A single functioning Death Star would be unable to blow up a Gas Giant planet

3 rounds, 7,000 character limit, 24 hours between rounds. The Death Star, the mega-weapon featured prominently in the first Star Wars trilogy of movies, is a moon-sized space station that is capable of destroying planets, as evidenced by the destruction of Alderaan, shown in the video to your right http://www.youtube.com...I will argue though that while the Death Star is able to blow up rocky Earth sized planets, the Death Star would NOT be able to blow up a gas giant planet the size of Jupiter or even Saturn, for the reasons stated below... 1) Atmospheric resistance and wind issuesThe Death Star as we all know operates by firing giant lasers at the planet targeted for destruction. The first problem for why a Death Star would therefore be unable to destroy a gas giant planet is because atmospheric fluctuations, temperature changes, etc. damages the strength and trajectory of a laser, as stated in the link below.http://fas.org...The Atmosphere of Earth stands at a height of about 50 mileshttp://science.nationalgeographic.com...The Atmosphere of Jupiter on the other hand has an estimated heights of over 600 miles, 12 times higher than that of Earths. https://en.wikipedia.org...More importantly, the wind speed of the atmosphere on Earth ranges from 0 to 100 meters per second, or 0 to 233 miles per hour in extreme circumstanceshttp://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...Jupiter's wind speeds though can AVERAGE almost 400 miles per hour, and wind speeds on other gas giant planets like Saturn can even climb up to 500 meters per second, over a THOUSAND miles per hour. If you include Uranus and Neptune as gas giants, the potential increases to a whopping 1500 miles per hourhttp://www.nasa.gov...https://en.wikipedia.org...http://www.space.com...This would create substantial problems for a Death Star intending to target a gas giant planet for destruction, because not only does the laser have to travel through a larger atmosphere to hit the center (and thus be more prone to lose power along the way), but the atmospheric fluctuations on gas giants are extremely more powerful than those found on smaller rocky planets like Earth or Alderaan, which would directly compromise a 'normal' blast from a Death Star to less lethal levels. The power from a Death Star blast would therefore have to be increased dramatically, to an impossible degree, which is where the next argument comes in2) Power needed to blow up a gas giant by a single Death Star would be unreachableWhen a White House petition asking for the construction of the Death Star went viral, one scientist who actually saw the petition commented that the amount of energy a Death Star needs to blow up a planet is:(Numerical Constant) x ((Gravity constant x Mass of planet squared)/ Radius of the planet)or N x (Gx(M^2))/R The energy needed to destroy Earth would be 100 Million Billion Billion Watts, and no, im not making that up, thats the actual estimaete:https://en.wikipedia.org...So because the energy needed to destroy a planet is directly correlated with the mass of the planet, the amount of energy needed to blow up a gas giant would be exponentially larger due to how much more mass there is in the gas giant than there is a smaller, rocky planet. While the Death Star can already produce the energy needed to blow up a small rocky planet, the amount of energy needed to blow up a gas giant would be too large for it to overcome. Multiple Death Stars firing all at once may do the trick, but putting the collective power of dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of Death Stars into a single Death Star is likely impossible to achieve. 3) It would be hard for a Death Star to hit the core of a Gas GiantAs stupid as this sounds, hear me out. Gas giants are known for not having solid, stable cores, its part of the reason why they are called 'Gas Giants' and not just 'Big a$$ planets'... The Death Star works by pinpointing the heart of a planets core and blasting it to smithereens, taking the rest of the planet out with the core in the ensuing blast. But pinpointing the heart of a gas giant could prove problematic since its not even known if gas giants have a solid or liquid core, it is in fact speculated it could be some combination of both, as explained belowhttp://www.spaceanswers.com...With the high winds and large atmospheres of gas giants taken into account, a shot from the Death Star could be diffracted enough to the point that it misses whatever is in the core of the planet completely, and instead pass through the planet completely. Even if you do hit the core of a gas giant, because the cores of gas giants are speculated to not even exist in a stable form, the Death Star blast could pass through the planet anyways since the core of a gas giant is not the same as the core of a rocky earth-like planet the Death Star is normally unleashed upon. 4) Laser intensity decreases over distanceThis relates back to argument 1 about the atmospheric issues posed by gas giants. Lasers lose their power the more distance the laser travels. https://www.laserworld.com...The problem this poses to a Death Star vs a gas giant scenario is that even in favorable atmospheric conditions on the gas giant, a laser beam can still lose power and intensity the further it travels since intensity naturally decays over distance. As stated in the link above, the only way to compensate for this deterioration is to increase the power of the laser. Therefore, in order for a Death Star to be able to blow up a Jupiter sized planet, the Death Star would have to be able to harness and unleash (safely) MORE then what is actually needed to blow up Jupiter to compensate for the intensity decay of a Death Star blast.