Star Wars universe does have lasers of all scales and power levels.
Yet literally no one uses them well on a personal scale.
The Jedi (and Sith for that matter) imbue it with a power of magical stone, and then…use it as a saber.
To balance this stupidity, stormtroopers, clones and droids all use slow, non-continuous energy blasters. With actual lasers, they could insta-kill any Jedi, but they cannot, because otherwise the movie wouldn’t exist.
star trek, and some other scifi genre captures it better, SW is more for children, it also magic-tech in it, so not really a true scifi.
SW is for children is not a great take. It’s just not sci-fi, and shouldn’t be judged as such. It’s a space fantasy, and it leans into the camp and the suspension of disbelief. They use wings and aerodynamics in space. Destroyed ships “sink.” The good guys never get hit and the bad guys die in one shot. Now, the new movies were absolutely disappointing, but Star Wars was never sci-fi, at least not in the ways this discussion is defining the genre.
Pictured are space-bombers. They drop gravity bombs… in space. Please stop talking about scientific accuracy in Star Wars.
Remember how in TESB, Han and Leia land in an asteroid crater/cave to hide and go out in the vacuum with nothing but an emergency airplane O2 mask thinking that’s OK? And gravity is earth normal gravity?
I’m pretty sure “a galaxy far far away” means the laws of physics are a bit different.
Also, let people enjoy things.
While that happening, there are also TIE bombers flying past dropping bombs on them.
I remember seeing this shit in theaters and losing my mind over how stupid it was. It’s in the middle of an incredibly bad movie anyway which doesn’t help, but I just can’t imagine how many people had to be involved with this creative choice and how ar least some of them must have brought up how stupid dropping bombs like that is in a space fight and yet they still went with it. Dumbest shit ever.
Didn’t TIE bombers bomb asteroids in TESB when Solo and crew were hiding in a giant worm? Sure looked similar, IIRC.
That’s like a land mass at least. In this scene they were doing this in straight up open space against another ship
but there’s gravity in space. surely that means there’s dropping stuff in space too!
Im honestly more concerned on how those bombs make it through the atmosphere and how much time it takes them to reach their destination.
Lol
They aren’t lasers, though. That’s just a colloquial term. Like how we call large language models AI.
Yeah, to add on to this:
At least back in the 90s/00s, the 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, extremely thermally hot, capable of doing immense burn damage, melting a hole through you or most other armors/materials/alloys.
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, or transformed into having a very strong, self contained psuedo-magnetic forcefield, that keeps the plasma from just immediately expanding in all directions upon exiting the barrel, and keeps it vaguely spatially constrained and coherent.
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.
Basically, their ‘coherence field’ is only stable for a short time, sort of like a gel capsule for a drug dissolves in your stomach after a certain amount of time.
This is again another rough 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
“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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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 blade 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.
Makes me want to go back and read some of the best of legends.
I think I am just gonna do that.
Somebody’s gotta tend to the old, sacred texts =P
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.
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.
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.
Speaking of “like charge” sabers, there is a fantastic scene in SpaceBalls where this happens… :)
I see your Schwartz is as big as mine!
Its yogurt!
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
Not quite sure 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?
…
But yeah, lightsabers work internally differently than say, the Mandalorian Darksaber… which actually is a proper blade, and uses… some other kind of arcane way to generate and sustain itself, I’m not up to snuff on that lore.
Also just kind of as a general addendum:
There are various materials in the Star Wars universe that can deflect or totally decohere and disperse the … ‘coherence field’ of plasma bolts / saber blades.
The Imperial Guards have pikes, staffs that are made of some kind of metal alloy, which can block lightsaber blades, and presumably also deflect blaster bolts.
They may be made out of Beskar, the same material as Mando’s armor? I am not sure.
Also, the uh… whatever the Darth Smiley’s helmet is made out of in The Acolyte… while I think that show is basically a complete mess both as a show and in lore terms… that material/alloy, cortosis, is actually present in a good deal of the older canon, and it seems to have some kind of ability to nullify, extinguish, not just repel, the ‘coherence field’ of most other ‘plasma’ based weapons.
"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
I get that, sort of, that… some kind of supernatural/extradimensional energy is essentially drawn into, and then focused by the kyber crystals and the modulation systems of a light saber…
I just had not heard that they involved a mechanically spinning component.
