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The first one.
Exhibit A: The hangar scenes
Where’s the curve?! Take that globehead!
Oh nos! I’ve awakened the ire of the Flat Death Star-ers!
Its only a model.
It’s well established in the Star Wars universe that all you need to create gravity is a floor. Take, for example, any scene from within any of the space ships. Gravity is never a problem.
Of course, a deep chasm also seems to create gravity, as seen in the first movie when Luke and Leia swing from one ramp to another to escape the stormtroopers chasing them.
Regardless, it’s easy to see from the blueprints that the layout is stacked like your first image.
Edit: upon closer examination it turns out it’s both. The plans show three ‘concentric surface decks’ that apparently work like your second image. So I guess the answer is ‘it depends on where you are in the death star’, and, I guess, which way ‘down’ is where you are.
Since the sequels had space “bombers” dropping unguided bombs by just opening a hatch and letting them go, you only need to have a vaguely identifiable “down” for gravity to work…
Star Wars apparently takes place in the Elemental Plane of Air
… Does the Star Wars universe follow an entire branch of fictional science where the lumineferous aether is real, and relativity… isn’t?
Yeah, kinda.
Little ships seem to push off of something in space to maneuver. Big ships at least are described as having gravity generators.
Then there are of the loud, fiery explosions, which wouldn’t really work in a vacuum or near vaccuum.
There doesn’t seem to be any radiation from anything anywhere in space, almost like some medium is blocking it.
Also they all seem to find a (nearly) level plane to fight there ships on.
It depends on what cannon you look towards to see if relatively applies, generally it doesn’t, but every once in a while the writers will turn a ship into pure energy and nuke something.
So, you can have a fiery explosion in space… its just that it would have to be kind of chemical that can burn without requiring oxygen.
IRL there are many chemicals that, once sufficiently heated, basically burn themselves up extremely energetically without need for an atmosphere to fuel this process.
Also IRL, most rockets are controlled, continuous combustion of varying kinds of volatile chemicals, and if combustion manages to occur not al the rocket nozzle, you can absolutely have a fiery explosion, as the rocket itself brings the oxidizer along with it.
Coloration of various kinds of chemicals exploding can potentially be a wide array of colors beyond the typical orange/red we generally associate with most movie explosions.
Movie explosions are themselves often dramatically overdone for the fireball effect by adding huge amounts of gasoline or kerosene or things like this to greatly accentuate the fireball.
Further, due to lack of a gravitation field, and atmosphere to allow for air currents, flames do not go up, they basically form spheres around whatever is burning, and look totally different from what we are used to.
Basically, fiery explosions in space are realistically possible, its just that they would look very different from say a fighter plane exploding in atmosphere.
Depending on how you explain them, they could be different colors, expand in very visually distinct ways, and probably visually persist for a much shorter time frame.
What you could not have is the scene from the Acolyte where Osha outs out a fire.
If some kind of flammable gas managed to ignite, then the fire would not be limited to just where it is exposed to
airspace.The combustion would spread through the entire container or fuel line system and basically all of that would likely explode.
Dude’s first word describing the explosions was “loud”. Just fyi.
Yes… and… ?
Their next words were ‘fiery explosion’, so I responded to that.
Its pretty immediately obvious that sound does not exist in space (beyond maybe you in a suit picking up vibrations from something you are touching), but this is a very, very commonly disregarded reality in nearly all space faring Sci Fi movies/shows.
I assumed this is so obvious it does not need an explanation as to its realism, whereas the presence of fiery explosions and fire in space is actually a complex and interesting subject.
You see, Star Wars unguided bombs work via the buoyancy principle, as outlined by our current Flat Earth Scholars.
/s
Haha but for real, in the original trilogy, I think there are a handful of scenes where TIE Bombers are shown dropping bombs, but its on things like pretty large asteroids or planets, and in at least the early games like TIE Fighter, the bombs are basically just replaced with things sort of like torpedoes: very slow, no or slow guidance/tracking, only useful against large slow targets.
Whilst the bomber scene in 8 is silly, I think its mainly silly that its like a bomb bay with a fucking open hole, like a ww2 bomber, but the crew are not wearing pressure suits and oxygen masks.
Even if there is one if those hangar forcefield type things… thats a component which can obviously fail, so you’d think the crew would be fully suited up the whole time.
At least with the TIE bombers, the bombs were some kind of glowing energy bomb thing, so there is room to assume like maybe they are shot in a downward direction or they have tiny thrusters or something…
The new one basically just decided to take a WWII style carpet bomber straight out of a war movie and toss it up into space. I’m shocked they didn’t just take a B-29, rip the props off, and make the back of the engines glow.
I don’t know why people have a problem with this. The bomb bay had gravity, just like all parts of every other ship, big or small. If you drop the bombs while they are inside of the ship, and they fall out of a hole (and we’ve seen big access holes in ships before) then once they are in space they will continue with inertia.
But what if the Deathstar wore pants…
Big enough nerd to know the canonical answer was both. The exterior of the Death star all had gravity pointed down towards the middle of the station. However once you got past this defensive layer artificial gravity was oriented like the left side.
