| Death Star vs. Doomsday Machine | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Season 9, Episode 4 | |
| Air date | June 24, 2024 |
| Written by | I'm Lynda |
| Episode guide | |
| Previous Scar (Predator) vs. Riddick |
Next Durin's Bane vs. Smaug |
Death Star vs. Doomsday Machine is a What-If? Death Battle by I'm Lynda. It features the first Death Star from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, and the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek – TOS series 2, episode 6, “The Doomsday Machine.”
Description[]
It’s Star Wars versus Star Trek, and giant planet-killing spaceship versus giant planet-killing spaceship!
Interlude[]
Wiz: The Death Star, a moon-sized spaceship designed and built to terrorize a galaxy.
Boomstick: The Doomsday Machine, a giant planet-gobbling spaceship that ended an interplanetary war, by ending the planets of the combatants.
Wiz: They're the ultimate weapons in science fiction.
Boomstick: But, what happens when they meet each other?
Wiz: I'm Wiz, and he's Boomstick.
Boomstick: And it's our job to analyze their weapons, armor and skills to find out who would win a Death Battle.
Death Star[]
Wiz: The leader of the Galactic Republic was Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine. But, unknown to the rest of the galaxy, Palpatine was also the Sith Lord Darth Sidious.
Boomstick: Sidious had plans for taking control of…well, everything for the glory of the Sith. So, he had the insect-like aliens, the Geonosians, design a weapons system of Biblical proportions. Designated as the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station, construction began on it during the Clone Wars, and continued after the fall of the Republic and the declaration of the Galactic Empire.
Wiz: When the Rebel Alliance found out about the ship, they spared no cost in collecting information on it. Finally, a group of rebels succeeded in stealing the schematics to the new station and got the information to Rebel-sympathizing Princess Leia Organa. The Princess was captured by Darth Vader, Darth Sidious's apprentice and chief enforcer, and brought aboard the station. The commander of the Death Star was Grand Moff Tarkin, and he was determined to use the station to its greatest effect, so he decided to squeeze her for information on the location of the Rebel's headquarters.
Boomstick: When torture didn’t work, he decided that the way to wring the information out of Princess Leia was to threaten to turn the station’s firepower on her home planet of Alderaan. When she finally buckled, Tarkin decided that Alderaan was in the perfect position to be used as an example of the emperor’s strength and ruthlessness. So, he fired the ship’s superlaser at the planet, blowing it to smithereens. And, not coincidentally snuffing out the lives of billions of people living on it.
Wiz: After that, he allowed the Princess to escape with her new-found rescuers, having put a tracking beacon in their spaceship. Following the Millenium Falcon to the Yavin IV, Tarkin began maneuvering the Death Star to use the superlaser on the rebel’s planet.
Boomstick: However, he didn’t realize that the rebels had studied the schematics and found a weakness in the Death Star. It seems that there was an unshielded exhaust port whose shaft led directly to the ship’s reactor system. The rebels decided that small, one-man fighter craft would be able to get close to the port and shoot a proton torpedo down the shaft, starting a chain reaction that would destroy the ship.
Wiz: And so, the rebels began their attack. Despite the presence of Sith Lord Darth Vader, the attack went pretty much as the rebels had hoped. They suffered some pretty appalling casualties, but in the end, a pair of proton torpedoes magically went down the shaft, and started the chain reaction, causing the Death Star to be blown to very small space debris.
Boomstick: In spite of this seeming easy take down, the Death Star is a formidable weapons system. Let's go ahead and look at its weapons, armor and speed.
Wiz: The ship has some 300,000 turret-mounted laser canons, 20,000 turret-mounted missile launchers, and 1,000 heavy tractor beam projectors. However, these are all fairly short-ranged weapons, and they are scattered around a ship that has a diameter of 160 kilometers or 100 miles, and a surface area of about 322,000 square kilometers or 200,000 square miles. So, yeah, that makes it a bit less impressive.
