Family Gives in to Dark Side, Builds Giant Death Star on Top of Home
The giant Death Star perched atop a home. Image: Screenshot from Death Star in Lafayette, CA YouTube video

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Family Gives in to Dark Side, Builds Giant Death Star on Top of Home

One family's quest to "reconstruct the perfect battle station."

With the new Star Wars film set for release later this year, fans are going crazy. One family has taken their devotion to the franchise to the next level: They've built a 23-foot, light-up "Death Star" onto their roof.

The Death Star is built as a geodesic dome: a spherical and hollow latticed shell made up of a network of geodesic triangles. The geodesics join up and intersect, distributing the stress all around the sphere and preventing it from collapsing.

Coby Powell and his family, based in Lafayette in California, built their giant Death Star in the backyard and used a crane to hoist it onto their roof just in time for both Halloween and the release of The Force Awakens.

Powell's Death Star is made up of 960 connections between the parts and covered by two T-10 parachutes (usually used by the US army), forming the epic 23-foot-diameter structure. At night it sparkles and glows, making it seem slightly less like a terrifying planet-destroying contraption and more like a giant Christmas bauble.

According to Powell's Youtube clip, the giant death star is one family's quest to "reconstruct the perfect battle station."