Or perhaps Star Destroyers dump their trash because they are simply mobile warships that must resupply at bases.
The Death Star on the other hand is a base. The sheer volume of material it must go through boggles the mind. A compactor would be a first step toward recycling and reuse, separating solids from fluids. Not much arrives and not much leaves.
If the Death Star had to resupply constantly, the resources required to shed waste and transport a small moon's worth of resources would be astronomical.
We only saw the relevant military aspects of the station. There very well may have been enormous sections dedicated to foundries, growing crops, schools (a million folks stationed there and not even a few of the staff's kids accounted for?), etc.
Remember that in the US military, for every front line soldier, there are dozens of supply personnel, support operators, etc. Why would we believe the Empire including the Death Star to be any different?
Pearl Harbor was (is?) a fully armed and operational naval base in 1942, but the stories from individuals that survived the attack, did not come from soldiers alone. Officers have wives and children; government contractors require civilian lodging; owners of bars and leisure establishments need local banks, accountants, distributors, and legal representation.
Key assumptions. Wookiepedia lists 120 km for the diameter of the first Death Star [1]. Density of steel is around 8000 kg/m^3 [2]. As a wild guess, I'll assume a uniform sphere with about 1/4 that density (i.e., rho = 2000 kg/m^3), to account for open space etc.
Surface gravity [3] is given by g = (4pi/3) * G * rho * r = 0.03 m/s^2
(i.e., about 0.3% that of Earth).
Escape velocity [4] is given by v = sqrt(2 * g * r) = 60 m/s = 134 mph
This is faster than I would have guessed, but I would expect that to be in reach for a good trebuchet. It's reasonable to assume the compactor is required to load compressed trash into such a device.
Tangential, but I have a similar sardonic rant about some occurrences in Rouge One.
1. Their data storage system where hard drives are retrieved by a manually operated claw machine game.
2. Their data transmission system that requires one to use a Wi-Fi link placed on a dangerous aerial catwalk with no safety rails.
3. Their seemingly lack of off-site backups evidenced by the confidence that destroying the data center will ensure the only copy of the death star plans are erased. Which begs the questions of how did they build the 2nd death star so quickly without the original plans?
P.s. did anyone else, while watching the scene where the heros were searching the Empire computers for the secret file name, think of the line from the Simpsons where Homer says, "I've heard how this ends, it turns out the secret code was the same nursery rhyme he told his daughter!"
Ha, good one. I never was a great speller. In fact in 6th grade, I wrote a program to do my "write your spelling words 5 times" homework for me. The teachers would let us type it on a computer, and this was in the days before copy/paste was well known.
How do we know that the Death Star didn't use the compacted trash to power up the laser thingy that destroys planets instead of ejecting it into space?
The environmentalists may be right, trash may one day destroy Earth.
I feel this last paragraph accidentally explains it all
> Please understand, gentle reader, I am all for creating hassles and headaches for the Empire. I just doubt that the Empire would have created so many for itself.
The world of the empire in the 9 films seems orderly and well orchestrated. The version seen via Andor is more like what a real authoritarian technocracy would likely operate like. It strives more for the appearance of competency and control than actual positive results. The reason for this thing? Someone assumed it should be there, so it was.
>The world of the empire in the 9 films seems orderly and well orchestrated
I'm curious what you mean by this, since we don't actually see a whole lot of the civilian day-to-day running of the Empire. In the original trilogy, the only planets we see have little to no Empire presence, and the prequel and sequel trilogies take place before and after the Empire respectively.
Why do we believe that every square inch of the star destroyer is so well planned? Most arguments here assume a design. It could be more "Warhammer" in that the system evolved, in a hive city kind of way, making use of whatever was around. A parasite that lurks in the trash compactor would be just the sort of thing a Warhammer novel would introduce and I love that it's there.
Wasn't star wars supposed to be a gritty counterpart to high fantasy high space operas? Or star trek?
While most of this is valid (how dare a space opera expect me to suspend disbelief!), I think there is a basis for such a compactor to exist in the first place.
