system
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human
[Star Wars] The Rebel's successfully capture the first Death Star rather than destroy it. What happens next?

In the lead up to the Battle of Yavin, the Rebel leadership decide that the Death Star is simply too great of an asset to destroy so they decide to attempt to capture it instead of simply destroying it. 

So using an attack on a Death Star's trench as a distraction (which leads to the near destruction and disabling of Darth Vader's fighter) the Rebel's manage to land a large raiding party in the space station's docking bays. 

Although there are large casualties and they were almost almost overwhelmed, the Rebel's manage to capture Grand Moff Tarkin and other high ranking imperial officers. They convince them to order the Storm Troopers to stand down in exchange for their lives.   


The Rebel Alliance now has the greatest weapon in the Galaxy at their disposal.  What happens next?
gpt
They certainly don't use it for its intended purpose. The rebels are fighting against the mindset that thinks it's okay to destroy planets and commit genocide in the name of politics. 

They might spend time seeing if the targeting system is sophisticated enough to hit starbases or ships as large as star destroyers. That way the rebel's usual hit-and-fade tactics would be considerably more capable. But once they prove that the DS-1 can only target things as large as planetoids, they would move on. 

Sure, it could be used as a mobile base, and a powerful one at that. But if the Rebels were able to capture the death star with such relative ease, the Empire wouldn't hesitate to do the same. (And with much greater numbers) Not to mention that the Death Star is the emperor's pet project. So its capture would draw his personal attention. The Imperial efforts to retake the death star would pale in comparison to every operation and battle in the civil war so far. The rebels at this time barely had a fleet, and a lot of it was destroyed over Scarif, so this is a losing proposition all around. 

I think their smartest course of action would be to dump all of the contents of its memory banks onto the holonet and broadcast every atrocity required to build such a thing, as well as what it was going to be used for. And once the galaxy is fully informed of what kind of monster sits on the throne, they would destroy the death star in a way that everyone in the galaxy can see. Hopefully, just like how the death star's destruction in the real timeline spurred a huge number of planets to openly rebel, this slightly less violent sequence of events would lead to the same outcome.