Timeline for How large were the Deathstar plans, in GB?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 28, 2016 at 21:33 | comment | added | user15742 | @meneldal Archive houses often operate on last decade's tech. | |
| Dec 28, 2016 at 21:29 | comment | added | user15742 | @TheIronCheek I'm in content production. We haven't produced tapes of any kind in over a decade, yet I still field calls from customers wanting to order the "tapes". Jargon often hangs around long after it is useful and eventually even changes meaning. In this case, "tape" means "a data medium". | |
| Dec 23, 2016 at 6:14 | comment | added | RichS | Ah, the Death Star plans are just a bunch of black and white gif files. That's exactly what they look like in the original movie. | |
| Dec 20, 2016 at 16:36 | comment | added | Joe L. | Construction plans also avoid redundancy by having one set of drawings that cover many identical floors or sections. You don't have to literally have a separate plan for every square inch of a building. | |
| Dec 20, 2016 at 3:59 | comment | added | meneldal | One other issue is it fits inside R2 in something which is hardly bigger than a random usb drive. So why do they need to store it in what looks like a 5.5" hard drive if it fits in something almost 1/100th of the volume? | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 23:50 | comment | added | Aify | But more importantly - was it a zipped file? | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 20:04 | comment | added | Tim | @Valorum - right, and I said 100Mb. Not sure what the volume of St Pauls is, but remember that the Death Star is 120km in diameter, hence my figures. | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 19:58 | comment | added | Valorum | @tim - The plans for St Paul's Cathedral ran to around 2-3000 drawings of various complexity. Using today's technology you could render those (or even scan them) in a few tens of megabytes; stpauls.co.uk/history-collections/the-collections/… | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 19:29 | comment | added | Tim | @Valorum - what, you mean like the plans consist of a 120km-diameter sphere, and that's all? And maybe an arrow pointing to a spot with a sign saying "mega death weapon goes hear" in crayon? | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 19:24 | comment | added | Valorum | @Tim - For all we know, the plans are a cut/paste job that only takes up a few MB and they've left it to the construction teams to fill in the blanks. That's why it's only barely operational after that many years of building it. | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 19:21 | comment | added | Tim | @Valorum - agreed. Say it was autocad, and a large building with volume of 1,000,000 cubic metres needed 100Mb file. And say you could fit 1,728,000,000 such buildings into the death star. Then you'd need about 17.28 petabytes for the file. These are rough calculations. It depends how detailed the plans were. | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 19:10 | answer | added | Valorum | timeline score: 10 | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 19:00 | history | reopened |
Valorum Jason Baker Buzz Null♦ |
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| Dec 19, 2016 at 18:22 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Dec 19, 2016 at 19:00 | |||||
| Dec 19, 2016 at 18:08 | comment | added | Valorum | This is answerable (at least in part). | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 17:49 | history | closed |
Cearon O'Flynn Mithical Blackwood CBredlow Himarm |
Opinion-based | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 17:16 | review | Close votes | |||
| Dec 19, 2016 at 17:52 | |||||
| Dec 19, 2016 at 16:50 | comment | added | Paulie_D | ...don't forget the freehand red circle saying "Shoot Here" | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 16:32 | comment | added | Gorchestopher H | Things like "one hard drive" and "took a long time to transmit" don't tell us much about the "size" of the plans. Data transfer rates trend at roughly the same rates as disk capacity. We also don't know how the plans are stored. Are these holograms? Are they vector models? Do they include wiring? Are sub-structures included? There really is no good way to know what kind of content to expect. The best assumption would be that the Death Star plans were likely 100 to 1000 times as "large" as "typical plans". | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 16:30 | comment | added | TheIronCheek | I don't see how there's any way to answer this. We don't know the giant-communications-tower-to-Rebel-ship transfer rate. Not to mention the fact that the data isn't even stored on a hard drive, it's a "data tape". And "data tapes" (plural) if you remember Admiral Motti's comments in ANH. We have no idea about the capacity or transfer speed and therefore know nothing about size. | |
| Dec 19, 2016 at 16:26 | history | asked | Luke | CC BY-SA 3.0 |