Boomstick: What's more impressive is that this thing has no less than 12,000 heavy turbolaser batters. These are the same weapons mounted on the Imperial Star Destroyers, the battleships of the Empire's navy. And, for comparison, each of those only has 60!
Wiz: But, the biggest, most Earth-shattering...get it?...weapon on this already impressive ship is the Mark I Superlaser. This weapon combines eight tributary laser streams to form one gigantic laser beam. It was this weapon that was used to destroy the planet Alderaan. According to the Wookieepedia, it has an optimal range of 2,000,000 kilometers or one and a quarter million miles, and a working range of 420,000,000 kilometers or two hundred and 60 million miles. That's triple the average distance from the Earth to Mars! The downside to this terribly impressive weapon is that it requires a full 24 hours to recharge the reactor that provided its energy, meaning that it can literally only be fired once per day.
Boomstick: The hull of the Death Star was made of quadanium steel, a particularly hard metallic alloy that was used in the construction of Imperial ships and battle stations. The hull was further protected by an array of ray and particle shields. The former protected against energy weapons, such as laser cannons, while the latter protected against solid objects, such as proton torpedoes.
Wiz: The next thing to consider is the Death Star's speed. Now, in the Star Wars universe, hyperdrive systems were rated by "Class," and the lower the number, the faster the engine. So, warships, diplomatic couriers and important governmental starships usually were equipped with Class 1 or Class 2 hyperdrives. Most civilian ships were equipped with Class 3 hyperdrives, while the ships of the rich and powerful were likely to have faster drives. The DS-1 Death Star was equipped with a lowly Class 4 hyperdrive, which means that it was very slow and sluggish ship.
Boomstick: We could talk about the crew of the ship. The Imperial Navy was a very professional service, with the Clone Wars having ended a mere nineteen years before the Death Star became fully operational. The Navy had also been involved in putting down numerous rebellions and fighting wars of various sizes since the end of the Clone Wars, so it was an experienced and capable force.
Wiz: And the Death Star never travelled alone, and it carried no less than 7,000 TIE/ln space superiority starfighters. These short range, one-seat fighter craft were the very symbol of Imperial power, with their opponents calling them "Eyeballs" or "Evil-Eyes." They were effective weapons, but their small size limited their ability to project power.
Boomstick: Overall, the Death Star is a formidable weapons system. It was designed to project Imperial power by entering and dominating a planetary system, being capable of dealing with anything it encountered, even being able to destroy a planet. It was not designed to participate in fast, running battles. But, if you come to it, look out!
Doomsday Machine[]
Wiz: Long, long ago, two races were locked in a titanic life-and-death struggle. One of the races created a doomsday weapon that they hoped would end the war, a weapon so terrible that it could destroy both sides of the conflict. Seeing their own potential destruction if the weapon should ever be employed, the war would quickly end.
Boomstick: Unfortunately, for them, it didn't work out that way. The weapon was employed, and the Doomsday Machines were unleashed into the universe to consume planets and just about anything else that got in their way.
Wiz: The Doomsday Machines or Planet Killers were robotic weapons, that were encountered a number of times by the United Federation of Planets. It has been speculated that they were created by the ancient race known as the Preservers, perhaps to be used against the Borg.
Boomstick: The initial Doomsday Machine that was encountered by the Starship USS Enterprise in the year 2267 was a prototype of the series and was entirely computer controlled. Later models had pilots who locked in crystalline stasis chambers. It kept them alive a really long time.
Wiz: This first Doomsday Machine was first encountered by the Starship Constellation, which was commanded by Commodore Matt Decker. The Constellation was investigating the destruction of system L374 when it discovered that the fourth planet in the system was breaking up, while being fired on by the machine. The Constellation engaged the machine, but quickly discovered that its phasers could not damage the machine at all, while the beam fired by the machine succeeded in utterly wrecking the starship.
