Darth Garden Gnome wrote:Kamakazie Sith wrote:Phasers being useless against metal........
I could be wrong, but I've never seen a reasonable display of hand phasers damaging metal. That's why all those conviently placed crates in most Trek are good cover, because they absorb the beam.
But I don't think Vaders hand would be quite thick enough to absorb the blast anyways.
It's a thick hand, though

Heh.
Seriously, we have seen phasers damage metal before...what was the damn episode?
...hmm...let me think...ah! "The Vengeance Factor." They weren't set to maximum power IIRC,
but it took sustained blasts and at least two phasers shooting to make some piece of metal burn.
I know Michael talks about it in greater detail in the Canon Database. Let me check...
The script says this:
DATA: Noranium alloys. Their salvage value is low.
...
(the away team is attacked by Gatherers armed with Rigellian phaser rifles and they're pinned down, hiding behind some rocks)
RIKER: Data... noranium vaporizes at... ?
DATA: Two thousand three hundred fourteen degrees. Of course, noranium carbide alloys vaporize at a slightly higher temperature.
GEORDI: Phaser setting seven ought to do it...
SCREENPLAY: Riker, Data, Geordi, and Worf fire at the pile of noranium. The noranium quickly bellows huge clouds of smoke -- filling the area almost immediately.
RIKER: Now!
(the four officers make a break for it, using the smoke as cover)
Mike's take:
"...this initially looks like a true vapourization event (notice the cloud of vapour). However, since smoke continued to pour from the alloy pile until Brull snuffed it out with sand, it's quite obvious that it was actually burning (this is not unprecedented; some metals burn easily). Therefore, the phasers actually ignited the alloy rather than vapourizing it. It's always possible that they vapourized some of it, but we'll never know how much because the pile continued to burn afterwards."
Sadly I have no clue how powerful Palpatine's lightning strikes might be, same said for all other such Force attacks. If anything's decided upon, it's hardly a maximum for what can truly be done, of course, since Palpatine was having fun torturing ole' Farm Boy.