Economics students believe they have figured out how much it would cost to build the Death Star. And it’s no wonder the Emperor appears haggard.
Members of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania believe Darth Vader’s boss would have to shell out a whopping $8,100,000,000,000,000. Or roughly 13,000 times the world's gross domestic product (GDP) to build one today.
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:00amSubject:
Death Star for $8,100,000,000,000,000
I hope American tax dollars helped to figure that out.
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Manegarm Title: European Imperialist Good Guy
Posts: 1,964 Registered: 2003-8-11 10:01:52
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:00amSubject:
Death Star for $8,100,000,000,000,000
We should totally take a loan and build one!
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Date Posted:1/1/00 12:00amSubject:
Death Star for $8,100,000,000,000,000
That does look expensive. But when you control a lot of different planets, each with varying degrees of wealth and construction capabilities, it's probably not that much overall. Not that he really dealt with it, but I wonder what kind of budget the Emperor had to work with. And he probably used a lot of slave labor, along with those contractors that got killed alongside the Stormtroopers.
Date Posted:1/1/00 12:00amSubject:
Death Star for $8,100,000,000,000,000
"Building one today" at our tech level is foolish.
A space empire with more advanced tech would be using things they consider "2nd and third gen commodity" tech as construction methods and componentry. Those are things we currently consider "state of the art", with an elevated price tag to match.
The whole point of building a terror weapon in any universe is that, compared to the cost of standard policing, it is CHEAPER and less human-resource intensive.
So at an advanced tech level, it probably cost the GDP/output of just a few systems to build. Otherwise, they'd simply build an assload more ships with the money.
Even if the problem was finding enough loyal personnel... that's also moot.
Star Wars showed a marked lack of understanding of econ in many ways, in that the damned station itself had a massive population of people. That's pretty damned inefficient, if the problem wasn't money, but rather that the Empire couldn't find enough people to man its machinery. They could have just used that staff to man hundreds of new star destroyers.
So no matter how you look at it, the station itself couldn't have cost TOO much. It doesn't make sense.
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