Why is There a Big Chasm in the Death Star?

When everyone was running around in the Death Star there was a place where there was a gap that they had to swing across. Why was there a gap there between two doorways? Shouldn't there been a walkway?

 

There was a retractable walkway but Luke shot the control pannel.

Leia: "We've got to get across. Find the controls that extend the bridge."
Luke: "I think i just blasted it."

I'm sure that EU has come up with an actual reason as to why there needs to be a chasm in the first place. The Death Star is full of chasms.

 

Wouldn't the trenches be to seperate the crew quarters from the superlaser?

 

The chasms are actually ventilation shafts...and yes, the bridges normally extend. Pay particular attention when Ben Kenobi deactivates the tractor. There you can see what the bridges look like.

 

In death star 2 there are less place than the death star 1 because it is not complete.I wonder why these two death stars different from each other?

 

Why is there a big chasm in the Death Star?

1. So the heroes can swing across it in a dramatic rescue.

2. Why not?

 

'Serious' answer: as many mentioned, it's a ventilation shaft, blah blah...

Movie answer: it's for the sake of the plot and all that. I'm reminded of that movie 'Galaxy Quest' (did I get the title right?) where there are obstacles in the starship (dangerous corridors and such) for no apparent reason, aside from providing dramatic moments.

Kinda like the laser doors in TPM.

 

As said above, luke blasts the controls to the bridge, hoping to lock the door from the stormies.
And yeah, i suppose they are ventilation shafts or whatever...

The reason DS1 seems to have more ventilation shafts than DS2 is because
1) we dont see that part of DS2, we only see emperors throne room (with shafts) and the hanger
2) DS2 is incomplete, and may have a newer design that would increase its defenses or something.

Clearly, Lucas wanted a sort of adventure feel involving swinging to safety...And he did it perfectly, and even gave us reasons (ventilation, destroying the bridge) why it had to happen...

 

I dont really believe the second one, if that was the case, they wouldnt have made a bigger exhaust port on the death star for ships to fly through. They obviously didnt learn their lessons from the first death star.

 

Uh...the Alliance attack wing didn't fly in via an exhaust port, but rather into the incomplete superstructure after the assault team on Endor downed the protective shield.

DS2 design called for thousands of ports only centimeters across for reactor cooling. The old flaw WAS addressed.

Pay particular attention to the Death Star's completion status AND Ackbar's briefing.

 

Of course, nobody pays any mind to the fact that the reactor exhaust ports wouldn't help to cool anything in the vacuum of space. They'd need radiator vanes instead.

 

I could conjecture that the shafts are lined with cooling apparatus like fins or vanes. That would be no stretch at all.

 

Is the ventilation air coming from the reactor dangerous to humans??? The chasm will just kill stormtroopers and imperials when the cannon is fired. It would cause poisoning and get a lot of casualties, It sort of not making any sense here.

 

It makes sense if you picture the cooling shafts for the reactors as seperate from the life-support system.

The cooling shafts are only inches across on the second Death Star, but there are presumably THOUSANDS of them and their length from the Core to the surface sectors AND their sheer number adds up to a heck of a lot of radiating surface area.

The ventilation shafts are part of the life support system.

 

an exhaust port does not necessarily imply cooling, merely expulsion of (primarily) gases. The ventilation shafts in DS 1 i would imagine are for the internal atmosphere - like giant aircon units...

 

The technical reasoning behind ventilation shafts is that it takes a lot of articifical atmosphere and oxygen to fill the the Death Star. It has to be circulated... otherwise it'd be VERY stale and smell horrible.

 

Because in the days beford digital technology, that was actually a decent stunt.

 

Ever been everywhere in a large building? There are often places of dead space where you run all the unsightly stuff like wiring/piping, etc. The 'chasms' in the Death Star might be the enormous space station variation on those very same access rooms.

In the two lab buildings where I work, these access rooms run nearly the length of the building, with grating separating the floors. If you dropped something small enough to slip through the grating, it would fall all the way to the basement level. It's pretty cool and not for people afraid of heights. It's more 'Die Hard' than 'Death Star' in visual feel, but in the slick, neat, futuristic way the Empire does things, I could see something similar (especially if repair crews had anti-gravity devices to move up and down between levels).

Just another option in addition/instead of oversized air vents.