How Much Would it Cost to build the Death Star?

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Centives


http://i.imgur.com/BJK9o.png

Building a massive space weapon is all very well, but you have to find the materials to build it with. It's easy to say that "sure, the Death Star would be expensive" but is there actually enough iron in the Earth to make the first Death Star? Centives decided to find out.

We began by looking at how big the Death Star is. The first one is reported to be 140km in diameter and it sure looks like it's made of steel. But how much steel? We decided to model the Death Star as having a similar density in steel as a modern warship. After all, they're both essentially floating weapons platforms so that seems reasonable.

http://i.imgur.com/vPrQM.png

Scaling up to the Death Star, this is about 1.08x10^15 tonnes of steel. 1 with fifteen zeros.

Which seems like a colossal mass but we've calculated that from the iron in the earth, you could make just over 2 billion Death Stars. You see the Earth's crust may have a limited amount of iron, but the core is mostly our favourite metal and is both very big and very dense, and it's from here that most of our death-star iron would come.

http://i.imgur.com/3f81Q.png

But, before you go off to start building your apocalyptic weapon, do bear in mind two things. Firstly, the two billion death stars is mostly from the Earth's core which we would all really rather you didn't remove. And secondly, at today's rate of steel production (1.3 billion tonnes annually), it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work. So once someone notices what you're up to, you have to fend them off for 800 millennia before you have a chance to fight back. In context, it takes under an hour to get the steel for HMS Illustrious.

Oh, and the cost of the steel alone? At 2012 prices, about $852,000,000,000,000,000. Or roughly 13,000 times the world's GDP.*

But then again, you can just take out a loan from the entire planet and then default on them in the most awesome way possible.

http://i.imgur.com/vddPu.png

(For the record when converting between iron and steel, Centives assumed a medium steel of 99.5% iron)

*Centives erroneously reported this figure as $8,100,000,000,000,000, which was off by a magnitude of 100. We'd like to thank commenter Ianvl for pointing this out. Despite our original error, the cost of the death star still comes out to be 13,000 times the world's GDP as we originally reported. Sincere apologies for the mistake.

[FBD]

so that means we can pull at least one out without screwin up the joint :lol:

[Godfather]

:lol:

How many people would have to work on it? How many smaller ships would be aboard and how much would each of them cost? How many loaves of bread would you need to bake a day? :-k So many questions yet to be answered to fully calculate the cost...

What I'm getting at is, how much would it cost to "witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!"

[Muddy]

wouldn't it just be easier to outfit the moon with weapons?

[Godfather]

Don't ask silly questions. We need the moon to orbit us for a several reasons, and our Death Star needs to be mobile so it can go out and rape and pillage alien worlds like in Avatar. (The best defense is a good offense)

It needs to be a new Star so we can crush our intergalactic neighbors.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

So many questions yet to be answered to fully calculate the cost...

It does say that the cost listed only covers the steel...so I would say you wou;d probably have to double it if you were to figure in all the costs :-k

[Teh One Who Knocks]

wouldn't it just be easier to outfit the moon with weapons?

That's no moon....

[Godfather]

It does say that the cost listed only covers the steel...so I would say you wou;d probably have to double it if you were to figure in all the costs :-k

Yeah that's what I was kinda thinking... wonder if you continued to apply the comparison to a US Super-carrier, how much more the fittings and fixtures and contents cost?

[Godfather]

:rofl: I love that people are passionate enough about their fan-ficiton to write stuff like this. I mean that in a totally non-judgmental way. Why not


Population

There are serious problems of scale with the figures for the crew and troop complements of the Death Stars as claimed by West End Games sources. Assuming their favourite personnel number estimates, and using their demonstrably erroneous diameters of merely 120km and 160km, the densities of humans on the surface of each battle station were about twenty-six and thirty-one per square kilometre, respectively. This assumes that all of the Death Star inhabitants lived on the same surface level. In fact we know that these battle stations contained at least several thousand floors, even if the habitable zone only extends from the upper few kilometres from the surface. If these Death Star population estimates were correct then either the corridors would be so empty that a chance encounter with a stormtrooper would be virtually impossible, or else habitation only covered a few isolated surface areas. If the battle station is inhabited in such a sparse or patchy fashion then it could be dangerously vulnerable to saboutage, or serious malfunctions could occur without being noticed. When we take physically realistic estimates for the sizes of the Death Stars, the population densities (again assuming only one storey) would drop to below one lonely human being per square kilometer!

