The Death Star's construction took much longer than portrayed in the Star Wars films, with over 20 years spent on perfecting the superlaser. The development of the superlaser, built using kyber crystals, was the most complicated and time-consuming aspect of the Death Star's completion.
Why did it take 20 years to build the first Death Star?
Construction projects require significant investments of time, money, and labor. The Death Star program required much of the Galaxy's resources, and the first “technological terror” took 20 years to build due to its unprecedented scale and the numerous aforementioned challenges.
Star Wars has fully explained why the Death Star took 20 years to make. The Empire's greatest super-weapon, the Death Star was actually in the works long before Palpatine even officially founded the Empire. The Empire had a special advantage in the construction process: the Sanctuary Pipeline.
Methods of faster construction had been developed in the years since the original station's conception, added to the fact that Imperial engineers made sure to allocate enough space on the station for the maximum possible amount of self-replicating construction droids.
It was two-three times larger than DS1 and took far more materials to build it. Sid also wanted it to look unfinished so he could lure the Rebels in: “it's a trap!” But he ensured the planet killer gun was operational by sending Vader in to oversee it.
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Could we ever build a Death Star?
And how long would it even take to build? On to the subject of materials, it's estimated that it would take 830,000 years at current global output levels to produce the amount of steel needed for just the superstructure of the Death Star.
But what made the Death Star particularly menacing was its ability to travel through hyperspace. Not only was it equipped with destructive armaments, it could pursue its prey with those armaments.
In the original Star Tours, a Death Star III is seen and destroyed during the ride sequence by the New Republic. Leland Chee originally created the third Death Star to explain why a Death Star is present on the Star Tours ride when both of the stations in the movies were destroyed.
Some Expanded Universe sources state much smaller figures—120 kilometers for the first Death Star and 160 kilometers for the second—however, most of the evidence argues for the larger sizes.
Hoping to crush the Rebellion once and for all, the Empire began construction of a second dreaded Death Star near Endor. Emperor Palpatine then leaked word of its construction to the Alliance, hoping to lure rebel forces in and destroy them.
In response to the original Death Star's destruction at the hands of Luke Skywalker during the Battle of Yavin, the second Death Star's design incorporated millions of millimeter-sized heat-dispersion tubes in place of the two-meter-wide thermal exhaust port exploited by the Rebel Alliance.
Did the Empire use slaves to build the Death Star?
Non-Humans and Human critics of the New Order alike were rounded up and enslaved en-masse for work on such projects as the Death Star. In addition, early into the Empire's formation, the 501st Legion had been ordered by Emperor Palpatine to sell Nosaurian women and children into a slave market at Orvax IV.
As revealed in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and its corresponding novel Catalyst, the really complicated part of the Death Star's completion was the entire point of the battle station: the superlaser. As it turns out, a laser that is able to destroy an entire planet is what took so long.
Why did the second Death Star take less time to build?
The planning for the second Death Star began before the first one was even finished. The Empire had all the resources and labor necessary to quickly construct the second Death Star much faster than the first.
Geonosis was the site chosen for construction of the Death Star by the newly established Empire. Travel to the planet was limited to supply convoys and high-ranking Imperials privy to the secret project to build the galaxy's ultimate weapon. The Empire sterilized Geonosis, killing almost all life on its surface.
Out of the 2 billion inhabitants on Alderaan - with the modern-day populations of China and India having about 2.8 billion people combined - about 60,000 survived the destruction of the planet due to being outside of its star system at the time.
After a successful attack on the Death Star II's reactor during the battle of Endor, the ruins of the destroyed battle station subsequently fell to the surface of the ocean moon Kef Bir. The Alliance Fleet had also set up tractor beams and shields to protect the forest moon from debris.
But taking all these sources into account, the death toll of the first Death Star can be left as around 1.1 million and the one of the second Death Star as over two million, which is still a lot even for Star Wars – more so considering that this happened in the first three films of the franchise.
In short, don't count on it happening anytime soon: The actual size of the Death Star, according to their estimations, is close to 120 to 160 kilometers in diameter, and would cost the equivalent of 18 quadrillion dollars to build.
Hyperspace courses were often plotted using a planet's mass as a backstop, with the hyperdrive's safety systems automatically stopping the ship as it reached the farthest point of possible travel. Hyperspace collisions, whether they be intentional or by accident, could devastate or even destroy a planet.
This process causes the star to turn into a “red giant” that grows very large. The star can then swallow up the planet, and anything else that nears it. The scientists say the planet's destruction happened between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago near the Aquila constellation.
However getting the parts into space to construct the Star Destroyer would require an additional $44.4 trillion USD in launch costs, suggesting that asteroid mining and refining technologies would have to be developed first to make it more economical.
The Death Star would require roughly a million billion times more power to blow up a planet, she said in the video. "In producing all that energy, you would produce a lot of heat — like enough heat to melt the Death Star," Burks said.
Scientists uncover the secret to building Star Wars-style laser weapons — but don't worry, we won't have a Death Star anytime soon. Today's infrared lasers are only powerful enough to disable aerial targets, but scientists now have the keys to building high-powered laser weaponry that can 'melt' distant targets.
