In a completely unrelated thread, I raised the spectre of one of the hallowed geek questions, “Who would win: Enterprise or Death Star?” Most people laughed and went for the Death Star because hey, that’s no moon. My response, I think, solves the issue admirably.
Plus you have to remember, the MacGyverish manner in which Death Star I and it’s “oh screw it, let’s just waste the galaxy’s resources making another one with an equally crippling design flaw that the primary weapon used by our enemies field in quantity can trivially exploit” cousin Death Star II were taken down. Starfleet is TRAINED for MacGyver moments.
They’d warp out of the system, leaving behind a plucky engineer and a couple of security people in a cloaked shuttlecraft. They would land right in the death star trench and drop a mine down the exhaust port. The mine would of course fail to arm, and a security person would manfully volunteer to descend into the trench and arm the mine manually, assuring his death, because hey, it’s what security people on the Enterprise do.
The Death Star would explode shortly therafter, possibly with Darth Vader feeling oddly about the Force, as if it was being countered by a Secular Humanist Federation Distortion Field. The remaining security person and the plucky engineer would return to the Enterprise shortly thereafter, staring wistfully into space.