Death Star Weaponry

weapon to keep the systems in line. According to grand Moff Tarkins cheerful strategy, sometimes called the doctrine of Terror or slightly less dramatically, the Tarkan doctrine. This reflected Tarkan's belief that fear and domination would keep the more rebellious systems in the Empire in check, and the Death Star would be the ultimate tool to bring about that fear and domination. The Death Star was no slouch for weaponry. For one thing, it had multiple vehicle bays with everything

from Thai fighters. The original Death Stars supposedly had twenty Thai fighters ready to take off at a moment's notice. It also had a T E T S or ad ADS if you prefer, and a T S T S. In fact, according to the Death Star Technical Companion from West End Games. The station house some seven thousand, two hundred starfighters total, four strike cruisers, three thousand, six hundred assault shuttles T eight s and an equal number of A T S T S and one thousand, eight hundred

sixty drop ships for troops, which is a lot. Now, I want to talk just about one of those because it's my favorite vehicle in Star Wars. That's the Thaie Fighter or a twin ion engine fighter that was the standard starfighter for the Empire during a New Hope and in several films after that. It was the basis for future starfighters and bombers like the Thai bomber of the Tie advanced the Thaie Interceptor. According to various source books, your standard Thai fighter measured about seven and a half

meters or twenty five feet tall. It was six point four meters or twenty one feet from side to side and six point three meters or a little less than twenty one ft front to back. In the world of Star Wars, the Thai fighter is all about performance as an attack vehicle. The ships have no shields, there's no hyper drive, so they have to be carried in larger ships for interstellar travel. They don't even have life support according to some source books, which is why the pilots

are in those big, fully enclosed suits. But we have seen characters inside the cockpit of Thai fighters who are not in fully enclosed suits pilot them. They're able to breathe without the aid of a special suit, so I suspect that idea of them being without life support is not completely cannon. They also had no landing gear or any moving parts at all. The end universe explanation for that is that it made the ships have less mass, which made them more maneuverable and made them cheap to

turn out on a mass scale. The lack of shields also gives insight into the Empire's philosophy regarding the expendability of its military force. Now, in our last episode, I talked about ion thrusters and how they work. Such an engine could move around the starship like a tie fighter, but it would be a really poor choice for a starfighter due to the very slow acceleration rate. It would take a long time VERTI fighter to accelerate to attack speed if all it had to rely upon where ion engines.

This comes down to simple physics shooting out sub atomic particles or or even atomic particles or molecular molecular particles that only transfers a tiny amount of momentum to something the size of a StarCraft, so you're not gonna get up to speed very quickly. Back to the Death Star, the station itself was really well armed all on its own. Part of the exterior of the Death Star is the big concave section that houses the stations super laser emitter.

In addition to this massive laser, which I'll talk about more in a bit, the Death Stars armament included tractor beams, turbo lasers, super blessed or nine twenty, laser cannons, and ion cannons. And I think starting at you know, looking at all these different ones would be really helpful. So let's let's take them turn by turn. I'm gonna start with ion cannons first. These are a cool idea and ion cannon in Star Wars fires out charged particles a

k A ions. So an ion is an atom or molecule that holds a net electric charge because it either has more or fewer electrons than it has protons, So electrons are negatively charged subatomic particles and protons are positively charged subatomic particles. So if you have an equal number of each in an atom or a molecule, your net charge is neutral. But if you have more electrons than protons,

the particle will have a negative charge. If you have more protons than electrons, then you get yourself a net positive charge. So in star wars, ion cannons fire off beams of these charged particles. Whether they're positive or negative, I don't know, And the intent is to disrupt the electrical systems at the target. So ion cannons do not cause direct physical damage typically, rather they disrupt electrical systems

like shields, which allows other weapons to do the heavy blasting. Now, this isn't that different from something that does happen in the real world called an electromagnetic pulse. There are actually electromagnetic pulse weapons or e m p s. Now e MPs don't have to be weapons. There there are natural phenomena out there that will generate electromagnetic pulses, but they

are also created through stuff like nuclear weapon detonations. We didn't know this necessarily when we were first building nuclear weapons, but we found out about it. These pulses can overload electronics with a voltage surge from electromagnetic energy, which effectively can fry electronic circuits if the force is strong enough and the circuits are not protected. The larger the circuits you're using here, the more likely you're going to see

