Comment on Star Wars is an ode to the stupidest use of battle lasers
turmacar@lemmy.world 5 days 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 They’re mostly explained away as outdated tech and “blasters are better” and that even the wimpy-est of force fields will stop them.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 5 days 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.