I think basing it on light is a mistake. I much prefer the solid core construction idea, with either a thin layer of plasma and/or a highly excited core material.
I re-watched Star Wars Episode 1 recently, and, as soon as the first lightsaber showed up on screen, I felt like a kid again. The movie is still terrible, and should be excluded from the series[1]. But, there is just something about watching space samurai, with light-up swords, that made me spend the next three hours imagining how to build something like it.
Or you stand there in disgust, wondering how the hell Oskar Schindler and Mark Renton found each other and why they haven't cut their hair in a long time ... and put it back on the shelf.
False, that's constructive interference. GP wants destructive interference. My suggestion is to load up the audio in Audacity, apply the "Invert" effect, and listen to that on loop for a few nights' sleep.
Early in Episode 1, one of the Jedi stabs his light saber point-first into a big metal door. It sinks in effortlessly and in short order begins melting the door. It doesn't compress or blow up. So that's one thing this description gets wrong.
This description says that there are physical glass filaments that they light travels through. So they hit against each other and can't pass through one another.
But the description says "beams from energy weapons hardly affect them and just pass through." But in the movies we see blaster shots being reflected by lightsabers.
IIRC in universe a lightsaber is essentially an infinte blaster shot trapped in a magnetic loop. The crystal tunes the magnetic loop, so blocking blaster shots is simple because the blaster on the "outside" bounces off the same field keeping the plasma "inside" and for the same reason you can have proper sword fights.
I forget if you can shoot a Jedi with a regular bullet but I'd imagine s/he could just dodge it regularly since blaster bolts travel significantly faster.
No, they're much slower. At 24 frames per second, you can watch a bolt from a blaster pistol fly across a room; even a tracer round from a low-velocity handgun would just be a streak. It's more in the range of a good fastball than a bullet.
Considering it has been shown that a lightsaber easily and nearly instantly cuts through most metals, apparently due to extreme heat, that regular bullets would likely not cause an issue.
The speed of the projectile is not an issue either, Jedi use a precognition-like ability to dodge or block blaster fire. That's why a group is required, to eliminate the possibility of them dodging and blocking.
Well, it depends on how thoroughly it dissipates the projectile. Turning a high-velocity slug into a high-velocity blob of superhot molten metal would certainly reduce its penetration, but you still wouldn't want it to hit you in the face.
Because that would make for a terrible sword fight scene.
It is interesting to think how you would do battle though, it would basically be the first person / fastest to swing, likely killing both parties anyway.
If there's something lightsabers don't cut through - I think cortosis was mentioned in the KOTOR games - then it would make sense to have a small lightsabre on the tip of a staff of cortosis. (Or perhaps, more practically, a staff coated with cortosis, I don't know how heavy that stuff's meant to be.)
In any case! ^^; A light-spear. You'd be able to parry with the shaft and stab/slice the other person from beyond their reach.
It's not canon, but I remember reading one the expanded universe books that describes a Sith that had somehow created a lightsaber with an extended blade for some perceived advantages. I believe it added 12 to 24 inches to the overall length.
I've just been wondering if a light saber is similar to an electrolaser [1], where you use a laser to ionize air and then send out an electric current through the plasma channel.
I could be wrong but wouldn't the power of the laser determine the length of the plasma channel?
1) This lightsaber appears to allow blaster fire to pass through undeflected.
2) There is no discussion of how sabers parry each other instead of breaking.
3) It appears to have a "blunt" tip.
1 and 2 could possibly be explained as a Force-related effect. Vader has been seen to deflect blaster bolts with his bare palms, so we know that the Force is capable of doing this; perhaps something in the design of the lightsaber makes it much easier to perform this feat with the surface of the blade, or perhaps it even produces a field or resonance in the Force that deflects energies without conscious effort beyond that needed to power the saber. Vader's deflection power may be inspired by study of the saber itself.
This implies that a sufficiently powerful Force user could parry a lightsaber with their bare hands! However, given that the blaster-deflection trick appears to be quite difficult, saber-deflection may be possible in theory but beyond any Jedi's abilities in practice.
2 could also be explained by advanced materials technology. The filaments, perhaps created by Force-guided elemental deposition, may simply be too strong for human muscles to break by whacking them together.
