WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
It is said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” What do you say when you make the same mistake three times? So the Empire built a Death Star with a critical flaw that caused a single point of failure and thousands died. It is said that Emperor Palpatine executed the designer responsible for the first station’s weak spot, then cloned him to make the second station without any imperfections. However, Lando was able to find the second battle stations point of failure, the station’s core, and destroy.
The destruction of this battle station, along with the death of the Emperor, would cause the New Republic to rise into power and restore freedom to the galaxy. Sure, evil continued to fester in the Outer Rim and coalesced into the First Order lead by Supreme Leader Snoke, but for a period we had peace.
Then the First Order became bolder. They created a Starkiller base to demonstrate their power. To show they are more advanced than the Galactic Empire, they make the base bigger and more powerful. Instead of being moon sized, Starkiller is made out of an entire ice planet. But if they truly wanted to show how much more enlightened they are you would think they would have fixed the one problem that resulted in the destruction of both Death Stars.
I understand that the planetary magnetic field would not be enough to contain the amount of energy that the weapon required, a thermal oscillator was built into the planet. But could they have not created some redundancy? What about adding a containment field that would contain the oscillator’s damage to the point of impact?
It is completely unfathomable that the engineering team behind the base did not do everything in their power to prevent a single point of failure. How many times will it take before the bad guys learn from their mistake? It would be like if Disneyland tried to recreate the Flying Saucer attraction despite the original’s much publicized mechanical difficulties.
It is unknown what happened to the engineering team that designed Starkiller Base. They might have died on the planet or Snoke might have killed them. I just hope that they didn’t come to earth and get jobs at Walt Disney Imagineering to work on the Star Wars Land. For their continued ineptitude and their inability to learn from past mistakes, on this Topsy Turvy Day, we name the Engineers of the First Order our King of Fools for 2016.