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

I read his Rebuttal to the Endor Holocaust before the site hosting it stopped working - and it made plenty of sense to me. Probably to several of the other Fleet Junkies as well.

 

Only so much use they got out of them as even that little tidbit mentions also

 

From the first page, but I'm not sure the discrepancy really has been explained. As far as I can tell, that page from the preview just labels the DS-with-equatorial-laser as schematics for a "concept" Death Star that were obtained after the Battle of Yavin. So why were there schematics like that floating around when the Death Star's superlaser seems to have been set in the northern hemisphere dating back to Episode II? And if those "concept" schematics were only obtained after the Battle of Yavin, why do they show up on Dodonna's screen in ANH?

 

Hm, I must have forgotten that scene in ROTJ where Jerjerrod wants more men because SW humans can smelt raw materials and lift tons of superstructure through space using only their hands. Maybe it's on the Blu-Ray?

 

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...-battle-station.50014788/page-2#post-51059198

 

Never really understood the need for slave labor in the construction of the Death Star, or for constructing anything for that matter in the SW Galaxy. I would think there would be numerous engineers, technicians, and droids out there to get the job done better, probably cheaper, and faster than any slave labor could. The only real benefit I could think of is maybe killing all the slaves afterward to ensure secrecy, like when they destroyed Despayre.

 

Those plan and supervise

We have seen SW droids at work 3PO sucks at his job, R2D2 is an insane renegade, battle droids can't shoot straight and from what we have seen of labor droids in Ep 4 they spent their time mucking about if not constantly watched. For that matter the only Droids that seem to do their jobs kind of well are that insanely expensive Assassin Droid in Ep 2 (though him leading someone back to its master cast doubt at even that) and that also insanely expensive Scout Droid on Hoth. So seems to sounds nicer on paper then in practice.

Droids are easier to kill actually.

 

"Keeping it a secret" wasn't the reason given in the Death Star novel for the destruction of Despayre- "testing the weapon out" was.

 

Quite right, I yield on the point droids would be easier to kill I wish droids were written a bit better in all SW media to actually be competent at least some of the time. I mean R2 has played some sort of role in destroying a pretty good share of the Imperial Navy.

I know, just giving it as an example of dead men tell no tales could be a reason to use slave labor and then kill them after the job is done.

 

Reviews are starting to appear on Amazon.

I found this one hilarious:

This Owner's Technical Manual has made Death Star ownership a breeze, especially the troubleshooting section given some of the problems I've been having ever since I drove my pre-owned Death Star off the lot.

Troubleshooting:

Problem:
- Death Star will not start
Possible Solutions:
- Check to see that your Death Star is plugged in
- Make sure power switch is in the "ON" position

Problem:
- Death Star will not destroy planets
Possible Solutions:
- Make sure the "destroy planet safety" switch is not engaged
- Ensure moon with rebel base is within firing range
[NOTE: A voice will tell you how many minutes until moon with rebel base will be within firing range]
- Press CTRL-ALT-DEL and choose "Reboot Death Star"
- Power down Death Star and wait one minute before restarting

Problem:
- Death Star explodes
Possible Solutions:
- Clear lint from thermal exhaust port before inserting laundry
- For Death Star model U, ensure Death Star is plugged into 110V AC plug; For Death Star model E, use 220V AC plug
[WARNING: Use of incorrect voltage may cause Death Star to explode causing serious injury or death]
- Check for Ewoks

Every Death Star owner will love this book! Consider it a must-buy if you are new to Death Star ownership.

 

Have fun.

 

Leland, you have ONE JOB . . .

 

Yay!

Or, as the Hiromi put it:

Spoiler

Hopefully someone will now fix it on Wookieepedia as well.

That said:

Amazon's resident Saxton fan, The Emperor (he's not Tzizvvt78 under another name, is he?) has taken the opportunity to trash it, as he does with any book that contradicts Saxton.

 

So pretty much each and everyone ever?

 

Only The Essential Guide to Warfare and Incredible Vehicles- but they're the only other technical books written to outright contradict Saxton, after Complete Cross Sections came out.

 

And the earth is flat and was created in six days ... .