3 could perhaps be solved by making the filaments loop back around at the tip instead of terminating in a ceramic cap. A single filament, then, would spiral clockwise out from the base of the blade, make a 180-degree turn, and spiral back inwards counterclockwise. The only problem is that this would produce much greater light pressure in the tip than along the rest of the filament; saber designers would have to take this into account to avoid catastrophic failure.
>This implies that a sufficiently powerful Force user could parry a lightsaber with their bare hands!
Relevant YouTube clip: [1]
Star Wars games are considered C-Canon[2], so I think it's a safe bet a work as huge as SW:ToR can be considered authorative. I also remember Knights of the Old Republic 2 having a feat called "Unarmed Parry" or so which allowed parrying any melee weapon.
electromagnetic containment sounds like the most viable solution. Now how are we going to solve the inevitable heat dissipation problem.
Basically we're trying to mimic the conditions of the sun, and wield such immense power in a very tiny handle no?
Don't think this will ever be possible :)
I think eventually something like a lightsaber would be feasible. I like to envision my Southern descendants having fun by hovering along in their speeders in the middle of the night slicing off the tops of mailboxes.
Making light saber technology somehow tied to the Force answers an obvious question from Star Wars: why do only Jedi have light sabers?
There's a more mundane answer: they're just not very useful weapons for normal people. It's like the difference between a sword and a gun. Which would you rather have to defend yourself? The gun beats the sword every time.
Unless--you're so super-humanly fast and accurate that you can use your sword to block every bullet fired at you. Or even better, bounce them back at the person who fired them.
Light sabers are great weapons for Jedi because Jedi have the reflexes and skills to make them useful. This is not limited to light sabers--we've also seen Jedi be superior as pilots, pod race drivers, and blaster shots.
You don't need to be force sensitive to use a lightsaber but it helps because it's weightless so someone without force enhanced reflexes is likely to slice off an arm or foot trying to actually fight with it. I'm pretty sure though there are a couple of expanded universe characters who use lightsabers but aren't force sensitive and of course there's General Grevious who is a robot.
I remember playing Jedi Outcast where you start as a regular guy with guns and then you slowly get new force powers. At the beginning I never used the light saber. However, the more skills and power the character got the more I was using the saber until at one point it was the only weapon I would ever use. The blasters just felt clumsy and limited.
It's useless until you get the ability to deflect blaster fire with it. Then it become free armor and eventually you can reflect most of the weapons back at the person who shot them.
Obi-Wan Kenobi calls a blaster "so uncivilized" as he throws one away, after using it to kill General Grievous in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith[1] (see time mark 6:17).
They probably would be, but presumably you'd run out of "bullets" pretty quickly if you were trying to block other bullets. Plus, a "blade" is probably more useful than a gun in most cases (e.g., breaking down a door.)
I think that they are. (Can you think of any in-universe proof they are not?) Blasters are less versatile than light sabers, though, so they carry light sabers.
I believe it started as a fan theory, but Han's incredible luck has been explained as latent Force-sensitivity. Appears to have made it into some expanded universe material.
Seems like a fan 'solution' to a fan 'problem'. There isn't anything in the movies to suggest that Han using the lightsaber was problematic. There was nothing to explain until other fan theories were made despite being in conflict with that scene in the movie.
I was under the impression when I first saw that scene that lightsabers were just meant to be technology - the more "civilized" version of a blaster in the way swords were once seen as more civilized than guns, but still basically just a device. Han knew where the button was to turn it on, which was all he needed to know. In the same way you wouldn't have to be a samurai master to use a katana to cut a watermelon.
I always thought one had to be a trained Force sensitive to construct one, which is among the final tests of becoming a Jedi. Apparently if you didn't build the device properly, it would blow up in your hand upon first activation.
Which is also why they are not mass produced.
Luke Skywalker's first lightsaber was his father's, it was blue. Luke built his second one, which was green. Vader later noted this as a sign his skills were "complete".
EDIT: I'm now reading that at some point lightsabers were indeed mass produced. I think that ruins the fun of the mythology around the weapon.
EDIT2: Now I'm reading that the crystal must be infused with the Force by the builder before construction. Fun mythology back on?
