On the implausibility of the Death Star's trash compactor (2002)
mcsweeneys.net
mcsweeneys.net
The Death Star on the other hand is a base. The sheer volume of material it must go through boggles the mind. A compactor would be a first step toward recycling and reuse, separating solids from fluids. Not much arrives and not much leaves.
If the Death Star had to resupply constantly, the resources required to shed waste and transport a small moon's worth of resources would be astronomical.
We only saw the relevant military aspects of the station. There very well may have been enormous sections dedicated to foundries, growing crops, schools (a million folks stationed there and not even a few of the staff's kids accounted for?), etc.
Remember that in the US military, for every front line soldier, there are dozens of supply personnel, support operators, etc. Why would we believe the Empire including the Death Star to be any different?
All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.
— Randall, the Philosopher
Not democratic, for the people, nor a republic. Does language mean nothing anymore to authoritarians?!
Key assumptions. Wookiepedia lists 120 km for the diameter of the first Death Star [1]. Density of steel is around 8000 kg/m^3 [2]. As a wild guess, I'll assume a uniform sphere with about 1/4 that density (i.e., rho = 2000 kg/m^3), to account for open space etc.
Surface gravity [3] is given by g = (4pi/3) * G * rho * r = 0.03 m/s^2 (i.e., about 0.3% that of Earth).
Escape velocity [4] is given by v = sqrt(2 * g * r) = 60 m/s = 134 mph
This is faster than I would have guessed, but I would expect that to be in reach for a good trebuchet. It's reasonable to assume the compactor is required to load compressed trash into such a device.
[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Star/Legends [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel#Properties [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_gravity#Relationship_o... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#Calculation
1. Their data storage system where hard drives are retrieved by a manually operated claw machine game.
2. Their data transmission system that requires one to use a Wi-Fi link placed on a dangerous aerial catwalk with no safety rails.
3. Their seemingly lack of off-site backups evidenced by the confidence that destroying the data center will ensure the only copy of the death star plans are erased. Which begs the questions of how did they build the 2nd death star so quickly without the original plans?
P.s. did anyone else, while watching the scene where the heros were searching the Empire computers for the secret file name, think of the line from the Simpsons where Homer says, "I've heard how this ends, it turns out the secret code was the same nursery rhyme he told his daughter!"
That’s the most common kind of rouge, but really rouge two or three are where it’s at, because they’re much redder.
The environmentalists may be right, trash may one day destroy Earth.
> Please understand, gentle reader, I am all for creating hassles and headaches for the Empire. I just doubt that the Empire would have created so many for itself.
The world of the empire in the 9 films seems orderly and well orchestrated. The version seen via Andor is more like what a real authoritarian technocracy would likely operate like. It strives more for the appearance of competency and control than actual positive results. The reason for this thing? Someone assumed it should be there, so it was.
I'm curious what you mean by this, since we don't actually see a whole lot of the civilian day-to-day running of the Empire. In the original trilogy, the only planets we see have little to no Empire presence, and the prequel and sequel trilogies take place before and after the Empire respectively.
Wasn't star wars supposed to be a gritty counterpart to high fantasy high space operas? Or star trek?
It stands to reason that a smaller vessel like a Star Destroyer, it is not logistically challenging to move the trash to an airlock for ejection.
On something so enormous as the Death Star, however, it might be so difficult to move the trash around that it's significantly more efficient to compact it before transport to the surface.
The program was written in such a way that it expected a certain number of dinosaurs in a paddock and returned a successful result when it reached that number. However, once it reached the threshold, it did not count more dinosaurs. Once modified, the program outputted the correct total, thus identifying that the dinosaurs were producing offspring in a single sex environment.
Take a look carefully next time you are in a zoo. No active electric fences, lots of very dangerous animals, all contained. Dinosaurs would be almost no different.
It's a clear case of "but then the movie wouldn't happen".
As a bonus round, note the strange absence of guns as a final fallback and the blitheringly idiotic reasons deployed that they don't exist, can't be used, or don't work somehow. Granted, you need more than a .22 in case of emergency but this has been a solved problem for over a century.
The first movie I still enjoy even so. I don't let this interfere with my enjoyment of a cinematic classic, and rich eccentrics hiring the totally wrong people who overconfidently do everything wrong I can track with. The sequels, especially the ones with more parks, I have a much harder time with. Jurassic World really should have worked just fine, at least up until the volcano hit. And I don't mean worked fine as-is, as it is also disastrously misdesigned. I mean, a real, correctly designed park is certainly not "easy", but well within reach for a modern corporation even remotely concerned about liability.
Did we watch the same film? It doesn't appear the metal rod did anything, as far as I can see:
As other have suggested, compaction is potentially needed to transport waste from the deeper parts. But there are several security considerations of just ejecting trash as-is from a high security area. I imagine a trash compactor is also a way to destroy the trash to prevent the old “spy tosses a data device into the prisoner cell block waste chute and have his allies follow the death star to pick it up during ejection”.