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.
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.
It’s fantasy, not sci-fi though
You can’t stress that enough. I love sci-fi, but I never really fancied Star Wars.
Now, as a dad, I rewatch the movies and replay scenes with my son, and the similarity with fantasy action movies strikes me. For example, the beautiful display of alien species and habitats.
We don’t need to split hairs - ‘sci-fi fantasy’ or ‘science fantasy’ is a real genre and common enough term.
Space opera, specifically.
its like BSG, its also space opera(at least the reimagined one)
Space Western
The most known version of which is FireFly (or Red Dwarf?)
I’d argue Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, and also Trigun are more ‘Space Western’ than StarWars is.
I think space opera can be sci-fi or fantasy? Star Wars is definitely fantasy tho.
You’re right, though the melodrama and swashbuckling of Space Opera definitely lend themselves more towards the soft sci-fi/sci-fantasy end of the spectrum. Sort of, “if the characters and plots don’t need to bear much relation to the real world, why should the setting?”
Laser swords and biological powers beyond our current grasp of the science behind them define it as science fiction.
I get it’s the quirky pickme trend to argue over this and I agree about the fantasy elements but don’t be the ‘actually’ guy in the room.
A humble farm boy’s parents and village are burned, leading to him leaving his home and finding refuge with a wise old man who has special powers. He tells him he knew his father, that he was a knight and they fought together. He gives him his father’s sword, and teaches him to use his own special powers. They receive a message from a princess in distress, who tells them she’s being held hostage by the evil emperor. They travel to save her with the help of a roguish anti-hero and free the princess. Once freed, they learn of a crucial weakness in the emperor’s fortress, and together they lead a raid to siege it. They succeed with the help of a rag tag bunch of rebels and the princess awards them with medals in her throne room.
That doesn’t sound like a story about how technology, science or knowledge effects people or society to me.
Magic swords and magic powers are exactly what makes it fantasy. I cannot imagine a worse example to pick for your point.
Quote the script where magic is ever mentioned in the films. A light saber is a device with a button that Luke has the knowledge to repair.
Put it in your fantasy section if you want, I’m not even arguing it’s not fantasy, but it’s undeniably science fiction.
Quote the script where someone explains the science of how the Force works. A lightsaber is a special magic sword that can only be made by a space wizard using their magic on a special crystal. It’s magic with a futuristic flavor, that doesn’t make it science fiction.
Also MAGIC too, star wars strangely has magic in it, which in contradictory to what a sci-fi, aka the night sisters.
Just because you don’t understand the science does not make it magic. The force is described as a biological phenomenon that the Jedi have some understanding of, whether the audience learns about it or not is irrelevant, it’s science fiction by definition.
Not really, in LoTr, they have a magical sword that shines around orcs, another one that can stop a ghost sword, and there are being with biological powers beyond the grasp of our understanding.
I think you are confusing setting with genre. By your logic the star wars and star trek porn parodies are also sci-fi and not porn.
Sci-fi is only sci-fi if science plays an integral role in the story, eg. Expanse, Stargate (shows), Star trek. But these are all arguably in space, so I get your confusion, that’s the setting, shows like Black Mirror and For all mankind are also sci-fi and those are present day things.
Well actually For all mankind plays out in an alternate past where the space race continues (though I guess this is also technically in space).
Black mirror explores humanity through the lense of abusing technological/scientific inventions.
So those are science based fictions, sci-fi.
Star Wars is space fantasy, arguably if we live in an alternate universe and the original trilogy is released in the late 2000s and 2010s they could be dubbed as YA. Random teenager protagonist finds out they are indeed special and helps to overthrow an opressive regime, like Divergent, Hunger games, Maze runner
lotr isnt scifi lol, its fantasy, but a specific to medieval types.
Who said Lotr is sci-fi?
I used LotR explicitly to show that Star Wars is closer to that and therefore a fantasy than it is to any well-known sci-fi.
I have always wished for a serious grown up version of Star Wars. Like not being afraid to sever limbs like they used to, or worrying about your scoundrels being too scoundrel-y. Also really taking an inventory of everything and seriously thinking about how it would interact.
