I’m not sure this would work, but I’ll throw it out. Suppose you have a tube with tiny little holes all over its surface. Each hole emits a small amount of butane gas, which is ignited. Think of a cigarette lighter on the lowest flame. So there’s a blue flame completely surrounding the rod all around, and all along the length.
Movie swordfighting might be a horribly impractical way to use real steel swords. But it just might make sense for lightsabres. A lightsabre is effective at slashing attacks, is effectively “edge” all the way around (there’s no flat of the blade), and for practical purposes, goes clean through almost anything except another lightsabre blade. If someone swings a lightsabre at you, your only options are to dodge, block with your own lightsabre, or get sliced in half. You can’t grab the side of the blade, or try to turn it into a glancing blow. And it seems to me that that’s what we see in the movies.
Star Wars lore handwaves that kind of talk by claiming that magnetic fields contain the energy within the blade without bleeding out. I don’t know how you get magnets to do that but I’m not a space wizard.
In the only post-RotJ-written EU books I ever finished, the original Zahn trilogy, he had lightsabers being a monofiliment held rigid by a force field, much like a Kzin Variable Sword. I liked that much better than all the “magic crystal” sillyness.
They obviously were, since small spaceships use their wings to bank through space like WWII-era airplanes.
When you put a Corellian light freighter into a turn, you do have to bank into it, otherwise all the loose stuff inside will be flung sideways.
Anyone answer this? Would it work? Or am I missing something obvious?
Although if someone blocks your lightsaber, you can just turn it off for a second to pass through the guard (I didn’t realize this myself, not sure where I saw this pointed out)
Es, but it takes about half a second to shut off and another half second to start up. There is no indication that a shut-down cycle could be interrupted with a quick restart, so you end up gapping you swing by a full second – that would not work so well in a fight.
I thought of a simple way to beat someone wielding a lightsaber. Clearly, from the movies, blasters are relatively lightweight weapons, or you couldn’t wield them with 1 hand. 2 points make a line, while 3 points make a plane.
SO…you just affix 3 blasters together into a triangle, where the spacing between the barrels is larger than the width of a lightsaber beam. Rig up some kind of mechanical or electrical trigger so all 3 blasters fire simultaneously.
It might be a 2 handed weapon at this point from the weight, but it would definitely still be man portable. Now equip all your goons with these weapons. Train them to fire at jedi simultaneously and to cover possible directions the victim could dodge while the bolts are in flight.
Since the saber beam is a line, it is physically impossible for it to stop all 3 blaster shots.
A grenade launcher would also be quite effective. (we see thermal detonators in the movies, so a launcher seems feasible. We don’t ever see regular firearms, so we have to assume they are not readily obtainable)
I can wield two lightstabers–one in each hand–and stop all three blaster shots when I appropriately cross the lightsabers.
Tripler
Basic geometry.
You got me there.
I think you could kill a lightsaber wielder with an extremely high tech weapon - like a 1928 Thompson submachine gun. Or if yoy want to be really sure, a minigun. Let’s see those human muscles move a lightsaber around 10 times per second (Thompson), or 100 times per second (minigun).
As for why it looks the way it does, I say glowing midichlorians. Lucas pulled all this out of his ass, so we might as well do the same. It’s glowing midichlorians. And they have the power to adjust their glow to ambient lighting conditions, because they don’t just use the force, they are the force. Apparently.
I think the core of the lightsabre foil is an artificial magnetic monopolar field, which glows because of the effect it is having on the air around it. You never see one being used where there is no appreciable atmosphere: in space, the foil would be basically invisible, or maybe have an extremely faint glow.
Well, we have in fact seen a lightsabre blade used in vacuum, and it did glow, but it was an absolutely fricking huge lightsabre, so that’s not a counterexample.
It is described as a “superlaser”, which did, yes, use the same thing that is in a lightsabre, but it was a projected beam, which does not really describe a lightsabre. And “superlaser” is a bit of a misnomer, inasmuch as laser beams themselves are not visible except when passing through a Rayleigh medium.
I think that when you put the entire binding energy of a planet in a beam that lasts for a few seconds, it’s going to be visible from the side no matter how it works, or what medium it’s passing through.
Bumped.
Not so farfetched as you might think:
Fanwank: the light doing the sabering is invisible to Jed-eyes and the colored light we see is added as a safety feature, first for training and later for carrying.
A proper lightsaber should be either a modified broom handle or something made on a wood lathe and painted to take advantage of the green screen stuff that is put in later.
I would use ash as the wood.