It stands to reason that a smaller vessel like a Star Destroyer, it is not logistically challenging to move the trash to an airlock for ejection.
On something so enormous as the Death Star, however, it might be so difficult to move the trash around that it's significantly more efficient to compact it before transport to the surface.
Also, a ship as small as a Star Destroyer doesn’t have to worry about issues that a Death Star might - it might make sense that the weight and balance of the Death Star has to be carefully controlled or it could get lopsided; meaning they don’t eject trash and instead compact it to be put on supply ships that just dropped off equal weight.
My biggest question that I don’t think has any plausible answer is the same as his first question: why is the trash system connected to the (presumably unobstructed) in-station ventilation? There is no feasible explanation.
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The Death Star on the other hand is a base. The sheer volume of material it must go through boggles the mind. A compactor would be a first step toward recycling and reuse, separating solids from fluids. Not much arrives and not much leaves.
If the Death Star had to resupply constantly, the resources required to shed waste and transport a small moon's worth of resources would be astronomical.
We only saw the relevant military aspects of the station. There very well may have been enormous sections dedicated to foundries, growing crops, schools (a million folks stationed there and not even a few of the staff's kids accounted for?), etc.
Remember that in the US military, for every front line soldier, there are dozens of supply personnel, support operators, etc. Why would we believe the Empire including the Death Star to be any different?
Not democratic, for the people, nor a republic. Does language mean nothing anymore to authoritarians?!
Key assumptions. Wookiepedia lists 120 km for the diameter of the first Death Star [1]. Density of steel is around 8000 kg/m^3 [2]. As a wild guess, I'll assume a uniform sphere with about 1/4 that density (i.e., rho = 2000 kg/m^3), to account for open space etc.
Surface gravity [3] is given by g = (4pi/3) * G * rho * r = 0.03 m/s^2 (i.e., about 0.3% that of Earth).
Escape velocity [4] is given by v = sqrt(2 * g * r) = 60 m/s = 134 mph
This is faster than I would have guessed, but I would expect that to be in reach for a good trebuchet. It's reasonable to assume the compactor is required to load compressed trash into such a device.
[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Star/Legends [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel#Properties [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_gravity#Relationship_o... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#Calculation
1. Their data storage system where hard drives are retrieved by a manually operated claw machine game.
2. Their data transmission system that requires one to use a Wi-Fi link placed on a dangerous aerial catwalk with no safety rails.
3. Their seemingly lack of off-site backups evidenced by the confidence that destroying the data center will ensure the only copy of the death star plans are erased. Which begs the questions of how did they build the 2nd death star so quickly without the original plans?
P.s. did anyone else, while watching the scene where the heros were searching the Empire computers for the secret file name, think of the line from the Simpsons where Homer says, "I've heard how this ends, it turns out the secret code was the same nursery rhyme he told his daughter!"
That’s the most common kind of rouge, but really rouge two or three are where it’s at, because they’re much redder.
The environmentalists may be right, trash may one day destroy Earth.
> Please understand, gentle reader, I am all for creating hassles and headaches for the Empire. I just doubt that the Empire would have created so many for itself.
The world of the empire in the 9 films seems orderly and well orchestrated. The version seen via Andor is more like what a real authoritarian technocracy would likely operate like. It strives more for the appearance of competency and control than actual positive results. The reason for this thing? Someone assumed it should be there, so it was.
I'm curious what you mean by this, since we don't actually see a whole lot of the civilian day-to-day running of the Empire. In the original trilogy, the only planets we see have little to no Empire presence, and the prequel and sequel trilogies take place before and after the Empire respectively.
Wasn't star wars supposed to be a gritty counterpart to high fantasy high space operas? Or star trek?
It stands to reason that a smaller vessel like a Star Destroyer, it is not logistically challenging to move the trash to an airlock for ejection.
On something so enormous as the Death Star, however, it might be so difficult to move the trash around that it's significantly more efficient to compact it before transport to the surface.