Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve heard the excitement over the new Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, which comes out this December. We’re excited about it too, but re-watching the originals reminded us that in the first movie, A New Hope, the Empire was defeated by ignoring a flaw in the Death Star’s ventilation system.
How would the Death Star’s HVAC system compare to a building here on Earth?
Calculations done by a fan of the movies show that in order to support the 1.2 million people on board, the first Death Star would require 346 quintillion cubic feet of air, made up of 290 quintillion cubic feet of nitrogen and 58 quintillion cubic feet of oxygen. Just for reference, 1 quintillion is 1 with 18 zeroes after it= 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The typical size of a large office building or manufacturing plant is anywhere from 100,000 cubic feet to over a million cubic feet. While still large, this is nowhere as massive as what the Death Star facility managers had to keep track of. Imagine trying to coordinate the industrial HVAC cleaning for a system as large as what the Death Star would need!
Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Ward wrote an essay titled ‘Don’t Come to the Dark Side: Acquisition Lessons from a Galaxy Far, Far Away’, which compared his experience with the Department of Defense to building the Death Star. In it, he talks about how “from a design perspective, a system as enormously complex as a Death Star is more than any program manager or senior architect can handle, no matter how high their midi-chlorian count is”, which means there is “bound to be an overlooked exhaust vent or two that leads directly to the reactor core”.
Like smaller versions of the Death Star, every building has complex systems inside it, with more issues than any facility manager can handle on their own. Budgets and schedules are tight, and while you may not have a boss using the Force Grip on you, there is still pressure to get everything on time and on budget.
Here on Earth, we deal with buildings that have weaknesses in the ventilation systems, and even though they aren’t being attacked by an X-Wing whose pilot is using the Force, it can still cause problems or be destructive. It’s important to have industrial HVAC cleaning performed regularly, which not only keeps the system clean and running efficiently, it can help to find problems and issues with the system. Star Wars would have had a different ending if Darth Vader had the Death Star’s ductwork inspected!
