Comment on Star Wars is an ode to the stupidest use of battle lasers
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 weeks ago
They aren’t lasers, though. That’s just a colloquial term. Like how we call large language models AI.
Comment on Star Wars is an ode to the stupidest use of battle lasers
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 weeks ago
They aren’t lasers, though. That’s just a colloquial term. Like how we call large language models AI.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yeah, to add on to this:
At least back in the 90s/00s, the rough canon explanation from various books and such is roughly…
The ‘lasers’ are actually coherent ‘bolts’ of highly energetic plasma, ie, gas excited/heated to the point that electrons are breaking out of their atomic orbitals.
The explanation is that ‘laser’ weapons, and ‘turbolaser’ canons… by some arcane process, as the plasma travels through the barrel of the weapon, it is somehow encased in, or enveloped by, a very strong magnetic forcefield, that keeps the plasma from just immediately expanding in all directions upon exiting the barrel.
It is supposed to be a sort of analogy to how rifling in a conventional firearm makes the bullet much more accurate… and it also kind of intuitively thus makes sense that a big, fuck off huge barrel, can throw a larger projectile downrange, and faster.
Its also sort of how a rail gun or coil gun works in real life, but not really.
In universe, plasma bolts do not travel at light speed, they also do not travel forever: they dissapate and sort of evaporate or fizzle out after travelling a certain distance, and this generally occurs more quickly from smaller weapons than it does from larger weapons.
This is again another roughly analogy to real world ballistics with solid bullets or shells… irl, longer barrels are able to increase the kinetic emergy imparted to a projectile, thus increasing its muzzle velocity, thus increasing its effective range.
Ammo is also a thing that exists in a lot of older Star Wars canon. A blaster will eventually run out of the… plasma fuel, which is often contained in essentially a magazine… and technically, all blasters also need either the rough equivalent of a starter engine, or an independent battery/‘ignition’ system to actually do the process of transforming the ‘ammo’ into a plasma bolt, and accelerate it out of the barrel and cohere it into a bolt.
I also recall Tibanna gas, from Cloud City, being specifically mentioned as a primary component of blaster ammunition in at least one of the Rogue Squadron games, though it apparently gets more complicated with different colored plasma bolts essentially being made of different blends of different kinds of input materials having different properties and only working properly in certain kinds of blasters, again, a sort of rough analogy to different calibers of bullets and barrels and chambers.
…
Light sabers follow a similar overall principle of ‘plasma bolt contained by some kind of coherence field’… but they use totally different internals to generate both the plasma and coherence field, and can seemingly just… do this nearly infinitely, never needing to ‘reload’, never running out of energy.
Those internals?
Magic (kyber) crystals and an extremely esoteric, basically electronic circuit design.
This is why so much emphasis is placed on a Jedi constructing their own lightsaber as a fundamental rite of passage:
Every lightsaber is bespoke, unique, you have to be essentially supernaturally intelligent, ie, sufficiently in tune with the Force, to be able to comprehend how to actually construct one… and indeed, there are at least a few instances or mentions of where someone attempts this, fucks it up, and their malformed lightsaber basically blows up in their face.
You can also see the ‘coherence’ principle at play as a light saber… well the ‘blade’ grows out of the hilt, as the coherence field expands… but it never disconnects, it never expels the plasma bolt away from the hilt.
…
So, if everything, lightsaber ‘blades’ and plasma ‘bolts’ are both encapsulated by some sort of pseudo magnetic coherence field, it makes some amount ofintuitive sense that if you get them close to each other, they will repel, deflect, ricochet.
… But, this cannot be just the electromagnetic force as we understand it in our world, because… well, that shit doesn’t actually make any sense by our understanding of physics.
We have no idea how to create a self sustaining magnetic field that can be projected away from the source of what created the field and just… keeps sustaining itself on its own…
And EM is just + or -, either attactive or repulsive, so we would expect to see say a + bolt and a + lightsaber be capable of deflection… but a + bolt and a - saber, or even a + saber and a - saber… well those should actually be attractive, so you’d end up with a bolt that curves toward a light saber and then combines with it, or even two sabers being drawn toward each other and then merging.
