Death Star II

The second Death Star was an enormous battle station, even more monstrous than the first Death Star. At some 500 miles across, it was the size of a small moon, and would have massed many trillions of tons.

Conceptually, the second Death Star was simply a repeat of the first: a huge sphere accommodating a massive superweapon capable of instantly blowing apart a planet. Only two significant differences, other than size, distinguish the two Death Stars: the second iteration had a superweapon capable of being toned down and used against capital ships in addition to planets; and it also lacked the exposed exhaust ports of the first version, which would have left it totally invulnerable once completed.

The construction of a second Death Star after the destruction of the first - a humiliating defeat which saw an enormous loss of resources and personnel due to a simple, biased oversight - demonstrates how obsessed the Emperor was with inspiring fear rather than applying good military sense. Rather like Hitler's obsession with superweapons while average but reliable technologies went underfunded, Palpatine's Empire invested an almost absurd amount of monetary and material resources into his Death Stars while at the same time scrapping promising, sensible projects such as the TIE Advanced, TIE Defender, Dark Troopers, and others. Considering that hundreds of thousands of conventional warships could have been built with the materials that went into the Death Stars, Palpatine's insistence on the doctrine of fear over traditional military strategies suggests either that his grip on reality was slipping, or that he considered conventional military force to be truly inadequate for maintaining a firm grip on his Empire.

In any case, Palpatine's plans were again undone by unforseen contingencies: The half-completed second Death Star, protected by a massively powerful planetary-scale shield projector, was left vulnerable to attack when a Rebel strike force neutralized the shield facility. As with the first Death Star, a tunnel connecting the core to the outside proved its undoing: in this case, whole ships - rather than proton torpedoes - plunged inside to destablize the massive reactor core. The second Death Star detonated with enormous force over the Forest Moon of Endor.

Oddly, the huge energy release of the DS II explosion seems not to have had any real effect on Endor. The gamma burst alone from such a beyond-nuclear blast would have incinerated everything on the facing side of the moon; debris propelled to large fractions of lightspeed would have struck mere fractions of a second later. How this could have not created mushroom clouds and vast masses of atmospheric dust spreading across Endor's surface remains uncertain, although certainly it has prompted no small amount of debate and division amongst Star Wars fans.

Record 1380 - ship - Last update 17 Nov 2007, 21:20:46

Entry written by: Torvus

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