Starkiller Base

"This fierce machine which you have built, to which you have dedicated your lives and labor and upon which we now stand, will bring a final end to the worthless Senate and its dithering members. To their cherished fleet. When this day is done, all the remaining systems in their hundreds will bow to the dictates of the First Order. And all will remember this as the last day of the last Republic!"

- General Hux

Starkiller Base was a mobile ice planet that was located in the Unknown Regions that served as a stronghold of the First Order three decades after the Battle of Endor. The base was commanded by General Hux and was armed with a superweapon capable of destroying entire star systems halfway across the galaxy, which the First Order viewed as an evolution of the planet-destroying capabilities of the Galactic Empire's Death Star designs. It was destroyed by a Resistance attack, due to a weak point which was damaged by pilot Poe Dameron, causing the implosion of the entire planet thirty seconds before the superweapon fired. The stored stellar energy caused the planet to ignite after its implosion, turning it into a star.

Description
Starkiller Base was a mobile, forested ice planet located in the Unknown Regions. The First Order, a junta that believed themselves to be the successors to the ideals of the Galactic Empire, converted the planet into a base of operations and used it to house a superweapon capable of destroying entire star systems. The superweapon consumed stars as a power source via a method which cut off starlight from the surface, and would move on to a new star system after depleting a particular star.

The weapon ran on a type of dark energy called "quintessence", which was ubiquitous in the universe, and offered a practically unlimited power source to the First Order. Using a star as a power source, an array of collectors on one side of the planet would gather dark energy in stages, redirecting it to the planetary core, where it was held in place by the natural magnetic field of the planet, as well as an artificial containment field maintained by the machinery the First Order had installed within the crust. As 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. It generated an oscillating containment field which allowed the installation to expend considerably less energy at containing the dark energy than would be required using a steady containment field. A colossal hollow cylinder, large enough to dominate the view of the planet from orbit, penetrated the containment field to a predetermined distance, in order to direct the blast towards its target, and also to absorb its energy, which would otherwise cause catastrophic groundquakes. This design made the weapon vulnerable when it was fully charged, as the destruction of the containment field oscillator the moment before the weapon fired would release the accumulated energy not through the firing cylinder, but throughout the planetary core where it was being held, leading to the gradual collapse of the surface into the core.

As Starkiller Base was charged through the power of stars, it gradually blocked out sunlight until, running at full capacity, it extinguished it completely, leaving the surface in darkness. In order for the weapon to fire, its weapons engineers would induce a breach in the containment field, allowing the collected dark energy to escape the core through the hollow cylinder opening on the antipodes of the planet relative to the stellar collector. During this process, the dark energy transformed to a state known as "phantom energy", and left the planet behind, tearing a hole through hyperspace along a perfectly linear path. The people stationed at the Base called the dimension through which the phantom energy beam traveled "sub-hyperspace", and this method of delivering the payload was near-instantaneous across vast distances. The rotation and inclination of the planet had to be taken into account for the weapon to target something, and also the lack of obstacles between it and the target, as the phantom energy beam would only be intercepted by an object of sufficient mass (like a planet). When the phantom energy struck a planet, the interaction produced enough heat to ignite the planet's core, creating a pocket nova. The space-time disruption caused by the phantom energy's passage would make the nova instantaneously visible thousands of light years away.

Starkiller Base was protected by a planetary shield that was strong enough to deflect any bombardment, and could not be penetrated by any ship traveling at sublight speeds. The shield had an exploitable flaw, however; a fractional refresh rate necessary for a shield of its size, which could be exploited by a single ship exiting hyperspace inside the shield, with barely a second to right itself before crashing on the planet's surface. The shield control was also localized, which meant that, in case it was disabled via malfunction or sabotage, the planet would be unprotected in the time it took technicians to arrive at shield control and put them back up. If shield control was damaged beyond repair, shield control had to be overridden, which was a time-consuming process. These flaws were utilized by the Resistance to destroy the Base. The Millennium Falcon entered the shield after traveling through hyperspace and crash-landed on the edge of a cliff.

