Death Star Contractors

[Khas 12,158]

In "Clerks", Dante and Randal discussed the role of independent contractors building the Death Stars, stating that the Imperial Army had to hire contractors to help build it, since they didn't have the manpower or the resources to pull it off.

 

And George Lucas confirmed this theory:

[scvn2812 504]

This is probably one of a handful of things the EU does well I will concede. The vast majority of Imperial hardware is probably produced by contractors. Given the Geonosians were supplying droids to the Confederacy and the Kaminoans supplying clones to the Republic in the movies and the general abundance of individuals motivated by personal gain, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the Empire used Space Lockheed Martin to build the Death Star since Space Lockheed and Space Boeing probably build most of their stuff. They obviously have way better data security though, seeing as Lockheed and Boeing get hacked about every over second and the Empire's military industrial complex kept detailed specs of the Death Star out of the hands of the rebels for 2 decades and the knowledge that there was a second Death Star in the works out of the hands of the rebels until it was practically online and ready to smash planets.

 

I'm sure someone, somewhere would consider this to be a Big Deal but I don't really see why this matters, other than to add color to the setting and confirm a theory that most people probably think is pretty reasonable. If someone cares to frame this in context of a VS debate, then I don't see how it would be better or worse than the Federation having no meaningful differences between their starship manufacturing and government, that's a function of competence not structure in my opinion. So neither better nor worse, just a different approach that probably makes more sense for the Federation as their economy likely resembles nothing we can really conceptualize where as Star Wars is probably more like our global economy, just on a galactic scale and with a megajoule of energy being cheaper than a bottle of water but just as scrambled and incoherent with just about every conceivable economic system existing simultaneously somewhere I would imagine.

 

Other than that, cheers to Kevin Smith for having a joke rant be insightful enough to take on some quasi-canon status by the man himself.