Saturday, December 17, 2016

Operating The Death Star Is Scary Expensive


I came across something so odd I never even took it in to consideration before I read this story.
 
Ovo Energy, a British gas and electricity supplier, decided to figure out the daily operating costs of the Death Star. They worked with physicist Stephen Skolnick and Dartmouth mathematics professor Alexander Barnett and broke down every aspect of what would be required to run a military base of this size and the number they came up with is insanely immense. The costs were in English pounds so I converted the numbers to US dollars.
 
It would take $7.8 octillion per day, that is $7,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 every single day. To put it in perspective, there is $70 trillion annually global economic activity so the Death Star would require 100% more in their daily costs than is exchanged on the Earth in a year.


Here are what specifications they used for the size:
Diameter: 75 miles
Equator: 234 miles
Total weight 907.2 trillion tons
 

Population:
General staff: 1,700,000
Imperial military: 343,000
Stormtroopers: 26,000
Total staff: @ 2,100,000
 

Here are some of the line item costs that would have to be taken in to consideration daily or weekly.
Daily electricity costs: $52 billion
Daily food costs: $296,668
Laundry costs per cycle: $232,562
Daily waste & recycle costs: $570148


Additional costs:
Hyperspace jumps: $110,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 each jump
Laser shot: $5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 each shot
Recharging the laser: $10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 each time to recharge

The total number of planets that the Empire rules is never stated in any of the canon storylines but in Wookiepedia it has been stated that the Star Wars galaxy is over 100,000 light years across, 50 million inhabited systems and 69 million colonies. People are going to be paying some series taxes to keep the Death Star up and running and none of this takes in to account the building costs, not just once but twice.

Here is the graphic that Ovo included on their website, here is their link <Original Story>

3 comments:

  1. That's awesome. I never took this into account. It took me years before I even stopped to consider that Luke killed more people on screen than anyone else in the original trilogy. (Assuming that alderaan had about the same population as the Death star)

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  2. Wow. Very cool. Didn't realize there were 1.7 million general staff working on the DS. That's insane. Especially when considering that there were only 26,000 stormtroopers.

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  3. Holy cow. That is some serious business.

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