The ultimate manifestation of the Empire’s overwhelming belief in strength through fear, the Death Star is everything insidious and evil about the Imperial engine in Star Wars—as well as its inevitable downfall. But while the story of stopping the Death Star is well trod at this point, the story of just how it was built in the first place is much more complicated.
It’s not just complex because the Death Star’s construction took place over the course of decades, but because of that time frame, there requires a reckoning that the Death Star was not a strictly Imperial project. Born from designs engineered by the Geonosians, approved by the a top cadre of Republic military officials, and ultimately put into place by their transformation into the Death Star, the battle station is less of a manifestation of one specific evil—although there’s a case to be made that Palpatine’s guiding hand across all theses factions as Darth Sidious makes the Death Star an extension of his own malice—and more of a broader rot.
That, in a galaxy swept in the cycle of increasing interstellar conflict, the need for further power, and further atrocities to maintain that power, would inevitably manifest in a superweapon capable of destroying worlds in the blink of an instant. The Death Star was always going to happen, in some way: it was just a question of who got there first.
The Plans
Although ideas of planetary-scaled superweapons had existed in the history of the galaxy for thousands of years, the idea for the battle station that would become the first Death Star came from the minds of the Geonosian peoples. Lead by by the weaponsmiths of the Geonosian Archduke, Poggle the Lesser, the design for the “Ultimate Weapon,” as it was simply known, was presented to Count Dooku and the nascent Separatist confederacy at the first battle of what would become the Clone War. Taken away by Dooku for safekeeping, the designs found their way to Dooku’s Sith Master, the disguised Chancellor Palpatine; the confederacy had financial powerhouses in allies to back the project, from the Techno Union to the Trade Federation, but the Geonosian’s designs were unfinalized by the time of the outbreak of the war.
Palpatine would keep the weapon plans secret for almost a year after the war began, eventually revealing the plans to a cadre of Republic advisors shortly after the second Battle of Geonosis in 21 BBY. Convincing these officials that the plans had emerged shortly after that battle—and after the Republic’s own special weapon development teams had failed to design several of their own large-scale superweapons in an attempt to find a swift and decisive end to the conflict—and were evidence of the Separatist’s own project to construct a planet-killer, Palpatine successfully petitioned that the Republic use the plans to build their own first.
Development of the battle station began in the utmost secrecy: the Jedi Order, although commanders of the Republic’s armed forces, were kept out of meetings discussing the logistical and funding hurdles necessary for a creation of its scale. In time, the Republic gathered select senators, representatives of massive shipyard worlds like Corellia and Kuat, as well as top researchers and military officers (including a young Orson Krennic, a Lieutenant Commander at the time), preparing to lay out construction in the orbit above Geonosis, now firmly under Republic occupation.
Republic Construction…
Increased funding driven by Senate support of the war effort allowed early construction of the battle station to begin hastily. As the asteroids around Geonosis were mined for raw material, droid factories occupied after the battles to secure Geonosis were put to task refining the materials needed for early phases of construction. While flotillas of ships carried materials around the Geonosian system, and limited construction was provided by sentient-operated machinery, most of the initial phase of construction was automated. Less than a year into construction, the battle station’s basic superstructure had been completed, moving on to the construction of an equator band and further support bands to lay the ground work for the construction of the station’s hull.
That next phase came with a grim realization however: in order to continue building the station at any sort of speed to outpace the Separatists’ own potential rival construction (even though one ultimately never existed), the Republic needed sentient labor. Although initial plans to petition the Kaminoans for a cloned workforce fell through, Krennic managed to surreptitiously negotiate a deal with the detained Poggle the Lesser: in exchange for safety and Republic cooperation, Lesser would task the Geonosian people with helping construct the station, knowing that hives of worker drones would tear each other apart without a project to be focused on.
... continue reading