How The Death Star Works

There’s a nifty little site called How Stuff Works that I check out from time to time. There are articles on “how so and so works” on just about anything you can imagine. It’s a great idea for a site, very educational and it does quite well.

At any rate, a reader brought to my attention that How Stuff Works put up an article on How The Death Star Works. The article reads like a mockumentary. It’s hilarious, and even an die hard Star Wars geek like me learned a few things about this moon sized oppressor of freedom. The introduction of the article says it all:

Simply put, the Death Star is the most ambitious space station project in Galactic history. It takes more than a million military personnel to run this station, which is the size of a small moon.

But the Death Star is no moon. Despite its size, the Death Star can still travel at superluminal velocities just like spacecraft with only a fraction of its mass. But the real power and purpose of the Death Star lies in its Superlaser. The Death Star’s Superlaser is capable of firing a beam of directed energy powerful enough to completely destroy a planet of any size! Needless to say, nothing quells chaos and disorder faster than the threat of total planetary annihilation.

Say what you want about the Empire, nothing brought civil unrest to a crashing hault like the phrase “stop… or we’ll blow up your planet”..

It’s a fun article, go on over and give it a read!