Is the Death Star a Cost-Effective Weapons System?

The Death Star Is a Surprisingly Cost-Effective Weapons System (from Mother Jones)
by Kevin Drum

There's been a lot of loose talk about the Death Star lately. I want to put it into a bit of perspective.

As background, some students at Lehigh University have estimated that it would be a very expensive project. The steel alone, assuming the Death Star's mass/volume ratio is about the same as an aircraft carrier, comes to $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the world's GDP. Is this affordable?

Let's sharpen our pencils. For starters, this number is too low. Using the same aircraft carrier metric they did, I figure that the price tag on the latest and greatest Ford-class supercarrier is about 100 times the cost of the raw steel that goes into it. If the Death Star is similar, its final cost would be about 1.3 million times the world's GDP.

But there's more. Star Wars may have taken place "a long time ago," but the technology of the Star Wars universe is well in our future. How far into our future? Well, Star Trek is about 300 years in our future, and the technology of Star Wars is obviously well beyond that. Let's call it 500 years. What will the world's GDP be in the year 2500? Answer: Assuming a modest 2 percent real growth rate, it will be about 20,000 times higher than today. So we can figure that the average world in the Star Wars universe is about 20,000 times richer than present-day Earth, which means the Death Star would cost about 65 times the average world's GDP.

However, the original Death Star took a couple of decades to build. So its annual budget is something on the order of three times the average world's GDP.

But how big is the Republic/Empire? There's probably a canonical figure somewhere, but I don't know where. So I'll just pull a number out of my ass based on the apparent size of the Old Senate, and figure a bare minimum of 10,000 planets. That means the Death Star requires .03 percent of the GDP of each planet in the Republic/Empire annually. By comparison, this is the equivalent of about $5 billion per year in the current-day United States.

In other words, not only is the Death Star affordable, it's not even a big deal. Palpatine could embezzle that kind of money without so much as waving his midichlorian-infused little pinkie. If it weren't for the unfortunate breakdown in anti-Bothan security and the shoddy workmanship on the thermal exhaust ports, it would have been a pretty good investment, too. In other words, yes: totally worth it.

UPDATE: Rewritten once, then twice, to make it absolutely crystal clear that Star Wars took place "a long time ago" but that its technology is quite a ways into our future. Everyone happy now?

UPDATE 2: Apparently the canonical figure for the size of the Republic/Empire is 1.75 million full member worlds. Needless to say, this makes the Death Star even more affordable.


Another Opinion:

You can't afford *not* to buy a Death Star!
by Seth Masket

A few years ago, someone (I can't recall who -- the link is dead) estimated it would cost $15 septillion to build a Death Star. I estimated it would cost several orders of magnitude less, considering that the original estimate was based on Earth's primitive and costly methods of transporting material into orbit. Now some students at Lehigh have estimated the cost at about $850 quadrillion. Kevin Drum points out that this is far less intimidating than it might look. If we wait about 500 years to build it (at which point our technology might have advanced to Star Wars-like levels), this figure will only be about 65 times world GDP. Spread the project out over 20 years, and that's only 3 times world GDP. Moreover, spread it out over the wealth of tens of thousands of star systems in the Galactic Empire, and suddenly this is looking quite affordable.

Drum concludes from this that building the Death Star was "totally worth it." Well, that's not obvious. One must ask, compared to what? I mean, what was the point of the Death Star in the first place? To intimidate planets that might have considered undermining the Empire. It couldn't be everywhere at once, but the example of destroying Alderaan had to have served as a deterrent for other planets. Notably, the Rebellion had few options for bases after that. They stayed on an ice planet briefly, and after that had to wander space in a few random ships. But, of course, the deterrent value was limited, since the Death Star had been destroyed. Everyone knew the Empire could build another one, but until they did, the threat was going to wane. So they threw together another one, which again got destroyed.

Now, just as building a Death Star sent an important message to non-compliant planets, destroying a Death Star sent a powerful signal, as well. It was a huge public relations coup for the Rebellion. So the Death Star, while a devastating weapon, was also a tempting target. There were some basic conceptual design flaws (both versions were destroyed by a small smuggling ship and a handful of single-person fighters), but really, even if it had survived Yavin, it was doomed to spend much of its operational time fighting off attackers, simply by virtue of being such a big fat target.

Had the Empire instead used that money to build thousands of additional star destroyers, that likely would have been a much wiser investment. Then they really could be everywhere at once. Hell, park one in orbit around every system in the Empire. Then when Leia says, "They're on Dantooine," Tarkin can just call up the ship hovering over Dantooine and say, "Are there rebels there?", and the captain can say, "Uh, no. She's lying." Saves a lot of time. Plus, even if the rebels could down one or two star destroyers, that doesn't provide them with anywhere near the public relations value of taking down a Death Star.

So, on balance, I'd say it was a bad investment, even if an affordable one.

One other point: It was really stupid to put both the Emperor and his chief enforcer on an uncompleted Death Star right before an attack they knew was coming. Had Vader and Palpatine been back on Coruscant when that went down, the Rebels would have won an impressive victory, but the Empire wouldn't have fallen. It would have been like Al Qaeda sinking the USS Nimitz -- serious, to be sure, but hardly death to America.