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The first one.
Any chance you know the canon explanation of how they counteract the gravity generated by the Deathstar’s mass?
How much gravity would the Deathstar’s mass provide? I feel like it would be very small considering it has no real massive central solid or liquid core.
It’s the size of a moon and made from metal: It’s definitely generating some gravity (even a small amount of mass generates gravity) but I guess whatever tech they use to generate gravity overcomes it.
It’s the size of a very, very small moon, and mostly hollow.
I should call her
Yeah the fact it’s called a small moon is slightly deceptive to us because our moon is absolutely huge as far as moons go. The natives of the SW universe would be used to much much smaller moons.
For reference, our moon is 3475km across and the death star is 150km across, so it’s diameter is 23 smaller. It’s also weighed at about 900million tonnes or 9*10^14kg.
If I’m right (which I’m likely not). g=(GM)/r² or g=(6.667*10-11*9*1013)/75².
That’s a gravity of 1.086x10^-5m/s² or if I round with pure disrespect for physics, 100,000 times weaker than earth’s gravity. Essentially it’s totally negligible compared to their artificial gravity. Hell, I don’t even think a marble on the floor would overcome it’s own grip and roll towards the center of the space station.
My maths is almost certainly wrong somewhere here, I failed it badly.
Our moon is huge for a planet of Earth’s size, but not compared to the big moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Last time I looked it up, I used Pluto’s moons as a reference because some of them are smaller than DS1, but Charon is quite a bit bigger. Based on the shapes of Pluto’s moons, I think even if DS1 were solid it would still be too small to compact itself into a sphere with its own gravity.
Fun fact: Charon is even more huge relative to Pluto (just over 50% of Pluto’s diameter) than Luna is compared to Earth (about 25% of Earth’s diameter).
fun fact, pluto and charon are technically a binary planet(oid), because the point they orbit is in-between them. (Charon doesn’t orbit Pluto, they both circle empty space)
Pluto has more than one satellite?
So small that a natural body of that size probably wouldn’t be massive enough to hold a spherical shape. DS1 was a little smaller than the real asteroid 128 Nemesis, which isn’t spherical. Maybe if it were made of something extremely dense, it would be, but you’re not likely to find a natural spherical object that size.
Now that I think of it, this puts the “that’s no moon” scene in perspective. Luke is a country bumpkin who just calls it a moon, but Obi-wan has an idea of its size (perhaps from glancing at the Falcon’s scans, since size and distance is hard to judge by eye; or he’s just a space wizard), and knows a natural object couldn’t be that spherical.
Unless the object formed as a sphere of molten water in the vacuum goldilocks zone, then froze into an huge sphere of ice as the star cooled.
It wouldn’t need to generate gravity.
Acceleration “down” would be enough.
Only if it was undergoing constant acceleration, which we know it to be incapable of.
It’s got sublight thrusters and steering doesn’t it? It could just fly around and around a circular path.
I ran the numbers, and it says about 0.00473m22
The gravity is negligible. The official sizes of the Death Stars have been 120 - 900 km in diameter according to rebel scale. For comparison, Earths moon is ≈3500
0km in Idiameter, and its gravity is 1/6 of earth’s. On top of that, the Death Stars are mostly hallow, being a metal framework, instead of solid rock.the Death Stars are mostly hallow
Our Death Star, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Thy empire come, thy will be done,
On Alderaan as it is in heaven,
Give us this day our daily rations,
And forgive us our rebellion,
As we forgive those who rebel against us,
And lead us not to the light side,
But deliver us from the Jedi,
For thine is the empire, and the unlimited power, and the dark side forever,
Amen
If Lemmy had gold, I’d give it to you.
Earths moon is ≈35000 km in diameter, and it’s gravity is 1/6 of earth’s.
Off the a factor of 10. The Moon has a diameter of almost 3500 km (Earth’s circumference is about 40,000 km, so your diameter would make the Moon larger than Earth).
However, the Death Star being mostly filled with air still means you’re probably right about gravity being negligible.
Whoops. Good catch! so about 4-30 times the size of the Death Star. That would mean the gravity of the Death Star is at most 1/24th that of earth’s, if it were solid rock and my math is correct. That’s at the surface, though. As you go inside, gravity will decrease until you reach the center where there will be no gravity at all because all the mass of the space station is pulling you away from the center equally. (assuming a uniform mass distribution).
g ≈ M/r^2
V ≈ r^3.
uniform density: ρ for simplicity’s sake
M = ρV
—> g ≈ ρr where r is the distance from the center of the death star, but no further than the surface
It’s not massive enough to create its own gravity. They use gravity deck plating.
