Lightsabers

[YT300000]

In KotOR, Cortosis is acknowledged as a weak and brittle material, and because of that they make an alloy out of it that makes it resistant to lightsaber damage instead of deactivating it, so that you could use the weapons (which are easily bluntable, but still useable) against normal targets, too.


No, it doesn't really make much sense.

They should have just used phrik metal, that stuff the electrostaffs in Episode III were made out of. Unfortunately the game came out well before Episode III.

Phrik first showed up in Dark Forces, back in '95. Pretty much all of these alloys and super-materials get recycled with random properties based on which name the writers remember first.

[Shroom Man 777]

Man, if ever I wrote a Star Wars awesome EU novel with interesting backstories, I'd have my bad guy be a ysalamiri farmer who feeds his Force-neutralizing Gila monsters a healthy diet of phrik filings and cortosis chips. These Jedi can be investigating the case of an ancient rare Sith artifacts that can cause black holes to prolapse or some shit, when they end up trespassing on this ysalamiri farmer's property and while their Force powers are sapped and impurified, the farmer goes at them shrieking "what are y'all doing in mah property!" and shoots them with a shotgun.

The Jedi can get saved by some hot princess chick in short denim pants and they can ride a hot red landspeeder while the farmer and his talking pet ysalamiri chases after them on some rustbucket hover tractor.

The (Jedi) Knights of Hazard!

[Prometheus Unbound]

My arnis/eskrima instructor had a good question.

If a lightsaber is weightless, or at least if it's hilt is very light and the beam-blade part is weightless, why do some Jedi hold the saber high over their heads and why do many of them hold it with both hands?

Isn't a high-overhead hold for heavier swords that take more force to swing, or those whose weight + gravity = total bisecting shit-ruining? And isn't a two-handed hold also done for more weighty swords?

Aren't lighter swords like rapiers held with one hand, where their low weights allow the user to wield them with speed and precision (though since those swords aren't huge and heavy, they can't do heavy killy swinging head-chopping strikes)?

So if you've got a sword that's lighter than even a rapier, yet a tiny flick can do more damage and more amputations and decaffeinations than a bastard sword, then won't holding it more like a rapier or some other lighter sword-weapon be more effective than needlessly holding it like it's a heavy sword which it isn't?

Won't holding a lightsaber like a heavy sword make you not as fast as a guy holding it like a rapier, and in these duels won't reaction time be darn important against guys wielding really light and really fast (laser) blades that can cut through anything?

Initially Lucas wanted them to be heavy, that's why Obiwan used both hands, as did Vader, but then he changed his mind. By the time of the PT, they were meant to be massless I think. Although I find it amusing that either by the Jedi using the Force to help manipulate them or gyroscopic stuff and imaginary mass, they always seem to behave like an aluminium rod. Odd, that

[NecronLord]

Phrik first showed up in Dark Forces, back in '95. Pretty much all of these alloys and super-materials get recycled with random properties based on which name the writers remember first.

If I remember Dark Forces right, Phrik was said to be rare and new at the time. Not showing up in KOTOR makes sense.