Star Wars Fans Still Can’t Figure Out This Debate 40 Years Later

The Death Star is central to so many Star Wars stories, yet its inner workings are still very mysterious to this day. When the franchise began, the space station had just been completed, and was used for the first time to demonstrate its revolutionary new power. Since then, we’ve seen it at various stages in its construction from many different angles, and some inconsistencies have emerged. Episode VI — Return of the Jedi shows second Death Star in a state of partial completion, with its weapon apparently in working order but its outer shell still in the works. However, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Andor show that the weapon seemed to be the last part of installed on the original Death Star. It’s a small detail, but it has spawned some interesting theories about its planet-killing power.

Our latest view of the Death Star came in the final episode of Andor Season 1, “Rix Road.” It showed the spherical frame and shell of the space station apparently complete, while several nested parts of the weapon and the dish it fires from were installed last. On the Star Wars subreddit, user u/Luke_Fluke13 posted this side-by-side with a view of the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. There, the weapon looked to be complete, but large chunks of the sphere still needed to be built, including a large band of panels around the front side.

Why were the first and second Death Stars constructed differently?
byu/Luke_Fluke13 inStarWars

Commenters had a lot of ideas about why it might have been built differently in these two instances, but the top comment from u/RoadBudget chalked it up to Galen Erso’s invention of the weapon itself. The Death Star is presented as a revolutionary new technology, after all, but a space station should have been commonplace in this universe — even if this was an abnormally large one. When it came time to build a second Death Star, the breakthrough on the weapon had already been made, so it could be built first while the shell was put together in the meantime.

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Some fans even say that this isn’t a theory — it’s practically confirmed in Rogue One and the prequel novel Catalyst. Meanwhile, others pointed out that Emperor Palpatine may have wanted to look incomplete in Return of the Jedi in order to lure the Rebels into a fight. The Emperor himself eventually boasts that it’s a “fully armed and operational battle station.”

These were some of the most popular explanations, but there were others proposed as well. Some fans thought that maybe Galen Erso did his best to delay the completion of the weapon itself, while others figured that the Emperor might have wanted to guard the secret of the weapon so no one else could recreate it. In the case of the second Death Star, however, he would have wanted to rush it so that he could use it against the Rebels again.

This is an interesting detail to speculate about because many of the theories can be true all at once. To decide for yourself, you can stream all the Star Wars movies and series on Disney+. Andor Season 2 will premiere there on April 22nd, 2025.