The Death Star On Kickstarter?

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The White House may have turned down the petition to build a functioning Death Star with its witty “This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For” statement, but that isn’t keeping a Kickstarter project from raising the funds to develop plans.

The Kickstarter project calls for raising $31 million to develop a design of a functioning battle station. So far the project has raised $344,063 and is trending toward reaching $3,907,311, roughly 13 percent of its goal.

Yes it’s a joke. In fact the deadline for the project falls on April Fool’s Day and the creator of the Kickstarter campaign says clearly that, “The main challenge is assuring Kickstarter that this is a joke and not a serious project. As proof, the goal has been set high enough to make successful funding almost impossible.”

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According to the details of the campaign, the $31 million would go completing the initial schematic and purchasing “enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports.” If you aren’t familiar with the exhaust ports, these were the Death Star’s weakness which gave Luke Sykwalker the opportunity to destroy the death machine in the cinematic feature Episode IV: A New Hope.

The stretch goal for this project would be a laughable $850 quadrillion, or $850,000,000,000,000,000 (A number initially developed by economics students at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA), which is an even more hysterical 12,000 percent more than the global domestic product.

Even so, it’s interesting that the Kickstarter project has received as much as it has.

If the pledges don’t quite make the campaign’s $31 million goal by April 1st, the project will likely fade away and the funders won’t be required to cough up the dough. But what happens if it does reach its goal?

Nick Petkovich, the creator of the project, describes himself as a resident of Leicestershire in Britain associated with the website www.gnut.co.uk which offers two text adventure games. Well hey, at the very least Nick will get a nice bump in traffic to his site.

Efforts have been made to try and contact Nick, but he hasn’t been available for comment.

So can we expect a Death Star from the creator of gnut.co.uk? That’s almost as laughable as the stretch goal. But it’s all in good fun. Personally, I’d like to see this thing meet its initial funding goal, now that would be a nice April Fool’s joke for good ol’ Nick.