The population of 31,622,963 postulated for the Death Star I in The Technical Book of Science Fiction Films is much more reasonable For the small size of the station assumed in this book, this means a surface density of crewman of 2217.46 / km². However the crew live and work on at least hundreds of layered decks throughout at least the top few kilometres of the the station's skin. Thus we still have problems with underpopulated corridors.

Realistic crew and troop populations for the Death Stars must be at least several thousand times the previously published estimates. Each of these battle stations probably carried a few billion military personnel. Given that the Galactic Empire is able to recruit from millions of worlds which typically have populations of billions, this is still only a miniscule fraction of the galaxy's total resources. It should be remembered that there exist totalitarian states on Earth where a substantial proportion of the total population is in military service. The Galactic Empire is probably a relatively under-militarised society by comparison.

It is noteworthy that almost all the gross underestimates of Death Star population are actually contained within documents authored by members of the Rebel Alliance [in ntrinsic terms within the STAR WARS universe]. The Movie Trilogy Sourcebook is written from the vantage of a rebel "historian" (retrospective propagandist) Voren Na'al. The Death Star Technical Companion seems to be a document aimed at rebel diplomats, officers and soldiers, at least according to hints like the appendix preamble on p.84. It is understandable that the propagandists of the Rebel Alliance and the New Republic might wish to belittle these intimidating accomplishments of Imperial military engineering, and to promulagte underestimates of the slaughter at Yavin, which a rational semi-quantitative analysis suggests to be comparable in magnitude to the holocaust at Alderaan.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

A few billion :facepalm:

FFS :lol:

[Godfather]

A few billion :facepalm:

FFS :lol:

Found a few sources that speculated the same :lol: Luke's a fuggin' murderer...

[Teh One Who Knocks]

http://i.imgur.com/KlGPZ.png

It had more personnel on board than I thought :-k

[Shady]

I have a problem with their initial estimate of how many tons of steel it would take. Now they merely size up a super carriers raw steel needs but they don't account for the supposed inner volume and design. Aircraft carriers do have so largish compartments/hangers but they are also very tight. Corridors are probably 4 feet wide vs the death star which has corridors that look to be on average 8-10 feet wide. Then take into account how many random "chasms" there are in the death star for no good reason other than to be there. There is quite a bit of open space in the death star. And on top of that there wouldn't be as big of a need for structural support other than the center of the station. On earth you have to worry about gravity pulling everything down, so things on the bottom have to be more structurally sound that say the tower on the aircraft carrier.

[Yt Trash]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdDRrcAOjA


This thread reminded me of this. Clerks "Death Star Contractors"

[Arkady Renko]

still a lot cheaper than bailing out Greece

[Muddy]

still a lot cheaper than bailing out Greece

:rimshot:

[Shady]

So I did a little more research on the financial aspect of a project like this.

Now assume that all the financing is coming from one source, the center of the galactic empire, Coruscant. Remember the planet has been turned into one giant city over the course of many thousands of years. The planet is 12,240km in diameter which gives us a land mass of 470,665,473 square km. I believe it safe to assume that it at least has an average urban density similar to that of New York City. Considering that the New York City metropolitan had a GMP of $1.28 trillion, and covered an area of 17,400 square km, we come up with a figure of $73,563,218.39 per square km (2010 census figures). Multiply that by the size of Coruscant and you get a truly mind boggling number. The estimated GDP of Coruscant would be $34.6 Nonillion or $34,623,667,052,494,870,000,000,000,000,000.

[FBD]

and they say the earth is running out of space and cant hold the seven we currently have :lol:

[Teh One Who Knocks]

and they say the earth is running out of space and cant hold the seven we currently have :lol:

What are you gonna do, drain the oceans so we can build more cities? :P

[Pony]

What are you gonna do, drain the oceans so we can build more cities? :P

No need, evolution will give us webbed feet and gills. I saw a documentary about it. Things will be tough for awhile while people are fighting over dryland but it will all work out in the end.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

:shock:

[FBD]

What are you gonna do, drain the oceans so we can build more cities? :P

no, just pointing out that the pop density of the rest of the world is miniscule compared to NYC, LA, Hong Kong...bring it anywhere even close and its tens of billions easy, if not a hundred...its just a matter of technological advances for infrastructure.