The Death Star is the ultimate weapon of the Star Wars universe, playing a major role in two of the films. It is an armoured battlestation with enough power to destroy an entire planet, taking the shape of a large grey metal globe 150km in diameter. An equatorial band divides the Death Star in half, and on its upper surface is a small bowl, like a particularly neat crater. From points around this crater, eight green laser beams are fired, uniting in the centre to form an ultimate turbolaser beam of death that can perform the coup de grace to any nearby planetoid. The Death Star also contains many hangars, prison cells, trash compactors and more bottomless pits that you can shake a gaffi stick¹ at.

The Death Stars were built by the evil² Galactic Empire as the ultimate weapon of terror, a means of keeping rebellious star systems in line. In both cases, however, the Death Stars were destroyed by a plucky, heroic, yet seriously outnumbered band of freedom fighters. Lucky that.

The First Death Star

Although the plans for it are glimpsed in Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) and we see it starting to be built at the end of Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, (2005) the first time we see a Death Star in full operation is in the earliest Star Wars film, Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)³.

In this film the Death Star destroys its first and only planet — the peaceful Alderaan, the home of the lovely Princess Leia. It then moves in⁴ to destroy the moon Yavin Four, the current base of the Rebel Alliance. However, the rebels have analysed stolen Death Star plans and found a crucial weakness. Small, nippy one-man fighters can outmanoeuvre the lumbering defences of the Death Star, allowing them to speed down a length of trench⁵ and fire a proton torpedo down a thermal exhaust port right into the Death Star's main reactor⁶. This works, of course, but only at the very last second. The Death Star blows into tiny bits, whilst Yavin Four and the Rebel Alliance are saved!

The Second Death Star

After the first Death Star met with such a spectacular end, the Emperor hit on a cunning new plan — build a new one, but this time without the one crucial weakness that made the last one explode into a million pieces. This is ready by the time of Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983).

The second Death Star is only half finished, and looks like a greying old apple with a few bites taken out of it. While it's still being built, it's vulnerable to attack — or so the Rebel Alliance thinks. When their fleet swoops in, they discover to their horror that the Death Star is fully operational. And it destroys... one small spaceship⁷.

However disastrous this looks at first, the Death Star's shields are soon down, allowing a number of small spacecraft to fly directly through the half-built infrastructure and into the core of the Death Star. Where, of course, they blow up the main reactor and narrowly escape the resultant explosion.

The Expanded Universe

If anyone has a mind for any further reading, the whole history of the Death Star is written down in a licensed spin-off novel called Death Star, by Mark Reaves and Steve Perry.

A stripped-down version called the Tarkin⁸ makes an appearance in two of Marvel comics 'Star Wars' strips, set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

A Death Star prototype makes an appearance in Kevin J Anderson's Jedi Search trilogy, set after Return of the Jedi. Like most prototypes, it's a bit rubbish — it has a weak superlaser that takes hours to recharge, and it can't fire with any degree of accuracy.

In the book Darksaber, also by Kevin J Anderson, the Hutts, a bunch of slug-like gangsters, fund the original designer of the Death Star to build them a budget version called Darksaber — a sleek, cylindrical superweapon without all the bottomless shafts and trash compactors that made the original so bulky. In a rather disappointing ending, the Darksaber simply fails to work when turned on, and runs straight into the asteroid it was supposed to be blowing up.

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¹ The traditional weapon of Tatooine's Sand People.
² Let's be clear on this point. Rebels good, Empire bad.
³ The Star Wars films were made in the order IV, V and VI followed by a prequel trilogy I, II and III.
⁴ It is unclear how the Death Star moves from place to place given its lack of any readily-apparent engines.
⁵ Why they don't just swoop in from above and fire directly down into the thermal exhaust port is never satisfactorily explained.
⁶ Or in layman's terms, drop a bomb down the chute and blow up the power generator.
⁷ This brings the combined Death Star kills to one planet, one spaceship and a handful of snub fighters.
⁸ After Grand Moff Tarkin, the commander of the first Death Star and who died on board when the superweapon blew.