Rogue One The Death Star Questions/Discussion thread

Sure you're not getting confused with illum? That's where most of the speculation about Starkiller comes from. At least there is some evidence to back that up. Jedha doesn't really make any sense.

Maybe that's just the new Snoke theories. Every planet is going to turn into starkiller

 

I don't know, the geography we've seen could match if the planet was to undergo an ice age. It seems though people are assuming that it's SKB because the planet is rumoured to be a source of Kyber Crystals.

 

If the Death Star beam hit so hard that it knocked the planet out of orbit? Or started an Nuclear Winter? A permanent ash cloud.

And it would explain why the planet has a big hole on one side.

 

It seems that they are borrowing heavily from the oldcanon Death Star novel, where the station's first actual shot was a low-power beam used to devastate the surface of the planet it was orbiting. Two subsequent shots broke the planet up even further, obviously not as completely as Alderaan.

 

They're doing the right thing with "legends". There are some really good stories and concepts to be mined.

 

One thing that was bothering me a bit was that if the Death Star is a big deal. Collecting up Kyber Crystals being a rare, difficult thing to do that needs a Galactic Empire's resources to do it, then how did a bunch of second rate Neo-Imperials build Starkiller?

For a while there it felt like two different fan fiction paths. Different writers making up their own ideas of how the Galaxy works.

But if it's a matter of the New Order lucking out on access to this huge exposed planetary core of Crystal, well, that makes a bit more sense.

 

well SKB itself was lush with Kyber Crystals that were mined. so i dare say it was easier to mine it, and horde a bunch of Crystals on the same planet. that, or they based the design of SKB/how it works, around the Kyber Crystal's that were already there. you arent wrong about finding it hard to believe, but the FO did have pretty good resources, not to mention more time than the Empire had (30 years).
and tbh, even though the big super weapon thing is very DS reminiscent (and this invites the whole copying/lack of ideas criticism), id honestly find it hard to believe that these things didnt happen more often, theyve been proven to work for the most part (until they dont) and has been happening since 1000 years ago (including the Kyber Crystals being used as a composite/ingredient for them).
has anyone seen Legend of Galactic Heroes? i would say thats very similar to what I envision how war would/should be played out in SW - though less politics and less 'chess games' being played, simply because that isnt Star Wars-y. i think the novels were released in '82 with the anime relaesed in '88, so its heavily influenced from SW itself (for those interested)

 

Anyone else bothered by the size of the Death Star's hypermatter reactor in the internal schematics we've seen lately? It seems WAY too big. It wasn't nearly that large when Lando, Nien Nunb and Wedge destroyed it in ROTJ, but I guess it's possible they made the reactor smaller for the second Death Star. But being that the second Death Star was much, much larger, it seems doubtful.

 

Yeah, been weighing on my mind so much I can't sleep.

 

Without something for scale I don't think we have anyway of knowing. I've seen people online try pixel to feet translations, but without seeing how big a falcon or an x-wing is inside of it you'd just be guessing.

 

I hope there are more shots of the Death Star laser being what looks like insulted or re-calibrated and an explanation to why it is like that in the first place.

 

I hope there's a sense of complacency and doom about the whole thing, just like the Titanic.

 

Strange Old Hermit wrote

Anyone else bothered by the size of the Death Star's hypermatter reactor in the internal schematics we've seen lately? It seems WAY too big. It wasn't nearly that large when Lando, Nien Nunb and Wedge destroyed it in ROTJ, but I guess it's possible they made the reactor smaller for the second Death Star. But being that the second Death Star was much, much larger, it seems doubtful.



I don't know if the proportions of certain elements are a good orientation. Just compare the size of the superweapon's dish between the ANH Death Star (100+ diameter ILM size figure) and the ROJ Death Star (approx. 290 km diameter, considering equatorial trench height is roughly the same on both but the trench is only half as tall on the actual DS II VFX model).

The thing that rather irritates me are these interior components that must have colossal dimensions and look outrageously oversized. The DS II VFX model images that provide good interior views feature none of these oversized objects outside the reactor core in the center and what appears to be some kind of cylinder core between the poles of the Death Star (picture not available but in the ROJ issue of Cinefex).



I would have rather loved to have seen the original Death Star schematics from ANH (and displayed in the Emperor's throne room in ROJ) thoroughly examined and translated into a more realistic schematic. Apparently considered to be too much of a research effort, unfortunately.

http://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-vi-return-of-the-jedi-1983/35/

http://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-1977/45/

 

Given that it was noticably flattened in ANH:



might this mean that the Death Star's shape has been slightly retconned? Being more spherical now?

I believe Saxton pointed out in the past that this image:

was more spherical than the ANH one, besides having a smaller dish holder. That was the origin of his theory that the ROTS Death Star was not the ANH Death Star, but something else, possibly a prototype.

Given that the newcanon has firmly established that it is indeed the ANH Death Star, the possibility of shape retconning for Rogue One is worth considering.

 

All I can say is that this is a fantastic and beautiful shot, illustrating (for the first time) how tiny the Death Star actually is next to a planetary, celestial body.

On the other hand, we must be looking at a very small moon in this particular shot:

 

Couldn't the shape of the ANH shots be chalked up to the anamorphic lenses?

 

No anamorphic lenses were used in that BTS shot with Dennis Muren...

But seriously, the screencaps do suggest it's wider at the equator: http://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-1977/24/

 

The Death Star must be very close, at least. Or the shot is extremely "zoomed in" for it to appear to fill a huge chunk of sky.

 

Frankly, I'm not sure I have any idea how to possibly rationalize this image, unless the Death Star was sitting inside a very large natural or artificial opening on that moon or planet...

If it really were behind the moon or planet I think it would look a lot smaller. Even in ROJ the Death Star didn't look THAT overwhelming when watched from below:

 

There's always the old standby "it's a movie - so "cool" trumps "physically possible" a lot" - the result - we can't completely trust what we see on screen, but instead assume that "in-universe" the objects will look different - larger, smaller, and so forth.

In real life, our Moon can look tiny compared to the Earth's horizon because it's so far away:

Spoiler

but to make it look as detailed and large as the Death Star and still have the horizon in-shot, you'd need a powerful zoom telescope.

Utapau had a similar image in ROTS with it orbiting something that looked very close:

Spoiler

 

I guess this is the official story: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/71223

So we are seeing the Death Star close to a very dense moon (with an atmosphere) approx. 590 miles in diameter.

 

How's that work? The smaller the moon is relative to the Death Star itself, the more curved we would expect the horizon of the moon to be, especially if the Death Star is very close.

If the movie designers did intend the moon to be 590 miles/945 km in diameter (given that the newcanon DS1 is only 120km not 160km, the moon might be a little smaller than 590 miles) - a possible alternative to dense material - might be artificial gravity - the moon is covered in little starship-type gravity generators which result in the whole thing being able to hold on to a oxy-nitro atmosphere dense enough for low air pressure to not be a problem.

Starkiller Base is even smaller at 660 km, making artificial gravity even more imperative.

 

Don't ask me, maybe it's just a mirage and only the Death Star hoovering above the planet below is the real thing.

 

I remember doing the calculations a few years back to see what a planetoid made of pure osmium (the densest stable solid element) the size of the moon Iego (2730 km diameter) would be, and I got 87.7% of Earth gravity.

When doing the same calculations with the vastly smaller Starkiller base, surface gravity would end up exceedingly low by comparison I think - more like 20% of Earth's.

 

Now this is based on mostly Legends but.....

DS-1 Had 1 big reactor that powered every thing. DS-2 Had 3 reactors so that's probably why the main reactor looked smaller than DS-1's.