Was Leia hit in the arm?

[Connor MacLeod]

Oh for crying out loud.

Has anyone actually gone back and LOOKED at the fucking movie? I mean the actual tape or DVD. In a frame by frame, rather than going by a silly youtube video (unless someone has a way to do frame by frame on youtube, then by all means.)

If you do you'd notice that it looks like the bolt hits, but it's hard to say unless you actually measure the length of the bolt and the angle and all that shit - and I doubt we could definitively prove one way or another (it vanishes one frame after the sparks and shit start up.) Post bolt we get a ton of sparks and shit for quite a few frames. Now, the fun bit here is, when she's "hit" - she doesn't react immediately. There's all this stuff sparking violently on or near her, but she's not reacting right away (it takes at least a few frames as I recall before her face shows any indicator, and that's even before she turns her face around.) Her arm is still even on fire as she falls back. By my count its about 8 frames, give or take a frame or two either way, before we start getting any definitive reaction from her - about a third of a second.

Those are the "facts" as they stand from the widescreen DVD edition. So yeah.. Let's see the competing theories trying to explain this.

I also don't see why the whole "capture/not capture" thing is relevant. We know they were already captured once alive. Why is it so shocking to figure they'd be captured again? It's not as if the whole Endor scene reeked of competence except for this one isolated event (If anything a "take alive" order probably made things HARDER for them to achieve their goals.) The whole "stun" thing isn't very relevant, since if we were arguing from the point of "thinking practically" they ought to have stunned them from the get go, rather than going "freeze" and pointing your blasters (something they actually do quite a bit in the movies from TPM to ROTJ.)

As far as the whole "firepower of blasters" thing goes, why the fuck is it a problem to get people to do some calcs or something actually.. you know.. referential? I can figure out Vympel's stuff at least (since I do a mess of this with 40K lasguns its close enough) but I'm curious as to what Havok thinks the actual firepower of a blaster is in quantitative terms, nevermind damage mechanisms and all that. I'm curious what his definition of "reasonable firepower" for a blaster is supposed to be.

[Simon_Jester]

Now, the fun bit here is, when she's "hit" - she doesn't react immediately. There's all this stuff sparking violently on or near her, but she's not reacting right away (it takes at least a few frames as I recall before her face shows any indicator, and that's even before she turns her face around.) Her arm is still even on fire as she falls back. By my count its about 8 frames, give or take a frame or two either way, before we start getting any definitive reaction from her - about a third of a second.

Is that unrealistic for real life bullet wounds? I mean, human beings don't react instantly to injury; the nerve conduction speeds impose a bit of a delay if nothing else.

[Batman]

A third of a second? Go stub your toe or something and time how long it takes from it happening to you feeling the pain.

[Teleros]

Would a delay that long support the idea of only a glancing hit at best? A shot that just clipped the edge of the building & Leia's clothes (but not her skin) would, I'd've thought, take at least a small amount of time to heat her skin up. I think I saw some mention of blood from the injury - perhaps fragments from the wall or the heat from the burnt clothes? It just seems a little slow for what I'm sure would have been a reflex action from a closer hit.

[Simon_Jester]

A third of a second? Go stub your toe or something and time how long it takes from it happening to you feeling the pain.

The nerve conduction velocities set that, and that's a lower bound. The real question is one of reaction to overwhelming pain, such as "every heat sensitive nerve in my arm just got overloaded and burned out." People don't always respond to that kind of injury instantly.

[Shroom Man 777]

Sometimes it actually takes you a short while to realize that you've been hurt fucking badly. I've had broken glass, and the steps of a car, cut me and only when I saw the red stuff did I realize that, oh fuck, I'm bleeding. Of course, I think the latter was probably due to head trauma.

[Simon_Jester]

Sometimes it actually takes you a short while to realize that you've been hurt fucking badly. I've had broken glass, and the steps of a car, cut me and only when I saw the red stuff did I realize that, oh fuck, I'm bleeding. Of course, I think the latter was probably due to head trauma.

Yeah, this is what I mean.

If you're expecting to perceive pain, you perceive it almost instantly. If you're keyed up (say, in the middle of a firefight), there can easily be a delay between the actual injury and your conscious reaction to it.

[Connor MacLeod]

A third of a second? Go stub your toe or something and time how long it takes from it happening to you feeling the pain.

The nerve conduction velocities set that, and that's a lower bound. The real question is one of reaction to overwhelming pain, such as "every heat sensitive nerve in my arm just got overloaded and burned out." People don't always respond to that kind of injury instantly.

Nice. Care to post some proof?

This also doesn't account for the violent sparks we see, either.

[PainRack]

There is some evidence that Leia was hit with a relatively less damaging hit though. We seen blaster bolts take down stormtroopers before, its an "insta kill" when they're struck in the torso.

Leia was up and running from the hit, didn't seem to suffer any loss of function and was moving about just fine at the Endor Party.

So, comparing the two incidents, even if we can't determine the firepower of the blaster we could claim that it must have been less damaging.