Science of Star Wars
In 1999, astrophysicist and mathematician Jeanne Cavelos wrote a book titled The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books. Timed with the release of The Clone Wars, Scientific American has posted excerpts from Cavelos's book, including bits about the power of the Death Star, light speed travel, and Darth Vader's bionics. From SciAm:
Science of Star Wars (SciAm), Buy Science of Star Wars (Amazon)The Death Star: Could It Destroy A Planet?
The Death Star's planet-destroying weapon is said in the Star Wars Encyclopedia to be a super-laser. While a laser is basically just light, it is light that can be focused onto a precise spot and can have high, extremely concentrated power. Lasers can produce a steady beam for long periods, or they can produce a very intense beam in short pulses, occurring thousands or millions of times per second. The amplified light of lasers can also be very powerful. A series of pulses can drill through hard materials like titanium or diamond.
A megawatt laser can burn a hole through a jet up to six miles away—though it needs to maintain contact with the aircraft for one to two seconds. In a 1998 test, MlRACL, a 2.2-megawatt laser, was able to hit a satellite in Earth orbit. MlRACL purposely did not destroy the satellite, since the test was designed merely to show that the laser could target and hit the satellite. But researchers say the laser could just as easily have melted it.
Thus it seems the lasers we have today would be capable of doing many of the things we see in Star Wars. We could injure or kill people; we could burn structures or melt holes in walls; we could destroy targeted areas of spaceships, assuming we could keep a beam on them for long enough. The main difference between Star Wars lasers and ours is the size. While we can create lasers that emit extremely powerful energies, we need to pump great energies into them to make them work. That energy source takes space, which the Death Star, at least, provides.
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"The Science of Star Trek: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books. "
Mis-typed as Star Trek. Niggle.
"Thus it seems the lasers we have today would be capable of doing many of the things we see in Star Wars."
Yes but can we make our lasers fly slower then the speed of sound?
No? How about lasers that can make that "pew pew" sound in deep space?
Oh man - you do not know what sorta geek storm you have just started with your Trek/Wars typo! Duuuuudes.... Not cool!
Ha! Thanks. (Secretly, I think Star Trek is cooler than Star Wars.)
trouble with tribbles i suppose
#4: Hooooo, hooooo "You have disappointed me for the last time commander Pescovitz." [Throat crush]
(Darth Vader heavy breathing is hard to type)
The binding energy of a planet the size of earth is unbelievably freaking huge.
http://www.treitel.org/Richard/rass/destroy_emf.txt
Enough energy at your disposal to explode an earth sized planet, you could just vaporize fleets of starships wholesale. Firing such a weapon at just one starship, when the enemy fleet conveniently appears grouped in close formation, as happened in episode 6 of Star Wars, is a colossal blunder.
I used this as a chief source when I did a report called "The Scientific Anomalies within the Star Wars Universe" in Astronomy class, in 12th grade.
As a Star Wars geek, it was surprisingly EXTREMELY well-informed and well-written (very accessible, too). It's a cool and fun read.
So I hate to open this can of worms but how does a light saber work. I assumed it was powered in part by the Force.
I always wondered why laser wouldn't simply reflect off of the aluminium space suits?
>So I hate to open this can of worms but how does a light saber work. I assumed it was powered in part by the Force.
I think light sabers are kind of lame as they are. Why not have non-terminating light sabers? Who says they have to end in a point a few feet away from the hilt?
"Why not have non-terminating light sabers? Who says they have to end in a point a few feet away from the hilt?"
Because Larry Niven would sue you, once he takes a break from convincing illegal aliens that hospitals want to steal their organs?
Or were those in a Ringworld book that came after Star Wars?
>Because Larry Niven would sue you, once he takes a break from convincing illegal aliens that hospitals want to steal their organs?
Ah, that's one area where my sf reading history comes up a little short (both with Ringworld, and organ theft). I'm imagining light/time-lagged light saber duels between worlds -- the sabers would curve over that distance, ya know.
@11: they tried that, but after the third time a novice cut down the ceiling of the Jedi temple, they decided they'd better change it to cause less collateral damage.
Making the story up, of course, but collateral damage is a very good reason why not. You don't want to have a weapon that you can't use within 100 miles of sentient habitation without causing the equivalent of 9/11, or can cut a moon in half by accident. And you don't want the ceiling falling on your head all the time, either.
A lightsaber that can be extended to 2 or 3 times the length of a normal one does show up in the novels, though. (So ashamed I know this...)