an impact. So if you're talking about a relatively simple, small circuit, it may not have enough of a voltage surge to cause any damage. Also, if it's an operation, it's more likely to to be damaged than something that has turned off. So any MP blast over like a power grid could cause massive damage that. That's essentially one gigantic circuit, and you've got a lot of big conductors there, and a powerful e MP blast would definitely cause a

massive surge through that system. Now, we don't have ion cannons in the real world, though there have been experiments with particle beam weaponry, which would fire charged particles at high velocity at a target. Such weapons would have been tested with the possibility of using them in anti missile defense systems, for example, with the intent of rendering missiles

useless or blowing them up before they reach their intended target. Essentially, these weapons deliver billions of charged particles at high velocity to targets to disrupt their atomic or molecular structures. It technically delivers kinetic energy to the target, which is the same as a conventional weapon like a gun or a rifle, only the bullets in this case are on the atomic

or molecular scale. There are some challenges to designing these since they tend to fire charged particles and particles with a similar charge will repel each other. So inside a particle accelerator, for example, you've got these really powerful magnets that generate a magnetic field that keep those charged particles focused in a tight beam. They can't wander because you're using this other very massive magnet to keep them in line.

But if you were to fire the beam outside of those magnetic fields, then the fact that you have all these similarly charged particles, they're gonna push against each other and the beam would spread out rapidly, and that would reduce its effectiveness. Plasma weapons are sometimes referenced as a possible alternative when it comes to energy based weapons, but these come with their own restrictions. Plasma is a conductive gas, meaning there are free roaming electrons in the gases. The

most plentiful form of matter in the universe. It's typically low density stuff and at very high temperatures it's it's the stuff of stars. But it's not ideal for any sort of distance weapon, as the gas will expand and disperse outside of containment. If you have a high pressure plasma gas and you release it into the general environment, that high pressure is going to cause the gas to expand as it enters the lower pressure environment, and it

starts to become less cohesive. It starts to lose energy rapidly, so you would have trouble finding a way to direct the plasma to a target at a high enough speed and coherence for it to actually do anything. Plasma does work great in short range applications, such as plasma torches. We can use powerful electrodes to ionize gas as it passes through a nozzle and create a very powerful cutting tool this way, but it's not going to become the

new long range weapon for space. Now I've got more technology I want to discuss before I hit the really big topic lasers, and that's tractor beams. The tractor beam plays a big part in a New Hope, as the Empire uses it to immobilize and capture the millennium falcon. So could such a thing actually exist? While I'll tell you right after we take this quick break to thank

our sponsor, So what exactly is a tractor beam? While a tractor beam is some form of energy that can draw objects closer to the source of the beam, which defies common sense as typically if you send anything out toward an object, it tends to push that object away rather than pull the object closer. But we do have experiments that mimic the tractor beams we see in science fiction, but they only work on a teen Italianese scale. So optical trap traps and optical tweezers are kind of in

this category. They use beams of light to immobilize or manipulate very small objects such as individuals cellular components, in a noninvasive way. So if you needed to move things around within a a an organic cell, but you didn't want to cut into the cell, you might use optical tweezers to isolate a particular part of the cell and move it to where you needed it to be. But these methods are more about pushing a particle around, not pulling it towards the source of the energy, so it's

really again, tweezers is the right term for it. It's not like you are magically latching on and harpooning it and pulling it towards you. But there are some that are closer to the concept of tractor beams. Bessel beams can draw a particle towards the source under specific circumstances. A bessel beam is a type of laser beam that, rather than forming a single coherent beam, manifests as a

series of concentric circles surrounding a central dot. So think of your typical bulls eye target like in a dartboard. The center the bull's eye is the dot of the laser, and then the concentric circles around that dot represent the various circles of light around that laser dot. So the light of the dot is not diffracted, and diffraction is the spreading of waves around obstacles. This happens with sound, light, and other electromagnetic radiation, as well as with subatomic particles

in motion because they display wave like properties. But the dot in a vessel beam comes from those concentric circles. So let's say you've got a very tiny object, and the object's size is actually smaller than the larger of the concentric circles in this vessel beam, and you direct a vessel beam towards this object, you would think that the little dot on the center of the vessel beam would just touch the the surface closest to the beam,

and that would be that. But in fact what will happen is as long as there's at least one concentric circle that's larger than the object, the dot will actually reform on the back side of that object rather than

on the front side of it. Uh, the considering circles will allow for this to happen, and you can actually use that to pull or manipulate an object to come toward the source of the energy to Physicists named David Grief and David Ruffner demonstrated this back in by using a pair of vessel beams and a lens that caused the two beams to overlap, and that way they could

