g Imperial Era g Contents

36

Death Star Plans

Location: Scarif

Date: 1 BBY

They called it “Project Stardust.” For nearly 20 years, the Empire had steadily expanded its reach, occupying planets, and even creating some semblance of governmental function from the turmoil of the Clone Wars. But in secret, the real work was being conducted in the atmosphere above the planet Geonosis. There, Imperial masterminds were building one of the most staggering superweapons ever conceived—a space station ominously dubbed the Death Star. This sinister plan had been in progress even as the first Clone War battles were breaking out, around 22 BBY.

The size of a small moon, the Death Star contained a superlaser powered by a hypermatter reactor. Upon ignition, the reaction was filtered through eight massive kyber crystals, allowing a focused beam of pure energy to devastate any target. When fully operational, entire planets could be destroyed, species exterminated, and all opposition to the Empire crushed.

The Rebel Alliance looked on helplessly as the the Death Star demonstrated its power by obliterating the holy city of Jedha. It finally appeared to many fighters that the Empire was now all-powerful and could never be defeated. But hope can flicker in the darkest of situations. The Rebel Jyn Erso knew that hidden somewhere within the Death Star’s systems lay a flaw, a weakness. This had been implanted by the weapon’s chief designer, Galen Erso, Jyn’s peace-loving father, a scientific genius whom the Empire had forced to work on the project.

On the tropical world of Scarif, the Empire had erected a vault to protect its greatest military secrets. This installation was heavily fortified. It was protected by elite stormtroopers, and surrounded by deflectors as well as a shield gate high above the planet that barred entry to the surface. Despite these formidable defenses, a Rebel cell led by young Jyn Erso calling itself Rogue One made a successful incursion. While the main party engaged the stormtrooper guards, Jyn and two of the Rebels penetrated the heart of a datatree. Among the thousands of identical data cartridges, they found the key to unraveling the Empire’s greatest threat.

A diagram of the complex inner systems of the Death Star.

The datatapes favored by the Empire were large and unwieldy. Their military-grade, shockproof, polyplast casings, and electromagnetic shielding protected everything from databank archives and top-secret files to primary schematics for clandestine projects. In the Structural Engineering node, the entire history of the Death Star’s creation was committed to a single cartridge, filling much of its 512-million exanode capacity. Pinpointing the precise location of the flaw, located somewhere within the Death Star’s network of heat exchanges and exhaust ports, would require further research by Rebel Alliance scientists.

Before the Rogue One Rebels could escape Scarif with the cartridge, the Imperial facility was destroyed by a single reactor ignition strike—a defensive maneuver carried out by the very weapon the rebels were investigating. By exploiting the Empire’s own advanced technology, Jyn Erso and her Rogue One band managed to transmit the plans to the Rebel Alliance just before the base was razed, sacrificing their lives in the process. The most important file—containing Galen Erso’s deliberate design flaw—had been copied to a small disc. This was later installed in the memory banks of the war veteran and astromech droid R2-D2.

Not long after the Battle of Scarif, equipped with this intel, the Rebel Alliance launched an attack on the Death Star in the Yavin system. Thanks to the almost unbelievable precision of one X-wing pilot—a young man named Luke Skywalker—the Rebels destroyed the superweapon. None of the Rebels’ future victories against the Empire would have been possible without Jyn Erso’s Rogue One team’s daring operation to snatch that precious datatape cartridge from the Imperial archives.

This blueprint shows the meridian trench that the X-Wings flew down. It led to the thermal exhaust port that was their ultimate target.

A close-up of the thermal exhaust port that led directly to the Death Star’s main reactor.