![sith empire ship classes sith empire ship classes](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JppX_ayVlsk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Let's guess that it costs $10,000 per thruster, for a total of $140 billion.
![sith empire ship classes sith empire ship classes](https://i.playground.ru/p/WSCn5_Ech3iw_gQ6OetNXw.jpeg)
The cost of the NEXT is unknown, but the principle is very cheap to demonstrate. If each NEXT weighs 100 kilograms including support material, their total weight will be 1.4 billion kilograms-around one-third of the total weight of the ship. The rated speed of the Star Destroyer is only 270 m/s (972 km/h), which we would reach after nearly four days. This is not much, but enough to get going: from a standing start, the ship would be moving at 2.9 m/s after one hour and 68.7 m/s after one day. This will accelerate the ship at 0.8 mm/s². This means we can run 14 million NEXTs with a combined total thrust of 3.5 million N. How many NEXTs can we power using the Star Destroyer? Let's say we use 98 GW out of the 146.5 GW available power, so two-thirds of the ship's total power budget.
![sith empire ship classes sith empire ship classes](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_SgcTMftpe0/maxresdefault.jpg)
The most powerful ion thruster prototype, NASA Evolutionary Ion Thruster (NEXT) has a power rating of 7 kW and thrust of 0.25 N. We don't have an equivalent ion cannon, so we will make do with 120 laser turrets for a total of $12 billion. Each turret will need four lasers, for $100 million per turret. Let's guess that, due to volume production efficiencies, we can also get the final 500 kW version for $25 million each. The technology is expected to work up to 500 kW, which should be enough to disable planes and trucks. It will be rated to 60 kW at a cost of $25 million for a demonstrator, which is enough to disable a car. The ATHENA laser is the closest thing that exists right now. We are told that the Star Destroyer has 60 turbolaser turrets and 60 ion cannons. We need to add weapons ($12 billion), engines ($140 billion) and TIE fighters and AT-ATs ($20 billion). This will get you something that looks like a Star Destroyer with the power and lights on but doesn't do anything yet. We have seen that the Imperial Star Destroyer is 44.4 times the $10.44 billion aircraft carrier, so the value of the base ship is about $464 billion. This tells us that the Star Destroyer based on a ship is actually quite light, which makes sense since it has many large internal cavities to hold spaceships etc. Scaled up to Star Destroyer volume, this would give it a weight of 11.9 billion kilograms. The ISS weighs 0.45 million kilograms, and I guesstimate an approximate total volume of 2,000 cubic meters (internal pressurized volume is 916 cubic meters). For comparison, the whole world produced 23.5 million GWh of electrical energy in 2014, which works out to 2,687 GWh continously (i.e., enough power to run 18.3 Star Destroyers).įor a sanity check, we can use the International Space Station. Each ship generates about 3.3 GW of electrity (enough to power continuously nearly three time-travelling DeLoreans from Back to the Future), i.e., 146.5 GW overall. It has two nuclear reactors and costs about $10.44 billion. Conveniently, it weighs about the same as the Allure of the Seas and is of a similar size and volume. Our second reference point is the Gerald R. Thus we can estimate its weight as 44.4 x 100 million = 4.44 billion kilograms. Hence the Imperial Star Destroyer is approximately 44.4 times the volume of the Allure of the Seas. If you look at a picture of the ship and consider that cruise liners are fairly boxy, we can approximate its volume as 360 x 55 x 60 = 1.188 million cubic meters. The Allure of the Seasis 360 meters long, 60.5 meters at maximum width (47 meters at waterline), and 81.3 meters at maxmium overall height. Ships are a good analogy because they need to be light and strong to transport lots of stuff fuel-efficiently. Our first reference point is the world's largest cruise liner, the Allure of the Seas.