Boomstick: Unable to escape or call for aid, due to a strange dampening field, Commodore Decker beamed his entire crew to the surface of the third planet in the system. Commodore Decker stayed aboard, planning on being the last to leave the ship. When the Doomsday Machine again attacked, it destroyed the ship's transporters and then turned to consume the third planet, leaving Decker alone to watch the destruction of the planet and the death of his crew of 400.
Wiz: Having picked up a faint distress call from the Constellation, the Starship Enterprise, commanded by Captain James T. Kirk, arrived on the scene and rescued Commodore Decker. The Planet Killer then fired on the Enterprise. Having sufficiently damaged the Enterprise, the machine resumed its original course, which Lieutenant Commander Spock calculated would take it through some of the most heavily populated portions of the Federation.
Boomstick: During the course of their interaction with the machine, Captain Kirk realized that an explosion inside the mouth of it might destroy whatever was inside of the hull. To this end, he steered the wrecked Constellation into the mouth of the machine and detonated its impulse engines, which did indeed succeed in destroying the machine.
Wiz: This was not the last time that the Federation encountered a Planet Killer. During the events of the comic book series, Star Trek: Voyager - Planet Killer, the USS Voyager encountered one of these vessels, and attempted to destroy in the same way that Captain Kirk had by piloting another ship into its maw and detonating it. Unfortunately for them, they discovered that Kirk had been quite lucky with his ploy and that the same trick was totally ineffective for them. They were only able to defeat the machine by coating the holographic doctor's emitter with neutronium, and getting him aboard with specially modified Borg nanoprobes, which infected and deactivated it.
Boomstick: During the events of the comic book series, The Q Conflict, Trelane conjured up a Doomsday Machine to test the abilities of Captains Kirk, Picard, Sisko and Janeway. The Starships Enterprise, Enterprise-E, Defiant and Voyager fought the machine in concert, each one taking a turn attacking while the other three served as distractions for the mighty vessel. In the end, they succeeded in destroying it by the Voyager flying basically into the machine's mouth and firing a salvo of quantum torpedoes, followed by the Enterprise-E, which did the same.
Wiz: Now, when it comes to the size of the original Doomsday Machine, that machine was 3,700 meters long, or roughly two and a quarter miles long. That is pretty huge compared to the Enterprise's 290 meter, or 950 foot, length.
Boomstick: So, it's huge in the Star Trek universe, but that makes it only about four times the size of a Star Wars Star Destroyer, twice the size of the Battlestar Galactica, only a little bigger than the V Mothership, and less than half the size of a Star Wars Super Star Destroyer!
Wiz: Nonetheless, when it comes to weapons, the Doomsday Machine is impressively equipped. Its primary weapon is a particle beam, a concentrated stream of subatomic particles, but in this case the particles are antiprotons! When a proton and an antiproton annihilate at rest, other particles are usually produced, but the total kinetic plus rest mass energies of these products adds up to twice the rest mass energy of the proton, which is 2 x 938 mega-electronvolts, or 1,876 MeV. This is equivalent to 7.18375 kilotons of TNT, or roughly half of the yield of the Little Boy atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War 2.
Boomstick: And you have to remember that that is *one* antiproton meeting *one* proton, and the Planet Killer is shooting an entire stream of these particles out at the target! If even one little antiproton gets through...KABOOM!
Wiz: The hull of the Doomsday Machine is made of pure neutronium. Now there are several different theoretical materials that this name is used for, but in this case it's a super-dense material that is found in the core of neutron stars, and it is sometimes referred to as neutron-degenerate matter. This material is crystalline in nature and is so dense that a teaspoon of the matter would weight about 1.5 billion tonnes, or about 1.65 US tons. Now, this material cannot exist except in an extremely powerful gravity well, so this must be a somewhat different form of neutronium.
Boomstick: In the novelization of this episode, Spock states that weighs a ton per cubic inch, but that would probably be an extreme understatement.