In addition to the primary weapon and shield control, Starkiller Base's facilities included numerous ship hangars, sanitation infrastructure, amenities for the garrison of stormtroopers, and a dedicated room where officers could confer with Supreme Leader Snoke via hologram.

History
The ice planet known as Starkiller Base was converted into a stronghold of the First Order, which operated it as their headquarters three decades after the Battle of Endor. The superweapon housed in the base bore some similarities to the Death Star and the Death Star II, the two planet-destroying battle stations built by the Galactic Empire, but it possessed far more power than its predecessors and was more than twice the size, as it was built into a planet. Starkiller Base represented a technological step forward in power, as the First Order believed that they needed to become more powerful than the fallen Galactic Empire if they were to succeed in enacting their goals. Starkiller Base drew its power from the energy of stars, a possible reason for its name.

Starkiller Base was the culmination of the Galactic Empire's research into dark energy translations and hyperspace tunneling. Enormous arrays of specially designed collectors use the power of a sun to attract and send dark energy to a containment unit at the core of the planet, where it is held and built up inside that containment unit until the weapon is ready to fire. Its ability to concentrate dark energy in this manner gave Starkiller Base access to a practically unlimited source of energy.

The first test of the of the base's weaponry, which had already been charged by draining a star before moving into position, happened right before the Battle on Takodana. After gaining Supreme Leader Snoke's approval, General Hux ordered the base to fire on the capital of the New Republic, Hosnian Prime, and four other planets in the Hosnian system, utterly destroying the planets and the New Republic's fleet.

During the battle on Takodana, the scavenger and Resistance ally Rey was captured by Kylo Ren and taken to Starkiller Base, where he attempted to interrogate her. She was able to resist and he realized she was Force-sensitive.

Destruction
As Starkiller Base prepared to destroy the planet D'Qar, the site of the Resistance's headquarters, the Resistance planned an attack of their own. Using information from Finn, a defected First Order Stormtrooper, Resistance pilot Snap Wexley flew a reconnaissance mission to the Starkiller Base system, acquiring detailed scan data on the Base. Using the data, Finn revealed a critical weak point&mdash;the Base's thermal oscillator&mdash;that, if destroyed when the weapon was fully charged, but before it fired, would eliminate the Base.

Squadrons of X-wings engaged TIE fighters defending the Base, while the Millennium Falcon bypassed its shields and deployed a ground team to disable the shield generators. When the X-wings tried to take down the thermal oscillator, but failed, Han Solo and his team delved deeper into the Base's subterranean complex, with the aim of reaching the weak point themselves. Along the way they re-encountered Rey, who had freed herself. Chewbacca detonated explosives on columns supporting an access tunnel that led into the thermal oscillator's conduit. With the tunnel open, Poe Dameron, leader of the Resistance starfighter Corps, entered it and destroyed the conduit, causing a chain reaction that ultimately destroyed Starkiller Base. As it was destroyed, the stored material from the sun it drained expanded to create a new star in the planet's place, turning the star system into a binary.

Behind the scenes
"It is very much — and it's acknowledged as such in the movie — apparently another Death Star. But what it's capable of, how it works, and what the threat is, is far greater than what the Death Star could have done. Starkiller Base is another step forward, technologically speaking, in terms of power."

- J.J. Abrams, on the similarities and differences between the Death Stars and Starkiller Base

Starkiller Base was created for the 2015 film Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens. The film's director, J.J. Abrams, stated that the superweapon's similarities to the two Death Stars from the original trilogy were intentional, as the new generation of Imperials within the First Order would want to prove that they were stronger and more advanced than their predecessors in the Galactic Empire. The base's name harkens back to the original name of Luke Skywalker, who George Lucas originally called Luke Starkiller.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens
 * Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens novelization
 * Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens junior novelization