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| Why, it's a moon-sized White Elephant! |
Have you ever worked at a megacorporation?
Or better yet, for government?
If you’ve worked on a megaproject, you know how often things go wrong, how much compromise is involved, and how easy it is for something to be overlooked.
Because something always is.
Take America's Zumwalt class destroyers: a multi-billion dollar fiasco for the United States Navy that fired $800,000 a pop shells.
The HE177, the LaGG-3, the A7V, and the Lockheed XFV-1 Salmon?
Failures every one.
History is littered with weapons and vehicles that perform badly, posing an even greater danger to their operators than the enemy. Ships so top heavy they immediately capsize (lookin' at you, Vasa), tanks so heavy they sink into the ground and can’t cross a bridge or use a road, sonic weapons that require targets to remain stationary for several minutes, ammo magazines placed below the ship’s chimney (the HMS Hood, possibly an inspiration for the Death Star flaw), constantly jamming gun magazines, and much worse have all been inflicted upon unfortunate servicemen.
The original Panama Canal project, designed by Ferdinand de Lesseps (the same man who built the Suez Canal), ended in fiasco, bankruptcy and mass death from disease. Some 800,000 French citizens lost their savings when the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique de Panama folded, almost bringing down the French government.
The bottom line? Lesseps original idea of building the canal, without locks, was wrong headed and never going to work.
How's that for a mega-project gone wrong?
Even worse, the USSR's White Sea-Baltic Canal was so badly managed it resulted in the deaths of 25,000+ workers.
How about the more recent Bataan nuclear power plant, built for $2.3 billion (and never completed, thankfully) in an earthquake-prone zone, near a volcano? I mean, seriously?
How about Chernobyl?
And it's not just in the realm of hardware: software absurdities abound. Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 has some delicious examples:
"On June 4, 1996, scientists hoping to research Earth's magnetosphere cheered jubilantly as Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency soared into the sky with scientific instruments they had built. Thirty-seven seconds later, their smiles vanished as the rocket exploded in a fireworks display costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
The cause was found to be buggy software manipulating a number that was too large to fit into the 16 bits allocated for it.
Two years later, NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter accidentally entered the Red Planet's atmosphere and disintegrated because two different parts of the software used different units for force, causing a 445% error in the rocket-engine thrust control.... their Mariner 1 mission to Venus exploded after launch from Cape Canaveral on July 22, 192, after the flight-control software was foiled by an incorrect punctuation mark."
Even better, a missing hyphen caused the Russian Phobos 1 probe to issue an 'end-of-mission' command while en route to Mars, resulting in it shutting down.
You read that right: a missing hyphen took out a multi-million dollar interplanetary probe designed by some of the smartest people on the planet.
It happens.
Tiny oversights can lead to catastrophic consequences.
Building a space station the size of a small moon... now that is a project of such mammoth complexity, it's practically inevitable that something crucial would be overlooked. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Honestly, it's amazing the Death Star worked at all.
The only down side: the Rebellion managed to analyze the flaw a little too easily, and the Imperials confirmed it as a risk during the Rebel attack. If it was that easy to discover the flaw, the Imperials would already know. Unless hubris and overconfidence prevented them for looking for that kind of flaw at all… which is actually... also kind of plausible.
If the Empire had HACMS (high-assurance cyber military systems), they'd have spotted major flaws, whether deliberately placed or accidental. As Star Wars droids don't seem to be especially bright, I doubt this was a thing.
Making the Death Star flaw an act of deliberate sabotage by a disgruntled anti-Imperial designer is just so much less fun it’s not funny.
I like my doomsday devices big and dumb.
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