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The second one, but standing on the outside of the sphere. It rotates around the gun.
Besides technical diagrams from supplementary stuff, the Falcon lands in a docking bay that’s oriented towards the first option. There could be some kind of transition point to the second option, but we don’t see it and it’d be really awkward.
Probably left simply because The death star is big but I don’t believe it’s big enough to hide the curve
Left.
Look at the windows.
The first one because luke fell off the bottom.
That was Cloud City
Was it? Dang, my bad. What about Lord Palpatine?
Somehow he returned
he didn’t fall out the bottom. he was killed, then retcond by mucky mousse.
He fell from the top so he could have just fell to the middle
Probably A. It would likely have used artificial gravity just like any starship. Star-Trek has it built into the deck plates but I dunno how Star Wars does it. Artificial gravity can then be dialed in to compensate for the natural gravity of the structure. Which is probably less than you’d think. Without normal gravity effects, the internal air and water pressure will be mostly uniform across the ship instead of denser towards the core.
Same with the matter making up the structure. It’ll largely be hollow and filled with air, so much lower natural gravity than an actual moon of the same size. According to official sources (referenced here: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92401/is-the-death-star-s-gravitational-force-strong-enough-to-hold-an-atmosphere) it’s between 120 & 160 km radius, for a probable gravity of ~0.04g. That’s not quite microgravity, but still far too low to be walking around in. For comparison Lunar gravity is ~0.166g.
It’s practically no moon
Logic says B but LEGO says A
I imagine they were shaping gravity anyway they wanted to.
Yeah, faster-than-light travel is an older technology in Star Wars than agriculture is in the real world.
I’d expect a little thing like artificial gravity to be a solved problem.
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Everything reminds me of her.
It’s not gravity, it’s the ForceTM
You’re held down by middlefloorians.
Judging by their ships, they have gravity generators which are small enough and have a small enough ratio of energy consumption to energy generation to be used in something like the Millenium Falcon.
Which would mean that from an Engineering point of view the option on the left would be perfectly feasible.
On the other hand it does make some sense to structure a combat vehicle as an onion with more mission critical sections inside were they are better protected and less important ones on the outside - you easilly have armour in between levels in that setup whilst in the setup on the left you would need to explicitly add rings of armor sectioning your corridors to achieve the same.
That said, in the Star Wars films we can see that the ship hangars with access to space have a “side” open to space and the “floor” side perpendicular to the radius line of the Death Star, which is consistent with the left side option and inconsistent with the right side one (where the opening to space would be on the top).
Judging by their ships, they have gravity generators which are small enough and have a small enough ratio of energy consumption to energy generation to be used in something like the Millenium Falcon.
Indeed and it’s quite clear that the Falcon has two gravity planes perpendicular to each other: 1. the plane that supports everyone on the main deck (cockpit, crew lounge, etc.) and 2. the gun battery gravity plane at 90 degrees. This is easiest to see in A New Hope during the TIE Fighter battle in the escape from the Death Star. Han and Luke are sitting back-to-back, separated by a short corridor that sits perpendicular to the main deck. I don’t think most people notice this because it’s not obvious.
Both.
The Millenium Falcon landed in a bay that was oriented with the N/S axis of the station, but was accessed on the equator. So the interior of the station has a gravity well with “up” pointing to one of the polls.
The surface cannons, surface towers, and trench defenses were all radially oriented with “up” pointing out into space, like you’d expect on a moon.
This also suggests the station was littered with gravitational dead spots and areas where you’d have to carefully transition from one gravity well orientation to another. No wonder everyone is wearing a helmet.
One of the reasons Star Wars gets called space fantasy is that these objectively cool scenes to shoot simply never make it into the movies because no one even thought of these details in the first place.
Imagine how cool a lightsaber duel would be in these gravity transitional areas, or zero g for that matter! Instead we just got one scene in A New Hope where they’re in the gun turrets fighting off TIES and it’s a pretty subtle detail.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
I love holding this fantasy nonsense up to scrutiny. I just falls apart in the most humorous way possible.
For instance, here’s a checklist for technology mastery in a galaxy far, far away:
[x] Artificial gravity [x] Practical FTL travel [x] Practical interstellar navigation [x] Energy weapons capable of destroying things at _any_ scale [x] Energy shielding [x] Laser. Swords. [x] High energy physics in general [x] Self-aware artificial Intelligence [x] Multicultural society spanning many worlds [x] Psychic powers, telekinesis [x] Pocket-sized SCUBA gear [ ] Materials capable of resisting laser swords [ ] Functional galactic government [ ] Counter-intelligence for said government [ ] Basic spycraft for said government [ ] AI that's good at lie detection [ ] Spaceborne capital ship battles, asymmetric warfare [ ] Large space-stations without critical weak pointsThere are materials resistant to laser swords and the magic in general in the EU. It’s an important factor in Hand of Thrawn I think.