Even if it was massive enough, if they can keep people sticking to the ground in a tiny ship they can surely counteract the gravity of a space station.
Also, most of their spaceships have wings. We’re thinking about this way too hard.
They don’t all have wings. Only the X-Wing and Imperial transport ships have actual wings, and we’ve seen them fly through atmospheres.
Well, yeah, but we’ve also seen the ones that look like a hamburger patty fly through the atmosphere (and, in fact, outmaneouver the winged ones). Clearly that’s not what they’re for.
Ah yeah. Dang. Well there probably a good technical reason behind it. I’m no starship engineer in the Star Wars universe.
The hamburger was originally a cargo ship, the one we see is special in that it has a bunch of very expensive, very powerful engines added.
It’s no wonder that a street racer can outpace army jeeps. Also, they couldn’t outpace TIE fighters in Ep.IV, which are known for being very fast for a coffee table.
I think the usual in universe reasoning is heat dissipation.
They are clearly not wings meant to create aerodinamic lift.
Well, no, they’re meant to make the pew-pew laser fights look like a film about airplane dogfights. So yeah, way overthinking it.
You’re here discussing it too, man
Oh, yeah, no, but that’s because I’m a nerd.
Technically everything with mass creates its own gravitational field; most things just aren’t massive enough for it to be detectable.
One of my favorite science facts: Because of how the strength of gravity diminishes as you get further away and stronger as you get closer, when you approach to within arms length of another person (approx 1m) the gravitational attraction between the two masses of your bodies can exceed the gravitational attraction between your body and the sun at any given time.
When the inverse square law and weak gravitational forces meet
Where I end and you begin
Another fun property of the inverse square law is that an infinite sheet of mass produces a gravitational field that is equally strong no matter how far you are from it.
It applies to any form of flux, like sound amplitude or light intensity.
This is why when you’re sitting on top of Mount Sanitas, you can hear traffic sounds at seemingly full volume. It’s just all the traffic of Boulder, which is roughly like an infinite sheet below you.
This is despite being unable to hear any given car more than a couple blocks away.
It’s also why if Superman flies over manhattan at night, he’s lit from underneath with an amount of light similar to someone who’s 10 feet from a skyscraper.
Yeah, but no one can escape the gravitational field of your mom.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist, as I half expected your comment to end with a “your mom” joke)
“Gravity deck plating”… okay that makes sense. So basically each floor has its own gravity generation to orient you to it. They’re all placed “bottom to top” to work like a building but it’d be possible to put one in at a 90-degree angle for say maintenance work.
There are crew walkways (I think they even have handguards!) along the beam path of the superlaser, so there are definitely at least a few small decks at different angles.
Like in the Falcon
Artificial gravity and inertial compensators are pervasive (if relatively handwaved/unexplained) in the SW universe
Hoverpads have fully replaced wheels and datapads have fully replaced paper, even in the poorest most remote communities.
Damn this makes the OSHA holes even more ridiculous
Bingo. See also, the guys in the laser shaft for the main cannon. The beam fires along / past them. Not from below.
Isn’t the emperor’s tower and all the surface guns oriented toward the second option?
Seems like it’s a little of both
That’s only at the top of the death star.
I know we’d all like some scientific actualisation of Star Wars but I mean:
- They made noise in space 'cause that’s fun.
- There was always gravity on pretty much any ship.
- I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
- There’s hyperspace since lightyears is a bit of a long time.
- Stormtroopers seem very scientifically and inefficiently accurate
At this point I think the Star Wars movies (the oldies) pretty much ignored a fair bit of the science.
But if it was a death star literally put there in our universe, I think there would be a bit of structural considerations for gravity, but not huge due to it being quite hollow. Gravity is pretty strong when the sphere is entirely comprised of dense rock and no air. A mostly hollow sphere of air where air is something close to 1/1000 that of rock (yes, used the density of water lol) is not going to get much of a rollicking from gravity.
Edit: an interesting ‘expose’ on the moon landings claim one thing: why were the photos so relatively boring? Because they were real and that’s all they could get for all the limited resources they had at the time.
I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
in The Last Jedi, Leia gets blasted into hard space and experiences weightlessness.
And then it really gets accurate.
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Because it looked silly. That is all.
Because they can believe space wizards but the idea of a twin sister of one of the most powerful space wizards in the canon being able to also learn space wizard shit over the course of several intervening decades breaks their incel brains.
