Revenge of the Sith

Finals for med school are finally done (!), so went with R. and J. to see Star Wars -- nothing really to write home about, but the post-facta commentary on Slashdot is quite funny:

You gotta realize, that even by Empire standards, the Death Star is unimaginably huge. It would be a titanic feat of engineering to build it. Consider: the Earth has a huge amount of iron in it... if the Death Star were made out of iron, it would require stripping away like a SIXTH of the Earth's ENTIRE MASS to build it. (those numbers are, admittedly, pulled out of thin air and are guesses, but I think they're in the right size range).

Now, they'd probably go get asteroids and use those, and they'd probably have an enormous assembly fleet, but it would still be an unbelievable amount of work. Doing it in just 20 years would strain even a Galactic Empire. And having the skeleton built is about 0.01% of the whole job. Consider houses... they'll have the frame up in a couple days, but it still takes six months to build. Compare that to the enormous internal volume of a Death Star versus its relatively small surface area.

The fact that they had a second largely built in just a few more years strikes me as far less believable than the long timeframe to do the first. They would almost have to have started it halfway through the first project.

Rome wasn't built in a day, and I very much doubt the Death Star was built in a decade.

Anyway, two things worth checking out are the l33t-speak SW trailer (shown above), and a well-written blog by Darth Vader, which *has* to be one of the best fan-fics I've read in quite a long time.