Death Star

The Death Star, formally designated the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station, was a colossal mobile space station built by the Galactic Empire to serve as a planet-destroying battle station and the ultimate symbol of Imperial power. Roughly the size of a small moon, it carried a superlaser powerful enough to obliterate an entire world in a single shot. Conceived during the Clone Wars and completed nearly twenty years later, it destroyed the planet Alderaan before it was itself destroyed at the Battle of Yavin by a small Rebel starfighter assault that exploited a fatal flaw deliberately hidden in its design. Its loss was a turning point in the Galactic Civil War, and the date came to divide galactic history into periods before and after the Battle of Yavin.

Design and capabilities#

The Death Star was a deep-space mobile battle station whose most distinctive feature was the large concave dish set into its northern hemisphere, which housed the superlaser emitter. The station's hypermatter annihilation reactor powered the superlaser and was linked to systems such as the power diversion solenoid and the station's enormous power cells. Beyond its primary weapon it was armed with thousands of turbolaser batteries and carried docking bays and squadrons of starfighters. Obi-Wan Kenobi, glimpsing it for the first time, mistook it for a moon before recognizing it as a space station.

Origins and construction#

The project began as a secret Separatist effort. By 21 BBY the Republic Special Weapons Group had developed plans for an automated battle moon and a torpedo siege platform, neither of which advanced past the design stage. After the Second Battle of Geonosis, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine presented battle-station plans to the Republic Strategic Advisory Cell. On Geonosis, the labor force engaged in a full-scale riot that destroyed three months of work, a disturbance that doubled as a diversion to let Archduke Poggle the Lesser escape back to the Separatists.

The massive undertaking was funded by a conglomerate of factions, including the Trade Federation, the Muunilinst Banking Clan, the Techno Union, and, covertly, the Republic itself. Under the Empire it became known as Project Stardust, and the construction effort was finally completed almost twenty years after its conception. The engineer Galen Erso served as the primary designer of the superweapon.

The theft of the plans#

Galen Erso secretly built a fatal flaw into the station: a weakness in the design that could allow the entire battle station to be destroyed with relative ease. Word of the weapon reached the Alliance to Restore the Republic at their base on Yavin 4, where leadership was divided over whether the threat justified continued resistance. Ultimately the rogue operatives Jyn Erso, Galen's daughter, and Cassian Andor led a mission, soon joined by the wider Alliance, to steal the station's design plans from the Imperial military archive on Scarif. Having retrieved the plans, Erso transmitted them to the Rebel fleet, and they were received by Princess Leia Organa aboard the Tantive IV. Leia fled toward Tatooine, where she was captured by Darth Vader, but not before hiding the plans in her astromech droid R2-D2, who carried them to Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The destruction of Alderaan#

To coerce Leia into revealing the location of the Rebel base, Grand Moff Tarkin ordered the first full test of the Death Star's superlaser, destroying her home planet of Alderaan. Leia escaped captivity aboard the station with the help of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, who had reached the station aboard the Millennium Falcon.

The Battle of Yavin#

Leia delivered the plans to Alliance leadership on Yavin 4, who analyzed the data and discovered the design flaw: a single proton torpedo fired into the thermal exhaust port could destroy the entire station. The Alliance launched a small starfighter assault as the Death Star followed the rebels to the Yavin system. Moments before the station could open fire on the moon sheltering the Rebel base, Luke Skywalker, aided by the Force, fired the decisive shot, destroying it. Many high-ranking Imperial officers perished aboard, including Wilhuff Tarkin, while Darth Vader escaped, having joined the dogfight in his TIE fighter.

Legacy#

The destruction of the Death Star weakened the Imperial Military and emboldened resistance, prompting an increase in pirate and dissident activity that Imperial statisticians had predicted. The Empire constructed a second Death Star, both as a sign of defiance and as a renewed instrument of terror, but it too was destroyed with all hands. The design flaw that doomed the first station never became widely known; the public story remained that of a single starfighter's lucky shot. Debris collected by the New Republic was later given to the Alderaan survivors to build a memorial station over the ruins of their homeworld. Decades afterward, the Empire's successor state, the First Order, built Starkiller Base, a far larger planet-destroying superweapon regarded as an evolution of the old Death Star project.