But we could not find enough humanity to hug a Wookie.
Re: #11 - The lightsaber is, in the immportal words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, "not as clumsy or random as a blaster... a more elegant weapon, from a more civilized age." It would be in keeping with an order of knighthood to use weapons evocative of the Middle Ages. As others have pointed out, too long a blade would be just too darn unsafe. A meter-long blade suffices as a weapon or tool, and requires skill to wield with deftness.
As for what the blade is, exactly, it's very likely not a laser. The business end of a laser is usually at its focal point, not along its length (which is why lasers can be used in surgery and to etch 3-D images in glass). But a lightsaber can not only be used to puncture things, it can cut with the edge of its blade (as in every limb-hacking and beheading in the Star Wars movies). Also, if two laser beams are crossed, they won't block each other as if they were solid, as lightsaber blades do.
Supposedly, in order to build a lightsaber, one needs special crystals. There might be a "standard" (in the Star Wars galaxy, anyway) laser emitter in there somewhere, but this crystal and possibly something else changes the nature of the beam into something more like a solid than a plasma.
May the Force be with you.
Does it explain how Stormtroopers were trained to shoot so accurately? ;)
my tuppence worth on light sabres - the beam is made from midiclorians, if I remember correctly only certain crystals can emit the beams and affect the colouration hence Vadar has a red one and Yodas is green while everyone else's is blue
my tuppence worth on light sabres - the beam is made from midiclorians, if I remember correctly only certain crystals can emit the beams and affect the colouration hence Vadar has a red one and Yodas is green while everyone else's is blue
Because I'm such a Star Wars nerd, here's some Lightsaber info from StarWars.com... "...(Adegan) crystals are ideal for the creation of lightsabers, as they focus the energy released from a saber's power cell into the tight, blade-like beam... ...Once unleashed, the power channels through a positively charged continuous energy lens at the center of the handle. The beam then arcs circumferentially back to a negatively charged high energy flux aperture. A superconductor transfers the power from the flux aperture to the power cell. As a result, a lightsaber only expends power when its blade cuts through something. So efficient is the blade, that it does not radiate heat unless it comes into contact with something.
The blade's color depends on the nature of the jewel it springs from, and while its length is fixed in the case of a single-jewel lightsaber, lightsabers equipped with multiple crystals can have their length varied by rotating a knob that allows the focusing crystal activator to subtly modify the refraction pattern between the gems. "
hope this helps.
Thanks, Longboxes!
The only way a laser could make a planet blow up is if the beam was made of antimatter, and then it wouldn’t be a laser, but something like an anti-proton beam. Better we just use photon torpedoes.
I actually followed the link to the SciAm excerpts, and they were mostly entertaining... but the discussion of the "jump to lightspeed" was extremely disappointing, as it focused solely on how long it would take to realistically accelerate to the speed of light.
Never mentions that Relativistic effects come into play, or that c is an unattainable velocity. Nope, it blithely assumes that Newtonian mechanics apply, and merely discusses what near-instantaneous acceleration would do to the occupants of the Millennium Falcon -- presumably turn them into a fine paste on the bulkheads.
It always seemed to me (and apparently to the author of The Physics of Star Trek) that any kind of credible interstellar propulsion system would require some kind of space-folding, and that the manifold your ship was in would do the actual movement -- your ship's actual velocity inside the manifold would be fairly modest.
The laser is merely the primer. The energy that powers the explosion of the planet comes from dark energy, the force that permeates all of space. It is the most powerful force in existence, accounting for 73% of all the mass-energy in our universe. You can get all these info from the fount of all knowledge, wikipedia.
@24 - As far as I know, the concept of dark energy hadn't even been formulated in the 70s when the first Star Wars movies came out. I'm starting to think this whole death star thing is like, made up or something. ;)
Just wanted to chime in that lightsaber technology has nothing to do with the force or midochlorians, otherwise General Grievous wouldn't be able to operate them.
Even if you consider the novels non-canon and only base lightsaber knowledge on the films, General Grievous operates the lightsaber just fine.
"light sabers" pah! In my day we had to get by with Slaver variable swords and were glad of them too!!
and here's a wonderful time waster:
http://www.technovelgy.com/
#24, how do we know that dark energy even exists? All we have is a weirdo theory and no way to test it. I think the Death Star's beam is a hyper-space conduit and once it finds the center of gravity (planet's core) it opens a wormhole into a real star, thus allowing an explosion that blows the planet up. How's that for sf bs?