How Stuff Works

[Tai]

Excellent write up:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/death-star.htm

[samuelk]

The How Stuff Works office is located about 10 miles from where I live. I want to work for them.

[Tai]

I think that's an excellent ambition. Have you considerd just walking into their office and saying, "Hey, hire me!" ?

[Circuit]

Then you could start a SamuelK section and write about how you work for HowStuffWorks.com! Eventually you could start your own HowSamWorks.com site.

[Medic]

Did anyone else read the 'Improbability of a Trash Compactor on the Death Star'?

It's pretty cool.

[Tai]

I did. Valid points :)

[samuelk]

Then you could start a SamuelK section and write about how you work for HowStuffWorks.com! Eventually you could start your own HowSamWorks.com site.

That would be a very small site.

Did I just go there? Oh, I think I DID! :O

[Tai]

Did anyone else read the 'Improbability of a Trash Compactor on the Death Star'?

It's pretty cool.

I was thinking about this more on the way home last night. I think I can explain away all his objections.....


Government Contracts ;)

[Andri]

Where is the piece about the trash compactor? I want to read it too.

[Tai]

Where is the piece about the trash compactor? I want to read it too.


http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2002/01/10deathstar.html

:thumbup:

[Andri]

Thanks, Tai! I greatly enjoyed reading it. I will check out the one about the lightsaber next. :bg:

[Tai]

Make sure you check out the sections on "Uses around the home" and "More Uses". There's some good ideas in there :)

[Shadowrat]

I see alot of explanations for his implausabilities.

The trash compactor didn't really have trouble compacting the thin metal rod of death star material. Clearly our heroes would have been crushed had the droids not deactivated the compactor.

The worm creature apparently had some lair/passage that it could retreat into. It obviously knew the compaction cycle was about to start, and moved on. Having alot of experience with pet snakes, I can tell you that they don't need much of a space to escape through. And for all we know, the creature could be capable of burrowing through the material of the Death Star itself.

How do we know the compactor ceiling and other walls also did not move? The droids stoped the cycle. We assume that the end of the cycle is killing the heroes, but it may have run on much longer compressing from different angles.

It certainly seems unsanitary to have vents running down into the cesspool of the compactor system. However, all plumbing systems need ventilation. The death star can't simply have a chimeny into space. So they decided to let the sewege vent into the prison. This is an acceptable if not ingeneious design.

I'm sure that unpleasant odors would waft out from time to time, but the station was manned almost entirely by clones. Everyone knows your own waste is not nearly so offensive to you as it is to other. You can't smell your own farts. Perhaps you can't smell your clone's either.

[Kermit]

You can't smell your own farts. Perhaps you can't smell your clone's either.

I think you mean breath... you can't smell your own breath.

Or you haven't been eating where I've been eating...

[Shadowrat]

still, it's a fact that any odors produced by you are more pronounced to other people than yourself. It's newton's 3rd law of organic odors. An odor tends to remain unnoticed until smelled by an outside person. Sure, you can argue that einstein introduced the theory of odor relativity, He who smelt it delt it. This poked alot of holes in newton's work, but current findings in quantum mechanics show that it is the simple act of observation that changes the state of the odor. Under this scenario, newton holds true again since most people choose to ignore their own farts.

[Medic]

So if a man farts in the woods, and there is no one there to smell it, does the fart in fact still exist?

And more importantly, do we have a farting smilie?

[Paladin]

Ok, my 2 cents...

The reason the trash compactor is so handy to the prison is to make disposal of the bodies easier. Also the reason for having a creature in it. The creature and eat the bodies and the resulting poo is almost certainly going to smell less bad than bobbing rotting corpses. Having spent much of my youth playing with a Death Star toy, I also feel qualified to say that the creature is more squid-like than snake-like. It has a single eyestalk which is can use like a periscope, and multiple tendrils which it uses for attack as well as propulsion. The creature obviously has a "doggy door" and is trained to leave when the door is openned, so it would not have been crushed, as Mr. Implausiblity suggests. Maybe he watches his movies with the sound off or is deaf, but it was very clear to me in the movie audio that a door opened, the creature broke off it's attack on Luke, the door closed and then the compaction cycle started. I like Sam's notion that if you are going to vent a garbage disposal somewhere in a closed facility, the prison is the most obvious place to do it.

Although we only see 3 walls of the compactor, it looks pretty likely that the compactor does only have the two moving walls. I am willing to chalk this one up to the fact that the compactor was designed by set designers, in other words... artists, rather than engineers, and Mr. Implausibility should get a life.

The author also blasts the reasoning behind the Empire compacting their trash before ejecting it into space at all. There would be two possible reasons. Number 1, compacting the garbage would allow it to be transported to the station's exterior using smaller passageways. Even as big as the Death Star is, interior space is probably at a premium, and therefore it would be good engineering to make the trash movement system as compact as possible. The second reason is that floating trash in space is a navigational hazard. The Star Destroyers did not eject it's garbage until leaving an area. The Death Star, while mobile, would have remained stationary during it's entire contruction period (which was just completed as the movie began). Ejecting it's garbage in uncompacted would result in lots of little pieces floating around, where they could be run into by those oh-so-fragile TIE fighters. It makes sense, then, that the garbage would be compacted into large chunks...large enough, even, to be targetted and destoryed by the Death Star's turbolasers. The garbage from the little compactors would probably travel to one or more large compactors where it would have been pressed into larger loads for ejection. These large chucks, larger than a starfighter, would have then been ejected and used for gunnery practice. Again, it's practical engineering.

[Shadowrat]

the creature is more squid-like than snake-like

I didn't have the luxury of my own death star when i was a child. Every time i was able to use someone else's death star, the compactor creature was gone. It seems they just naturally can slip away.

I did encounter the chewed up corpse of a compactor monster once. It seems little brothers consider them a delicacy and will ravenously feast upon them (as well as the integrated light sabers of obi-wan, luke, and darth vader)

[Orion]

I'm as much of a starwars geek as the next guy, but come on... why you gotta try and rip apart the movie? have a little suspension of belief, man!

[Medic]

Oh, I honestly didn't mean to rip the movie; in fact, due to the amazing amount of crappy movies I regularly ingest, my belief suspension muscle is rock hard. I just thought it was an interesting theory. And just as interesting were the counterpoints.

And no one answered my fart question.

[Circuit]

I think you guys are thinking too hard to explain a poorly thought out scene in the movie that was there simply to put the heroes in peril. Also, I'd be willing to bet that the author of that article wrote it with his licking muscle firmly placed within his mouth pouch. :)

[jackrabbit]

this is against several of my own personal taboos, but I like you Medic. I wouldn't do this for Q...

http://www.martiancartel.com/img/fart.gifhttp://www.martiancartel.com/img/fart2.gif

And Circuit's right. We're not talking about Orson Welles here. George Lucas wrote Star Wars. The Jar Jar Binks, and "Sand is Rough" guy.

[Medic]

Thank you, Bunny!