GrS 17:1:4 Death Star review, day four

The emperor's been reading the minutes and, according to a very disgruntled Vader, agreed with me about the astromech droid thing, so we spent the first part of the meeting talking about building an authentication protocol into the astromech droid control panels. I managed to get everyone to agree on the old Techno Union Encryption Protocol, so only astromech droids modified by us can use the panels.

It's the same protocol that I built into R2-D2 years ago. They don't know it, but the encryption key I selected for the Death Star is the same one I used with R2-D2. I chose it in memory of him.

After that, we moved on to atmospheric systems and environmental, during which I caused a bit of a stink, if you'll pardon the pun. I mean, I understand about the interior doors and bulkheads closing automatically in the event of explosive decompression. I even agreed that isolating parts of the station to preserve the atmosphere was a good idea, but no one seemed to understand my point that the circuits were so sensitive that blaster fire at the controls would set them off.

"Do we really want captured Rebels running around and locking all the doors by blasting the controls?" I asked.

"What rebel invaders?" Tarkin snorted.

"The ones who are looking for the tractor beam," I started to say, but then I got the look from Vader, so I shut up.

The last things reviewed were the reactor and thermal systems. I noticed that there was no protection for the thermal exhaust port as there normally is--a physical protective cover so torpedoes and bombs can't be dropped in--and asked about it. "It's okay," said one of the system guys, "it's fully ray-shielded."

"Ray-shielded?" I asked, incredulously. "That won't stop a proton torpedo from a determined pilot."

The system guy snorted. "Look at the size of it! You'd need a pilot who could bulls-eye a womp rat in a T-16 to even hit it. Besides, a ship small enough to get in there is too small to carry proton torpedoes."

"Okay," I said, shrugging. "Anyway, I assume whoever designed this wasn't dumb enough to have it lead directly to the reactor."

"Why not?" Vader asked then, sounding annoyed.

"Are you serious?" I asked in surprise. "Any kid right out of school will tell you that an explosion in an exhaust port will trigger a chain reaction that causes the main reactor to go critical and explode. That's why they're always shielded against energy weapons and usually mechanically protected against proton torpedoes. No competent engineer would allow a design like this off his desk!"

The system guys all glanced at each other but didn't say a word, and Vader made some very annoyed breathing noises, and it suddenly occurred to me who the designer behind this scheme might be.

"On the other hand," I said, as I saw Vader's hand coming up in a classic force-choke maneuver, "the point's well taken that no ship small enough to get in there is likely to have proton torpedoes."

Vader's hand went back down, and we finished the rest of the review.

Before leaving, took a copy of the data tapes for the station. Just in case. Told Vader I wanted to study them on my own time. Not sure he believed me. I didn't realize, but even these tapes have got a standard astromech droid hookup port. Don't know why you'd want to transfer a load of data tapes into an astromech droid, but if you needed to, you could do it in a hurry with these. Sounds like a security risk to me.

Anyway, I transferred the data tapes into my system here, so I can look at them whenever I want. They're not actually the full set, only the bits we were reviewing, but I'm not really interested in the rest of them anyway.

I talked to Bevel Lemelisk a little after the meeting, and yeah, he said that he'd wanted to remove the port altogether, but Vader had disagreed with that decision, so it got left in.