Even as a little kid, the trash compactor-- just one of hundreds, one
assumes-- on the Death Star made no sense to me. Glad to see someone at long last agrees.


https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/on-the-implausibility-of-the-death-stars-trash-compactor

by Joshua Tyree

I maintain that the trash compactor onboard the Death Star in Star Wars is implausible, unworkable, and, moreover, inefficient.

The Trash Compactor Debate turns on whether the Death Star ejects its trash into space. I, for one, believe it does. Though we never see the Death Star ejecting its trash, we do see the Empire capitol ships, the Star Destroyers, ejecting their trash into space. I, therefore, see no reason to suspect that Empire protocol dictating that trash be ejected into space would not apply equally to all Empire spacecraft, including the Death Star.

The Death Star clearly has a garbage-disposal problem. Given its size and massive personnel, the amount of waste it generates--discarded food, broken equipment, stormtrooper excrement, and the like-- boggles the imagination.
That said, I just cannot fathom how an organization as ruthless and
efficiently run as the Empire would have signed off on such a dangerous, unsanitary, and shoddy garbage-disposal system as the one depicted in the movie.

Here are the problems, as I can ascertain them, with the Death Star's garbage-disposal system:

1. Ignoring the question of how Princess Leia could possibly know where the trash compactor is or that the vent she blasts open leads to a good hiding place for her rescue crew, why are there vents leading down there at all?
Would not vents leading into any garbage-disposal system allow the fetid smell of rotting garbage, poop, spores, molds, etc., to seep up into the rest of the Death Star? Would not it have been more prudent for the designers of the Death Star to opt for a closed system, like a septic tank?

2. Why do both walls of the trash compactor move towards each other, rather than employing a one-movable-wall system that would thus rely on the anchored stability, to say nothing of the strength, of the other non-moving wall, to crush trash more effectively?

3. Why does the trash compactor compact trash so slowly and with such difficulty once the resistance of a thin metal rod is introduced? Surely metal Death Star pieces are one of the main items of trash in need of compacting. It thus stands to reason that the trash compactor should have been better
designed to handle the problem of a skinny piece of metal. (And while I hate
to be the sort of person who says I told you so, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that a one-movable-wall system would have improved performance in this regard.)

4. Why does the trash compactor only compact trash sideways? Once ejected into space, wouldn’t the flattened, living-room-sized, and extremely solid panes of
trash that result from such a primitive, unidirectional trash compactor pose serious navigational hazards for Empire starships in the vicinity?

5. And what of the creature that lives in the trash compactor, the dia-noga? Presumably, the creature survives because the moving walls do not extend all the way to the floor of the room, where the liquid is. After all, if the walls reached the floor, the dia-noga would be killed each time trash is compacted. The design employed on the Death Star must allow the organic trash to filter down to the bottom, where the one-eyed parasitic worm-creature devours it. But what happens when heavier pieces of non-organic trash fall down there? Would such trash not get wedged under the moving walls, causing them to malfunction? Do stormtroopers have to confront the creature each time they retrieve pieces of un-compacted trash? And why is the dia-noga there in the first place? Did the Empire purposely put them in the compactors as a sort of symbiotic waste management system, like farmers using goats to keep the grass under control?
Or is this some opportunistic creature that snuck aboard like rats would do on the sailing ships of old? If the latter, why does the Empire tolerate their presence?

6. Why not have separate systems for organic and inorganic waste, thus
allowing full compaction of the inorganics and a closed sanitary system for
the organics?

7. Why does the Empire care, anyway, about reducing its organic garbage
output? Are we to believe that the architects of the Death Star, a group of individuals bent on controlling the entire known universe, are also concerned about environmental issues?

8. Personally, were it up to me, I would have designed special garbage ships instead of employing a crude, cumbersome, and inefficient (to say nothing of unsanitary) compactor-worm combo to deal with the trash.

9. If the Empire insists on ejecting trash into space, why do they bother compacting it? Space is infinite, is it not? In such an environment, it hardly matters what size the trash is. In fact, a persuasive argument can be made
that it’s actually better for the trash to take up more space so that it appears on radar systems as something for ships to avoid. Compacted trash creates smaller chunks of harder trash that would undoubtedly cause serious damage to Empire starships. And needless to say, damage to starships would, in turn, create yet more hassles and headaches for the Empire.

Please understand, gentle reader, I am all for creating hassles and headaches for the Empire. I just doubt that the Empire would have created so many for itself.

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