Obligatory “How Stuff Works” article on lightsabers.
I seem to recall that in very early drafts of “The Star Wars”, Lucas planned on having everyone armed with lightsabers instead of any guns. The reasoning was that it seemd like a bad idea to be shooting any kind of weapon in a space ship that might cause a hull breech, so everyone used sabers to prevent that. It then evolved into only the jedi as we see in the final stories.
As I and others on this Board have remarked, the closest thing in sc ience fiction to a Light Sabre prior to the Star Wars films were the “Variable Swords” from Larry Niven’s “Known UIniverse” stories. These consisted on pieces of wire contained in a stasis field. I know how to m ake wire, but I’ll have to get back to you on the stasis field. Even if it works, though, it won’t be identical to a light sabre.
The only other thing I can think of are ultra-light yet ultra-strong molecule chains, which will slip through virtualy anything and lop them off. Again, Niven used these in his stories involving “Sinclair molecule chains”, and they did a nice job of lopping off limbs of the unwitting (There’s current movie potential there. See my thread on lopping off limbs). Such strong chains would be great for building, say, space elevators, which is why they show up also in Arthur C. Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise. In that story there’s a very elaborate mechanism for sawely controlling the chains so you don’t get cut.
Because they are not as clumsy or random as a gun?
Anyhow, you can’t take seriously (from a scientific standpoint) any science fiction movie where swordfighting is considered a valid form of military combat. That includes Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, or any other movie where a sword is used for anything other than ceremonial purposes.
There’s a long history of swords being used as weapons in SF, going back at least to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ a Princess of Mars. The Martians have flying machines and weapons of all kinds, but still use swords for fighting. Burroughs’ imitators kept it up and it became a cliche, which sf itself poked fun at. Read Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales of the White Hart. In Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones”
family mem,bers amuse themselves by writing a space serial involving a Space Emperoer and heros who fight battles with swordsd whiole they’re running their own more plausible SF lives. It reads like a prescient vision of Star Wars.
And the Indiana Jones visual joke where Indy shoots the swordsman showed up ages before as the punch line in SF/fantasy stories.
But I suspect the romance of swordplay and the nifty visual image have guaranteed that swords will be in fiction forever. It ain’t just science fiction. Just one bullet coulda taken out the Bride in the Kill Bill movies. Shotgun fulla salt be damned.
The answer to all of the technological problems is … midichloridians.
The novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, set between ANH and ESB, includes a bit where Luke recharges his saber by drawing energy from a captured blaster, suggesting that indeed the lightsabers need charging up. Also, every energy weapon in the galaxy has a standard power connecter, letting them be casually hooked up to each other.
Plus there was crystals! Coo-ul.
[QUOTE=Mac Guffinif the magnetic fields are powerful enough and polarized the same, they would tend to repel each other wouldn’t they? Of course if the polarity is disparate then they would tend to attract each other and would then lead to the embarrasment of having your Lightsaber stuck to that of your opponent.[/QUOTE]
Yeah - I hate it when I get my Schwartz twisted. 
Well, this wasn’t a movie, but IMHO Piers Anthony did a good job taking his ‘swordfighting in spacesuits’ sequence in Mercenary very seriously, including the reasons for the validity of it. Running over his points briefly.
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It’s a hard SF setting without powerful blasters, phasers, or portable laser guns. Even huge ship-mounted lasers are generally used for point defense, to prematurely detonate incoming explosive shells or missiles, rather than to hurt other ships. Handheld laser guns are used sometimes, but they are ‘scorchers’ (don’t remember if this term was used), meant as nonlethal weapons against unarmed opponents… not powerful enough to effectively puncture an insulated spacesuit.
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Using firearms or other projectile weapons on EVA combat is counterindicated, both because of the action-reaction effect of recoil, (which could push lightly magnetized boots away from a spinning spaceship hull,) and because of the possibility of damage to a ship if a stray bullet collided with it.
Thus special rapiers were used by spacesuited soldiers attempting to covertly gain entry to an enemy ship, or by the defenders. (shrugs.) Not perfect maybe, but better than a lot of sci-fi cliches I think
Just as a nitpick (assuming my memory is correct), the variable swords didn’t have just any wire, they specifically used Sinclair monofiliment, the “ultra-light yet ultra-strong molecule chains” you talked about, made up of a single polymer molecule a few atoms wide and as long as you need. The variable sword was just a method for keeping the monofiliment away from you and going through your target, as well as giving the monofiliment a “backbone” so it didn’t just bend when used.
Wire that’s only a few atoms thick (as long as it has support from a “statis field”) will certainly slice through most materials. Although at that level I have to wonder how likely it would be to stay sliced, since there’s no “wedge” to move the pieces apart further than the width of the monofiliment. I can certainly see damage to biological cells, but what about materials like metal? Couldn’t it be more like slicing ice with hot wire, where the ice refreezes behind the cut? How “repairable” are crystalline bonds, and what distance is required to make sure they do not reform?
Incorrect. The variable swords, like everything involving stasis fields, were originally Slaver technology. And the Slavers (almost) all died off billions of years before Sinclair was even born, much less had invented his monofilament. Variable swords are invariably just described as being a very thin wire, and (if one doesn’t have to worry about how strong it is) we can easily make wire thin enough with current rather straightforward technologies.
Ok, between this and my poorly remembered posts over in the CS “Time travel book recommendation” thread, I’m going to have to give up posting about books unless I have the actual volumes to refer to. It’s been far too long since I cracked open my Niven books.
In my defense, I did know that the stasis field was Slaver technology. But I was thinking that the variable sword itself was developed by humanity by combining the stasis field (after they reverse-engineered the tech) with Sinclair wire to make the monofiliment sturdy enough to use as a weapon. Actually, after poking through a few online sources about the swords, I’m wondering how wrong I was. Have you got a cite I could check to straighten out my fuzzy memory? I’ll be pulling out my copy of Ringworld and some other Known Space volumes to do some self-research as well.
Do you have a copy of the short story “The Soft Weapon”, found in the collection Neutron Star? The titular weapon was a multi-use device invented by the Tnuctipun (opponents of the Slavers in the War), and one of its settings was a variable sword. I know of no other place where it’s made explicit that variable swords were old-tech, but any place where they’re described (as, for instance, toward the beginning of Ringworld where Speaker pulls one out of a dead carcass), the blade is always said to be a “wire”, not a “monofilament”.
I thought the Kzinti invented the variable-sword, using slaver stasis technology. In any case, it’s my understanding that the wire is just wire of some kind - it’s rendered unbreakable by virtue of being in stasis.