access to that in the real world. And as for warping spacetime, that itself is largely theoretical, since it would require such enormous amounts of energy that nothing we

have ever done comes even close. However, that does lead me to the last bit I want to cover in part one of how the Death Star works, which is the dust Stars reactor. Now, a space station, that huge one that's capable of moving through space at high speeds and firing an incredibly powerful laser would need a truly tremendous power source. The Death Star has a hyper matter implosion core which used that fictional stuff of hyper matter

as fuel to produce huge amounts of energy. And the close this thing we might ever be able to make would be a fusion reactor. Fusion power generates electricity by fusing to relatively light atomic nuclei to form a heavier nucleus. This reaction releases energy as a result. It's an exothermic reaction as long as the nuclei are light nuclei. This

is the way that stars emit energy. Fusion requires incredibly high temperatures and the millions of degrees kelvin, and because of this it is really challenging to pull it off here on Earth. We've done it, but not in the way that is economical. For sustainable power, the expense of operating the system is greater than the value of the energy we get out of it. For now, So what

is going on? Well, at an atomic level, we are forcing these nuclei to get close enough so that the nuclear force kicks in and overrides the electrostatic force that would normally be forcing the two nuclei apart from each other. Now, these are both fundamental forces in nature, or at least, electromagnetic force is a fundamental force. Electrosthetic relates to that.

The nuclear forces, both the strong and weak nuclear force, are stronger than the electromagnetic force, but only at very very close distances I'm talking about on the atomic scale. The electromagnetic force is weaker, but it has a greater

scale of effect or a greater range of effect. So if you can get the two smaller nuclei close enough so that the nuclear force takes over, it will counteract that electrostatic force that's pushing the two nuclei apart, and for lighter nuclei, that creates that exothermic reaction I was talking about, and thus it releases energy. Now, if we ever find an efficient way to harness fusion, it could

potentially solve many major energy problems here on Earth. Fusion doesn't rely on heavier radioactive particles the way fission does. Fission is the basis of our nuclear power today, but we just have to find a way to make it work, which granted, is easier said than done. We may never

find a way to do this economically. If we could, however, it would be an enormous boon because even though fusion is technically a non renewable energy source, we have so much of those lighter elements at our disposal it would take millions of years for us to consume all of it, which means we would have a lot of time to start coming up with alternatives for our energy needs, and in the foreseeable future, possibly long before humanity itself dies out,

we would have plenty of energy. Uh. That is kind of the summary of how the Death Star works with its supplemental systems. In our next episode, we're gonna look more at how it becomes a truly operational battle station with all the weaponry involved, and we'll talk a little bit more about the Death Star too, and the star

Killer base as well on the differences between them. Death Star two was much bigger than the original Death Star, even though it didn't look like much in the film Return of the Jedi, But we learn a lot about its capabilities in that movie, so we'll talk more about that in the next episode. It also give us an opportunity to talk about things like force fields, because there was one around the Death Star too. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's

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