cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/1104168
The first one.
Any chance you know the canon explanation of how they counteract the gravity generated by the Deathstar’s mass?
How much gravity would the Deathstar’s mass provide? I feel like it would be very small considering it has no real massive central solid or liquid core.
It’s the size of a moon and made from metal: It’s definitely generating some gravity (even a small amount of mass generates gravity) but I guess whatever tech they use to generate gravity overcomes it.
The gravity is negligible. The official sizes of the Death Stars have been 120 - 900 km in diameter according to rebel scale. For comparison, Earths moon is ≈35000 km in Idiameter, and its gravity is 1/6 of earth’s. On top of that, the Death Stars are mostly hallow, being a metal framework, instead of solid rock.
the Death Stars are mostly hallow
Our Death Star, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Thy empire come, thy will be done,
On Alderaan as it is in heaven,
Give us this day our daily rations,
And forgive us our rebellion,
As we forgive those who rebel against us,
And lead us not to the light side,
But deliver us from the Jedi,
For thine is the empire, and the unlimited power, and the dark side forever,
Amen
Earths moon is ≈35000 km in diameter, and it’s gravity is 1/6 of earth’s.
Off the a factor of 10. The Moon has a diameter of almost 3500 km (Earth’s circumference is about 40,000 km, so your diameter would make the Moon larger than Earth).
However, the Death Star being mostly filled with air still means you’re probably right about gravity being negligible.
It’s not massive enough to create its own gravity. They use gravity deck plating.
Even if it was massive enough, if they can keep people sticking to the ground in a tiny ship they can surely counteract the gravity of a space station.
Also, most of their spaceships have wings. We’re thinking about this way too hard.
Technically everything with mass creates its own gravitational field; most things just aren’t massive enough for it to be detectable.
“Gravity deck plating”… okay that makes sense. So basically each floor has its own gravity generation to orient you to it. They’re all placed “bottom to top” to work like a building but it’d be possible to put one in at a 90-degree angle for say maintenance work.
Artificial gravity and inertial compensators are pervasive (if relatively handwaved/unexplained) in the SW universe
Isn’t the emperor’s tower and all the surface guns oriented toward the second option?
Seems like it’s a little of both
I know we’d all like some scientific actualisation of Star Wars but I mean:
- They made noise in space 'cause that’s fun.
- There was always gravity on pretty much any ship.
- I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
- There’s hyperspace since lightyears is a bit of a long time.
- Stormtroopers seem very scientifically and inefficiently accurate
At this point I think the Star Wars movies (the oldies) pretty much ignored a fair bit of the science.
But if it was a death star literally put there in our universe, I think there would be a bit of structural considerations for gravity, but not huge due to it being quite hollow. Gravity is pretty strong when the sphere is entirely comprised of dense rock and no air. A mostly hollow sphere of air where air is something close to 1/1000 that of rock (yes, used the density of water lol) is not going to get much of a rollicking from gravity.
Edit: an interesting ‘expose’ on the moon landings claim one thing: why were the photos so relatively boring? Because they were real and that’s all they could get for all the limited resources they had at the time.
I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
in The Last Jedi, Leia gets blasted into hard space and experiences weightlessness.
Wasn’t there a space fight with horses on the wing of a star destroyer in the rise of Skywalker?
Yes, I’m pretty sure either a hobbyist equestrian or a full on equestrian’s parent was on the sequel trilogy’s rollover staff, for two separate sequences to feature space horses coming to the rescue.
Also, low-key bummed that we didn’t get Finding Your Roots with Lando Calrissian and totally not just gender flipped Finn but aged slightly and in charge of a bunch of other horse girl deserter storm troopers.
They specifically noted they were talking about the old movies. Or didn’t you get that far before you needed to “correct” them?
I seem to recall one instance that may portray the lack of gravity. When Darth Vader gets shot and goes spinning off. That’s about it.
One of my gripes with star wars is a pilot can fly any ship from any faction without prior flight experience on that ship. They just go in flip some switches, push some buttons then jumps into the pilot seat and off they go.
That’s one of the many things Andor gets right, at least with that shuttle they steal near the start of the series. Cassian basically chews his crew out for planning to just jump into an unfamiliar ship and wing it.
