Someone once said that those who think big make big mistakes, and Palpatine and Tarkin paid dearly for their mistake. In the case of the first Death Star (EM1) a design ‘fault’ allowed Luke Skywalker to destroy it with simple proton torpedoes. An armored battle station capable of withstanding the combined attack of hundreds of destroyers is blown apart by a single X-wing fighter. The battle of Yavin becomes, in this way, a peculiar homage to the biblical legend of David against Goliath . The result in both cases was similar: on the one hand, he elevated David as king of the Jews – enthroning his entire lineage in addition – and Luke Skywalker, a simple apprentice moisture farmer from a remote planet in the Outer Rim, to general and great leader of the rebellion against the Empire. The moral of this whole thing is simple: if you want to be great, take down a big baddie by yourself. As the priceless Billy Crystal said in the movie My Giant Here , “without Goliath, David was just a little shit who threw stones.”
As we are told in Rogue One, EM1 was able to be destroyed because the brilliant human engineer Galen Walton Erso designed – on purpose – a way to reach the reactor core : through one of the thermal exhaust ports located in one of the trenches. of the station. The million dollar question is how it is possible that he managed to slip such a goal to the rest of the technical team because, to begin with, the station did not need ventilation ducts : without air there is nothing to do. In the absence of matter, the only way to eliminate excess heat is by radiation: any body that has a certain temperature above absolute zero (-273 ºC) loses energy by emitting infrared radiation (the range of the electromagnetic spectrum in which the alien saw in the Predator movies). Then the only mechanism that EM1 has to eliminate the excess heat generated is through radiation.
And that’s exactly why the Geonosis engineers weren’t very sharp in designing the Death Star: aesthetically pretty but functionally a disaster . Because if we don’t want to spend a bundle on air conditioning, the sphere is not a good option. The reason is purely geometric: it is the shape that offers less area compared to its volume. In other words, two space stations with the same volume, the one with the largest surface area will remove excess heat more efficiently.
But the worst design error lies in something that neither the great Moffat nor any of his officers took into account, the danger that the ultimate goal of the station posed to them: to blow up planets, as they did with Alderaan. The Imperial scientists should have told Tarkin up and down: the greatest danger facing the EM1 is not an attack by super destroyers but the remnants of the planet they destroy with their superlasers . Obviously large pieces can be destroyed with turbolasers and particles smaller than 1 cm are not a great threat to its integrity: at most it causes superficial abrasions and micro-holes. The problem is those between 1 and 10 cm in size that travel at speeds of 10 km/s, or what is the same, 36,000 km/h: they can cause catastrophic damage. They’re not big enough to be vaporized by defense tower cannons (and we saw how little value they had against rebel fighters in the Battle of Yavin) so the station should be protected from hypervelocity impacts from impossible particles. to follow That is why our ISS is the most armored ‘spacecraft’ ever sent into space. An armor that was specially designed to protect critical components, such as living areas or high pressure tanks.
On the other hand, that the Rebel Alliance did not consider the economic cost of destroying it does not say much about the intelligence of its leaders. Apparently dominated by the military component, which only seeks the defeat of the Empire, they were not able to estimate the macroeconomic implications of their decisions.
University of Washington professor Zachary Feinstein published the December 2015 article It’s a Trap: Emperor Palpatine’s Poison Pill (The term ‘poison pill’ refers to a corporate strategy designed to discourage hostile takeovers.) In it he calculated the economic repercussions of the Battle of Endor, where the second Death Star (EM2) was destroyed. The conclusions were devastating and made it very clear that Leia and her co-religionists did not take into consideration the problems that they would face after the defeat of the emperor. According to Feinstein , the destruction of the EM2 implied that the Alliance had to prepare a financial rescue of between 15 to 20% of the Gross Galactic Product to mitigate the economic collapse that its destruction would entail. Perhaps a better solution would have been to take it over and control it, not destroy it.
Of course, there is another small detail that shows that the rebels weren’t very good at basic physics either: destroying the EM2 on the Sanctuary Moon of Endor would have meant the destruction of the moon itself. In 1997 a pamphlet appeared titled The Holocaust of Endor where an analysis of what should have happened was made; something totally different from the fireworks we saw in the movie.
In the holograms that we can see in the Home One ship, the relative size of EM2 and the moon of Endor (which, being protected by the force field, must be in geosynchronous orbit -or endorsynchronous-) are shown. From there it follows that it is about 7% that of the moon: the diameter is therefore about 340 km.
If the Death Star exploded within seconds of the attack, heaven-sent catastrophe on the Alliance ships and the home of the Ewoks is assured. First we have the fall of radioactive material from the reactor core throughout the hemisphere that had EM2 in its sky. Second, the shower of chunks of EM2 itself, either minuscule in size or large chunks of metal. Traveling at 350,000 km/h all ships in the vicinity would have been destroyed and the surface of Endor razed to the ground . Other calculations, less conservative, estimate that the speed of the remains must have been 1.2 million kilometers per hour. If the amount of steel invested up to that moment in its construction was 10 trillion kilos, the fragments of the station that fell on Endor would have created craters four times larger than that of Chixculub, the one left by the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
