Death Star Technical Companion

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2002-08-09 10:36am

It says that the "habitable crust" of the DS Mk I was 2 km thick, and that
most of the interior was taken up by power cells, hyperdrive engines,
sublight engines, and computer cores....

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2002-08-11 01:35am

even so, the population density given is ridiculously low, and that document bears overtones of rebel propaganda and misinformation in general.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2002-08-11 05:45am

the population density given is ridiculously low

True, but remember, you only need a relatively small number of people to operate the Death Star's primary systems compared to the maximum number of people it could possibly hold. I'm speculating that most of the Death Star's interior space is given over to troop housing, and possibly even interior training grounds and such.

In ANH and ROTJ, they probably only had a tiny fraction of the maximum number of people on the DS. Remember, in ANH, the Death Star wasn't 100% complete until just before the destruction of Alderaan (there's one point, while Tarkin is musing to himself, where a crewman says "The final checkout is complete... all systems are operational"). This leads me to believe that it wasn't fully packed with the total number of people they could fit on it.

Pablo Sanchez · Post by **Pablo Sanchez** » 2002-08-11 11:04am

That seems to be contradicted by the SW:ICS diagrams.

Doomriser · Post by **Doomriser** » 2002-08-11 04:07pm

The SW:EGVV has the DS with 1 million crew as a minimum skeleton crew. It was undercrewed in this manner when it was detonated at Yavin. OTOH a different official source (somewhere on SWTC if you want me to dig it up or just go look at the page yourself) as the max crew at 37 000 000. So during ANH, the new DS was operating on a skeleton crew until it would be presumably be fully crewed at a later time.