As fans already learned, the Death Star isn’t only huge, it’s apparently easily destroyed. Kinda makes you wonder how much it would cost to construct a Death Star of your very own. Luckily, someone else figured it out. Ryszard Gold considered the Death Star’s size, the price to launch it into space, and all the air you need to fill it so you and your own Tarkin BFF can run up and down the passageways.
Add it all up, and we have a figure of exactly:
$15,602,022,489,829,821,422,840,226 and 94 cents.
Tell you what, I’ll pitch in the 94 cents.That is a lot of money. Wait, no that’s a disgustingly large sum of money. How much exactly? $15 Septillion, I told you. But how can we conceive of that number? Well, the figures I could find for the World Economic Value were pretty general, around $14 Trillion USD. In other words, the DS would cost 1.11 TRILLION times the amount of money available in the world, that’s not even including the fact that the majority of that is digital and not physical.
Read the full article here:
One Death Star for $15 Septillion? What a deal!
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SOURCE: TheForce.net
Waitwaitwait, what’s this about launching it into space? Was it not *built* in space?
Plus, there probably weren’t very high labor expenditures, given the number of Wookiees and droids working on that thing.
Of course, I haven’t gotten around to reading Death Star. But still. Someone better check their math before we commit to this.
While they’re at it, Darth Stewie wants to know how much it’ll cost to plug up that pesky exhaust port.
According to the novels, videogames, Clone Wars tv shows, etc., the Death Star was constructed mainly by droids and slave labor. Slave labor was pretty much the backbone of the Empire.
There’s my geek moment!
2 words: independent contractors.
hmm, initially I was thinking it stands to reason that its gonna be a lot more than the world economic value on Earth. It was built by an *empire* after all, i.e., multiple planets but yeah, that is a little expensive. I guess like Toph says, there was a lot of free labour with all the droids…
http://www.igp-scifi.com
I don’t question the calculations (excellent work) but it seems like he figured out building it the hard way. The easier way to build it would be to start with a space station that processes the raw materials from mining asteroids already in space. Factories on the space station would create the building materials. The space station would just expand as it gathered raw materials. If you used the same system to create robot workers and more factories as they were needed it would cut the construction time exponentially as well.
What about Solar sheilding is it included? I think that a exhust port grill of some kind should be in order
It was built in space, but you have to launch the steel and other materials from the earth into space…
Could you imagine the insurance payments on this thing???
And invest some money in target practice for the troops.
Death Star 2 was obviously built in sace, and at the end of Episode 3 we see the outline of the original being made in space
Toph’s right about the launching it into space thing, especially considering the picture of it half constructed IN SPACE that you’ve shown. Do your research.
um… I would have to say it would not cost them anywhere near that. From my calculations it would take zero dollars. They would just take what they need and enslave all around… like wall street and banking, but in space.
And about that pesky exhaust port… Do you think they purposely put that there in case the whole “Evil Empire” thing didn’t work out they can collect on the insurance? Something to think about people….
Now calculate how much it would cost to cloth, shelter and feed all the people in the world who need it. Chump change for a few corporations I would think.
Lets spend time calculating stuff thats actually important, and not arbitrary.
what if it were made out of all recycled materials? Would that lessen the cost? And what if the air was produced through a botanical garden which naturally released oxygen?
You’ve got to get all that metal into orbit somehow.
I’ll take one. Will you take a check? LOL
I thought the same thing, Toph. Once you read the article, though, he’s not talking about launching it into space, he’s talking about launching the raw materials into space to be built. He doesn’t even go into construction costs. This is strictly raw materials (steel and oxygen/nitrogen for atmosphere) and cost of transport to launch into space. In “reality” the costs would be astronomically higher, given current techonology. That’s the rub, though. Just in Star Wars alone, we see how easy it is for Han to take off in the Falcon versus how much hassle it is for all of NASA to put together one launch of the space shuttle…
I wonder if that’s the lowest bid from a contractor. And Darth Stewie is right, it’s built in space, so shave off a few septillion for that. And you know whoever gets that contract will not only but subcontracting the HVAC and plumbing, but all contractors will be going out to the Outer Rim territories, picking up some slave labor and only paying them a few Dactari credits a week, which is probably why its so easy to destroy, the labor is inexperienced. Not only that, but if they are the same contractors from the Big Dig, they will embezzle most the money, draw out construction for years on end, and eventually the gun will collapse on a Storm Trooper and kill him.
It my have been built in space…. but the materials had to get there some how.
I think we’re missing the real problem here, what is the conversion between USD and EECV (evil empire cash value, which i just made up thank you).
