In "Blueprint for a Battlestar: Serious Scientific Explanations Behind Sci-Fi's
Greatest Inventions," NASA insider Rod Pyle explores remarkable and memorable technologies from the world of science fiction. Each concept is explained and dissected to reveal the real science behind it. Some are temptingly within our reach — such as cyborgs and artificial intelligence — others are further off, but fast approaching reality (think bio-ports or cloaking devices). Below is an excerpt of "Blueprint for a Battlestar: Serious Scientific Explanations Behind Sci-Fi's Greatest Inventions" (Sterling, 2016).
Death from Above: Building a Death Planet
Without doubt, the technological celebrity of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was the death Planet known as the Death Star. It was the threat that hovered above a world...the target of the heroic pilots in their X-Wing fighters and the home base that Darth Vader so tenaciously defended with his wicked Twin Ion Engine (TIE) Fighters.
Tactical Concerns
Death Planet Mk1: General Arrangement Diagram
Death Planet Mk1: General Arrangement Diagram
The death planet seemed so effective that it was even the subject of a public petition sent to the White House in 2012. The suggestion was that the US should build its own Death Star, presumably to maintain law and order on some planet other than Earth. The tongue-in-cheek document garnered more than 25,000 signatures, enough to warrant an equally silly response from the Obama administration. They said the cost of such a device was estimated at about $850 quadrillion (which is even larger than the US debt,) and that it would take 833,000 years to create enough metal to fabricate it. The response further elaborated that the US government did not support blowing up planets and had tactical concerns about a weapon which could be destroyed by a tiny, battered one-man fighter. https://www.livescience.com/56803-book-excerpt-blueprint-for-a-battlestar.html
