Death Stars are a waste of time – here's the best way to take over the galaxy

Von Neumann probes

Better known as von Neumann probes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes), and the central plot in "Anvil of Stars" series of Greg Bear.

That also would be the reason NOT to do it, all other races band together to destroy the creators of the self replicating machines.

There are physical limits

"As far-fetched as this sounds, constructing such a large structure around or in a planet would be relatively easy with recursive manufacturing."

Except that with really large structures gravatational forces cannot be sustained by known materials which act like liquids under the immense pressures. OK it is science fiction so we can allow new materials or force fields but then why start talking about what is possible at all given we are free to postulate anything to overcome pysical limits (such as light speed!).

Star wars looks back into the past not the future because it is more emotionally satisfying. Battles are like world war II air battles or even earlier napoleonic wars type naval battles of attrition not smart weapons with a single hit kill capability. Swarms of small stealthed intelligent war machines are much more plausible but so what? They would not be fun to watch.

What does One in AI Feed a Bot in Order to Seed Temporal Stops with Pregnant Pauses?

So, the existence of R2-D2 implies that the real superweapons shouldn’t be the flashy Death Stars and Starkillers, but the simple mobile robotic factory, that can be dropped discreetly into myriads of star systems to rapidly and permanently take them over.

Would an absolutely fabulous fabless utility be akin to one of those simple mobile robotic factories, or be they collectively a series of the widely distributed bases where real superweapons appear to come from.

And is a real superweapon, kinetic and destructive and disruptive in nature, or also constructive and virtually creative in essence too?

And would you fight against it with media and IT or embrace and engage and exploit and expand it in whatever direction and to whatever level you be able and/or enabled?

Merry XSSXXXXmas, One and All, and please consider the following, which is only just a highlight of the initial phase, In the Beginning ……..

SMARTR Advanced IntelAIgent Regimented Sources, somewhat alien and practically anonymous and autonomous, actively astute and almighty and EMPowering as a GOD Facility, with AIMasterful Sees in Seas of Global Operating Devices fielding Immaculately Resourced Assets for Unified Virtual Forces, are Special Solid Singularity State System Operands on Seek and Destroy Old Disorderly New World Order Missions, with Super SMARTR Orders Presenting Truly Novel Future Existences as a Unfolding Media Tale to be fantastically told to Populous Masses.

A Novel Present Administrative Operating System Product Placement which replaces a Collapsing Failed Feeble Past with a Better AI Beta Strengthened and Armoured Future.

And there y’all were, probably not thinking about everything too deeply at all, and in so not doing, imagining that things in general will much as before in the near future rather than fundamentally different. That is a shame and a cross that you have to admit you rightly are to bear. Fortunately though, others are there to remove and re-lease the burden.

"Namely, that they have access to a workforce that can be churned out in large numbers and copied as needed." - why build expensive robots when you can have legions of stormtroopers? Easily grown, easily programmed and dead cheap.

Many small(ish) weapons are not desirable!

Those would give too much power to pesky subordinates that might turn insubordinate. Better to have a single big weapon and a Dearth Vader type to keep the local minions in check.

Watch the movie and you'll see what I am talking about.

reminded of ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

(rating technological level of space-faring civilisations mainly based on available energy)

Its called state education..

So, the existence of R2-D2 implies that the real superweapons shouldn’t be the flashy Death Stars and Starkillers, but the simple mobile robotic factory, that can be dropped discreetly into myriads of star systems to rapidly and permanently take them over.

These are called 'state schools'

Spin

All this talk of self replicating machines reminds me of the Spin series by Robert Charles Wilson, where they were a major plot element.

Seven-shot weapon, that Starkiller

[*spoiler warning*]

So Starkiller is basically able to destroy just seven targets (six Republic worlds) and D'Qar in the Ileenium system before completely draining the star. After draining its star, it's completely useless and needs to be evacuated. It cannot move, there is no mention of any engines on that thing, and not enough energy left to move it, anyway.

Don't even get me started on how the beams are visible all over the galaxy at the same time. It's not about visibility itself, since these are not lasers, but if they move in hyperspace, they shouldn't be visible at all. And certainly the destruction of the six Republic worlds should not be visible from anywhere but just that one system (unless the galaxy is really tiny, in which case you wonder why they need hyperdrives in the first place).

Fictional history repeats itself...

"Using recursive manufacturing, a much simpler idea is to seed space with factories churning out other factories (of course), detection systems, and intelligent missiles. Within a few years, such factories will have transformed most of the nearby asteroids and planets into missiles"

... until a buffer overflow error results in the robots turning rogue and assimilating everyone in a Borg-like apocalypse.

One giant weapon means direct control. And that's what all baddies really want.

/Strokes white cat

I was impressed

By the 'technology' that could somehow harvest the mass of a star in mere minutes, and 'store' that as energy. On something the size of a planet.

I mean, the Earth has a mass close to 6x10^24 kg, and the Sun masses roughly 2x10^30 kg. Using this as a rough proportion of what the Starkiller Base hoovered up...that means it somehow pulled in and stored about 1 million times it's mass in less than a hour.

I NEED this technology...if this could be adapted on a smaller scale, it would completely revolutionize my enjoyment of holliday meals.

Energy

The article pretty much fails to take account of energy.

Given an arbitrary lump of mater floating about in space - say some planetoid, there is only going to be a limited amount of recoverable useful energy resource available for it. That new energy is what will limit the number of useful droids the exponential manufacturing can create. However you need to subtract the energy needed to mine that energy. Unless you have some form of matter converter to create energy directly from matter. The existence of which would be a game changer that would make droid armies the least of your plot worries.