You forgot the over head costs, zoning permits (conditional use variances, setbacks, etc.), aligning favor with the planning commission and all of their variances, impact fees (look, it blows up easily, gotta have clean-up measures installed), and naturally the federal bailout when the Empire goes bankrupt and has mass layoffs due to losing the fight.
Well it was built in space which means it wouldn’t need to be launched, BUT all the material to make it in space would have to be launched from one kind of gravitational field or another. So launch costs do count.
Is this is inflation adjusted dollars? It happened “long, long ago” so weren’t things cheaper then?
Also droid and slave labor is cheap but it isn’t free, there are overhead costs involved in building robots, and collecting/housing/feeding your slave labor force.
Yes, it is plain visible that the 2nd Death Star was being constructed in space. Also, the largest expenditure in the list is for blasting rockets into space. As anyone who has ever seen any of the movies knows, pretty much any ship can go into space with the smallest of effort. They don’t use rockets in Star Wars. The price of steel, as all materials are, is based upon its scarcity. I think we can expect, that in a galactic Empire, that iron and carbon will be very common across planets. As such, the price of steel will be much, much smaller than the price based off the amounts of these materials on Earth. Toph is correct also in pointing out that droids would do much or all of the real construction work. It is the same for the price of oxygen and nitrogen, although with something as large as the Death Star, it is very likely that it would have a way to generate air.
Well..it was built in space using both slave and military labour. IE, free. Also, the Empire’s economy is based on over a million star systems…about several million WORLDS. Add to that the fact that they don’t have to pay their bills…they just destroy anyone who sends them.
My main “nitpick” with the Death Star is its gravity. It’s made clear that hyperdrives can’t function in gravity, and yet a thing this size would create a gravity well deep enough to keep it immobilized.
No doubt they captured Scotty from the Federation to find a way around that, in less than 8 hours.
I agree with Toph. the first Death Star was built in space by enslaved wookies and convicts. that by itself cuts down cost. it was also built by clones and droids, again reducing cost. I would think there would be some type of expense just because of it’s size, being close to the size of a moon and all but I’m not sure if it would be as much as 15 spetillion dollars. they also don’t use dollars in Star Wars, so how much would it be in credits I think is a better uestion.
in terms of Darth Stewie, if I remember correctly it cost more then it was worth it to plug it up and putting a board over it would have looked tacky.
Yeah, a more realistic figure for the cost should take into account that most all the materials are acquired from orbital asteroid mining. The technology to do that exists now, we just aren’t using it because it’s only economical for building really big stuff in space. Like, say, a Death Star.
Is that all? I’ll buy it!
If instead you buy the uniforms and furniture from the companies that outfitted Battlefield Earth, I bet you could save a septillion or two. the Death Star may be a sphere, but there’s a lot of corners that can be cut.
I totally agree; I’d like to see a raw materials cost separately – in both today’s dollars and 1977 dollars.
The Death Star may have been built in space, but the materials it was made out of and the personnel/droids/machines that built it had to come from somewhere.
So, much like the real world MIR and ISS, the Death Star was assembled in space using materials and components made on the surface of various planets.
yeah get estimates. I suppose given that the Empire enslaved hundreds of worlds the affordability is feasible. Plus, who knows how many other corners they cut building the damn thing.
Yeah, you know, maybe put a piece of plywood over it or something.
Man, that’s A LOT of car washes, barbecue plates, and cake sales.
Whether or not they built it in Space, you still have to get the raw materials into orbit.
It was obvious in Return of the Jedi they were constructing it in space above the Endor moon.
Any space station built with a thermal exhaust port leading directly to the main fusion reactor is incredibly stupid engineering design. Must be American made.
I expect the vast bulk of that figure is some mythical ‘cost of getting that material into space’ amount. The pure and simple fact is that anything that large would be constructed in space, with the materials being scavenged largely from a convenient asteroid belt.
The empire did use a lot of slave aka free labor to build the first one. So you could cut labor out of the equation but it was built in space so you’d have to shuttle people back and forth between the planet and space to help build the thing. I wonder how much a super star destroyer would cost to build cause those things are sweet.
“Waitwaitwait, what’s this about launching it into space? Was it not *built* in space?”
How do you think you’d get the materials up into the sky to build it?
Since when did Wookies work on the Death Star??
The key question…..does it need one……and how big does it have to be…if its too big it’d be hard to carry round, if its too small you could lose it….how many do you have cut……how many people can you trust with a key…..can you trust yourself with it…..its alot of money to spend if you cant start it…..and once you’ve started it would you wanna turn it off…..what about the front door key and back door key….where would you put the door…and who could you trust with that…
Tell you what, take 2 and i will put in 3 battelships for 1´s price
Duh, just build it in space just like it really was.