One thing you haven’t mentioned is real-time intra-galactic video calls.
The government(s) is comparably effective to modern governments here on earth, which is to say rather dysfunctional. This would be more impressive if communication was limited to FTL couriers, but it’s very much better than that.
Spycraft isn’t too effective against members of the government using the government to destroy the government. It’s a problem we haven’t solved either, at least in democracies. The government is also not a major force everywhere in the galaxy, and a lot of spycraft and intelligence went into rooting out dissenters. It’s basically the whole plot of Episodes IV & V.
I think droids that are capable and/or willing to engage with subterfuge at more than face value are both expensive and controlled. This moreso exposes how relatively widespread and easily obtainable high-level computing is, yet it’s mostly slept on. There might have been an AI war at some point in the past that causes people to take AI shackles very seriously, but that brings us back to having large numbers of populated worlds without significant government regulation of any kind. AGI is a real weird point in general here, I agree.
There’s lots of capital ship battles, especially in the EU. The originals don’t have a lot of them because the Empire took them all and keeps a tight fist on everyone capable of making them, while the prequels are about the escalation of a very peaceful government to war. I think Clone Wars stories have more of this. Asymmetric warfare is definitely a thing in the main trilogies though, unless I misunderstand what asymmetric warfare is.
Weak points? Absolutely. It’s a disgrace to engineers everywhere, to the point that the Death Star’s flaw has been made into an intentional sabotage in at least one story.
I’d really like to see more laser sword tech though. Like Grievous but on purpose, maybe large plasma tunnel bores or something.
I think the lore explanation for light saber tech not being more common is the “Kyber crystals” they require are very rare, and also maybe it requires the force to use it somehow? Grievous was a cybernetic with an organic brain, and a sith lord.
There’s no way they used that much of the interior. Where do all those giants pits go?
Down.
B) if their antigrav is like 2001 a space Odyssey. A) if they’re using local gravity (eg built in the gravitational orbit of something).
So depends where it was built.
Either way miniaturization is what they really need to focus their efforts on. Hell, they’d save a lot of space if it were an unmanned drone. Which is also true of Elon Musks schemes to get to Mars.
The first one.
Isn’t the emperor’s tower and all the surface guns oriented toward the second option?
Seems like it’s a little of both
That’s only at the top of the death star.
Bingo. See also, the guys in the laser shaft for the main cannon. The beam fires along / past them. Not from below.
Damn this makes the OSHA holes even more ridiculous
Any chance you know the canon explanation of how they counteract the gravity generated by the Deathstar’s mass?
It’s not massive enough to create its own gravity. They use gravity deck plating.
Even if it was massive enough, if they can keep people sticking to the ground in a tiny ship they can surely counteract the gravity of a space station.
Also, most of their spaceships have wings. We’re thinking about this way too hard.
They don’t all have wings. Only the X-Wing and Imperial transport ships have actual wings, and we’ve seen them fly through atmospheres.
Well, yeah, but we’ve also seen the ones that look like a hamburger patty fly through the atmosphere (and, in fact, outmaneouver the winged ones). Clearly that’s not what they’re for.
Ah yeah. Dang. Well there probably a good technical reason behind it. I’m no starship engineer in the Star Wars universe.
You’re here discussing it too, man
Oh, yeah, no, but that’s because I’m a nerd.
They are clearly not wings meant to create aerodinamic lift.
Well, no, they’re meant to make the pew-pew laser fights look like a film about airplane dogfights. So yeah, way overthinking it.
“Gravity deck plating”… okay that makes sense. So basically each floor has its own gravity generation to orient you to it. They’re all placed “bottom to top” to work like a building but it’d be possible to put one in at a 90-degree angle for say maintenance work.
Technically everything with mass creates its own gravitational field; most things just aren’t massive enough for it to be detectable.
One of my favorite science facts: Because of how the strength of gravity diminishes as you get further away and stronger as you get closer, when you approach to within arms length of another person (approx 1m) the gravitational attraction between the two masses of your bodies can exceed the gravitational attraction between your body and the sun at any given time.
When the inverse square law and weak gravitational forces meet
Where I end and you begin
Another fun property of the inverse square law is that an infinite sheet of mass produces a gravitational field that is equally strong no matter how far you are from it.
It applies to any form of flux, like sound amplitude or light intensity.
This is why when you’re sitting on top of Mount Sanitas, you can hear traffic sounds at seemingly full volume. It’s just all the traffic of Boulder, which is roughly like an infinite sheet below you.
This is despite being unable to hear any given car more than a couple blocks away.
It’s also why if Superman flies over manhattan at night, he’s lit from underneath with an amount of light similar to someone who’s 10 feet from a skyscraper.