My headcannon for this is that spaceships in that universe are to those people what cars are to us. If you know the basics of driving a car, you can drive most cars, though the bigger ships might get more complicated (I’ve never seen one of our heroes try to back up a star destroyer into a starbase to help with their buddy’s move.)
Good call on it being hollow and mostly air.
FYI for soil, air is ~1/2000 the density.
There was always gravity on pretty much any ship
And if the ship got damaged where the nose started falling (downward?) the gravity would shift towards the nose so that everyone went sliding across the floor.
That only happened near planets.
Star Wars ships don’t orbit. They simply hang in the sky, in much the same way that bricks don’t. In Star Trek ships orbit to save on fuel costs while parked near a planet. But in Star Wars antigravity is so cheap that it’s more efficient to be stationary relative to the planet’s surface. Which means no microgravity.
This is just my head canon, but the noise actually comes from speakers on board the ship /in the cockpit, to help give the pilot an audio cue as to where hazards are around them.
I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
Leia did one in the sequels.
I don’t deny the star wars universe is getting a bit more of an update in the cinemas, especially post-Interstellar and whatnot, but space opera in the 80s was really intent on ignoring the stark reality of space for both constraints of filming and viewership. Goddamn fun though.
Spacewalks are a bad example anyway. A ship’s artificial gravity could extend outside its hull. Conversely, the lack of spacewalks doesn’t mean we aren’t shown the absence of gravity, since we see the ships themselves maneuvering in a way that suggests a lack of gravity.
Gravity in SW is still kind of fucked, but not “gravity in deep space” fucked.
Spoilsport! But like you say this is fiction, and entertainment, it is a fantasy world! :)
But yeah, the last one bugs me in soo many films and tv shows. They have super advanced AI robots tech, they can regrow a hand in a day, no more disease and live 257, transport living moving organisations across great distances, have developed telepaths and telekinetics, and can fold space-time, but are fucked if they can shoot straighter than a drunk badger with one ‘arm’, balancing on a log going down a rapids!
Yeah, the fact that we already have the technology to make a gun that handles the aiming for you… and we aren’t even shooting light, which would be even easier to auto aim. Fights should be super short and boring, one shot, one kill… 20 shots, 20 kills. There would be no action heroes because very few people would ever live through more than a handful of fights. The heroes would be the beurocrats, so we’d have to spend alot more time watching them.
Sounding like they made the right choice.
Guns shouid make fights super boring. Literally just kill anyone you’ve got line of sight to.
But instead, they make fights more interesting, because now cover is a thing and it’s all angles.
I’m sure there will be something interesting about laser vs laser wars that we can’t even imagine now (unless we quit being pussies and start putting realistic robot capabilities into video games).
These guys are supposedly in a vacuum outside the first DS:
There’s a whole Legends thing for Spacetroopers. New canon is pretty much just the guys above.
I think the animated shows had a few more space realistic moments like space walk repairs and such.
Best battle scene in the whole series from clever tactics PoV IMO was Anakin deploying his artillery into a planetary ring system and then using his capital ship to bait Greivous into a pin between the ring mounted tanks and the capital ship.
Best battle overall is obviously the siege of Mandalore just for the absolute knockdown drag out chaos in the middle of a domed city megastructure that’s probably meant to be a seed for an eventual ecumenopolis.
the sphere entirely comprises* dense rock
or
the sphere is entirely composed* of dense rock
I thought you might be correcting me so I checked up the definition. Both are okay?
‘Composed of’ is a better sounding phrasing though.
itsnotits said “X or Y” because both X and Y are correct.
You mixed the two by writing “is comprised of”
The construction of the first Death Star
Cross-sections of the DS-1 Death Star.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/DS-1_Death_Star_Mobile_Battle_Station
Not sci Fi specific, but this is for detailed drawings.
https://lemm.ee/c/wimmelbilder
Edit: damn no posts yet :(
Other Edit: !wimmelbilder@lemm.ee
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !wimmelbilder@lemm.ee
It’s not gravity, it’s the ForceTM
Besides technical diagrams from supplementary stuff, the Falcon lands in a docking bay that’s oriented towards the first option. There could be some kind of transition point to the second option, but we don’t see it and it’d be really awkward.