Wiz: Nonetheless, this collapsed matter would be extremely durable, being completely resistant to electricity, and so able to withstand heat that Doomsday Machines have been known to hide inside of stars. In the Star Trek universe there is no weapon that can penetrate it. As an added bonus, the hull seems to generate a disruptive field that interferes with radio and transporter beams.
Boomstick: Another weapon of this machine is a very strong tractor beam. After it has chopped up planets with its antiproton beam it uses the tractor beam to pull the material inside of it, where it can be converted into antiprotons for the beam and into energy for movement.
Wiz: As for movement, the ship is somewhat sluggish, with the original Star Trek having no trouble out accelerating the machine and out turning it. Nonetheless, it can move quickly, theoretically being able to reach Warp 10, the speed at which an object would actually be present in all places simultaneously.
Boomstick: As for crew...well it doesn't have one.
Wiz: The machine is controlled by a surprisingly primitive AI that operates on a fairly simple level. If a spaceship enters its preprogrammed defensive sphere, it will be immediately attacked. However, if the ship is below a certain size and it moves far enough away, then the machine will ignore the craft and cease pursuing it. Also, if one craft is moving away from the machine, when another attacks, it will immediately switch targets, rather than finishing off the original target. Each time that one of these Doomsday Machines was defeated, it was by manipulating these flaws.
Boomstick: Flaw? Yeah, it has them, but this weapon is outrageously dangerous, a true doomsday machine!
Intermission[]
Wiz: All right the combatants are set, and we've run the data through all possibilities.
Boomstick: It's time for a DEATH BATTLE!
DEATH BATTLE![]
Pre-Fight[]
Wilhuff Tarkin stood in the Overbridge watching the viewscreen, a thoughtful look on his patrician face.
The new Death Star was not long on its shakedown cruise when it picked up a garbled distress signal from the Imperial Star Destroyer Revenge. Following the line of the distress call, the ship proceeded to M-370, a small, main sequence star with seven planets. Except that the seven planets were gone. The Science Section was at a loss to explain what had happened to the planets, as the star had not gone nova.
Tarkin knew that the Mark I Superlaser had the power to destroy planets, but that would still have left behind the equivalent mass of the planets. In the case of M-370, the planets were missing, as if they had been somehow picked up and taken away.
The distress signal from the Revenge had changed to an automated disaster beacon, meaning that it was now beyond rescue.
The Death Star followed the disaster beacon through four other stars, finding the stars unchanged but their planetary systems simply wiped away, as if they had never been. But in this last system, they found that the destruction had not been total, as the two innermost planets still survived and travelled serenely in their timeless orbit. And it was here that they found the Revenge.
Or, rather, what was left of her.
The ship was quite heavily damaged, with the upper-rear command and control section being completely blasted away. There were a further two neat holes cut through the hull of the ship, showing the violence that had been visited upon the ship.
Repeated radio calls had failed to produce any response, and scientific scans could find no sign of life on the hulk. Admiral Motti had asked for permission to send a boarding party to examine the wreck, but Tarkin had seen no sense in wasting the effort, when whatever had wrecked the Revenge was out here, rather than in there.
Now Grand Moff Tarkin sat in contemplation, his mind turning the facts of the situation over, looking for an understanding of what was going on. He knew that the rebels had found out about Project Stardust and were no doubt already planning a response. But he had expected some form of conventional attack on the station. Could this be part of an elaborate trap for the Death Star? And, if so, how had they so utterly destroyed the planets in the five systems.
Without turning, Tarkin gave his order to the admiral, "Scramble all the ready TIE Fighters. Sweep in every direction. Something has been causing this destruction; find it."
"Sir," the admiral began, "a strange radio interference seems to be nearly total in this system. Once the fighters are launched, it may be impossible to keep in communication with them."
"Nonetheless," Tarkin answered, "they are the eyes of this station, and I want them out and looking for whatever did this."
"Yes sir," the admiral replied. Then, he turned and pointed to a technician at a command station who began issuing the necessary orders.
