Spoilers Andor - Season 2
- Thread starter Fuddles
- Start date
He just felt, like many do, that there was something arrogant about the Ghormans. They were always too good for the rest of us. Plus they were aggressive and unpleasant, much like their spiders.
Interesting. If the Empire figured out that was its only real purpose, it could even be used to explain how the second Death Star was completed so relatively quickly.
The Imperial doctor who used the sounds of wailing alien children to torture Bix on Ferrix.
They gouge mined an entire planet. It's safe to say that they took every last bit of that stuff that they possibly could. For all we know, that could mean that they managed to stockpile enough to make 20 Death Stars. Or two Death Stars and that fleet on Exogol (that I still think was dumb and wish wasn't a thing, but it is so may as well accept it.)
Indeed, who's to say that there was only ever intended to be one of those things? Much easier to control the galaxy with several of them than just one. Also; having more than one lessens the chance that a certain Grand Moff might get ideas above his station and try to take power with it for himself, since the only sure fire way of stopping a Death Star (or so they probably thought) is with another Death Star.
Part of me would like to see an 'Infinities' type story set in a version of reality where for whatever reason (maybe Cassian never learned to swim either in that timeline?); the Death Star wasn't destroyed and the Emperor's vision played out as he'd planned (at least at first). Maybe even have a story set a thousand years later and see what that setting would be like.
It's an idea that's been floating around since the Revenge of the Jedi concepts with two Death Stars being built in orbit of Had Abbadon. I remember the Star Wars Choose-Your-Own-Adventure adaptation had a bad ending where it said that, after the Rebels failed to destroy the Death Star at Yavin, the Empire built two more. IIRC, there are Star Wars strategy games that also give the Empire the option of having more than one Death Star at a time.
I've definitely locked into the theory that they were already building the Death Star II before the Death Star I was finished. I think I mentioned earlier here that I was looking at the studio model, and there's an interesting aspect that even in 1977, the Death Star model had the superlaser slightly elevated away from the main sphere (something Rogue One elaborated on with the installation sequence) but the Death Star II model has its superlaser flush with the hull, and it's also a proportionally larger part of the station (which, overall, is bigger than the first one, so the weapon is doubly expanded).
RotS, Rebels, and Andor show they started building the Death Star before the weapon was finished, and the R1 backstory novel Catalyst says they started building the Death Star before they even knew what the weapon was going to be, so they were locked into an exact size no matter what the final engineering said would work best. Maybe once the design was completed by Erso's team, the designs went to a separate project to build a version that wasn't size-constrained, constructing the reactor and weapon first at the optimum scale, and only then enclosing the rest of the station around it.
The only caveat I'd add to that is to be wary of the need to explain how the Empire (mostly) built the second one in less than a quarter of the time of the first. We know that the main hold-up was the weapon, so the super-structure and the majority of secondary and tertiary systems were all basically finished long before the reactor systems and main weapon, which likely had to be assemble, tested, stripped out, disassembled, rebuilt, reinstalled, tested again, over and over and over.
All that to say that I don't see a need for the second one to have been started before the first was complete. I think it's more likely that Palpatine wouldn't have given the green light for more until the weapon proved to be operational, so not until the Jedah test. Indeed the dissolution of the senate just days later are probably the best indicator for when that trigger was pulled. After all, once they knew what they were doing, it ceases to be an engineering problem and mostly just becomes a logistical one, and we know from many stories set between the Lucas trilogies that the Empire was tearing apart whole planets and stockpiling vast amounts of rare minerals long before the Ghorman massacre. It's how Thrawn figured it out, it's how Dedra figured it out, hell, it's how Hera & Kanan met! The probably even had the secondary construction site over Endor already set-up and ready.
Looks like a flask!
The Death Star, as a battle station, was completed within ten years. The superlaser was the issue that kept it from being fully operational for another decade. Since they solved that issue and they wouldn't need to be quite as secretive with the Senate gone, the Second Death Star was a bit more than half complete within four years. The only main design issues they needed to solve were to incorporate the superlaser into the build from the start and put a patch on the reactor problem than caused the first one to explode.
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