An inelegant weapon for a more barbaric age

Friday, December 15th, 2017

A lightsaber would not be an elegant weapon, as any plasma torch able to cut through a blast door like butter would vaporize flesh explosively:

He thanks Matter Beam of Tough SF for running the numbers. His estimate of a light saber’s output was 35 MW, about the same as a nuclear submarine’s reactor.

I found some footage of a modern plasma torch cutting through meat:

Star Trek’s phasers have the same problem as Star Wars’ light sabers, by the way. Vaporizing a human wouldn’t be much more elegant.

Comments

  1. Buckethead says:

    Well, elegant in the sense of not leaving anything you need to bury.

    Had an image though, imagining what the new version of light saber would be like in combat — if you had power-armored troops whose armor would protect them from the heat emitted by their light sabers, moving through a landscape charred and burned from lots of sword-sized miniature suns. That’d be kind of awesome.

  2. Alistair says:

    OK, OK, very good. I figured out the problem years ago, and this is fine as far as it goes.

    But, and I hate to defend Star Wars here, perhaps we have it wrong in assuming the lightsaber is a THERMAL weapon. Sure, it melts metal and leaves glowing residue from its cuts. So there are clearly thermal effects. But perhaps we should look for another hard-sci interpretation of the lightsaber which matches with what we see on screen?

    Perhaps the lightsaber actually is a very sharp knife, and not a torch. Created by some kind of force-field, obviously (we see how good shield technology is in the days of the Republic) but with the fields honed to an atoms width?. Perhaps the luminous glow is just an artefact caused by ionised gas being sliced apart or arcing between the paired fields of the blade? An artefact onto which attention understandably but misguidedly focuses?

    This forcefield-blade-not-plasma-torch explanation has several advantages in canon. It explains why the blade cuts through flesh rather than explosively vaporises it into pink mist. It explains why two lightsaber blades actually repulse rather than entangle or just pass through each other. It explains the distinctive Doppler hum of the blade as the ionising edge moves towards you or away. It explains why a Jedi has to push the weapon into a blast door rather than hold it like a torch – the weapon exerts a reactive force on his hand.

    Just thoughts.

  3. Alistair says:

    …and forcefields also explains why a lightsaber reflects blaster bolts rather than absorbing them.

    I think there is a case for forcefield-not-thermal basis here.

Leave a Reply