Father Skywalker said:
I guess he could have. But, remember what he told admiral conan antonio motti???
He wasn't impressed with the first original, or the second, death star for that matter too. He viewed the death star as overkill, cheesy, and totally worthless in comparison to the power of the darkside of the Force..... In a new hope, he didn't seem like such a big fan of it.... That was all the idea of tarkin and the emperor.....
Maybe Emperor Darth Vader would have destroyed Alderaan and despayre with the Force Storms.
However, how many planets would they have destroyed if the rebels alliance didn't defeat them???
Vader was not above using technology as a means to an end; he loved the Executor, and was all about being a pilot. Plus, Vader respected Tarkin, and the Tarkin Doctrine relied heavily upon fear-inspiring technology; overpowering, overwhelming, "over-kill" weapons in order to make people think twice before they opposed the Empire. The Death Star was the keystone of the entire Tarkin Doctrine.
If Tarkin was still part of the Empire under Vader's command, it is likely that things like the Death Star would still exist, whether Vader agreed with them entirely or not, they were still useful instruments.
I am unsure if Vader was ever steeped enough in the Dark Side (as there was always good in him, however deep down it was) to be able to conjure a Force Storm.
Father Skywalker said:
If darth vader had never used any of the death stars, the quadrillions of average joes living in his empire would live totally happy and totally unaffected by his rule. the only reason that the empire was so "evil" was because they dissolved the senate and democracy and their/the leader had absolute power, which is not evil in and of itself......
The quadrillions of imperial citizens lived happy lives, only a few billion or so were affected by it, a very tiny and a small percentage of them.......
I'm pretty sure that the destruction of the Jedi Order and the murder of not only most of the Jedi Council, but also the Jedil Younglings, as well as the Seperatist council (which at the time was suing for peace) counts as evil.
And there's even more evidence that the Empire is evil if you look at EU sources (which you are asking for, because you won't accept that the Empire is just evil as it is in the films): Palpatine murdered many officers and political rivals and other elements from the Republic that might oppose him; he also had the planet of Caamas devastated and turned into a poisoned wasteland as he saw the Caamasi as a threat; he had The Eye of Palpatine created to destroy the Jedi Enclave on Belsavis; he allowed Tarkin to land his ship on top of peaceful protesters on the planet Ghorman; he ordered the enslavement of the planet Kashyyyk and the Wookiees who lived there, as well as the murder of surviving Jedi on the planet; the further murder of surviving Jedi by Darth Vader on Kessel; the manipulation and enslavement of the Noghri; the genocide of the Falleen by Darth Vader in order to contain an outbreak of a biological weapon the Empire had been secretly developing on the planet; not to mention the forceful acquisition of resources from many planets; the subjugation of alien species and the replacement of alien governments with Imperial human governments; and the forceful and violent subjugation of any planet that opposed them in order to make an example of them for other star systems. This is all before the Death Star blew up Alderaan.
There's probably a million other atrocities out there that I haven't read about, but the Empire was certainly not "good" by any stretch of the imagination just because not every citizen wasn't brutally murdered by stormtroopers.