Same reason why Holdo caught shit for not telling Poe anything while my Navy friends were all relieved to find out she wasn’t the kind of ship commander who would actually fucking execute you and dump your body in the drink for the level of blatant insubordination that idiot was pulling just in front of her face nevermind scheming behind her back with Finn and Rey to undermine her plans, and also to accuse her of being the traitor and arranging a kangaroo court mutinee basically acting as a thin veneer for him to shoot her in the face under color of “law” for having the gall to actually treat him like the insubordinate demoted twit he was.
Her forve manipulation skills were basically never mentioned before that point. People had more than enough of characters pulling force skill out of nowhere by that point.
It’s the surviving the vacuum without her eyes bugging out that people don’t like.
Because she’s a girl and girls can’t be wizards.
Wasn’t there a space fight with horses on the wing of a star destroyer in the rise of Skywalker?
Yes, I’m pretty sure either a hobbyist equestrian or a full on equestrian’s parent was on the sequel trilogy’s rollover staff, for two separate sequences to feature space horses coming to the rescue.
Also, low-key bummed that we didn’t get Finding Your Roots with Lando Calrissian and totally not just gender flipped Finn but aged slightly and in charge of a bunch of other horse girl deserter storm troopers.
Lol yes but that was within a planetary gravity well
Don’t make excuses for the sequels.
They specifically noted they were talking about the old movies. Or didn’t you get that far before you needed to “correct” them?
I seem to recall one instance that may portray the lack of gravity. When Darth Vader gets shot and goes spinning off. That’s about it.
Good catch, I think you’re right
he was just doing that because it’s a neat trick
It’s so wizard!
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You’re right, it’s been too long since I’ve watched it
Lightyears measure distance, not time.
Quantum Physics joined the chat
When time is measured in meters you know you’re in for one hell of a ride.
And parsecs measure distance, not time, and yet here we are.
That’s been explained.
I hate that retcon. Let Han Solo be a sleazy piece of shit conman. Stop trying to make his lies real via retains. Don’t make him shoot in retaliation. In the original edit he has an arc. He goes from sleazy piece of shit to respected rebellion leader. Almost like he was a metaphor for how a lot of insurgents have backgrounds as pieces of shit. Now the cannon has him as a squeaky clean guy always doing the right thing even when sometimes he doesn’t realize he’s doing the right thing
How do you feel about Jar-Jar being a Dark Lord of the Sith?
Or midichlorians being attracted to the Force rather than being the source of it?
Do you have other retcons you don’t like?
Shortcuts, baby!
Dimensional rotation, pal
okay guy-on-the-way-to-Brock
One of my gripes with star wars is a pilot can fly any ship from any faction without prior flight experience on that ship. They just go in flip some switches, push some buttons then jumps into the pilot seat and off they go.
That’s one of the many things Andor gets right, at least with that shuttle they steal near the start of the series. Cassian basically chews his crew out for planning to just jump into an unfamiliar ship and wing it.
That’s why it really bugged me that the resistance just gave Luke an X-Wing.
I fucking love Andor
My headcannon for this is that spaceships in that universe are to those people what cars are to us. If you know the basics of driving a car, you can drive most cars, though the bigger ships might get more complicated (I’ve never seen one of our heroes try to back up a star destroyer into a starbase to help with their buddy’s move.)
Yeah but that’s no problem. We used to fly all sorts of ships with xbox controllers back in the day.
There’s plenty of spacewalks in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. They don’t have gravity there and instead have to use thrusters or magnetized boots.
Good call on it being hollow and mostly air.
FYI for soil, air is ~1/2000 the density.
Thanks, I believe I was being lazy to not want to deal with averaging the density of various rocks, but your suggestion about the density of soil is a good one.
There was always gravity on pretty much any ship
And if the ship got damaged where the nose started falling (downward?) the gravity would shift towards the nose so that everyone went sliding across the floor.
That only happened near planets.
Star Wars ships don’t orbit. They simply hang in the sky, in much the same way that bricks don’t. In Star Trek ships orbit to save on fuel costs while parked near a planet. But in Star Wars antigravity is so cheap that it’s more efficient to be stationary relative to the planet’s surface. Which means no microgravity.
This is just my head canon, but the noise actually comes from speakers on board the ship /in the cockpit, to help give the pilot an audio cue as to where hazards are around them.
This is just my head canon, but the noise actually comes from speakers on board the ship /in the cockpit
I’m pretty sure this was explicitly addressed in at least one of the pre-Disney novels, and was somewhat entrenched with a part of the fanbase afterward.
