Many were delighted with the release of Rogue One: Star Wars, which told a brief history of the opening of the original Star Wars. This is the story of how the rebels stole the plans of the original Death Star, a space station the size of a small moon and powerful enough weapons to destroy the planet.
If we could get our hands on these plans, could we build such a fortress? How could the Death Star work in light of our technology? As conceived by the creators of Star Wars, it is a space station with a diameter of 120 km, made of quadanium steel (a fictional alloy), and operated by an imperial personnel of two million people, including officers, stormtroopers and pilots.
What would this station be like in the real world? Let's not worry about the sheer amount of raw materials required. For example, at current production rates, it would take 182 times longer than the universe exists to collect enough of it. Of great concern is how to bring such a colossal battle station to life and how to generate gravity on board. This is where our traditional technologies may not work.
The International Space Station requires about 0.75 watts of power for every cubic meter of the space station. It is provided by eight solar panels 34 meters long and 12 meters wide. Even if we had 100% efficient solar panels covering a much larger Death Star, we would still be getting 45 times less power per unit volume. Not to mention the fact that the energy will be severely lacking if the station is moved further from the sun.
It would seem that you can use the trick from "A Space Odyssey of 2001" and spin the Death Star to create artificial gravity due to centrifugal force. To recreate Earth's gravity, the station has to rotate every 3.5 minutes, which sounds rather absurd.
But Kubrick had a reason to make a ring-shaped station. The centrifugal force is proportional to the radius of your circular path. As you move towards the center of the station or towards the poles, this radius decreases and the artificial gravity disappears. If you really create gravity in this way, questions arise about the spherical design of the Death Star.
Dyson sphere
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Perhaps the clue was in the title all along. What if there is a fake star in the heart of the Death Star? Would this solve the gravity problem? Then the entire station would become in some way a Dyson sphere, a technological megastructure that physicist Freeman Dyson proposed: he believed that alien civilizations could build such a sphere to use all the energy of the star. But Dyson's hard-shell spheres will inevitably collide with gravitational stress. Even if the sphere does not break apart, a small push is enough for the entire structure to collapse.
However, Dyson spheres are typically the size of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. For the Death Star, which is much smaller, the problems of most Dyson spheres will not exist. A reactor in the core with a diameter of 13.2 kilometers will require 370 times less mass than the moon. And if steel and titanium can't withstand these conditions, the amazing material graphene, for example, can easily cope with the gravitational forces involved.
And we don't really need a real star in the center of the station - future fusion technology could provide enough energy. Although we currently use more energy than we get in fusion experiments, many plasma physicists believe that we need to get bigger, and the ITER experiment with a volume of one-third of the Olympic pool will handle it. If successful, we could provide our Death Star with two million times the energy needed by all of humanity.
But there are still problems. The pressure in our Death Star reactor will be colossal. The artificial star's own gravity will not be enough to contain the fusion plasma, so we need something to help us. Magnetic fields could be the solution. The only catch is that we will have to create the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe - a million times stronger than ever created on Earth, something more inherent in magnetars, neutron stars with the most powerful magnetic field.
However, a start has been made. These are the things to start with.
ILYA KHEL