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[scriver]

So you're saying that if building the death star was like wanting to play a game of basketball, all we'd have to do was go into the next room and fetch the ball? Easy peasy!

[Kot]

Nuke powered spaceships, man. Or tall basketball players. Also, you could always mine out Moon and have Death Star built out of rocks, or something.
You're taking this thing awfully seriously, tho.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Instructions unclear, Ganymede now rapidly expanding cloud of plasma.

[Sheb]

Given that the Earth's core is a solid mass of iron with a diameter of 6800 km, I seriously doubt we don't have enough metal. The Death Star itself is only about 150 km in diameter. Assuming it has the same density as modern ships, the Death star has a mass of something like 10^15 tons, and there is 9*10^17 tons of iron in the crust.

[LordSlowpoke]

brb building a spaceship out of elemental iron

[MonkeyHead]

Given that the Earth's core is a solid mass of iron with a diameter of 6800 km, I seriously doubt we don't have enough metal. The Death Star itself is only about 150 km in diameter. Assuming it has the same density as modern ships, the Death star has a mass of something like 10^15 tons, and there is 9*10^17 tons of iron in the crust.

Obtaining the stuff is the issue rather than the raw quantites.

[Sheb]

Oh, totally, we're only producing about 850 Mt of steel a year after all.

[MonkeyHead]

1,200,000 years of steel production would be enough, with some allowance for spare bits.

[notquitethere]

There must be a cheaper way to blow up planets.

[scriver]

Can't we just pour water on earth's core, then hollow it out as appropriate and use that as our death star?

[notquitethere]

I think I tried that in dwarf fortress once, but the fps drop is so extreme you can't get anything done.

[Frumple]

There must be a cheaper way to blow up planets.

Well, there's a pretty cheap way to blow up* the earth, anyway. Literally free, actually. All we have to do is wait many million years until the sun expands and consumes it. You may picture an image of kenshiro pointing at the earth saying "You are already dead." at your leisure.

*More or less. Boil away/burn is close enough, right?

[Morrigi]

This is an exercise in futility, since we couldn't build the Death Star with modern technology at all. With technology sufficient to build the Death Star, we would have technology sufficient to also allow for large-scale exploitation of Mars and the Asteroid Belt at the very least.

Edit:

There must be a cheaper way to blow up planets.

Yes, you just throw a large chunk of metal at it, at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Thing is, actually blowing up planets is totally impractical. All you need to do to ensure the death of everything is to turn the surface into glowing slag, which is far more efficient.

The Death Star is horrifically impractical and over-engineered, but damn impressive when it works.

[Il Palazzo]

We could perhaps build a small Death Star? A mini-cooper, VW beetle-style budget battle station? Maybe just strap an AK-47 to the Sputnik?

[Frumple]

Oh, probably. It wouldn't be doing any planet busting, but it'd be relatively easy to build something up there able to bust up a city or two. Probably not with death lasers, but rods from god are close enough, right?