An example of one of the Bad Theories of Spacecraft Design.

Some flaws:

• Its one big weapon is not easily aimable.
• Its smaller weapons have crummy range.
• It has one small weakness.
• Its creators are confident in their machine.
• The guns are manned by neither infallible machines nor smart humans, so they are bound to fail.
• It has ridges in its surface, so that the enemy fighters can be sheilded from fire.

http://hubble.stsci.edu/discoveries/hstexhibit/stars/stardeath.shtml

Armament
1 Superlaser
5,000 Turbolaser Batteries
5,000 Heavy Turbolasers
2,500 Laser Cannons
2,500 Ion Cannons
768 Tractor Beam Emplacements

Crew: 265,675
including
57,276 Gunners

Troop Capacity: 607,360
including
25,984 Stormtroopers
42,782 Starship Support Staff

Total Population: In excess of one million
Taken from a Star Wars magazine, this is the figure that includes any non-military staff, such as cooks, cleaners, people who empty out garbage compactors and the valets who park TIE Fighters.

Fighter Complement:
1831 TIE Fighters
2904 TIE Assault Craft
806 TIE Boarding Craft
1384 Scouts (Whatever these are)

Warship Complement:
6 Star Destroyers
10 Battleships
39 Heavy Cruisers
17 Light Cruisers
81 Fighter Tenders
190 Troop Transports
714 Corvettes
509 Tanker Drones

Defenses:
Reinforced hull plating
Multiple overlapping shield generators
Sensor jammers
"Countermeasures"
(Either all this wasn't working well at Yavin or they were pretty poorly designed)

Cost: You have to be kidding

Taken from http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ds.html though if anyone has any more accurate figures then /msg me and I'll put them here.

The "Death Star" was created by Dr. Evil in Austin Powers II: The Spy who shagged me as an integral part of his Alan Parsons Project.

This Death Star was in fact the Earth's moon with a "laser" placed on the surface, with a moon base in a protective bubble.
The purpose of this new Death Star was to place the weapon in such a position that it could threaten any city on planet earth, providing plenty of authority behind any ransom demand that would be made.
In typical Dr Evil fashion, the only armament on the station is a large, chrome laser with flashing red lights which has the dubious honor of also attracting midget clones.

This Death Star was ultimately destroyed by the Doctor himself before it could achieve its purpose.

Death Star n.

[from the movie "Star Wars"] 1. The AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the movie. This usage is particularly common among partisans of BSD Unix, who tend to regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames. 2. AT&T's internal magazine, "Focus", uses `death star' to describe an incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light -- a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

One day at my previous place of employment, some of my team members decided to amuse themselves by raiding my Star Wars daily calendar and removing most of the character pictures. Once they had a pool of characters to choose from, they assigned everybody's cubicle and office a character. Some people had choices (I got Darth Maul), others did not (my neighbour got Jar Jar).

Our project area sign also got a picture of the Death Star posted up for passer-bys to see. Nobody really gave it much thought until one day, the sign was altered to read...

"Thank you for shopping at Death Star. Please visit again soon!"

Now would be the time to fill you in on what our company was all about. Well, we were originally a small firm that designed Dense Wave Division Mutliplexing (DWDM) testing equipment. After about 6 months in operation, we produced a prototype of a tunable optical transmitter and that was enough to get the big guys showing up at our door with moneybags. Feeling invincible at the height of the bubble, we ended up selling our souls to one of these big companies for mostly stock.

Back to the story at hand...

From that moment on, our team was no longer the (product name here) Development Team - we were the Death Star, ready to blast the competitors to pieces in the name of the Empire!

Cut to a mere 10 months, 75% layoffs, and thousands of next-to-worthless stock later. News came that the plug was finally being pulled and that we had two weeks to wrap everything up.

During the doomsday meeting, the VP of Business Development asked if anybody had any questions. One of my colleagues asked out loud, "Why us?"

The VP paused in thought and replied...

"Well, you can't really name yourselves Death Star and not expect somebody to drop a bomb down your asshole, now can you?"