Various post movie items and technical drawings suggest it’s layers of levels on a north/south axis with living areas nearest the equator.
Of course later depictions kinda contradict that layout, or at least complex it up.
They’d better complex it up. There’d be no point to have 1/4 of all your levels be ‘engineering sector’ in a big bunch. Ideally that would be spread out. If my last name was Erso, I’d probably split the sphere radially into more or less functionally equivalent sectors like an orange, then each of those split into the northern and southern halves that again are mostly redundant and identical. In that way, make it so each sector is fairly locally self-sufficient from an engineering, life-support, and resources standpoint. Each sector might get certain macroscale incursions from systems like the lolhuegmegaturbosuperlaser or what-not. Overall it seems to me that since said laser is not taking up a significant portion of the station’s interior volume and they do have this crazy amount of habitable volume, they must be using it for its living space potential and thus you’d expect a good portion of that volume to be for troopers to live, eat, socialize, exercise, etc. Lots of gyms, mess halls, entertainment facilities, lots of laundry, banks, etc. While it obviously doesn’t fit the Empire’s aesthetic, I figure there’s gotta be some gardens going on in there, at least some kind of food generation and processing arrangement.
We have seen trash compacting, detention centers, hanger bays, some of the command and control; but the brief glimpse from the movie doesn’t answer the hard questions like “could the Max Rebo band book a tour on the Death Star cantina circuit?”
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I was under the impression that most of the death stars internals were comprised of the planet destroying gun and also empty space. It’s so enormous that all the other parts we see including with living quarters, engineering, hangars, control rooms, the brig, trash compactors, etc. take up a relatively small percentage of the total volume.
My take was that the main systems require a large overall footprint, but it leaves an awful lot of the volume otherwise empty. Which, we do get plenty of signature ‘bottomless’ shafts in there for sure.
I think Furious Obituary is my new favorite genre of writing.
Edit: Also I agree with every line of that obituary. I suspect Cheese and Hedi might also have some strong opinions as well.
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So, it turns out BC is awesome.
Want to know what to do when it’s time to save a life? You’re 30 minutes away from possessing the most rewarding skill in the world.
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While the allocation of layers may not be what I envisioned, the overall design of the layers is pretty much what I thought.
BC represent! /15 characters
A different variation of the internals which has what must be parts of the generation system.
A third variation showed the internal space dominated by fuel storage tanks:
I heard someone refer to Andy Sekis and Martin Freeman as the movie’s “Tolkein White Guys”.
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According to the second diagram, the death star is nowhere near the size or mass of our moon. Also effectively no gravity on the surface.
Running the numbers, it looks like you may be right. It appears as if surface gravity on the Death Star would be about one millionth that of the surface of the moon, if I did my calculations correctly.
Comparing it to asteroids of comparable radius, it’s still on the order of 6 or 7 orders of magnitude less massive. It is comparable in radius to two of Uranus’s moons (so it can be mistaken for a “small moon”), Rosalind and Caliban. However, then, we’re looking at about one-thousandth of the mass or so. So as big as it is, the fact that it’s mostly hollow really does reduce its overall mass.
Editor’s comments on Milo’s manuscript:
DELETE UGH is my new reply to any and all conservative bullshit.
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From what I recall the image in question giving a mass was preliminary numbers and it had been revised in both size and mass.
Even still I wouldn’t count on it having a significant surface gravity based on its intrinsic mass alone, but Star Wars has had no qualms about generating artificial gravity so it’s all a bit moot anyway.
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My favourite woman bathed in pink light released a new video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJW4-cOZt8A
I recommend it. It’s a bit 101 but it also manages to talk eastern bloc style philosophy while keeping it fun. Anyone who’s read Smith can say that’s challenging.
“Daemonette of Slaanesh” actually had me laughing pretty hard.