Of the countless awe-inspiring designs spawned by the Tarkin Doctrine, none have come close
to matching the sheer scale and terrifying function of the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station.
Known to its creators, and later to the galaxy as the Death Star, the battlestation’s purpose
was as simple as it was frightening, the complete, total, and instantaneous obliteration, of
inhabited terrestrial planets.
Though fleets of starships had been more than capable of rendering life-supporting worlds
uninhabitable for several thousand years, the Death Star was not built as a weapon of
conquest, but rather as weapon of terror.
When the Death Star’s superlaser was fired, the single blast would reduce the entirety
of the target world to particulate debris and superheated gas, in the space of a few
short seconds.
This was intended to deliver the message that the Galactic Empire was now so vast and so
powerful, that destroying an entire world’s supply of natural resources and valuable territory,
was a small price to pay, to ensure the complete and total subjugation, of galactic society.
At a colossal 120Kms in diameter, the Death Star took the form of a vast, monolithic sphere,
similar in size and structure to a class IV moon.
Running the entirety of the sphere’s equator, a kilometre-wide trench played host to countless
docking bays and massive ion drive housings, and mounted on the station’s northern hemisphere,
a huge concave dish held the eight particle accelerator tributaries needed to form the
superlaser beam.
Comprising 84 separate internal levels, each separated into 257 subsections, large portions
of the Death Star had more in common with planetside cityscapes than anything seen on
a conventional space station, with the station’s 350,000 crew members living and working in
huge ray shielded structures, spread in vast city sprawls across the Death Star’s Surface.
The Superlaser which served as the Death Star’s primary weapon, drew its power directly from
the station’s central hypermatter reactor.
Using an advanced Mygeetan Energy Crystal, recovered by the 501st Legion during the Clone
Wars, the reactor channelled its energy into 64 shafts, which converged internally to generate
the eight particle beams emitted from the weapon’s dish.
Upon reaching a safe distance several kilometres from the station’s surface, these eight
beams again converged, this time creating a beam of pure energy so powerful, that It
would tear the very atoms of the target planet into matter/antimatter pairs, causing a blast
of such intensity, that it would rupture the barrier between normal space and hyperspace.
An attack on the Death Star by a conventional fleet was close to impossible, as the station
was layered with a sheet of military-grade quadanium steel hull plating, which was almost
three kilometres thick and heavily ray shielded.
The Battlestation also boasted a huge arsenal of defensive weaponry, including over 10,000
turbolasers of varying yield, hundreds of proton torpedo batteries and several magnetic
railgun emplacements.
Boarding the station was similarly difficult, as the Death Star carried a standard Stormtrooper
complement of 26,000, as well as 400,000 Support droids, many of which were combat capable.
The singular vulnerability of the Death Star, and ultimately the cause of its destruction,
was a small, two-meter thermal exhaust port on the surface of the station’s equatorial
trench.
This port led directly to the central hypermatter reactor, and though the port was ray shielded,
a properly calibrated proton torpedo could be skilfully aimed to enter the port, igniting
a cataclysmic chain reaction, and completely destroying the Battlestation.
This strategy was successfully employed by the Rebel Alliance during the pivotal Battle
of Yavin, but even while targeting this weakness, the alliance still suffered heavy casualties
before succeeding in their attack.
Though the destruction of the death star was primarily an alliance victory, it also served
as something of a relief to the men and women of the Imperial Navy.
For many years, the majority of naval officials had been irritated by the incredible amounts
of credits and resources being diverted into the design and maintenance of the death star
project, a cost which, if applied differently, could have been used to assemble and commission
over 10,000 Imperial Class Star Destroyers.
In spite of its colossal expense, the Death Star represented an incredible feat of engineering,
not only for the galactic empire, but across the entire field of starship construction.
At the time of its completion, the station was by far the largest spaceworthy vessel
in galactic history, and the superlaser it wielded boasted a longer range, and greater
destructive power than any directed energy weapon previously designed.
In its designed capacity as a weapon of terror and symbol of imperial dominance, the Death
Star succeeded wholeheartedly, and though it’s operational lifespan was short, the
Battlestation fully succeeded, in becoming the very incarnation of the Tarkin Doctrine.