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The Death Star is a fictional mobile space station and galactic superweapon featured in the Star Wars space-opera franchise. The first version, which appears in the original 1977 film Star Wars, is stated to be more than in diameter, and is crewed by an estimated 1.7 million military personnel and 400,000 droids. The second Death Star, which appears in Return of the Jedi, is significantly larger at between to in diameter, and while it appears unfinished, is technologically more powerful than its predecessor.

Although details, such as the superlaser's location, shifted between different concept models during production of Star Wars, the notion of the Death Star being a large, spherical space station over 100 kilometers in diameter was consistent in all of them. George Lucas gave the original task of designing a "Death Star" to concept artist and spaceship modeler Colin Cantwell, In a 2016 interview, Cantwell related that "I didn't originally plan for the Death Star to have a trench, but when I was working with the mold, I noticed the two halves had shrunk at the point where they met across the middle." As it "would have taken a week of work just to fill and sand and refill this depression," Cantwell suggested a trench to Lucas to save the labor. Lucas liked the idea, The buzzing sound counting down to the Death Star firing its superlaser comes from the Flash Gordon serials. Portraying an incomplete yet powerful space station posed a problem for Industrial Light & Magic's modelmakers for Return of the Jedi. Only the front side of the 137-centimeter model was completed, and the image was flipped horizontally for the final film. Both Death Stars were depicted by a combination of complete and sectional models and matte painting.

The Death Star explosions featured in the Special Edition of A New Hope and in Return of the Jedi are rendered with a Praxis effect, wherein a flat ring of matter erupts from the explosion.

The grid plan animations shown during the Rebel briefing for the attack on the Death Star late in A New Hope were an actual computer-graphics simulation from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory made by Larry Cuba and Gary Imhoff as part of a CalArts project, and had been included during filming.

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