Yarrrrrrr mateys, I feel one o' me specialty supergiant posts a-comin on!
It's just Star Wars. No such thing as ANH.
I love you, man. :lol
Anyway, maybe the Death Star draws power from the engines to fire the super-laser, and it can't fire while moving.
Good simple idea, I like that one.
Why would the DS need to be firing its engines in space?
To move?
Come to think of it, does it have hyperdrive, and if so, why not come out of hyperspace closer?
Yes, it must - otherwise it would many years to get around. As for hyperspace exit points, I reckon they're doing bloody well to move that thing at superluminal speeds to *anywhere*, let alone being precise with the parking. :lol
Oh, I know:
Who cares? Star Wars rules!
LOL, I love you too.
Now, as for why they didn't blow up the gas giant, here's two explanations. (1) It's a gas giant, with no hard core, therefore the superlaser's reaction wouldn't have worked the same. Given that they hadn't tested it on a gas giant, they didn't want to risk things going wrong. (2) They knew what would happen, and knew they wouldn't be able to get out of range of the explosion. Destroying the gas giant would be too dangerous and their shields couldn't take it.
That works for me too. Of course, if that's the case then the real question would be 'why not exit hyperspace within weapon range but at a safe shield distance, blow the planet to kingdom come, and let the debris and radiant energy take out the moon?'.
The most obvious explanation for not blowing up Yavin is that is simply beyond the Death Star's capabilities. The ability to destroy an Earth sized planet doesn't mean it can just as easily destroy a planet hundreds of times more massive.
Well said; for example Jupiter is over 300 times the mass of Earth. If Yavin is in that range, you've got a lot more binding energy to overcome than for a terrestrial planet.
how come the laser can blow up a planet with a single shot that lasts a whole 2 seconds? You'd think it'd need time to heat the core of the planet to the explosion point. If it was hot enough to do it intitially you'd think it'd just burn a hole through the planet so it'd look like a giant donut in space.
One of my friends is a physicist, he's devoted waaaaaaaay too much time to this question.
According to him it isn't about time, it's about the quantity of energy delivered. I guess you probably *do* burn some kind of hole very likely, but everything you 'burn' doesn't cease to exist, it's becoming plasma and expanding. It has to go somewhere, but if it can't expand rapidly enough out of the hole you're boring then it goes in every other direction. The pressure produced exceeds the gravitational binding energy of the planet, then kaboom! It's just a question of whether it is a fast boom or a slow one.
Maybe a Death Star that can blow a terrestrial planet to bits in 2 seconds takes 45 minutes to do the same to a gas giant. And that might give rebel leadership too much time to escape, so ten minutes orbiting the planet to get a clear shot is preferable.
The Death Star must be big enough to have its own gravitational pull. In theory, couldn't its presence near another planet have adverse effects on said planet?
Ha! It would exist, but it'd be negligible. The second one is 500 miles wide and actively hovers above Endor, it's way below orbital altitude - but we don't see much sign of volcanoes or extreme tides or whatnot.
These things are big, but they're honeycombs. An asteroid the same size would weigh thousands of times more.