Steepling his fingers before his mouth, Tarkin added, "Admiral, call the crew to general quarters."
Immediately a klaxon began to sound.
The crew of the Overbridge worked in silence, knowing that the Grand Moff did not tolerate idle chatter in his presence.
Suddenly, the silence was broken when a young lieutenant spoke up from her station. "Sir, a returning TIE Fighter squadron reports that several hours ago a ship suddenly appeared in the vicinity of the second planet, which is on the other side of the primary, and began firing on it."
"Several hours ago?" Tarkin barked at her. "Why are we only being informed of this now?"
"The fighters experienced a sudden increase in radio interference when the ship appeared and were unable to report in until they had closed to 10 light-seconds," she replied.
"I did warn you about the interference," Admiral Motti announced smugly.
Tarkin waved the man to silence and began to issue orders. "Navigation, plot an intercept course with the intruder. Admiral, prepare all TIE Fighters for launch on my command."
The tactical display showed the calculated placement of the intruder, while at the same time showing the firing arc of the superlaser.
Governor Tarkin patiently watched the display as the time ticked down.
Finally, the sensor array of the Death Star cleared the star, and presented a clear image of the second planet and the intruder.
Actually, the second planet had been destroyed, leaving a debris field with no piece larger than the Death Star itself.
The intruder was a long, thin craft, shaped vaguely like an old-fashioned windsock.
Admiral Motti stepped forward, staring at the intruder in amazement.
"Admiral," Tarkin barked, "have you ever seen a ship like that before?"
"Never," the admiral answered without looking away from the screen.
"Fire Control, target the ship with the superlaser and prepare to fire on my command."
"Yes, sir," the Fire Control Officer replied. Then, he began pressing buttons on his console.
Tarkin raised an eyebrow as he continued to study the intruding spacecraft.
"Sir, target computers are locked on the ship and the energizers are ready to fire."
Tarkin nodded, and commanded, "fire!"
FIGHT! []
The eight lasers fired from their emitters, converging on the amplification nexus. Then, the deadly energy lanced forward, knifing through the darkness of space towards the Doomsday Machine. It struck the machine towards the middle, causing it to shake and glow red. When the beam stopped, it turned towards the Death Star and began to accelerate towards it.
"That's not possible!" Admiral Motti exclaimed.
Governor Tarkin turned towards the control staff.
"Navigation, hard astern!" He barked. "Take us back behind the primary!"
Still staring at the screen, the admiral responded, "the station responds too slowly for that. We don't have time!"
"Then we must make time," Tarkin responded over his shoulder. Turning again to the staff, he ordered, "Launch all TIE Fighters!"
Within minutes, streams of the short-range fighters began flowing towards the Doomsday Machine.
The giant machine seemed to ignore the tiny craft, until they began swarming around it, strafing it with their laser canons. Suddenly, the giant machine turned, the burning light its huge maw flared, and a great beam of seemingly solid blue light lanced out into the void. All the TIE Fighters that were caught in the path of the beam flared and disappeared in tiny puffs of smoke. The Planet Killer turned slightly and fired again. Again, large numbers of TIE Fighters were caught by the beam and instantly turned into vapor.
"Science, what is the composition of that beam?" Tarkin demanded.
The officer at the Science station responded, "Sir, Science reports that the enemy weapon is a beam of antiprotons. Further, it appears that the hull of the ship is made of pure neutronium."
Tarkin spun on his heel to face the young technician.
"Is that possible?" he demanded.
"So, the Science Section reports, Sir," the young man answered.
"Navigation, have we reversed?"
"Yes sir. We have changed the vector of movement and are accelerating. Forward movement is still quite slow."
Tarkin turned back to the viewscreen.
The TIE Fighters swarmed around the Doomsday Machine like hornets around a bull. The giant machine turned and fired, the blue light lancing through space, vaporizing numbers of the small craft with each shot.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, the Death Star moved back behind the star, and out of line-of-sight of the Planet Killer.
