system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] Why build a Death Star from scratch instead of hollowing out an actual moon/asteroid and placing all the necessary equipment inside?

Why bother building your own metallic superstructure when you can just hollow out an existing moon or asteroid?
gpt
The long and short of it is that naturally-occurring rock isn't strong enough for what they needed the Death Star to do.

Durasteel (the material from which both Death Stars were constructed) is highly resistant to blaster fire even when it's not shielded and can better withstand the immense forces of moving through hyperspace. Non-synthesized materials would be more likely to fall apart under a terrorist bombing run or if they needed to relocate the Death Star to another system.

With the massive amount of digging that would be required to give this hypothetical moon a new "skeleton" and enough mounting points for a synthesized hull in addition to all the internal architecture necessary for that scale of a military base, it's actually not that much harder to just build the structure they need from scratch. Besides, with the entire station constructed from synthesized materials, there's much less chance of any of the internal levels collapsing, in addition to many other benefits.