Spoilsport! But like you say this is fiction, and entertainment, it is a fantasy world! :)
But yeah, the last one bugs me in soo many films and tv shows. They have super advanced AI robots tech, they can regrow a hand in a day, no more disease and live 257, transport living moving organisations across great distances, have developed telepaths and telekinetics, and can fold space-time, but are fucked if they can shoot straighter than a drunk badger with one ‘arm’, balancing on a log going down a rapids!
Yeah, the fact that we already have the technology to make a gun that handles the aiming for you… and we aren’t even shooting light, which would be even easier to auto aim. Fights should be super short and boring, one shot, one kill… 20 shots, 20 kills. There would be no action heroes because very few people would ever live through more than a handful of fights. The heroes would be the beurocrats, so we’d have to spend alot more time watching them.
Sounding like they made the right choice.
They shoot plasma, not lasers. Think Halo alien weapons.
Ah fair, not quite as easy as re-aiming light accurately then, but probably still easier than solid metal.
Guns shouid make fights super boring. Literally just kill anyone you’ve got line of sight to.
But instead, they make fights more interesting, because now cover is a thing and it’s all angles.
I’m sure there will be something interesting about laser vs laser wars that we can’t even imagine now (unless we quit being pussies and start putting realistic robot capabilities into video games).
I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
Leia did one in the sequels.
I don’t deny the star wars universe is getting a bit more of an update in the cinemas, especially post-Interstellar and whatnot, but space opera in the 80s was really intent on ignoring the stark reality of space for both constraints of filming and viewership. Goddamn fun though.
Spacewalks are a bad example anyway. A ship’s artificial gravity could extend outside its hull. Conversely, the lack of spacewalks doesn’t mean we aren’t shown the absence of gravity, since we see the ships themselves maneuvering in a way that suggests a lack of gravity.
Gravity in SW is still kind of fucked, but not “gravity in deep space” fucked.
These guys are supposedly in a vacuum outside the first DS:
There’s a whole Legends thing for Spacetroopers. New canon is pretty much just the guys above.
I think the animated shows had a few more space realistic moments like space walk repairs and such.
Best battle scene in the whole series from clever tactics PoV IMO was Anakin deploying his artillery into a planetary ring system and then using his capital ship to bait Greivous into a pin between the ring mounted tanks and the capital ship.
Best battle overall is obviously the siege of Mandalore just for the absolute knockdown drag out chaos in the middle of a domed city megastructure that’s probably meant to be a seed for an eventual ecumenopolis.
the sphere entirely comprises* dense rock
or
the sphere is entirely composed* of dense rock
I thought you might be correcting me so I checked up the definition. Both are okay?
‘Composed of’ is a better sounding phrasing though.
itsnotits said “X or Y” because both X and Y are correct.
You mixed the two by writing “is comprised of”
Oh got it, thank you!
The construction of the first Death Star
Cross-sections of the DS-1 Death Star.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/DS-1_Death_Star_Mobile_Battle_Station
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Not sci Fi specific, but this is for detailed drawings.
https://lemm.ee/c/wimmelbilder
Edit: damn no posts yet :(
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Ok, but where’s the bathroom?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like the floors on the surface are oriented radially, so mostly most floors are oriented north, while the outer floors are oriented up.
It’s not gravity, it’s the ForceTM
You’re held down by middlefloorians.
Besides technical diagrams from supplementary stuff, the Falcon lands in a docking bay that’s oriented towards the first option. There could be some kind of transition point to the second option, but we don’t see it and it’d be really awkward.
Both.
The Millenium Falcon landed in a bay that was oriented with the N/S axis of the station, but was accessed on the equator. So the interior of the station has a gravity well with “up” pointing to one of the polls.
The surface cannons, surface towers, and trench defenses were all radially oriented with “up” pointing out into space, like you’d expect on a moon.
This also suggests the station was littered with gravitational dead spots and areas where you’d have to carefully transition from one gravity well orientation to another. No wonder everyone is wearing a helmet.
One of the reasons Star Wars gets called space fantasy is that these objectively cool scenes to shoot simply never make it into the movies because no one even thought of these details in the first place.
Imagine how cool a lightsaber duel would be in these gravity transitional areas, or zero g for that matter! Instead we just got one scene in A New Hope where they’re in the gun turrets fighting off TIES and it’s a pretty subtle detail.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
I love holding this fantasy nonsense up to scrutiny. I just falls apart in the most humorous way possible.
