The Death Star fulfilled it's primary purpose when it destroyed Alderaan. As much as it was a weapon of terror, it served a much greater purpose as the Empires number one piece of mining equipment. When Alderaan was blown to bits, it was not vaporized it was merely reduced to small chunks of matter. A complete metallic core of a planet was suddenly made into asteroid size chunks to be collected by Imperial droids, fed into a space born smelting plants and converted into Star Destroyers, Fighters, Planet Assault Ships, a Death Star 10x bigger than the original, etc etc and that's only .00001% of the core material. I can't imagine the Emperor didn't have a deeper use of a Death Star other than just being a weapon of terror. Reducing a planet into resource raw materials just makes too much sense to ignore it.
The Death Star fulfilled it's primary purpose when it destroyed Alderaan. As much as it was a weapon of terror, it served a much greater purpose as the Empires number one piece of mining equipment. When Alderaan was blown to bits, it was not vaporized it was merely reduced to small chunks of matter. A complete metallic core of a planet was suddenly made into asteroid size chunks to be collected by Imperial droids, fed into a space born smelting plants and converted into Star Destroyers, Fighters, Planet Assault Ships, a Death Star 10x bigger than the original, etc etc and that's only .00001% of the core material.
I can't imagine the Emperor didn't have a deeper use of a Death Star other than just being a weapon of terror. Reducing a planet into resource raw materials just makes too much sense to ignore it.