…
In conclusion: Star Wars is science fantasy in the sense that it seems to operate under a… not completely alien, but significantly distinct set of basic laws of physics… you’d probably have to be a Jedi or Sith to truly understand how they actually work =P
Ketram@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Maybe I’m just old, but I can’t stand how magic the " kyber" crystals are in the rewritten sequel canon. In older legends canon, there was no “the crystal chooses the Jedi blah blah blah” which really makes it seem incredibly religious. You could use nearly any focusing crystal in a lightsaber, and Jedi would often choose a crystal that is sentimental or meaningful to them. There was little to no magic, and lightsabers were cheap and simple to construct. It was more that no one but a force-user could bring a laser-sword to a laser-gun fight and not die immediately.
I know I’m just not up with the times but I really loved old Star wars legends and how much emphasis it put on how these people who could use the force were normal people with exceptional abilities trying to interpret something much stranger and bigger than them (the force), and I feel like “kyber” crystals are a symptom of the very binary, new light vs. dark sequel canon which I find insanely reductive.
So uh yeah, I know I’m just old but it really bothers me.
P.S. Also isn’t the word “Kyber” just them bastardizing “Kaiburr” crystals (which were supposed to be rare lightsaber crystals)? I was pretty sure this was always the case.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I generally agree, with some nitpicks.
The old canon several times mentions that wielding a lightsaber is actually extremely difficult and unintuitive…
…because the ‘blade’ is literally weightless, that alone would throw off a lot of wielders of more conventional swords…
… but also because the saber, potentially as a byproduct of the ‘coherence field,’… produces strong, unituitive gryoscopic forces when moved or rotated at various angles and speeds.
…
The old explanation I remember is roughly that force sensitives essentially just intuitively know how to counteract this, to varying degrees of proficiency, but a non force sensitive, a non force user… they’d pick it up and awkwardly flail about with it as it seemingly gains and loses weight, is being pushed and pulled in crazy directions that make no sense compared to just, a physical sword or staff.
Sort of like trying to use a very, very poorly balanced real world melee weapon, but the weapon’s poor balance also actively changes, like its center of gravity just seemingly randomly alters as you move it.
Basically, a non force user fights the weapon, whereas a skilled force user understands it, and in a more physically tangible sense, literally allows the weapon to guide their combat movements and style, they know when to go ‘with’ it and when to go ‘against’ it, to achieve the actual desired motion.
This is kind of sort of depicted in the Mandalorian, with the Darksaber seemingly becoming exhaustively heavy, massive, and Mando has to… learn how to use it, how to work with it.
And also: yes, Han uses a lightsaber in the OT, but most of the early expanded universe did just explain that by saying he is actually force sensitive, that his absurd luck and piloting skill in various situations does mean he is actually a untrained force user, he just also is a stubborn ass who thinks the Force is bullshit, at least initially, lol.
…
But anyway, yes, they used to make lightsabers out of a wider variety of crystals, not just ‘kyber’… and yes, i also do remember many different variants of how ‘kyber’ was actually spelled.
For the life of me I thought its proper spelling was ‘khyber’ until i bothered to look it up in an actual wiki in the last couple of months.
That could be me misremembering, or maybe that was what I originally read decades ago now, or maybe what i am rembering got ‘telephoned’ through a bunch of people first, on some forum.
…Man now I kinda want to set up SWGEmu, hahahah!
Ketram@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Thanks for the clarification. I remember the gyroscopic weight stuff somewhat, but always sorta dismissed it since it felt like it was selectively used by authors and many of my favorites made little to no mention of it.
I haven’t had much desire to watch any of the new stuff since Force Awakens so I’m not up to snuff on the new stuff. Keep on enjoying it though! Makes me want to go back and read some of the best of legends.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 weeks ago
In the comics taking place tens of thousands of years before the movies the Jedi have to carry large energy cells with them. They are attached with long cables to the hilts.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yep!