Like to your point - no need to toss out the more magical force elements but maybe just tone it down a bit and ground them in reality a little better? Because it’s absolutely ridiculous how they’ve become these invincible laser blocking demigods. They should be afraid to deploy, just like anyone, if there’s going to be shooting. It’s just lazy writing most of the time and it would be wonderful to see what a skilled hand could actually do with it all.
All they had to do for the Sequel Trilogy was adapt the Thrawn series.
…
Absolutely you do not have to be 100% faithful, absolutelty you can change some bits and bobs around, overemphasize a character’s trait, underemphasize another, spend more or less run time developing certain people, relationships, etc.
Adjust and rewrite parts of it to make more sense with the old cast of actors being older than their characters were in the Thrawn series… and/or use all that fancy de-aging / re-voicing / face transplanting tech they have used all over the place with many of the same actual actors on other projects.
Its got new and old characters.
Its got Mara Jade, a new main female character, who is actually compelling and complex and fleshed out.
It respects the old characters, acknowledges their flaws and highlights their strengths. You actually see them face new struggles and have new failures in the actual temporal continuum of the plot… not as shoehorned momentary flashback/retcons to explain why someone is a completely different character now.
Its got more mature and serious themes and character arcs.
Its got an actually compelling main villain.
Its got a secret shadow fleet of ships… but with an actually competent explanation for them.
It got big ass space battles, and personal upfront altercations, its got strategizing and politics and intrigue.
It even ends on a victorious… but not a ‘final’ victorious note, leaving the gate open for you to really try and do your own thing from then after.
Its even already been functionally story boarded by being adapted into a comic book series.
…
But nope, we instead got a bunch of disrepectful hacks who were convinced they could outdo everything prior, cast it all aside initially, and then started trying to copy parts of it after they realized how badly they’d fucked up.
Fucking hacks.
Its got Noghri!!
I should go back and read that again, I remember loving it so much. Also remember when Disney announced that the extended universe would be discarded to make room for new cannon and how much my heart sank hearing it.
I fully support a reread!
=D
Also, because I am in nitpick mode:
Canon is a body of work accepted as legitimate, official, standard, etc.
Cannon is what you fire a cannonball with.
=P
Anyway, I’m off to go enjoy a dessert in a desert.
I mean… they do take pause when a Mandalorian is shooting. They may block lasers but putting a lightsaber in front of a slug 6 inches from your face just turns you into Swiss cheese.
Also, their flamethrowers. A lot of mandalorian weapons were utilized solely to counter force users.
Yeah like force speed. You have that ability, yet you used it only once. Would have been pretty handy like a hundred times in various sticky situations.
Yeah it’s so damn lazy, like they introduce these things like they’re in a vaccum, situationally just to have a cool scene and toss any kind of continuity aside
Agreed. Star Wars was never much my cup of tea - a bit too campy. That changed with Andor and Rogue One. Those are up there with my favorite movies/tv of all time.
Rogue One was really close to what I want the franchise to be. Having a universe with the force users instead of about the force users is so much more interesting.
I want to see the rebels and empire go at it like this:
And why the hell do the stormtroopers wear all that armor if one shot kills them?
The actual answer is that faceless pawns make better canon folder villains because it’s less likely the audience will relate to them as actual people in the context of the narrative. The in-universe explanation is that faceless pawns are better foot soldiers for the empire because it’s less likely said empire will relate to them as actual people.
Because it’s cheap and looks scary. The Empire controls through fear and perceived power, not actual technological superiority. Stormtroopers primary job is to suppress dissent in civilian populations, they generally aren’t fighting an opposing army.
Because they tend to bump into things an awful lot.
It does deflect/disperse some of the energy, how much depends on what kind of plot armor you are wearing beneath it.
The OG trilogy was an interesting-enough drama with a vibrant setting, made groundbreaking by their special effects. Everything else in the franchise was made to sell toys, with maybe one or two exceptions. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously like that, I think…
Being able to levitate things with your mind trumps everything.
I thought they were plasma based weapons
Are you beginning to feel a narrowing of your throat?
13th gen Nerf hot pool noodles shall not be questioned
this comment section is a lot calmer than I expected, given the subject.
Star war is for 11-year-olds, David Lucas said it himself!
