How much gravity would the Deathstar’s mass provide? I feel like it would be very small considering it has no real massive central solid or liquid core.
The gravity is negligible. The official sizes of the Death Stars have been 120 - 900 km in diameter according to rebel scale. For comparison, Earths moon is ≈35000 km in Idiameter, and its gravity is 1/6 of earth’s. On top of that, the Death Stars are mostly hallow, being a metal framework, instead of solid rock.
I know we'd all like some scientific actualisation of Star Wars but I mean:
They made noise in space 'cause that's fun.
There was always gravity on pretty much any ship.
I don't really recall any spacewalks so we don't see any instance of 'no gravity'
There's hyperspace since lightyears is a bit of a long time.
Stormtroopers seem very scientifically and inefficiently accurate
At this point I think the Star Wars movies (the oldies) pretty much ignored a fair bit of the science.
But if it was a death star literally put there in our universe, I think there would be a bit of structural considerations for gravity, but not huge due to it being quite hollow. Gravity is pretty strong when the sphere is entirely comprised of dense rock and no air. A mostly hollow sphere of air where air is something close to 1/1000 that of rock (yes, used the density of water lol) is not going to get much of a rollicking from gravity.
Edit: an interesting 'expose' on the moon landings claim one thing: why were the photos so relatively boring? Because they were real and that's all they could get for all the limited resources they had at the time.
One of my gripes with star wars is a pilot can fly any ship from any faction without prior flight experience on that ship. They just go in flip some switches, push some buttons then jumps into the pilot seat and off they go.
That's one of the many things Andor gets right, at least with that shuttle they steal near the start of the series. Cassian basically chews his crew out for planning to just jump into an unfamiliar ship and wing it.
My headcannon for this is that spaceships in that universe are to those people what cars are to us. If you know the basics of driving a car, you can drive most cars, though the bigger ships might get more complicated (I've never seen one of our heroes try to back up a star destroyer into a starbase to help with their buddy's move.)
There's plenty of spacewalks in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. They don't have gravity there and instead have to use thrusters or magnetized boots.
Thanks, I believe I was being lazy to not want to deal with averaging the density of various rocks, but your suggestion about the density of soil is a good one.
And if the ship got damaged where the nose started falling (downward?) the gravity would shift towards the nose so that everyone went sliding across the floor.
Star Wars ships don't orbit. They simply hang in the sky, in much the same way that bricks don't. In Star Trek ships orbit to save on fuel costs while parked near a planet. But in Star Wars antigravity is so cheap that it's more efficient to be stationary relative to the planet's surface. Which means no microgravity.
This is just my head canon, but the noise actually comes from speakers on board the ship /in the cockpit, to help give the pilot an audio cue as to where hazards are around them.
This is just my head canon, but the noise actually comes from speakers on board the ship /in the cockpit
I'm pretty sure this was explicitly addressed in at least one of the pre-Disney novels, and was somewhat entrenched with a part of the fanbase afterward.
Spoilsport! But like you say this is fiction, and entertainment, it is a fantasy world! :)
But yeah, the last one bugs me in soo many films and tv shows. They have super advanced AI robots tech, they can regrow a hand in a day, no more disease and live 257, transport living moving organisations across great distances, have developed telepaths and telekinetics, and can fold space-time, but are fucked if they can shoot straighter than a drunk badger with one 'arm', balancing on a log going down a rapids!
Yeah, the fact that we already have the technology to make a gun that handles the aiming for you... and we aren't even shooting light, which would be even easier to auto aim. Fights should be super short and boring, one shot, one kill... 20 shots, 20 kills. There would be no action heroes because very few people would ever live through more than a handful of fights. The heroes would be the beurocrats, so we'd have to spend alot more time watching them.
I think the animated shows had a few more space realistic moments like space walk repairs and such.
Best battle scene in the whole series from clever tactics PoV IMO was Anakin deploying his artillery into a planetary ring system and then using his capital ship to bait Greivous into a pin between the ring mounted tanks and the capital ship.
Best battle overall is obviously the siege of Mandalore just for the absolute knockdown drag out chaos in the middle of a domed city megastructure that's probably meant to be a seed for an eventual ecumenopolis.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like the floors on the surface are oriented radially, so mostly most floors are oriented north, while the outer floors are oriented up.
Besides technical diagrams from supplementary stuff, the Falcon lands in a docking bay that's oriented towards the first option. There could be some kind of transition point to the second option, but we don't see it and it'd be really awkward.
