Origins: Imagine if Stonehenge was a massive gun, and you get a feel for Centerpoint Station. It's a relic of a long lost civilization, and no one is quite sure how it works, but it sits there floating in space between the twin planets of Tralus and Talus.
A really close look at its very first painted Drew Struzan illustration shows that it's just two Y-wing engines stuck together inside a ball. Mystery solved!
Plausible Non-Draconian Reason to Keep it Around: It belongs in a museum.
Considerably Less Effective Names: It has been referred to as the Starbuster, which doesn't sound all too ominous.
Achilles Heel: It's never a good idea to use an extremely powerful and complex device without really knowing what it does or how it does it. The aliens who built Centerpoint never left an owner's manual. As such, the results of firing it have often been unpredictable, even up to the point where -- like the Tarkin -- it fired on itself.
Continuity Headaches: Just one quibble: Wedge Antilles is Corellian and grew up in the Corellian system, which is home to this bizarre space station that is 350 kilometers in diameter. So why is he the guy who exclaims "look at the size of that thing" when the comparatively small Death Star comes into view?
Further Reading: This artifact was introduced in the Corellian Trilogy of novels by Roger MacBride Allen, published by Bantam Books in 1995. It makes notable appearances in the Agents of Chaos duology by James Luceno, published by Del Rey in 2000, and the current Legacy of the Force series from Del Rey.
