Simplest answer.
The Death Star was put together with incomplete plans. A lot of it was jury rigged. The bosses didn’t care about anything except the Big Gun and the hangars for the TIE fighters. There are dozens of safety hazards throughout the damn thing. You never see a single safety rail, or a ‘No Smoking’ sign, or a sign pointing to the escape pods.
There was probably some old Republic mandate for a trash compactor on any vessel of such and such specs. It was easier to shove the thing in than to waste time fighting the bureaucracy.
This the plausible deniability I needed
I can’t remember the title or author, but there was a fun little story about the first beer blast in space.
Some billionaire’s pet project is a couple of hundred kilos underweight for the scheduled launch. Instead of recalibrating, the ground crew loads the container with beer and other contraband.
Wasn’t the designer of the death star force to work on it against his will and purposefully put in design flaws as a secret protest? It would make sense that he’d put in all kinds of nonsense to make it as dangerous and impractical to operate as he could get away with.
It was probably built by the lowest bidder too.
In the books it was literally built by slave labor… so yes.
There’s that, but get real.
The Death Star was bigger than the Island of Manhattan. You really think that one guy was designing every single corridor and compartment? Like I said, the ‘designer’ was working on the Big Gun, the hangar decks, the control rooms, and the engines. Things like life support, crew quarters, mess halls would be left to the sub-contractors.
I’d like to imagine a ‘Hitchhikers’ crossover where someone sneaks in an entire youth hostel into the plans…
Or a coffee shop that exclusively features Vogon poetry
If you want to go down that road, you could write a version where the Death Ray was powered by Vogon poetry.
Like, it’s actually just a big speaker and the rest of the station is the amplifier (and some soundproofing, so you don’t kill your own people).
True, I’m sure there was a team, but as a lead designer he could try and poison other parts of the design too, like “you can’t put guard rails anywhere, it will interfere with photon flux-a-ma-bob flow and the whole things would explode” and nobody was smart enough to challenge him.
If you really, really want to go full meta, try this.
The Lead Designer [let’s call him Jon] was a big fan of a fantasy franchine that featured all kinds of daring escapes from the bad guys castles.
Jon decides to incorporate stuff from ‘Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers*’ into the design of the Death Star. And if anyone does point out that Corridor B-187 looks a lot like the Viper’s Palace of Horror, Jon can just say that the show was surprisingly advanced for it’s time.
*Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers is an actual book by Harry Harrison, author of ‘Bill,the Galactic Hero’
I mean, there’s an assumption that the trash disposal only takes normal waste. This is attached to the detention block. They need something that can destroy bodies of expired prisoners without a fuss.
The odd crushing mechanism I’m putting down to narrative convenience, because, you know, it’s a fucking story not a documentary
The weird snake monster is for disposing of the bodies though and it must not ever squish skinnier than that.
I always assumed there were some drainage holes or something that the monster uses to avoid being squished. Maybe it comes and goes to the area behind the walls where the mechanical stuff is
Right? It lets Luke go as soon as we hear the first big metallic creak.
Ejecting waste in low planetary orbit should have been SOP to ensure it’s burned up on atmospheric re-entry. Leaving it in space as the Star Destroyer did is the most hazardous.
“Ejecting” being the operative word. The waste would need significant ∆V compared to the space station in order to actually fall instead of stay at a similar orbit and create a hazard.
Also, considering it could travel between systems, it couldn’t always rely on a planetary atmosphere to dump its waste on.
It would be characteristically Empire to eject the waste in a geosynchronous orbit so it stays there for years and years, as a “fuck you” to the planet below.
Hmm, it’s not a big deal for the Star Destroyer to just eject the waste… they can just fly away from it after. But the Death Star is the size of a moon… if they just ejected waste the same way, it would end up orbiting the station… in a few months you’d have a cloud of trash around it.
Maybe they compact trash so that it can be more easily shipped out? Or maybe they have some kind of launching system that fires compacted trash out fast enough to escape the Death Star’s gravity?
They’d have to eject it with sufficient speed to be over whatever escape velocity is for the station. I’m guessing it’s not that high. Sure, it’s the size of a moon, but its density would be far lower. It’s hollow, more like a coarse foam.
Depends on whose mass estimates you like… it might have a core of high density material in the reactor.
If not you’re probably right though, escape velocity would be pretty low.
Who’s to say that the compactor room is the final step in the garbage disposal process? Perhaps the garbage is squashed into huge living room sized squares in the initial compactor unit, then those squares are dropped into a secondary unit for further processing.