The Millenium Falcon landed in a bay that was oriented with the N/S axis of the station, but was accessed on the equator. So the interior of the station has a gravity well with "up" pointing to one of the polls.
The surface cannons, surface towers, and trench defenses were all radially oriented with "up" pointing out into space, like you'd expect on a moon.
This also suggests the station was littered with gravitational dead spots and areas where you'd have to carefully transition from one gravity well orientation to another. No wonder everyone is wearing a helmet.
One of the reasons Star Wars gets called space fantasy is that these objectively cool scenes to shoot simply never make it into the movies because no one even thought of these details in the first place.
Imagine how cool a lightsaber duel would be in these gravity transitional areas, or zero g for that matter! Instead we just got one scene in A New Hope where they're in the gun turrets fighting off TIES and it's a pretty subtle detail.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
I love holding this fantasy nonsense up to scrutiny. I just falls apart in the most humorous way possible.
For instance, here's a checklist for technology mastery in a galaxy far, far away:
[x] Artificial gravity
[x] Practical FTL travel
[x] Practical interstellar navigation
[x] Energy weapons capable of destroying things at _any_ scale
[x] Energy shielding
[x] Laser. Swords.
[x] High energy physics in general
[x] Self-aware artificial Intelligence
[x] Multicultural society spanning many worlds
[x] Psychic powers, telekinesis
[x] Pocket-sized SCUBA gear
[ ] Materials capable of resisting laser swords
[ ] Functional galactic government
[ ] Counter-intelligence for said government
[ ] Basic spycraft for said government
[ ] AI that's good at lie detection
[ ] Spaceborne capital ship battles, asymmetric warfare
[ ] Large space-stations without critical weak points
Probably A. It would likely have used artificial gravity just like any starship. Star-Trek has it built into the deck plates but I dunno how Star Wars does it. Artificial gravity can then be dialed in to compensate for the natural gravity of the structure. Which is probably less than you'd think. Without normal gravity effects, the internal air and water pressure will be mostly uniform across the ship instead of denser towards the core.
Same with the matter making up the structure. It'll largely be hollow and filled with air, so much lower natural gravity than an actual moon of the same size. According to official sources (referenced here: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92401/is-the-death-star-s-gravitational-force-strong-enough-to-hold-an-atmosphere) it's between 120 & 160 km radius, for a probable gravity of ~0.04g. That's not quite microgravity, but still far too low to be walking around in. For comparison Lunar gravity is ~0.166g.
Assuming the mass is evenly distributed the mass above you doesn't contribute any additional gravitational force. The mass above you can be described as a hollow sphere. Inside such a sphere all gravitational components cancel out. So its just important that less mass is below you
B) if their antigrav is like 2001 a space Odyssey. A) if they're using local gravity (eg built in the gravitational orbit of something).
So depends where it was built.
Either way miniaturization is what they really need to focus their efforts on. Hell, they'd save a lot of space if it were an unmanned drone. Which is also true of Elon Musks schemes to get to Mars.
Judging by their ships, they have gravity generators which are small enough and have a small enough ratio of energy consumption to energy generation to be used in something like the Millenium Falcon.
Which would mean that from an Engineering point of view the option on the left would be perfectly feasible.
On the other hand it does make some sense to structure a combat vehicle as an onion with more mission critical sections inside were they are better protected and less important ones on the outside - you easilly have armour in between levels in that setup whilst in the setup on the left you would need to explicitly add rings of armor sectioning your corridors to achieve the same.
That said, in the Star Wars films we can see that the ship hangars with access to space have a "side" open to space and the "floor" side perpendicular to the radius line of the Death Star, which is consistent with the left side option and inconsistent with the right side one (where the opening to space would be on the top).
Judging by their ships, they have gravity generators which are small enough and have a small enough ratio of energy consumption to energy generation to be used in something like the Millenium Falcon.
Indeed and it’s quite clear that the Falcon has two gravity planes perpendicular to each other: 1. the plane that supports everyone on the main deck (cockpit, crew lounge, etc.) and 2. the gun battery gravity plane at 90 degrees. This is easiest to see in A New Hope during the TIE Fighter battle in the escape from the Death Star. Han and Luke are sitting back-to-back, separated by a short corridor that sits perpendicular to the main deck. I don’t think most people notice this because it’s not obvious.
to answer this question, ordinarily, i would just reach for the nearest sci-fi game and tell you how they implemented it, but the only game that comes to mind is Space Engineers and that game has both of these