Books Death Star Owner's Technical Manual: Imperial DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

My mistake, it was 164 km or so. Rather have that than any other estimates. We can technically follow that as the highest canonical source, even beyond movie visuals or "what sounds cool" to paraphrase Leland Chee. These people actually made the things. No one should have more say over the designs than their creators.

As for the hologram in ROTJ, I wouldn't put much stock in that, given holograms are meant to be tactical. The one in TPM showed the secret corridors in the palace as being pretty huge compared to the actual building, iirc. For ease of viewing rather than accurate scaling. Same with the barely zigzagging corridor view on the DSII hologram vs. how the interior actually looked like when they were flying through it.

 

Feed in those figures (1.2m, 1:180000 scale) and you get 216 km.

"Highest canonical source" is statements made by Lucas - not statements made by staff on his films.

As to holograms being meant to be tactical- I agree. Which is why I didn't like Saxton's figures for the size ratio between the DS2 and Endor: because they were based much more on the hologram, than on the movie shots.

 

Just googling it now, I saw someone maybe this nice comparison chart. I always knew how big the DSII was, well at least how big it use to be, but this really puts into perspective.

 

Saxton's figure for DS2 height to trench height ratio is 153:1 (so a 900km DS2 would have a 5.88km trench, and a 160km DS2 would have a 1.04km trench). Makes the 160km figure look more realistic - since what we see on screen does not look nearly as high as 5.88km- scaling from the Emperor's docking bay.

 

Given the small hangar Vader's shuttle lands in, the entire trench seems a lot bigger. I also doubt the Executor's crash-site would lack a curvature given a 160 km station would be less than 10 times the Executor's length in diameter.

 

It lacked a curvature because it was a model shot- possibly against a completely straight model surface that only looks curved because it's set at an angle.

Yes- there's lots of size inconsistencies. But what's wrong with choosing the smallest justifiable size, rather than the largest? Especially since it's more consistent with the novelization.

Given that Vader's bay is the smallest one, next to the Emperor's, it's on the order of 72m wide, 48m high- with the Emperor's bay being about 375m wide, 170m high.

Obviously these are ballpark figures, based on the diameter of Vader's shuttle when it lands at the start of the movie.

 

Wait, so it took them nineteen years to make the fatally flawed DSI, but only four to build the much bigger DSII?

 

Part of the DS II, we seen the thing, it was not even close to finishing as the guy in charge mentioned.

 

Given how close to the RoTJ level it looks in the Brian Wood In The Shadow of Yavin comic (and given the before this, in Choices of One, it was depicted as half-complete a few months after Yavin- a case could be made that construction began on the DS2 some time before A New Hope.

The only thing that needed to be changed after Yavin, was the heat radiation system (from a few large ports, to many microports)

However, as mentioned, the idea that it was "much bigger" seems to be being moved away from again- with the writers of The Death Star Owners Workshop Manual taking note of the novelization, and interpreting "nearly twice as big" as "when complete, it will be over twice the volume".

 

DSII did not have a gym.

 

To the few posters (besides me) - who have grown distrustful of Saxton's figures over time- what was it that first made you suspicious of them?

 

Would you rather have a million dollars or a billion dollars?

Always struck me as weird as well. The explanation I would come up with is that DS1 was something new and they had a hard time getting all it all to work, that why it took so much longer. Though for me, just the existence of a Death Star makes many things seem very inconsistent with many EU aspects of the SW verse.

I was distrustful of almost every other EU number ever given pretty much immediately, if that helps any. In all seriousness thanks for the scouting report on the book thus far, can't wait to get it in a few days.

 

Him clearly just misreading stuff and not consulting various sources that were clearly available to him was always something of a brow raiser.

 

There's no sense in consulting WEG when WEG is the thing you're trying to disprove. The people who worked on the films didn't work on the books that came after the films. A shame, but that's how it is. I'll gladly ignore Saxton and any other non-movie production source (the Encyclopedias, the WEG and WOTC systems, Pablo, Leland etc.) if it means only ILM's own ideas are retained in canon.

 

*waits for Pablo measuring the DS and DS2 models in the Lucasfilm archives for his next blogpost*

just when you think sizedebates are over...

well, I'd rather talk timeline and other issues. sizes I stopped worrying about long ago. Be it character heigths... starship lengths... space station diameters or else... I am more worried for character ages, timeline issues and such.

