Designing the Death Star

[nancylebov]

At this point, I like to think the single point of failure (possibly multiple single points of failure) was put in by utilitarian (it's worthwhile for the few to die for the many) engineer-architects, possibly enslaved or at least trapped into their work.

These single points of failure were sold to their pointy-haired bosses as a way of saving money by not having redundancy and safety measures.

Hubris could also be involved-- a belief that the other side isn't able to get our blueprints and/or is too stupid to understand them.

And speaking of time and change and hubris.... what would war and diplomacy look like if keeping secrets were effectively impossible?

Comments

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

I'd already posted my answer on the Overthink site; basically the D.S. design started from a much simpler design fractal that the original designer(s) sold the Empire as a simple base design that could be expanded just about infinitely, and as proof, (WHAM!) they designed a whole space station out of it. But on that economy of scale, somebody somewhere resorted to the old cut & paste technique to save time and a flaw crept in that made it all the way into the final build. And this flaw was what the Rebellion was looking for, whether they knew it existed or not. That led to Princess Leia's downloading the blueprints into R2D2 and so on.

Thank you for pointing me to this site; it's been an incredible source of geek giggles.