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 days 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 days 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 days 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.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I completely get what you mean on that.
Personally, I wish it was more prevalent… I think the main reason it isn’t, is that… its actually fairly difficult to write a description of … what this would be like, and it is also difficult to depict this visually, both in still and moving images.
Again this I will freely admit is my preference/opinion, but yeah, I really wish they had actually gone a bit further into this…
Like with Frank Herbert, Dune, and the basically bizzare combat style that comes with the daggers and personal shields.
The slow knife makes the cut, in that universe, literally, because the shields block things moving at high velocities, but not slow velocities.
I just love the shit out of… physically based, but playing by different rules, martial combat, hahah!
I also really like in say, Enders Game, where Ender has to essentially just learn/invent an entirely new paradigm of combat to work with zero G and the suits that constrict and paralyze theb part of your body that gets hit with whatever kind of weapons they use.
I think I am just gonna do that.
Somebody’s gotts tend to the old, sacred texts =P