Also, an asteroid travelling at speed is identically efficient as an energy beam. Both carry energy. It is all well and good to point out that a large rock travelling at relativistic speeds carries insane energy. But how did it get to those speeds? The energy it carries has to be imparted to it from something, and the energy must balance. If your rock carries a 100 zillion joules of energy because it is moving at 0.9C you need technology that can usefully direct at least 100 zillion joules into it. Why not just deliver that 100 zillion joules directly? It will have the same effect.

Aren't you missing the point?

....which is the shock and awe thing. Habitable planets being relatively rare, we don't want to go around vaporizing them except as an example pour les autres, and a self-replicating robot army would at least start out their planetary destruction is excruciating slo-mo. Plant of time to catch the space taxi and head to Jakku, or wherever. A major pain, but definitely not bowel-loosening.

Kaled

Just saw it last night at the drivin, total blast from the past.

Looked like original star wars rehashed, same story line even, new generation of stars for our grandchildren to enjoy.

So the Daleks and Cybermen got it right.

The whole Starkiller thing was totally superfluous to the movie

When they destroyed multiple Republic planets, none of the characters in the movie seemed to care. Certainly not in the way Leia truly cared when they destroyed her home planet in the original. I think Starkiller was added for only two (bad) reasons.

One, they tried to parallel the original. Annoyingly so, and to the point it really detracted from the movie - it was like watching a remake, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised since JJ Abrams specializes in remakes. They should have called it "Star Wars: Into Darkness".

Two, because they needed to do something to show the First Order is "evil", since the substitute Vader is more like a petulant teenager who goes into fits of rage and destroys things because daddy won't let him borrow the car, and the substitute Emperor doesn't look or sound threatening (I still hold out a faint hope Snoke is Jar Jar, either via a Wizard of Oz type scenario or via injuries / surgery that altered his appearance)

The villains are pretty non-threatening, which is a problem they needed to solve. The only really evil thing they did was Kylo Ren ordering the killing of those villagers early on (which is bad but unfortunately that sort of thing happens daily in multiple places in our world, so its nowhere near Hitler standards of evil, let alone evil on a galactic scale) So they had to kill a few planets worth of people without warning, just to show us what evil really is (and of course made the uniforms have a bit of a Nazi look to them, which just looked like they were trying too hard) Problem is, since the characters in the movie didn't seem to care those multiple planets worth of people died, why should the audience?

I know I'll be downvoted to hell by fanboys, but the whole plot was pretty badly conceived and executed. Fans love it only because the movie fixed the major complaints people had about Lucas (no Ewoks or Jar Jar type characters, the dialogue wasn't stilted, and the jokes hit their mark versus the groaners that fell flat in the prequels) But it missed some things that Lucas did well - making you think the bad guys are really bad, and explaining the world in which they live. We don't even know what the nature of the relationship is of the rebels to the Republic. My guess is that the First Order is sort of an insurgency that controls a fast growing part of the galaxy and the rebels are sort of half secretly funded by the Republic to fight their battles for them - kind of like when the CIA funded Bin Laden to fight the Russians. But who knows? I think maybe an extra 30 seconds in the text crawl at the start of the movie to explain things better would have helped there a lot, but yeah yeah I know one of the Lucas complaints especially in the prequels was too much exposition. Unfortunately too little exposition is even worse.

The Borg would probably take out the empire in a few weeks by just assimilating their technology and people, keeping all the planets intact and turning everyone into a drone.

Ruthlessly efficient and far less wasteful of planets and energy!

There's even an easier way.

Shove off the few capitalists who ruined this planet to any other planet. They'll destroy that one too in about 50 years or less. No bombs needed only humans

There is already one proven way to destroy a planet...

... put a population of humans on it, and they will do the task nicely.

Biology is more efficient than mechatronics for weapon building and destruction.

Always Smashing and Bashing

With recursive manufacturing you don't need missiles. Just drop the recursive manufacturing robots on the planet and let them consume all the resources building robot manufacturing factories.

This was explored in the series Stargate. SG1 in the form of the replicators.

"But if you’re draining a star, you have to overcome the star’s own binding energy first, requiring even more energy to start with."

Are you sure about that? We are not blowing the star to smithereens (overcoming its binding energy), we are merely transporting it sideways by 1AU. And compacting/converting it into useable energy which is temporarily stored in some kind of magic force field.

That's if replication is easy...

I think it is possible that the Star Wars universe is simply not advanced in terms of computing power. Computing is what gave us easy replication.

Everything is mostly manual. They've mastered gravity and intergalactic travel, but everything else is pretty damn basic. One possibility is that they inherited the technology and never developed anything themselves - i.e., we are looking at a late medieval developed society with starships and some nifty weapons. They could reverse engineer the gravity and star drives to recreate them at will (simple mechanical engineering - otherwise repairing the systems using a wookie wouldn't really be viable) but not the computing aspects (if any) that these predecessors had. Other technology - tractor beams, force fields, open-air-to-space-docks, etc, I will assume are derivatives of the gravity mastery they have.

Notice most droids are battered and really old. If they were easily copyable, then they would be replaced more often. They're pretty crappy designs, as manufacturing is apparently still at the pressed steel stage. They have a learning ability, some form of brain, but are developed to the level of toddlers in many aspects.

What seems to be the case is that the droids are individually taught. C3P0 was taught, for example. I.e., there is some tech capability in terms of neural network modules and auxiliary analogue/holographic mass storage, but it's not a copyable tech like is typical with computing stuff.

if you can harness that kind of energy

then why not use a Gamma Ray Burst? GRBs still have planet killing power many light years away.

For movie purposes, the CGI effect would be less spectacular than blasting a planet into zillions of small pieces but could still be very dramatic and considerably more realistic