That’s No Moon! That’s a Death Star Drone

With all the excitement around Star Wars: Rogue One being released, we suspected we’d see a new Star Wars themed drone pop up. We didn’t expect this though! Look at that giant Death Star drone! Most of the video makes it a bit difficult to judge the scale, so be sure to watch right at the beginning when it is released from its hangar (garage).

Brought to you by Flitetest, this video also has some added special effects to turn it into the space battle scene everyone really wants, including ships and planets being squished by the Death Star. I love how the snow looks, being whipped up by the wind from the bigger drone.

My mind keeps envisioning the crew all standing around going “pew pew pew” during the filming, and frankly I would have found that just as delightful.

The build took about a week and a half to complete, and involved shaping insulation foam and creating a drone chassis large enough and strong enough for the Death Star skin. Austin Furey tells us a bit more about their process:

The dome was relatively easy to make, we used two inch thick blue insulation foam and laminated them together with spray adhesive. Then Chad [Luis] used a hand rasp to shape it and then he went in with a wire brush on a drill and hollowed out the center.

A difficult part of the build was making a 6ft Y6 hexacopter “chassis” with such long booms.
The torsion from the motors wanted to twist the whole frame in flight so we had to add in extra supports to cross brace it.

Over all we were really pleased with how it performed!