Now I'm no physicist, but wouldn't the heat of the "blade" still be capable of melting the door, unless the jedi applied enough pressure to actually collapse the blade?
Indeed. If I recall the scene in question correctly, they did seem to be quite ginger in applying pressure, appearing to let the heat do all the work. (Mind you, I haven't seen that movie in at least a decade and my youtube/google-fu failed to produce a clip)
I recall that on several occasions Jedi just shove the things as hard as they want into and through whatever they want. Especially in fighting the droids in the Clone Wars episodes.
I assumed the slowness of sliding the blade into the door in the scene you mention was due to the thickness of the door. It couldn't be sliced open because it was too thick, therefore you melt a hole into it.
I'm not even sure why that part is necessary. The mirror can be anchored at the other end and the filaments constructed/woven such that they assume the proper shape when charged.
My theory - just made it up - a lightsaber is a hologram formed by phase conjugation of third-order non-linear vacuum polarization (chi-3). A fusion energy source emits gamma rays which form the hologram, and in turn the hologram shapes the beam, it's a feedback effect.
A lightsaber beam can block another light beam in the following way - the incoming beam acts as a wiggler for the lightsaber pump photons, which first get downshifted and then disintegrate into matter-antimatter pairs. The trick is to separate the matter from antimatter and channel them into the reactor. So firing at a lightsaber actually charges it.
The problem of course is conservation of momentum. To counteract the backwards jolt, a lightsaber creates a forward momentum impulse. This counteraction is not perfect, so Jedi are trained to maintain their balance in such situations.
When two lightsabers contact their beams are actually consumed by the other. That's why the Jedi/Sith can go on fighting forever, all the while throwing senate furniture at each other.
It's never been conclusively ruled out. Curious fans have speculated about it every now and then. In the books, he ends up fathering three Jedi. (Granted, he fathers them with Leia, a known force-sensitive. But it's entirely possible he's force sensitive, too.)
I should note that a fantastic way to start a nerd fight with Star Wars fans is to take the position that Han is force sensitive. Most people seem vehemently opposed to the idea. They see it as breaking character and/or narrative theme for him.
For all that's known, Grievous was a pretty good fighter before he got turned into that machine monster. So, like Vader, he is still alive in a Force sense.
I guess this is also why his MagnaGuards don't carry lightsabers, but electrostaffs instead.
Nobody cares about Grievous. He's part of the later, shittier movies from a different director (yeah Lucas in 2000s has nothing to do with the Lucas in the 70s).
Yep, he picked it up and just turned it on. I guess you could say it was natural instinct but I would have to think such a thing would require a great deal of concentration.
Plus there's the fact it's quite canon that there's a power source. Luke bought one when he built his second lightsaber.
EDIT: Thanks to Wookiepedia I now see that the earliest lightsabers were the result of the user channeling the force through the device. Later to be changed to various power sources which resulted in superior weapons.
Not necessarily. Temperature determines which way heat energy flows, it says nothing about how fast it flows. I can hold my hand in an oven at 500 degrees with no problem because the transfer is very slow. Briefly touching a much cooler 150 degree piece of metal would give me a nasty burn, because of how quickly the heat transfers.
Not necessarily, maybe the thermal properties of the lightsaber are modified to give them high thermal resistance that is lowered contextually (like when youre slashing up some guy)
That is true. He could do it. But there is the problem of the Tauntan. If the saber did produce that temperature, they wouldn't need to rest inside of the the warm carcass, therefore, by the movie's logic, the saber doesn't produce much temperature.
It is funny to see which attributes each person believes need explaining. The article here spends paragraphs on the blade, but hand-waves a handle-sized terawatt power source into existence.
If you read the full article it is explained later on how the filaments of glass are coiled and wrapped in such a way that they fit in the handle and expand when lit by the light pressure causing the filament cords to expand like an inflated wick.
I re-watched Star Wars Episode 1 recently, and, as soon as the first lightsaber showed up on screen, I felt like a kid again. The movie is still terrible, and should be excluded from the series[1]. But, there is just something about watching space samurai, with light-up swords, that made me spend the next three hours imagining how to build something like it.
[1] http://static.nomachetejuggling.com/machete_order.html