 

I too will await another blog post emphasizing model measurement over authorial intent and visual imagery in the end product.

 

I don't see how the measurements of the model in question aren't the ultimate statement of authorial intent in this matter.

 

Because, as I pointed out before, the two models in the film shot don't add up to Pablo's 1:1 measurements. If the brass model is kept consistent with the design of the larger ISD physical model, it's closer to 17,6 km, not 13,469 km. 17,6 km being ILM's only statement so far as to what they conceived the Executor as being, compared to the Star Destroyer.

 

For the record, the only official sources Curtis Saxton wrote are the IncredibleCrossSections for AOTC and ROTS. In none of those two is either DS1 or DS2 mentioned. While not the author, he is however mentioned as a consultant for ICST, SW:CLT and SW:ROTS:VD.

So obviously he was good enough for LFL to directly work for them and that means he has at least the same standing and credibility as other LFL-employees like Leland Chee, Pablo Hidalgo or the authors of the current work in discussion.

Second, taking a look at his original site http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ds/index.html he lists the following sizes based on the following observations:

For DS1:
- a size between 125 and 190 km from the target scope range,
- a size between 93 and 169 km based on the polar trench width,
- 164km according to model-maker Grant McCune in BanthaTracks

For DS2:
- a lower limit of 270 km based on the waistband trench and Vader's shuttle,
- 245-445 km based on star destroyer-shadow in concept art,
- 900 km based on comparison of DS2 to Endor, once from the tactical hologram of the rebels and once from the "real life"-POV from the approaching rebel-fleet,
- 160 kilometers based on the ROTJ-sketchbook. Saxton speculates, that this sketch is based on the idea, that DS1 in ANH would have been 160km and that the original idea was to have both DS's being the same size. If that was the case we also know, where the "twice as large as the first one" from the ROTJ-novelisation (and if we take that as our sole evidence, we can also start discussing Owen Lars being Obi-Wan's brother again) came from,
- 800 km from Richard Edland in Cinefax 1983.

I fail to see, how this amounts to "not consulting various" sources or a single-minded insistance on a single number. And contrary to WEG's 120 and 160km which appeared out of thin air, here we seem where the numbers came from. Picking a single one of those might let us keep a smaller DS2, but if we want to consider them all, we are on the safe side with the largest number of 900km.

 

Concerning the different sizes of DS1 and DS2 and the times it took them to construct: According to WEG's DSTM it cost the empire two years and the equivalent of "a score of sectorgroups" to construct the DS1 we see in ANH, so 60% of DS2 by the time of ROTJ doesn't seem unlikely, especially given the fact, that the GalacticEmpire no longer has to concern itself with a meddling senate, which - contrary to more recent material - at that time (ANH) still had some teeth left.

 

accidental double post instead of editing.

 

According to Lucas though- the DS1 we see at the end of RoTS is the same DS1 we see in ANH (must have been redesigned a little bit) - thus- 19 years, not 2.

I'm told Gary Sarli pointed out Saxton was calculating size based on the wrong shuttle bay - and thus, that the lower limit is closer to 160km.

Given that the current official size of the Forest Moon is 4900 km diameter, this does not work.

Also- given that the DS2 was in front of the Forest Moon- so more than a planetary radius "closer" than the Forest Moon is (in terms of the cores of each object) it will look much larger relative to the Forest moon than its true size is. All the other screenshots show a much higher size ratio of Moon to DS2, than 11.5.

 

FTeik
Plus, there's an inference from a passage in the ITW: OT, repeated in SW: CL, that the first DS wasn't constructed solely with the most efficient placement of self-replicating (von Neumann) construction droids. This was only done for the second, larger station, based on good experience with doing so during the first one's construction. Hence some of the shortened construction time on the larger follow-up can be explained as the Imperial engineers learning from different techniques used during the first project which decreased construction time.

 

Neither was the second one build with Neumann machines, like mentioned two pages ago.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine
The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced and examined by Homer Jacobsen, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann and in more recent times by K. Eric Drexler in his book on nanotechnology, Engines of Creation and by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle in their review Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines which provided the first comprehensive analysis of the entire replicator design space.

Actual construction time. We know from Death Star that there have been numerous delays throughout the years. The actual construction time in the Technical Journal of 2 years isn't contradicted since the remaining 17 would be on account of sabotages, bureaucratic quagmires and logistical delays. Plus building two or three prototypes just to test the main weapon.

Stopped reading right there.