Yeah. For that level of resources they probably could have just had ten Star Destroyers orbiting every known inhabited planet.
But real-world warfare history is full of these expensive disasters that, in hindsight, were spectacularly dumb ideas.
I don't think the Death Star was meant to be practical. More of a terror weapon or trump card, akin in some ways to nuclear weapons whose true value transcends their practical value. The destruction of Alderaan felt like an allegory for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
> The US Navy has aircraft carriers, which are every bit as ridiculous as a Death Star.
They aren't ridiculous in the real world. They are in some theoretical worlds with alternate assumptions about what wars actually happen, but...
> They are utterly useless against well armed opponents.
They are quite useful, though, against the opponents that the US has actually fought against since WWII, though, which are mostly not with opponents that would be “well-armed” in the sense needed to make your claim true, are often also outside of the effective force projection radius of such opponents, and often would be inconvenient for US force projection without having convenient sea-mobile airbases with a air wing the same rough size as the median national air force.
Yeah. They project force in a way that battleships no longer can. And whether or not they're really used, the fact is that they can be used. And very few counties want to mess with a US aircraft carrier and its escort surface fleet.
In WWII they were absolutely invaluable against a peer enemy in the Pacific theater. They were the single most important bits of military hardware in that war.
They grew more vulnerable over time, first to peer enemies and eventually to rebels funded by sorta-peer enemies like Iran. In 2025, I don't think anybody doubts that a sustained saturation attack would fail to sink or at least prevent a carrier from functioning.
(Though it's also worth noting that the Houthis haven't been able to hit one yet, even with Iranian backing)
Still, a carrier group allows the US to project a tremendous amount of force anywhere in the world, and if a nation state hits one they're going to face an absolutely tremendous amount of military wrath from the US, which kind of gives them a strength beyond their literal combat capability.