Yeah, but no one can escape the gravitational field of your mom.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist, as I half expected your comment to end with a “your mom” joke)
Artificial gravity and inertial compensators are pervasive (if relatively handwaved/unexplained) in the SW universe
The gravity is negligible. The official sizes of the Death Stars have been 120 - 900 km in diameter according to rebel scale. For comparison Earths moon is ≈35000 km in diameter and it’s gravity is 1/6 of earth’s. On top of that, the Death Stars are mostly hallow, being a metal framework, instead of solid rock.
the Death Stars are mostly hallow
Our Death Star, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Thy empire come, thy will be done,
On Alderaan as it is in heaven,
Give us this day our daily rations,
And forgive us our rebellion,
As we forgive those who rebel against us,
And lead us not to the light side,
But deliver us from the Jedi,
For thine is the empire, and the unlimited power, and the dark side forever,
Amen
If Lemmy had gold, I’d give it to you.
Earths moon is ≈35000 km in diameter, and it’s gravity is 1/6 of earth’s.
Off the a factor of 10. The Moon has a diameter of almost 3500 km (Earth’s circumference is about 40,000 km, so your diameter would make the Moon larger than Earth).
However, the Death Star being mostly filled with air still means you’re probably right about gravity being negligible.
Whoops. Good catch! so about 4-30 times the size of the Death Star. That would mean the gravity of the Death Star is at most 1/24th that of earth’s if it were solid rock, and my math is correct. That’s at the surface, though. As you go inside, gravity will decrease until you reach the center where there will be no gravity at all because all the mass of the space station is pulling you away from the center equally. (assuming a uniform mass distribution).
g ≈ M/r^2
V ≈ r^3.
uniform density: ρ for simplicity’s sake
M = ρV
—> g ≈ ρr where r is the distance from the center of the death star, but no further than the surface
How much gravity would the Deathstar’s mass provide? I feel like it would be very small considering it has no real massive central solid or liquid core.
I ran the numbers, and it says about 0.00473m22
It’s the size of a moon and made from metal: It’s definitely generating some gravity (even a small amount of mass generates gravity) but I guess whatever tech they use to generate gravity overcomes it.
It wouldn’t need to generate gravity.
Acceleration “down” would be enough.
Only if it was undergoing constant acceleration, which we know it to be incapable of.
It’s got sublight thrusters and steering doesn’t it? It could just fly around and around a circular path.
I mean, those are equivalent forces. Gravity doesn’t actually exist as a separate force, just like acceleration isn’t a magical force appearing from nowhere.
It’s the size of a very, very small moon, and mostly hollow.
Yeah the fact it’s called a small moon is slightly deceptive to us because our moon is absolutely huge as far as moons go. The natives of the SW universe would be used to much much smaller moons.
For reference, our moon is 3475km across and the death star is 150km across, so it’s diameter is 23 smaller. It’s also weighed at about 900million tonnes or 9*10^14kg.
If I’m right (which I’m likely not). g=(GM)/r² or g=(6.667*10-11*9*1013)/75².
That’s a gravity of 1.086x10^-5m/s² or if I round with pure disrespect for physics, 100,000 times weaker than earth’s gravity. Essentially it’s totally negligible compared to their artificial gravity. Hell, I don’t even think a marble on the floor would overcome it’s own grip and roll towards the center of the space station.
My maths is almost certainly wrong somewhere here, I failed it badly.
Our moon is huge for a planet of Earth’s size, but not compared to the big moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Last time I looked it up, I used Pluto’s moons as a reference because some of them are smaller than DS1, but Charon is quite a bit bigger. Based on the shapes of Pluto’s moons, I think even if DS1 were solid it would still be too small to compact itself into a sphere with its own gravity.
Fun fact: Charon is even more huge relative to Pluto (just over 50% of Pluto’s diameter) than Luna is compared to Earth (about 25% of Earth’s diameter).
Pluto has more than one satellite?
fun fact, pluto and charon are technically a binary planet(oid), because the point they orbit is in-between them. (Charon doesn’t orbit Pluto, they both circle empty space)
I mean, we mostly only have info on our solar system for moon sizes. We could easily be an oddball, although it’s not good science to assume we’re special in any way.
I should call her
So small that a natural body of that size probably wouldn’t be massive enough to hold a spherical shape. DS1 was a little smaller than the real asteroid 128 Nemesis, which isn’t spherical. Maybe if it were made of something extremely dense, it would be, but you’re not likely to find a natural spherical object that size.
Now that I think of it, this puts the “that’s no moon” scene in perspective. Luke is a country bumpkin who just calls it a moon, but Obi-wan has an idea of its size (perhaps from glancing at the Falcon’s scans, since size and distance is hard to judge by eye; or he’s just a space wizard), and knows a natural object couldn’t be that spherical.
Unless the object formed as a sphere of molten water in the vacuum goldilocks zone, then froze into an huge sphere of ice as the star cooled.