The sort of proto sabers seem to be prior to them figuring kyber crystal magic, iirc, and needing to carry a more crude power/plasma source with them.
Sort of like a radioman in WW2 had to carry around a whole backpack sized radio, whereas nowadays we have like, a cell/smart phone, or just a proper encrypted handheld radio with way, way superior battery/power system in a more compact package.
9_Propulsion@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Speaking of “like charge” sabers, there is a fantastic scene in SpaceBalls where this happens… :)
lastunusedusername2@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I see your Schwartz is as big as mine!
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Its yogurt!
turmacar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“Real” lasers also show up sometimes in the old EU. They’re mostly explained away as outdated tech and “blasters are better” and that even the wimpy-est of force fields will stop them. There’s not nothing to that either. A laser you either need to hold it exactly on target for a measure of time or have a massive amount of cooling in the emitter. If you can just “send plasma” in that direction instead it solves those problems.
“Slugthrowers”, i.e. ‘real guns’, also show up and “blasters are better” because the bolt is faster and doesn’t suffer as much from aerodynamic effects. But a lightsaber user is going to have problems if a bullet is now just molten instead of being reflected away.
That’s leaning a lot into the older EU though which is much more a universe like 40k where tech just “is” and people maybe don’t understand the mechanics of how it works anymore.
And of course it’s significantly much more about the rule of cool than real physics.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yep, you got it!
There indeed are older kinds of weapon tech, … but yeah, they havent’t been widely used for like… thousands, tens of thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin 4.
It does indeed end up being a sort of… largely post technological progress setting, most things are ossified… almost everytime something is doing something ‘novel’ with tech… its basically been done before, or its just outright a ‘find the lost relic’ scenario, and yeah, you do run into weird situations where ‘ancient relics’ can actually be quite useful in more or less rare and specific scenarios.
Hell, you can even say that… the Force itself is roughly analagous to the Warp, in many ways.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
another note on the light Saber blade: it’s actually a long spinning loop like a narrow ‘0’ or the eye of a needle, which is why it doesn’t disconnect
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Not quitesure if I am understanding you correctly, but I think you are saying it isn’t like, a flat, edged geometry…
…its more like a sort of … very angry, ‘fuzzy’, elongated cylinder with a roughly hemispherical ‘endcap’.
And the sort of… exit point, or emmitting point of the ‘blade’ is… more like an camera aperture or a nozzle.
But you also say this O, this eye of the needle… is spinning?
That is a bit of lore I am not familiar with, could you expand on that?
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
"Energy constantly flows through the crystal. You're not fighting with a simple blade as much as you are directing a current of power." ―Sabine Wren and Kanan Jarrus on the Darksaber, Rebels: s3e15 Trials of the Dark SaberI’m sure there are other references, too, but for it to be a power current it needs to flow to and from a terminus. See also the Tagge Protoblade in which the energy circles around a metal core (internally referred to as the corn dog lightsaber) instead of being a sword
Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
As I understood from the legends material, lightsaber blades are an arch shape. It extends out, bends at the tip, and returns to the handle. That’s why they’re near infinite, They’re 99% efficiency recycling energy and only energy lost is energy imparted is through impact.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Huh.
I do not recall ever reading or hearing about what is now the ‘legends’ version of the canon… that lightsabers form some kind of self recycling loop, in that manner.
…
But anyway, that also makes no sense in our real world physics.
It… still net expends energy to maintain plasma in a contained space.
Said plasma would want to basically explode outward in every direction, and a real world magnetic field would have to be stronger than that (real world) force, and … also… it would be absurdly thermally hot that any wielder of a lightsaber would basically oven cook themselves within seconds of turning it on.
…
As of yet, nuclear fusion in a tokomak style, contained plasma loop… is still a net energy loss, and that is the closest real world equivalent to a ‘self cohering plasma bolt’ that I can think of…
Barring I guess ‘ball lightning’, maybe, which is theorerically proposed to maybe be some kind of naturally occuring instance of something similar, but to my knowledge, no one has ever like, made a ball lightning generator to test those theories.