Originally posted by: zombie84
The EU can come up with whatever contrived explanation it wants but the fact is that by the films themselves, nothing about either Death Star construction makes any sense. ... So how long has this thing been under construction for? Since the ten year period when Palpatine came into office? We don't know. Then its complete twenty years later
The EU can come up with whatever contrived explanation it wants but the fact is that by the films themselves, nothing about either Death Star construction makes any sense. ... So how long has this thing been under construction for? Since the ten year period when Palpatine came into office? We don't know. Then its complete twenty years later
If you're just going by the movies themselves -- Episode III wasn't a film, it was a digital video -- then the "thing" wasn't completed 20 years later. The "thing" was abandoned and replaced with something else that had a different shape and a larger superlaser. The only way the RotS thing could be the Death Star is if they added another shell around the extant structure to make it oblate and make the superlaser dish larger, or if they tore most of it down and rebuilt it. Personally, I think the RotS battlestation was a prototype -- it was either spirited away to the Maw like the EU says, or it was tested to destruction long before the real DS project began.
I mean, realistically, you don't build just one of these things, put a Grand Moff aboard, and send it out to destroy things. You have to prototype and test the power systems, the propulsion systems, the computers, all kinds of stuff that's being done on a scale the Galactic culture had probably never done before. You have a test article that you're constantly rebuilding and stressing to its design tolerances, maybe for decades as mission creep and bureaucratic torpor sets in, then you mothball it and build the real thing.