For instance, here’s a checklist for technology mastery in a galaxy far, far away:
[x] Artificial gravity [x] Practical FTL travel [x] Practical interstellar navigation [x] Energy weapons capable of destroying things at _any_ scale [x] Energy shielding [x] Laser. Swords. [x] High energy physics in general [x] Self-aware artificial Intelligence [x] Multicultural society spanning many worlds [x] Psychic powers, telekinesis [x] Pocket-sized SCUBA gear [ ] Materials capable of resisting laser swords [ ] Functional galactic government [ ] Counter-intelligence for said government [ ] Basic spycraft for said government [ ] AI that's good at lie detection [ ] Spaceborne capital ship battles, asymmetric warfare [ ] Large space-stations without critical weak pointsThere are materials resistant to laser swords and the magic in general in the EU. It’s an important factor in Hand of Thrawn I think.
One thing you haven’t mentioned is real-time intra-galactic video calls.
The government(s) is comparably effective to modern governments here on earth, which is to say rather dysfunctional. This would be more impressive if communication was limited to FTL couriers, but it’s very much better than that.
Spycraft isn’t too effective against members of the government using the government to destroy the government. It’s a problem we haven’t solved either, at least in democracies. The government is also not a major force everywhere in the galaxy, and a lot of spycraft and intelligence went into rooting out dissenters. It’s basically the whole plot of Episodes IV & V.
I think droids that are capable and/or willing to engage with subterfuge at more than face value are both expensive and controlled. This moreso exposes how relatively widespread and easily obtainable high-level computing is, yet it’s mostly slept on. There might have been an AI war at some point in the past that causes people to take AI shackles very seriously, but that brings us back to having large numbers of populated worlds without significant government regulation of any kind. AGI is a real weird point in general here, I agree.
There’s lots of capital ship battles, especially in the EU. The originals don’t have a lot of them because the Empire took them all and keeps a tight fist on everyone capable of making them, while the prequels are about the escalation of a very peaceful government to war. I think Clone Wars stories have more of this. Asymmetric warfare is definitely a thing in the main trilogies though, unless I misunderstand what asymmetric warfare is.
Weak points? Absolutely. It’s a disgrace to engineers everywhere, to the point that the Death Star’s flaw has been made into an intentional sabotage in at least one story.
I’d really like to see more laser sword tech though. Like Grievous but on purpose, maybe large plasma tunnel bores or something.
I think the lore explanation for light saber tech not being more common is the “Kyber crystals” they require are very rare, and also maybe it requires the force to use it somehow? Grievous was a cybernetic with an organic brain, and a sith lord.
Now I’m wondering, do we see any force-insesitives using a lightsaber at all, even without skill? Like to cut a door or something. Do they even operate without force assistance?
There’s no way they used that much of the interior. Where do all those giants pits go?
Down.
Logic says B but LEGO says A
Get your science out of my Star Wars
The second one, but standing on the outside of the sphere. It rotates around the gun.
Probably A. It would likely have used artificial gravity just like any starship. Star-Trek has it built into the deck plates but I dunno how Star Wars does it. Artificial gravity can then be dialed in to compensate for the natural gravity of the structure. Which is probably less than you’d think. Without normal gravity effects, the internal air and water pressure will be mostly uniform across the ship instead of denser towards the core.
Same with the matter making up the structure. It’ll largely be hollow and filled with air, so much lower natural gravity than an actual moon of the same size. According to official sources (referenced here: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92401/is-the-death-star-s-gravitational-force-strong-enough-to-hold-an-atmosphere) it’s between 120 & 160 km radius, for a probable gravity of ~0.04g. That’s not quite microgravity, but still far too low to be walking around in. For comparison Lunar gravity is ~0.166g.
It’s practically no moon
i don’t know much about star wars, but wouldn’t gravity be weaker near the centre as you’d have less mass below you and more above you
Assuming the mass is evenly distributed the mass above you doesn’t contribute any additional gravitational force. The mass above you can be described as a hollow sphere. Inside such a sphere all gravitational components cancel out. So its just important that less mass is below you
The first one because luke fell off the bottom.
That was Cloud City
Was it? Dang, my bad. What about Lord Palpatine?
he didn’t fall out the bottom. he was killed, then retcond by mucky mousse.
Somehow he returned
He fell from the top so he could have just fell to the middle
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Left.
Look at the windows.
Palpatine’s Spire.
I imagine they were shaping gravity anyway they wanted to.
Yeah, faster-than-light travel is an older technology in Star Wars than agriculture is in the real world.
I’d expect a little thing like artificial gravity to be a solved problem.
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