PT Why did it take two decades to build the first Death Star?

Beezer
So in short
The Force did it

 

Do we know that what we saw at the end of ROTS was the actual Death Star in ANH? It could have been a prototype.

 

This is correct

 

As far as the Death Star itself being unharmed by the explosion, the station does have shields, so it's highly logical that the shields on the planet-facing side would be at maximum strength to ward off any extra debris or energy.

 

You mean the same shields that the rebel starfighters just flew right through with nothing more than just a little bit of turbulence? As expressly stated in the movie (and I don't care what the nonsense that is the EU says) those shields were designed to repel a large scale assault. General Dodonna didn't say anything about them repelling a "Large scale assault - oh and planetary debris").

No, it is not even remotely logical that the Death Star could be in orbit around a planet, output enough energy to destroy the entire thing outright, and not be damaged itself. You may as well try and apply real world physics to Sauron's disembodied, sentient eye residing at the top of a huge tower. Fortunately, I am one of those that can enjoy Star Wars without ridiculous attempts to explain the physics behind it. The whole point of "Galaxy Far Far Away" is to let the viewers know we are in fantasy environment where real world physics are to be ignored. I leave that to the Star Trek fans.

 

Yes -

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/DS-1_Orbital_Battle_Station

In the Revenge of the Sith DVD commentary, Lucas made an off-hand comment that the Death Star seen at the end was the first Death Star. He explained this was due to "union disputes and supply problems."

 

In order to overcome the gravitational binding energy of an Earth sized world you must deliver 10^32 joules of energy to it. To make it bust like Alderaan takes a far greater sum on the order of 10^38 joules. This just happens to be the per second power output of the entire Milky Way galaxy with an estimated upwards amount of 400 billion stars. That used to be found right here on this website, and other folks were kind enough to of course check his math via other web pages and a book too.

 

It should be noted that the latter was an upper limit:

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ds/index.html

Alderaan is probably a typical habitable planet, with much the same dimensions and composition as our Earth. An approximation for its gravitational binding energy can be obtained according to the density structure profiles of the Earth or Venus. An approximate figure for the binding energy of Alderaan, assuming Earthlike composition and mass of 5.9 x 1024 kg, is:

U = 2.4 x 1032 joules.​

It should be noted that this is simply the minimum energy required to destroy a terrestrial planet. The Death Star's maximum capability is much greater.
The duration of the superlaser strike on Alderaan was about 0.21s (although it took slightly more than a second for the weapon to build up energy before the beam was released). Therefore the power of this beam, which needs to exceed the power dissipation rate of any deflector shields of the target, is at least of the order of 1032 W.

In A New Hope the original Death Star was able to generate at least this amount of energy and to replenish it within the few days which transpired between the destruction of Alderaan and the Battle of Yavin. According to The Death Star Technical Companion, the Death Star was capable of generating sufficient energy for a full planetary disruption in a single day. Thus the main reactor was capable of generating energy beyond the station's continual running needs at a base rate of at least 2x1027 Watts. This power is approximately five times the continuous output of the Sun. It is vastly in excess of any artificial power source known to any other major fictional universe.

It should be remembered that this is only a minimum for the power of the Death Star superlaser and the output of the main reactor. This is the quantity of energy which is required to blast the material of a terrestrial planet into space at approximately the escape velocity, which at the surface is about a dozen kilometres per second. Thus any explosion merely at the threshold energy would take hours to unfold. The explosion of Alderaan took less than a second to occur, implying characteristic speeds of at least thousands of kilometres per second. The actual energy delivered by the superlaser therefore must be very much greater than the calculated minimum.

By performing frame-by-frame timing measurements on the expanding cloud of debris, (assuming a movie frame rate of 24/s) the velocities of indentifiable parts of the explosion can be determined.
The outermost parts of the cloud are expanding at a characteristic speed of 1.8x107 m/s. This is about 6% of the speed of light and 1600 times escape velocity. Since these are the fastest-moving pieces of ejecta, they can be used to determine an absolute upper limit on the total energy of the blast. This destructive energy of Alderaan's superlaser beam was less than 2.6 million times the threshold; in other words: 3.4x1038 J. The actual total energy was some fraction of this upper limit, depending on how the blast energy was distributed amongst the particles.

 

Beezer: People can like both, you know. Yes, Trek does seem to be more serious but that's no reason to potentially insult Trek fans for possibly enjoying that aspect. You can totally suspend disbelief as you choose but some of us can't and that's okay too.

As to the question I expect it took roughly 19-20 years purely as a plot convenience. I do believe the image Dooku showed us is indeed meant to be Tarkin's DS1. I thought it was the coolest PT to OT link as it ties the RL friends respective SW characters.

 

Poor story telling without the necessity of tying two trilogies together. Either that or contractors were on strike for 18 years.

 

Like others have said, whenever you build or take on a project for the first time, it will simply take longer. I would assume that for the Death Star 1, it took a little over 19-20 years for it to be complete...

 

Yup. The later EU has also lengthened the time the DS2 took - from about a year, to more than 4 years.

Thus the disparity is less severe.

 

I don't mean to insult Star Trek fans; I proudly consider myself among them. I have all 3 season of the original series on blu-ray, all 5 of the released TNG seasons on blu ray, not to mention all 12 movies. In fact, my Star Trek blu ray collection is quite a bit larger than Star Wars because there is so much more material (even though I am a much bigger Star Wars fan).

I'm just saying that these "real world physics" discussions are much more appropriate to Star Trek than Star Wars based on its setting. It takes place in our existence, our planet, our history, etc. Obviously it is set in the future, but that is why physics discussions make a bit more sense for Star Trek than Star Wars.

 

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far away"

 

Even at the lower limit it's a million Sun's worth. But that lower limit is obviously exeeded. Even if one called it halfway it's still billions of Suns. I should note it is not the total mass/energy of all those stars over their lifetimes. Simply the power output every second.

 

The short answer: death sticks.

Entire legions of the first batches of Clone Troopers who labored on the Death Star became addicted to this fatal habit.

 

Of course we also must realize that the DSII was only halfway completed.....

 

The new Death Star Owners Workshop Manual book says (for the DS2) that the reactor power is "equivalent to hundreds of supergiant stars".

 

Not even Emperor Palpatine can defeat big buisness!!!

 

I've always had a pet theory that the DS2 was under construction before the first one had ever been destroyed.

 

And the EU ended up taking the same approach, eventually.

 

Likely not only the DS itself was a great challenge, but a lot of the tools, machines, and technology in general necessary to build it first had to be developed.

 

Vader kept destroying them whenever he would think about Padme. The Death Star we see in ANH is version 938.

 

its the size of a small moon....