generate enough power to actually move stuff. They could direct the beams at an object and use a strobe like pattern of turning the beams on and off, and that doing this would cause the dot to reform on the back of the particle and create enough force to push the particle towards the source of the beam. So could we ever build a vessel beam big enough to tow a spaceship? No, and that scale the lasers would require an enormous amount of energy, more than what we could

easily generate. And if we could generate that force to create or that inner g rather to create a vessel being powerful enough to do it, it would just burn up the target. It would be such an intense laser beam that the the energy it would be imparting to the object would actually cause it to catch fire, as opposed to pulling it toward you. If it did pull it towards you, you would suddenly be pulling a an object that was currently on fire towards you, which is

not ideal. It turns out, if if there's an object on fire, my first advice is don't go toward it. Move further away. Now, if we found a way to create a similar device using a different energy intensive source,

a macro sized tractor beam could be possible. In theory, other options would be to create some sort of gravitational or electromagnetic pull on the object, But to use a gravitational beam would require warping spacetime itself, which we can't yet do, and which would require again enormous amounts of either mass or energy in order to warp this face time matter or spacetime continuum sufficiently, and that's not something

we could do. Electromagnetic fields would be easier to generate, so you could create an electromagnetic field to attract spacecraft towards you, but it would also be pretty easy to avoid because if you just made your spacecraft I'll stuff that wasn't magnetic, you wouldn't really be affected, though your electronic systems might be at least temporarily affected. So if it were a normal permanent magnet kind of approach, it

wouldn't really affect your electronic systems too much. But if it were an alternating current approach where you've got a varying electromagnetic field, it would be back to that electromagnetic pulse issue I talked about earlier. Now this brings us to lasers. The Death Star has tons of lasers. Most of them are for the purposes of defense, but there's the really big one that's for the purposes of blowing

up planet's real good. So how do these work? And would such a super weapon really be able to blow up a planet. Well. First, lasers are devices that create light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. That's what laser means. To create a laser, you first need a special substance to serve as your lazing medium. This can come in lots of different forms. Some lasers use crystals, some use

special types of glass, some use certain gases. But in any case, you have this lazing medium and then its job is to absorb energy, typically from either a powerful electric current or from another laser. So as you direct this energy toward this lasing medium, the electrons inside that

medium get excited. It's a party. They begin to push out from their normal energy state around the nuclei of their respective atoms, so they start to occupy higher energy states that normally they wouldn't be able to be in. But when you stop pumping energy into the medium, that allows those electrons to return to their normal rest energy state, the lowest one that they would occupy around their respective

nuclei under normal conditions. However, all that energy you pumped into the medium has to go somewhere, right, you have to have the law of conservation take effect. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but it can be converted from one form to another. So you pumped this lasing medium full of energy, the electrons have taken that and they've gone into higher energy states. You remove that source

of energy, the electrons come down. They have to give off that energy somehow, So in this case, those formally hyperactive electrons release all that excess energy in the form of photons, the basic particles of light. The type of medium will determine the color of the emitted photons. So, for example, ruby lasers amid a dark red beam, no big surprise there, Helium cadmium lasers will blast out blue beams. Green beams might come from a neodymium doped atrium aluminum

garnet laser. What the heck is that, Well, it's a crystal in which a small amount of triplele ionized neodymium replaces about one percent of the utter um ions in a host crystal. And the reason I bring it up is that the super laser of the Death Star is green,

although they don't use that as their lasing medium. See in the world of Star Wars, special weapons like lightsabers and the Death Stars super laser depended on these fictional materials called kaiber crystals, which are attuned to the force, which is that mystical power that binds all things together. So the Death Star super laser is kind of magic, I guess, But like I said in the last episode, Star Wars is really more of a fantasy than a

science fiction story. The Death Star uses eight lasers aimed at a focal point to create the super laser. It's the combined laser that the Empire uses to blow up planets. And how powerful is that laser? According to Dr Patrick Johnson, who wrote the physics of Star Wars, it would have to be a real whopper. Now. Dr Johnson does not calculate how much energy the laser would need to destroy a planet, because real world physics don't work the way

we see the events unfold in Star Wars. Hitting a planet with a laser, even a super powerful one, would not make it explode, as if the entire planet were made out of T and T. You could heat up the planet considerably, effectively killing off all life on that planet. And if you kept a powerful enough laser on a planet long enough, you could start to melt the planet, but you wouldn't cause it to explode into a billion pieces, and that makes sense. It's similar to how you can