"Communications," Tarkin commanded, "contact Fleet Admiral Sturvis. Advise him of our situation and instruct him to send a fleet to our position as soon as possible."
The Communications officer responded, "We cannot get through, sir, the interference is still making long range communication impossible."
Tarkin studied the viewscreen for a minute, and then announced, "Admiral, detail a squadron of TIE Fighters to act as scouts. I must be kept informed as to the enemy's movements."
"Yes, sir," Admiral Motti replied.
Over the course of the next few minutes, the Doomsday Machine used its particle beam to practically sweep the heavens clear of TIE Fighter. After that, it turned and used its tractor beams to draw in large chunks of the destroyed second planet.
Back on the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin met with the head of the Science Section, analyzing the reports brought back by the scouts.
Finally, after all too little time, word was brought that the Planet Killer was circling around the star, undoubtedly looking for the Death Star.
"Fire Control, open fire as soon as the enemy comes within range," he ordered.
And when the Planet Killer closed to the 1,200 kilometer range, the turbolaser batteries opened up on the machine.
The Doomsday Machine turned, circling around the larger spacecraft on a spiral course that brought it ever closer. Flashes of laser fire lanced through the darkness of space, raining on the hull of the machine.
"As expected, sir," the technician reported. "Our laser fire is having no effect on its hull."
Suddenly, the machine turned, and a lance of blue energy leaped out of its maw, aimed straight at the Death Star. In spite of its great size, the battle station shook under the assault. The Planet Killer then turned and resumed its spiral course.
"Damage control?" Tarkin queried.
"Minimum damage, sir. The particle shields have resisted the beam so far, but the energy usage is pushing the systems into the red zone," came the reply.
"Very good. Fire control, keep firing. Find a weak spot in the thing's hull."
The duel continued, with the battle station raining laser fire on the Doomsday Machine, and the other turning and firing its antiproton beam back.
Suddenly, one of the Doomsday Machine's beams hit, and the Death Star positively rocked. Alarm klaxons sounded, and red lights flashed.
"What happened?" Governor Tarkin demanded.
"One of the beams struck an unshielded exhaust port. Damage is extensive." Came the report.
Tarkin turned back to the viewscreen. He stared at it for a moment, and then announced, "We can't penetrate its hull. We need a clear shot at the internal mechanism. Fire control, when the intruder next turns, fire all turbolasers at its opening!"
And when the Planet Killer turned, the barrage of laser fire targeted the machine's mouth.
The machine barely hesitated before it fired again, the blue antiproton beam striking the already damaged portion of the Death Star. A giant explosion wracked the station, sending plumes of fire and a hail of debris out into space.
"How did we miss that large opening?" Tarkin demanded.
"Many of the batteries did not miss, sir," came the reply. "The beams are just bouncing around inside. We can't get a shot straight through!"
"Fire all weapons! Navigation, move us off at flank speed. Get us out of here!"
But it was already too late.
The Doomsday Machine accelerated to match speed and kept firing, it's antiproton beam tearing deeper and deeper into the Death Star, causing more and more damage to the internal system of the battle station.
Finally, the beam dug through to the main reactor. The Death Star flared in a tremendous explosion and disintegrated.
K.O.! []
A few remaining TIE Fighters raced away from the carnage, the ships being too small to attract the attention of the Planet Killer.
Tractor beams shot out of the maw of the giant robot, pulling in the largest remaining pieces of the Death Star.
Results[]
Boomstick [throwing up his arms]: Kaboom!
[Off camera, something crashes, like it was knocked down by the force of Boomstick's yell. Wiz turns to look at the source of the crash, a look of surprise on his face.]
Boomstick: OK, Wiz, you better have a good explanation for this one.
Wiz: The Death Star was larger than the Doomsday Machine, and in certain ways more dangerous.
