The Star Wars Death Star Would Cost A Staggering $7.8 Octillion Per Day To Run

It's thought the Death Star, the moon-sized battle station featured in various Star War movies and built by the Galactic Empire, is around 75 miles in diameter. Not only is it huge but it houses a planet-destroying superlaser, a tractor beam, laser cannons, 342,000 Imperial Navy and Army troops, 26,00 Stormtroopers, and around 1.7 million personnel of "varying combat eligibility."

As you can imagine something of such a colossal size and harboring so many people who need to be fed, clothed, and washed, is going to use a lot of energy. With the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story out soon, which features a motley band of rebels who steal the plans to the Death Star, British energy company Ovo have jumped on a PR opportunity and calculated the costs of the Death Star's energy bill.

The final figure they reach for powering the Death Star after calculating things like laundry costs, powering the superlaser, feeding the crew, recycling, and jumping to hyperspace, amounts to a staggering £6.2 octillion (British pounds). Which equates to around $7.8 octillion PER DAY—as an actual number that looks like this: $7,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

To put it in perspective Ovo say that figure is 30 trillion times all the money on Earth. Which is a shitload of money. To figure out the cost they spoke with Stephen Skolnick, blogger and editor of the American Physics Society along with mathematician Professor Alexander Barnett from Dartmouth University.

Ovo give a full, complex breakdown of how they worked out the costs of the Death Star energy bill over on their blog. Costs include around $52 billion a day on lighting the starbase and a few hundred million on laundry.

So, yeah, it costs a helluva lot to run it. Which means the Galactic Empire must be very, very rich. Check out the infographic below created by Ovo for a breakdown of the costs.