burn wood using a magnifying glass and sunlight. It takes a little bit to heat up the surface enough to start the process, so it doesn't instantaneously happen. If you have a really powerful magnifying glass and you have a good, uh good angle on the sun, you can start burning wood very quickly. But even then you're talking about heating up a substance to the point where it starts to burn. Even a super powerful laser would not instantaneously cause a

planet to explode. Now, Dr Johnson did say that if you wanted to create a laser capable of packing the same punch as the most powerful collision we know about, you'd have to match the blast that Jupiter received when fragment g from the Shoemaker Levi comet hit the planet's surface. That impact was equivalent to one point one two times

ten to the twenty seven power jewels of energy. One jewel is equivalent to one three thousand, six hundred of a what hour, and Dr Johnson points out that with one point one two times ten to the twenty seventh power jewels, you're talking more energy than all of humanity would be able to use over the course of three million years if you rely upon the use rates that

were recorded in two thousand thirteen. So three million years of using energy the way we did in thirteen, and you would approach the amount of energy that was that was represented by this collision on Jupiter. And even that is not the same as what it would take to destroy a planet. Right, that's not even a full a full charge of this Death Star laser. It can't be if the if Jupiter still around, unless I checked it is.

Then you would have to assume that whatever the Death Stars laser packs, it's got to be higher than that. So that means it's got to be more than the energy that we would use over the course of three million years. It's also equivalent, by the way, to the total amount of energy our Sun emits over the course of three minutes. And I don't mean the energy that's coming to Earth. I mean all the energy coming out of the Sun for three minutes. That's a lot of energy.

So again makes the Death Star pretty unrealistic, but fine for a fantasy. So when we come back, we'll talk about the Death stars weak point and the super weapons. The bad guys built to replace the Death Star once it done got exploded. But first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So ventilation shaft. What the heck was that about? Well, as we learn in Rogue one, one of the engineers who worked on the Death Star

created this vulnerability on purpose. He was compelled to work on the station by the Empire, and he managed to sneak in a severe design flaw that apparently no one else Q aid during the entire construction process, which speaks poorly on the Empire's quality control system. I would say the engineering question was galen Urso, the father to jen Urso,

that's the main protagonist of Rogue One. Galen Urso's design had a ventilation shaft running from the exterior surface of the Death Star directly down to the very core of the hyper matter power reactor, and a direct hit on the ventilation shaft would send energy down to overload this reactor, causing a catastrophic chain reaction within the reactor core, which would lead to the destruction of the Death Star as

the reactor would explode in an uncontained massive explosion. This is similar to a nuclear meltdown in some ways, and a nuclear meltdown. You go with a controlled nuclear reaction which then turns into an uncontrolled one. Technically, that usually means that the dampening techniques you would use to restrict nuclear activity within a reactor would fail, and so these reactions would continue to happen and they would accelerate, and a nuclear reactor would then therefore get really really hot

and a lot of radiation would be released. It typically wouldn't explode, but things might start to melt if it got hot enough, and uh, the containment system could fail, and that could release a lot of radiation in the process. This has happened a couple of times, or radiation has been vented into various areas um or has otherwise been

able to leak out from a nuclear facility. You still wouldn't see a massive explosion, really, You would just have a lot of very deadly radiation leaked into the environment, which is pretty darn bad all by itself. But the Death Star, of course, relied on hyper matter, which apparently is extremely volatile, So I'm going to give this one a pass. Now, some quick discussion about the successors to the Death Star, the Death Star to Son of Death Star, which we saw in Return of the Jedi was similar

in many ways to its predecessor. Like other elements of Star Wars, there are major discrepancies regarding the death Star to size. I'm talking about huge discrepancies. So some sources state it had a diameter of a hundred sixty kilometers. That was the same size that I used when I was making all my calculations for the first death Star.

And again there are other accounts that say the death Star, the original one had a diameter of a hundred twenty or a hundred forty kilometers, so that one also had a lot of disagreement. But other sources say the second death Star was much much bigger, at nine hundred kilometers

in diameter. That would put the circumference of the death Star to at five thousand, six hundred fifty two kilometers, which means it would be about half as large as our moon, whereas, of course the first death Star was one the size of our moon, so it would be much much bigger if in fact those numbers are the official ones, but it's really hard to track down what the official official term was. So it had similar armaments and vehicle complements as the original Death Star, just presumably