I wonder what arguments the proponents for the lower numbers had beside "we stated that bantha-dung since the beginning".

 

Probably they read The Essential Atlas, noted The Forest Moon of Endor's listed diameter (4900 km) noted that in most of the screenshots, the size ratio of Forest Moon to DS2 was not 11.5 to 1, but more like 30:1, and put the two factoids together.

Interestingly, while Ryder Windham used the higher figure for the DS1 in one of his books (The Rise & Fall of Darth Vader) every version of his Ultimate Visual Guide (including one published in 2013) has used the lower figure. Suggesting that while he may have used it once, he later changed his mind and has not used it ever since.

 

Now we know continuity checking doesn't mean much in the eyes of lobbyists. I'm going to lobby for ILM's work, not Windham, Saxton, nor WEG.

Btw, a recent Insider article about this book used the 160 km figure for the first DS. Windham should have lobbied that too.

 

I'd like to know which of Ryder Windham, Chris Trevas, and Chris Rieff was the lobbyist- and if it was Ryder Windham, what convinced him to side with the lower figures, between him releasing The Rise & Fall of Darth Vader, which uses the higher figure (in October 2007) and the later revisions to the Ultimate Visual Guide - which uses the lower figure.

 

Yes, and why ignore the actual people who built the thing in the movie and did come up with their own sizes for what they wanted them to look like "in real life"?

 

The model sizes are 4 ft and about 5 ft - my guess is that it simply wasn't clear at the time WEG was writing, that they were "supposed to be built to different scales".

 

True, but making one mistake so many years ago shouldn't reverberate all the way to our time without actually getting checked, imho.

 

These were the statements (at least according to Saxton):

Bantha Tracks #6 [Autumn 1979], the official STAR WARS fan club magazine of the first generation, contains information about the scaling of miniature models in A New Hope, as told by Grant McCune, Chief Model Maker for the movie:

"The scale on the models ranged from 1:8 on the life pod and Lifepod Bay to 1:16 for most of the space vehicles to an incredible 1:180,000 for the Death Star (making the full size Death Star 102+ miles in diameter)"

The July 1983 issue of CINEFEX contains an interview with Richard Edlund of Industrial Light & Magic, regarding the effects of Return of the Jedi. In this interview, on pp.7-8 he says:

​

" The Deathstar, I think, will be a lot more interesting than the one in the first Star Wars — mainly because it is under construction ... Plus, it will be MUCH bigger. In Star Wars, it was really difficult to establish the scale. It was supposed to be miles in diameter, but with a full sphere it was hard to tell. The NEW one is SUPPOSED TO BE MORE like FIVE HUNDRED MILES in diameter, but since we're not dealing with a sphere all the time, we'll be able to establish landmarks and get a better sense of scale."​

I'd be interested in knowing what convinced Chee to disregard those statements.

Possibly it was the same thing that convinced him, splatbook writers, and the writers of From Star Wars to Indiana Jones, to disregard this one:

There is one piece of evidence that ordinary ISD's are in fact a few miles long rather than exactly one mile. This hint is mentioned in the context of a discussion of the ISD design in Stephen Sansweet's STAR WARS: From Concept to Screen to Collectible. It seems possible that the Lucasfilm artists working on the original film designed the ship to be five or six miles long. If so then this original intention takes precedence over the one-mile figure given in Roleplaying Game and other recent references. The size of the ISD is dealt with on pp.42-43 of the Sansweet's book. A caption to the illustration on p.43 is quite explicit:

The final version of the Star Destroyer, built in several different sizes, was meant in filmic terms to be about six miles long.​

 

Additionally, the ROTJ pre-production art showcases at least one Calamari cruiser concept, scaled to the ISD and I believe the artist wrote "1 mile" underneath the two, for measuring. So that's an example of ILM changing their design from this early, first-movie scale.

EDIT: Re-checked, the 1MI. notation is under a different cruiser concept, but on the same page in the ROTJ Sketchbook. The comparison diagram is of a different cruiser design, that later became the MC30c frigate.

 

Well, if size can be changed based on mere lobbying, lets get cracking on the Viscount (17Km!) and Home One (3.2 Km!)