Death Star Designer Game
Star Wars Ship Creator, Colin Cantwell, has been under the radar for much of his recent life until now. During his amazing career, he worked with George Lucas on designing the X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Y-Wing, Death Star, Millennium Falcon, and Star Destroyer for the very first “Star Wars” movie, “A New Hope”.
Pre-Disney-Canon answer! For Disney canon, see Adamant's answer.' Why would something so grand contain such a fatal flaw?' Other than 'how else would ANH work' reason, you mean?Because whoever designed it didn't realize it was a fatal flaw. If you were a software developer (or designer) you'd know that it's impossible to design bugless software of any complexity. A Space Shuttle was destroyed on the account of a piece of foam.
Mars-bound lander was lost due to a metric-imperial unit conversion bug. And so on and so forth.In-universe, it was retconned to be not an uncommon design flaw,. To quote from:In another example, Ice Station Beta was destroyed by Kyle Katarn when he planted sequencer charges in thermal exhaust ports throughout the facility.' Would the Rebel Alliance had even attempted the mission if Leia didn't think Luke was the one?' Leia did NOT think Luke was 'the one'.
Or anything beyond a capable pilot. He was just another X-Wing pilot, not a designated shooter.He didn't 'have the force' up until he took that shot.
Leia had no reason to know he had Jedi abilities. Having any sort of exhaust ports on a space station would be a little on the stupid side to begin with. For one, you'd need a constant resupply of whatever is being dumped into space as exhaust and you'd be adding another acceleration vector to account for in navigation, and for two, with a large spherical station, you could easily take advantage of the great ratio of surface area to volume and turn portions of the surface into a huge radiator/heat sink and let the heat bleed off pretty rapidly into the vast coldness of space.–Apr 29 '11 at 0:24. Disney Canon: Absolutely notThe exhaust port flaw was included by Galen Erso, one of the designers of the Death Star, as a means of deliberately sabotaging the Empire:“My colleagues,” Galen said, “many of them, have fooled themselves intothinking they are creating something so terrible and powerful it willnever be used. But they’re wrong.
Death Star Designer Game Play
No weapon has ever been left on theshelf. And the day is coming soon when it will be unleashed.”His head turned from the recorder as if what he said next, more thananything, he feared to say aloud.“I’ve placed a flaw deep within the system. I do not believe that the exhaust port was really a design flaw. The path to the port was heavily guarded by laser towers and the Death Star was able to launch fighters to defend itself.I think the real flaw was that the Death Star only launched three fighters. It should have launched enough fighters to where anyone trying to run the trench would be immediately under such an intense barrage of laser fire that they'd have to take evasive maneuver out of the trench to survive or die like most of them did in the movie.In the end it was the over confidence of the commanders of the Death Star that lead to its destruction, not the existence of some small reactor exhaust port.
In the Star Wars novel, the explanation is given that the port would be useless if it were to be particle-shielded; however, it is ray-shielded. Obviously someone knew there may be a problem if that were to be targeted, and gave it the best protection possible while still allowing the port to do its job.There is still a question; this is an auxiliary exhaust port 'right below the main port'. Why not target the main port? The main port would be bigger, right? Maybe the main port can be closed, or particle-shielded, to protect it from attack, and the station (or that part of it) could rely on the auxiliary port. I think it was clearly a design flaw - the 2nd Death Start engineered a way around it (I believe it used multiple, smaller exhaust vents, which lacked the direct path to the reactor core) and it allowed a single fighter to destroy millions of people and uncounted trillions in resources for the cost of a proton torpedo (and a handful of fighters).
I'd call that a design flaw.It likely wouldn't have been such a big problem if the Empire had been smarter - the Death Star should have had screening elements to deal with smaller ships. The only reason they didn't have them is that they rushed to Yavin as soon as they confirmed it was the base, hoping to reach it before the rebels could evacuate or summon fleet elements.
From a purely technical standpoint, it was clearly a design flaw in that it went STRAIGHT DOWN. A simple P-trap (like the one under your sink) near the exit would have been enough to capture any incoming debris (including photon torpedos) near the surface of the Death Star where they would explode. They'd do damage there of course, but not allow a straight shot to the reactor core.Or even multiple of these. Or having the vent make many turns or angles on its way up. Any of a number of simple engineering solutions would overcome this issue.