more of them. The new design did not have that thermal exhaust part of its predecessor. It specifically was designed to not have that same weakness. Instead, it was using millions of smaller ports all across the surface of the Death Star Too, and they were measuring just millimeters across. That would cut off access to the station's core from the outside once the station was completely built, but during the events of Return of the Jedi, the Death Star

too is still under construction. So while there's no thermal exhaust port, there are these big honking gaps in the extern all hall of the Death Star that a ship the size of, say the Millennium Falcon could fly through to get access to the station's core. So the Death Star two's defense was boosted by a ground based shield, a deflector shield. The Death Star too was presumably in geo stationary orbit above the forest moon of Indoor, which

had the Imperial Shield generator on it. Geo stationary orbit means that you are in an orbit high enough where you are consistently over the same point on the ground of whatever body you are orbiting. So if there were

a satellite and geo stationary orbit above Atlanta. It means the satellite would always be directly above Atlanta even as the Earth continued its rotation, So we presume that the Death Star two was the same way in order to have this projected shield consistently wrapping around the Death Star. To shields, by the way and the star Wars universe are energy shields which use some sort of energy field

to deflect incoming attacks. There were deflector shields that could deflect energy fire and others that could deflect physical or kinetic based attacks. A lot of ships would have both for energy attacks. That might be something similar to a magnetosphere. Earth has a magnetos sphere that protects us from much of the Sun's more harmful radiation. The magnetosphere deflects charged particles, which prevents them from hitting the Earth and causing massive

problems for the biological critters we have here. When we send people to space, we actually have to include shielding to help protect them against such radiation as they travel outside the protective magnetosphere. Presumably, deflector shields are somewhat similar, though their specific mechanism hasn't really been explained. And then there's star Killer Base. We'll just cheat chat about this for just a moment. This is the super weapon that appears in the Force Awakens. It is an ice planet,

a roving ice planet. It's actually mobile, and it serves as the housing for this weapon, which could send a powerful laser across the galaxy to destroy entire star systems. The weapon would run on a dark energy that is plentiful and poorly defined, as is the want with star Wars. The planet would harness this energy using nearby stars and pour all the energy into the planet's core, which would continue to contain the energy until the weapon was ready

to fire. They would essentially breach the containment field to allow this energy to escape in a big blast, and through the firing process it would be converted into something that they called phantom energy, which does not exist. But it could actually tunnel through hyperspace, thus traveling across the galaxy to its target, and even moving faster than the speed of light, because again it's using kind of a wormhole approach. It's not traveling the entire distance from Star

Killer base to the target. It's using hyperspace to kind of leap frog to that position. And it was strong enough to destroy multiple planets in a single firing, which suffice it to say, is way beyond anything we can do and relies upon physics that do not exist in the real world. So there's not really any way I can tackle this except to say that we do have a concept about civilizations that are capable of harnessing all the energy coming out of a star, which comes from

the Cardassi of scale. This describes civilizations by how much energy they can harness relative to their surroundings. So a Type one civilization on the cardasshe of scale would be able to harness all the power coming to its planet from its nearby star. So in our case, we would be a Type one civilization if we harnessed all of the energy that the Sun was shooting at us, specifically, like all the energy hitting the Earth. If we could harness all of it, we would be a Type one civilization.

We can't do that. We lose a lot of the energy that is coming from the Sun. Uh. Some of it gets reflected off, a lot of it gets lost is heat. We're not harnessing all of it, so we're not truly a Type one civilization. Yet a type to civilization would be able to harness all the energy coming out of a star entirely, not just the stuff hitting

our planet. So if we were a type two Kardashian of civilization, we would be able to harness all the energy coming out of the Sun, not just the stuff that's directed our way, and we would need something like a dicen sphere to do that. And I'll have to cover a dicensphere in a future episode and explain what

that is and how that would in theory work. And then the types of the kardashi of scale civilizations go all the way up to Type five, which would be a civilization so powerful that would be capable of manipulating reality itself. And boy, how they would I like to see that happen. But I have a feeling if such a thing were even possible, it's nowhere close to ever

being something that humanity is going to see. However, that does conclude our episodes on the Death Star, the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, and and the hubrists of the Empire that allowed such powerful weapons to be destroyed thrice over. And it was fun to look into this. I enjoyed being able to use Star Wars to talk a little bit about tech and physics, and that's always a blast to be able to use some pop culture

to talk about other stuff. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's an episode topic like uh technology or personality and tech, or a company in tech that I should cover, or maybe there's someone you would like me to speak with an interview of some sort, or maybe a guest host. Let me know. Send me an email. The address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw

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