It’s Star Wars so most likely nr 1.
If it’s a big as a little moon it’ll have his own weak gravitational pull
It’s no moon
I’m curious if it would be similar to that of the moon, less than, or moreso.
It is made entirely of metal which is super dense and has a lot of mass, but a lot of it is also open space I imagine. Curious if the smaller amount of dense metal would have a larger or smaller mass than a solid moon.
Wait. I just realized energy also creates a gravitational pull, and the death star’s whole thing is destroying a planet right? That’s got to take a huuuge amount of energy because the explosion has to massively overcome the gravity holding the target together.
A quick google search says you’d need 10^32 Joules to blow up the earth. E=mc2 so dividing that energy by the speed of light squared gives about 1.1e15 kg of equivalent mass which is relatively small compared to earths mass (6e24) but still large.
For reference, if the radius of the Death Star was 1000m you’d get about 5.2m/s2 acceleration from just that energy in its core.
But if the Death Star is able to blow up multiple planets, then the energy it has to have on hand goes up. So if the Death Star contains enough energy to blow up 5.4 billion planets, then just that stored energy would have nearly equivalent “mass” to the earth.
But gravitational acceleration is inversely proportional to distance squared. So since the Death Star is small, you wouldn’t need that much energy to get earth gravity. If we assume the Death Star has about a 160km radius, then you’d only need enough stored energy to blow up ~45,000 earths to get a surface gravity of 9.1m/s2.
This gravity would increase as you got closer to the core or whatever part stores all that energy. But if you spread that energy out a bit you could probably extend how large the earth-like gravity range in the station would be.
The mass of the structure itself would contribute to the gravity too so that 45,000 is probably an overestimate.
TL;DR: From rough math in my head, assuming a radius of 160km, point mass, and ignoring the mass of the structure, you’d only need to store ~5e19 J of energy in the Death Star to get earth like gravity on the surface. That is approximately the amount of energy required to blow up 45,000 earths
Do you have a citation that energy has a gravitational pull?
In particular, the curvatureof spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever matter and radiation are present.
As I understand it, gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime which is described by the Stress-Energy Tensor which only accounts for energy and momentum in a given part of spacetime.
So, really it’s like energy is actually what causes gravity in the first place, not mass. Massive things have large gravitational pull because mass itself has/is energy, E = mc2. This energy and its motion curves space and gravity results from that curvature.
Then again, I’m an engineering student not a physicist, so maybe I’ve got something wrong.
That’s pretty fascinating.
Just like earth! With magnets! GOSH.
Or like the picture on the right but with the people standing on the inner surfaces instead of the outer ones? Centrifugal force from rotation is the only way we know how to make “artificial” gravity, although you can imagine the comical scene if it had to stop rotating in order to fire.
It being a sphere should make walking around very uncomfortable. Every single place is a ramp, and the gravity is never the same anywhere.
It could spin around the cannon’s axis pretty easily, I imagine.
Also it would need to spin in layers because the outside would be moving a lot faster than the inside. For the size of it that actually probably wouldn’t matter all that much since the closer layers wouldn’t need to be inhabited by anyone but much more resilient droids.
One thing for sure is that even with such afancy technology they probably wouldn’t have directional floor gravity producers. The stacked version would then need to have gravity generators at the very bottom and it would get weaker as you go up which would be…strange.
And this is Star Wars is much closer to fantasy than sci-fi…
Mix of both probably. Star Wars tech seem to swap gravity direction easily and smoothly. Like the gun chambers on the Millennium Falcon.
since death star is capable of delivery a blast with high energy density, its core might be a nuclear fusion or anti matter power plant. maybe the mass there generates sufficient gravitational force.
The main weapon of death star was powered by kyber crystals, the same crystals that powers a Jedi’s lighsaber.
That said, the death star also needs power for various other stuff not only the planet destroying mega cannon, so it’s easy to assume there’s also a powerful power plant for powering rest of the station.
There was also 123 “highly radioactive” generators powering it’s propulsion system and hyperdrive.
Lol it’s probably magic from a gnome in a weird helmet
Could also be spin gravity, with the feet pointing outwards.
It doesn’t spin, otherwise the laser becomes… pointless.
Could still establish orbit and adjust spin in a way so they are tidally locked
a tidally locked orbit like that isn’t going to generate 1g of force though. Earth’s tidally locked moon only rotates once every 27 days.
It’s manned by military personel who should expect not having comfortable 1g all the time (either way doesn’t matter as Star Wars has magic gravity anyways)
Then you don’t get the spin you need but whatever is compatible with the thing you are orbiting.
Not if the center of the laser dish is one of the poles.
Yes but once you start spinning you want to keep spinning, and that kinda fucks with turning in any direction because of the angulam momentum.
I feel like there’s a pun semi-buried here…
How would the elevators work if it was like 2nd picture?
The same way they do on Earth. Up towards the outside, down towards the center. Of course, most of the elevator shafts would only go down partway.
But – since we see artificial gravity in Star Wars, you could say that all the rooms in the Death Star are laid out as haphazardly as the toys in a kid’s box. It wouldn’t be the silliest thing in the franchise, after all.
