I was shocked that the Empire's reaction to having their central secret military archive compromised was (spoiler ahead) to blow the whole base from space; more so when it is hinted that this was their only copy.

Watching the Death Star operating at low power was cool though, as well as knowing that it had undergone some "preliminary tests" before Episode IV.

I saw it less as a rational move on the part of the Empire, and more as a rational move on the part of Tarkin. With the Death Star functional, Krennic would be gaining more status. Tarkin wanted to take as much credit as possible, as seen earlier in the film. Given an excuse to remove a political rival with the excuse of securing the plans to prevent any additional transmissions, he took it.

Also, I had recently read this fanfiction [1] about a project manager working on the second Death Star, complaining about how much of the institutional knowledge from the first Death Star had been lost, making the second Death Star be quite rushed. The loss of the original plans made the fanfiction fit in even better.

[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11685932/1/Instruments-of-Destr...

The whole affair was a real shitshow. Blowing everything and everyone up is good bureaucratic response when your boss has a habit of strangling people.

>Watching the Death Star operating at low power was cool though

Oh yeah the slomo nuke that's literally outran by the characters. ಠ_ಠ

Given that they were a large distance away from the site of the explosion, it isn't unreasonable. From orbit, we see that the shockwave has covered a large proportion of Jedha's circumference, easily visible from space, at the time of the jump to hyperspace. Estimating the diameter at 5% of the planet's circumference, the shockwave traveled about 600 miles, which would take about 45 minutes for the shockwave to reach, assuming similar size and atmospheric density as Earth (reasonable, since humans can comfortably live there).

Clearly, the stronghold is not 600 miles from the city, as the shockwave was traveling faster than the rockwave, but it gives a good sense of timing. Note that the characters were not able to outrun the rockwave without the jump to hyperspace.

It looked to me like they're literally running out of the building as the shockwave was travelling through it, and then running to the ship and getting there before it gets to them. It didn't look like they were far from the site at all. Without seeing the scene again I guess it's hard to check.

Good point. I've only seen it once so far, so I will keep an eye out for it the next time. My interpretation was that the initial shockwave had hit the building, and was causing all the structural damage that we saw as they were leaving the building. The shockwave passed, at which point they were trying to get to the ship and leave before the larger danger of "the horizon is missing" reached them.

My feelings on it were that the building was shaking due to seismic activity at a low level on the outskirts of the rock wave. The sheer size of the rock wave might make it seem closer than it was. The problem is that we have little indication how far away the base was from the initial blast point. My thought it was quite a distance away since they had X-Wings parked out front in the open.

Logging and access control. Even today some "special collections" are not stored and provided access as easily as technologically possible in order to intentionally restrict access. The humans in the certified birth certificate process could be replaced by a very small shell script technologically, but legally their slowing things down paradoxically provide a useful service by getting in the way.

If I were retcon-ing the data silo design they're worried about a terror attack methodically destroying trillions of dollars of stored design data, or being too easy and fast to use, resulting in the wrong people putting together the wrong collection of ideas and figuring out the overall plan. You can do a lot of interesting compartmentalized grunt work engineering. So here's the static and dynamic loads gimmie a minimal mass truss design for those loads with a factor of safety of 9 but you don't have to be told thats the death star's laser cannon support thingy and it would be bad if enough people put 2 and 2 together.