Starkiller Base, How Could It Work IRL?

[KerbalCorgi]

It'd be a lot cheaper to just coat the planet in nitroglycerin and stick a lighter next it. 

[cantab]

I suppose it depends how much like the movie incarnation you want?

If we take the fundamental idea of drawing power from a star to destroy a distant planet, then there are a few pretty pragmatic ways to do it.

Giant mirrors is my first thought. Build something akin to a Dyson sphere, but designed to reflect and focus the light from the star onto its target. Applying (possibly wrongly) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_length

I estimate that you could focus on a planet-sized target at a distance of a couple of thousand parsecs - which is a pretty big chunk of the way across the galaxy. You would probably be using planet sized mirrors too - the whole affair would make Starkiller Base look TINY. With a whole star's worth of light the target would be destroyed in short order. Of course the catch is light travels at, well, the speed of light.

The next obvious idea is to run solar powered antimatter factories. If you cover a planet in solar arrays it's going to take millenia to make enough antimatter to blow a target planet apart, but if you Dyson sphere the whole star then you can make target planets go boom on a daily basis. Presumably if you have faster-than-light travel you can load your antimatter bombs onto that. The bombs would be several times the size of an Imperial Star Destroyer but smaller than the "Super Star Destroyer" type ships. Again your Dyson sphere is making Star Wars stuff look miniscule.

Either concept also avoids the "one hit blows it up" aspect of the Death Star and Starkiller Base. A realistic Dyson sphere is just a swarm of satellites, albeit perhaps satellites the size of planets. Blow up one mirror or one antimatter factory and it's just a single piece that the weapon will work fine without.

Edited December 31, 2015 by cantab

[GeneralVeers]

Here's my plan for a starkiller weapon. This is top secret, by the way.

Very simply, it's a missile with a narrow, aerodynamic, and very well-heat-shielded hull, carrying a hefty nuclear-scale warhead. Probably in the range of gigatons, at a guess. The missile penetrates into the core of the star and detonates. The blast wave within the star increases the pressure in the fusion zone surrounding the helium core. Greater pressure means faster fusion. This will produce a temporary fusion runaway, which in itself would likely be extremely deadly to any life forms in the system. But the blast wave from the missile will also shove the mass of the star outwards, creating a void in its core.

Then the star collapses back in.

End result: a second fusion runaway. Hopefully a much bigger one. And if either pressure wave is enough to get the star's core up to the fusion point for helium........boom. Supernova.

No, I don't have any idea if it will actually work.

 

[insert_name]

according to wookiepedia, it just uses the star as a jump start to harness dark energy to fire a weapon through another dimension. I suppose if you were the only one who could harness dark energy, and convert it into matter you could just buy the universe

[Apexazimuth]

I have to throw the whole starkiller base into fantasy-suspension-of-disbelief land in order to enjoy the movie.  There are countless ways that the whole project is just silly and shouldn't even exist.

How did construction on this project continue without being identified and stopped?  In the time it would take to build such a weapon, you could have used your hyperspace windows and big rocks to utterly obliterate all enemies anyway.  IF You could build the base fast enough that it wouldn't be stopped, then you have an army of von neuman probes that may as well be used as a weapon themselves.. Just tell them that all the other planets are raw materials.

The movie's fun to watch, but kinda silly to try and think of as practical or realistic.

[GeneralVeers]

The real problem is, after the Death Star first appeared on the silver screen in 1977, every other superweapon in sci-fi existence, before or since, was relegated to that second-best "gee, that's kinda lame" category. Even the second Death Star in Return Of The Jedi just didn't have the same snazz about it. And since then, Star Wars canon has been running the superweapon trope into the ground--the Sun Crusher, the Tarkin, the Darksaber, the Mass Shadow Generator, Centerpoint Station, the World Devastators, the Shawken Device. Just on and on and on and on.

Let it die, sci-fi writers. The Death Star is the true Ultimate Weapon. It always will be. And you will never be able to top it.

[PB666]

34 minutes ago, WedgeAntilles said:

The real problem is, after the Death Star first appeared on the silver screen in 1977, every other superweapon in sci-fi existence, before or since, was relegated to that second-best "gee, that's kinda lame" category. Even the second Death Star in Return Of The Jedi just didn't have the same snazz about it. And since then, Star Wars canon has been running the superweapon trope into the ground--the Sun Crusher, the Tarkin, the Darksaber, the Mass Shadow Generator, Centerpoint Station, the World Devastators, the Shawken Device. Just on and on and on and on.

Let it die, sci-fi writers. The Death Star is the true Ultimate Weapon. It always will be. And you will never be able to top it.

The death black hole. hmmmm, death pulsar, death inflationary quantum singularity, you never know what hit you. 

My question is why in a science forum in a game without weapons are all the noobs here suddenly interested in fantasy superweapons.......... kiddos, guess what we have no targets, unless you want to blast ice volcanos on enceladas. 

Edited December 31, 2015 by PB666

[fredinno]

2 hours ago, PB666 said:

The death black hole. hmmmm, death pulsar, death inflationary quantum singularity, you never know what hit you. 

My question is why in a science forum in a game without weapons are all the noobs here suddenly interested in fantasy superweapons.......... kiddos, guess what we have no targets, unless you want to blast ice volcanos on enceladas. 

I would like a nuclear weapon or maybe just a bomb, so I can create ICBMs- like IRL.

[kmMango]

Practical? No. Possible? Maybe.

I understood it as basically a giant solar flare cannon. It sucks in the star's plasma, presumably with a colossal gravitational distortion, confines it by using the planet's core as a giant magnet, compresses it to the point of fusion, and uses the energy to fire gigantic plasma bolts through "hyperspace" at the target.

Because it uses existing resources as a power source, i.e. stars, it might actually be more efficient per shot than the Death Star. I'd imagine once it destroys a planet, they jump to the system they just destroyed and siphon off its star for the next shot. Probably loaded with factories to mine the planetary remnants for resources to build more ships. At least, that's my theory.

[SSgt Baloo]

If you pitch a big enough rock at something fast enough, you can break anything.

Visual aid: https://youtu.be/PENT_hnyO-o

Edited January 11, 2016 by SSgt Baloo