Take me high and I'll sing

 He has no one to bitch to about it. 

Even the Emperor’s jumped on the superweapon hype train. Even the tolerably-competent officers like Tarkin are all #TeamDeathStar, and then there’s smug assholes like Admiral Motti who just won’t shut up about it, and honestly?

Vader’s probably been on the email CC list for the design since the project started. Years of enduring shitty design and interdepartmental bickering and watching some smarmy asshole in an inferior cloak prance about bloviating about his special superweapon like somebody who has an anime body pillow of the superlaser housing.

And then there’s this one scientist who keeps going on and on about this thermal exhaust problem.

Just. Huge amounts of emails on the subject, going on and on and on about it.

Vader is totally the only person who actually reads these after the first, like, five of them. Everybody else just skims through them with a side of “Seriously, Galen? Another one? Force-dammit, Krennic, couldn’t you have left him on that mudball with his family?” But Vader is bored out of his skull with 90% of his job anyway, and it’s not like he has anything better to do. Besides, viciously judging other people’s design abilities is the closest thing to pass for fun when there aren’t any Rebels to slaughter or armies to curbstomp, and there’s plenty of shit design for the judging.

He spots the flaw in the reactor the first time it appears in the plans.

He’d have shit himself if it wasn’t for the suit.

He promptly makes a bet with himself on whether anybody is going to spot it.

Nobody does.

They’re a pack of idiots. Every last one of them.

Maybe he contemplates telling them for like two-thirds of a second. It would be fun to lord his actual mechanical expertise over that little shit, Krennic.

But then he considers that he can only tell them once, and what if it were after the thing blew itself right the fuck up, what if that? He can still point out the flaw, and he can throw everyone’s stupidity right in their stupid faces, but also there’ll be no more Death Star.

So when Galen Erso sends out Thermal Exhaust Problem Analysis Report #6,109 and buried in paragraph 37 is a suggestion of an extra exhaust port, and Krennic responds with “SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT YOUR GODDAMN THERMAL EXHAUST PORT, GALEN, I DON’T GIVE A SHIT!” and Erso goes, “So you approve the solution?” and Krennic goes “S***** F*** LKJDGJFKL!!!!LJF$%#$DJF! YES!” Vader saves the email exchange for posterity and is downright cheerful the rest of the week.

True, he acts in its defense, chasing down Rebels when the plans are stolen. Of course he does. They’re Rebels, and hunting them down is his job and one of the very few pleasures of his existence. But it’s not for the Death Star. In fact, if one of them were to escape with its plans, and hide them successfully, and keep their location secret through torture and worse, and if another of them were to fly a starfighter well enough to keep from being destroyed long enough to drop a torpedo through that vulnerable exhaust port and touch off that reactor instability and turn the whole massive, ridiculous, wasteful, absurd, and vaguely insulting contraption into so much spacedust …

… well …

… oops.

Vader’s only regret about the whole affair is that Krennic predeceased it and is therefore unavailable for gloating to.

The Annual literally starts with Tarkin arriving on Scarif, only to find Vader had broken into the archive and was just casually studying the Death Star plans

Then later on, he literally says THIS to Tarkin

Because the entire point of the exhaust port is how absurd a long shot it is. If you can survive flying through a narrow trench lined with turrets while in an active dogfight long enough, then you might get close enough to attempt a shot your computers are literally incapable of making.

No matter how many times it gets brought up, no one is going to put time and energy into addressing this, because no reasonable person would consider this an actual vulnerability.

But we’re not talking about a reasonable person.

We’re talking about Anakin “I destroyed a droid control ship from the inside piloting a fighter I had never seen before when I was ten years old” Skywalker.

He sees those plans, and immediately knows how he would take down the Death Star.

Who cares that a computer couldn’t make that shot? It’d be easy, if you use the Force.

You know, the Force? That thing all you Imperial officers are calling superstitious nonsense?

They're the ONLY surviving NONDAMAGED form of the show. In the late 90s, the masters from which the show is printed were damaged with a red-pink hazy filter.

So. Good luck buying them even if you find them. They're some of the most valuable collector's items in the entire franchise.

Without piracy, there would be NO UNDAMAGED COPIES OF SAILOR MOON AVAILABLE TO ANYONE ANYWHERE, PERIOD.

postcard c1910

And then went to gloat over his acquisition and opened up the towels. Which had absorbed enough of the oil the metal was stored in to prevent it from reacting with any spare oxygen in the air.

So it started to react and my teacher's friend freaked out and realized he was going to get caught and get in trouble. And in a panic, he ran to the bathroom and flushed it down a toilet. A brilliant strategy, is it not, for disposing of a chemical that reacts somewhat to air, but whose characteristic interaction with water is generally described as "violent"?

Word for today: wisdom of repugnance