Boomstick: For example, the Death Star could destroy a planet with a single shot of its superlaser, whereas the Doomday Machine's antiproton beam tended to slice up a planet like a Christmas turkey.
Wiz: Nonetheless, though, in a straight up fight, just about all of the advantages lay with the Planet Killer.
Boomstick: The Mark I Superlaser was an impressive weapon, but a key weakness of it was that it could only be fired once every 24 hours. In most fights, that meant that the Death Star would only get one shot with it in a fight. So, the question was, would it be powerful enough to crack the Doomsday Machine's neutronium hull.
Wiz: The Superlaser succeeded in blowing up Alderaan, which presumably had roughly the same mass as Earth, roughly 6 x 10^24 kilograms, and the same radius of about 6 x 10^6 meters. Now, to blow apart such a planet, you would need to overcome the energy it would take to assemble it from cosmic debris. This would be about 2 x 10^32 joules, or 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules, which is a tremendous amount of energy.
Boomstick: The hull of the Doomsday Machine was forged in the heart of a Neutron Star, which has a mass of about 1 billion tons, a diameter of about 20 kilometers, and a gravity of about 10 times that of Earth.
Wiz: Running the math, that means that the energy needed to explode such a star would be about (2x10^30 kg) * (1x10^12) * 20000m, or 4x10^42 joules.
Boomstick: That's about 20 billion times the amount of energy that the Death Star cranked out to vaporize Alderaan.
Wiz: With today's science there is no theoretical way to remove neutronium from a Neutron Star, and keep it stable. But, even if you assume that it greatly decreased the strength of the material, it would still take vastly more power to break it than the Death Star demonstrated.
Boomstick: But, Wiz, if they had fired that honking great laser canon right at that mouth of the Doomsday Machine, that would have fried its interior but good!
Wiz: That is possible, but not entirely likely. In the novelization of the original Star Trek episode, we see Commadore Decker take Spock's advice and pilot the Enterprise right past the mouth of the machine, firing its phasers at it at a rather close distance. It had no effect, because as Lieutenant Sulu reported, "Those beams are just bouncing around inside. We can't get a shot straight through." The fact is, that the first Doomsday Machine was destroyed by what was later figured to be a lucky shot when the Constellation exploded right inside its mouth. Trelane's Doomsday Machine was only destroyed when something like 20 quantum torpedoes were fired into its mouth at nearly pointblank range.
Boomstick: OK, well, what if they had waited and fired at a really, really close range?
Wiz: Admittedly, that does increase the likelihood of success, but the question is if they would indeed do that. The entire station was designed to destroy opponents at long distance, up to 260,000,000 miles, which is why it was not designed well to deal with small opponents at close range, and when the ship prepared to fire at Yavin IV, it did so at long-range indeed. So, it is logical to assume that the superlaser would be similarly used against the Doomsday Machine.
Boomstick: But what about all those thousands of turbolasers? Surely some would be targeted at the mouth and get through.
Wiz: Again, as was found in Star Trek, the Planet Killer's high-radiation energy furnace distorted all attacks that weren't made from right inside the mouth, making them useless. Plus, the Death Star simply was not maneuverable enough to be piloted right up to the mouth of the machine.
Boomstick: And that leaves us with the Death Star's shielding. Why didn't that protect it?
Wiz: It does appear from available sources, that the first Death Star was not protected by one gigantic shield, but was instead protected by a patchwork of ray and particle shields. This meant that there were weak spots in the ship's defenses, such as the exhaust port that the Rebels used to destroy it. The Doomsday Machine was willing to ignore the small starships of Star Trek, but the crew had realized that it was designed to fight against larger ships. Therefore, it is likely that the machine would be unrelenting in its attacks on the Death Star, and would eventually find the weak spot in its defenses.
Boomstick: And once it did, it would just slice and dice the Death Star the way that it did a whole group of planets.
Wiz: That's right, and that's why the winner is the Doomsday Machine.
