Tech infographic: powering up Star Wars

[Vance]

This fun little article compares the estimated power output of some of star wars technologies to those of real life. This site, my site, and Saxton's sites are referenced.

http://www.ebates.com/blog/how-many-bat ... star-wars/

[Borgholio]

I like the stats on the Death Star. AA batteries stretching end to end across the entire observable universe.

[Adam Reynolds]

Where is it stated that lightsaber use no energy when not touching something? Given that they produce light, that is impossible. Not to mention that their "naturally recharging power cells" violate the laws of thermodynamics. Unless one uses the argument that Jedi recharge their lightsabers through the Force over time. Not canon anymore, but I, Jedi had something similar to this*. Nothing like this was mentioned in the Clone Wars lightsaber building episode however.

* And of course Corran Sue was better able to do it than others. And oddly enough he actually did the inverse, draining the power cells of his lightsaber to give him greater energy reserves in the Force.

[Purple]

Maybe it only uses a really small amount of energy which can than be recharged like those fancy kinetic watch things. The "uses no energy" thing could simply mean the battery does not get drained.

[Crazedwraith]

Where is it stated that lightsaber use no energy when not touching something? Given that they produce light, that is impossible. Not to mention that their "naturally recharging power cells" violate the laws of thermodynamics. Unless one uses the argument that Jedi recharge their lightsabers through the Force over time. Not canon anymore, but I, Jedi had something similar to this*. Nothing like this was mentioned in the Clone Wars lightsaber building episode however.

* And of course Corran Sue was better able to do it than others. And oddly enough he actually did the inverse, draining the power cells of his lightsaber to give him greater energy reserves in the Force.

Ehh... no. I, Jedi says nothing of the sort. It has meditation and force use being integral into creating a lightsaber. A 'Melding the components together until they are more than the sum of their parts' new age spirutal sort of thing. Bit silly but also explains why they're only a force user thing. There was never any mention that Corran was any better at it than anyone else.

Given the number of times he fucks up and almost gets himself killed through his own stupidity in I,Jedi it still amazes me people point to it to cry Mary Sue.

[Borgholio]

The "uses no energy" thing is due to the way the saber works. The energy beam is actually a loop, not a solid "stick" of light. It is projected out, then when it reaches the point, curves back and is re-absorbed into the hilt. The circuits and battery are superconductive so the blade actually doesn't use any energy unless it is forced to expend some cutting into an object.

[Purple]

The problem with that is that some of the energy is going to be lost in interaction with the surrounding air. Unless there is a magical vacuum around the blade it is going to be constantly cutting into the air around it. Also, the fact that we see some of the energy being given off as visible light.

[Borgholio]

The problem with that is that some of the energy is going to be lost in interaction with the surrounding air. Unless there is a magical vacuum around the blade it is going to be constantly cutting into the air around it. Also, the fact that we see some of the energy being given off as visible light.

Oh definitely, but given how much power is contained in the lightsaber's battery, I would say the amount wasted as visible light or in interactions with the air is negligible.

[Vance]

A few dozen watts of lighting could be considered nothing when you got a multi gigajoule battery... but its still something

[Lord Revan]

sure but then I always interpeted the "looses no energy" as "looses practically no energy" as in that energy loss from just being turned on is so minor it's not worth mention after all if it takes millenia of constant idling to drain the blade it's not really that big of a deal.

[Adam Reynolds]

Where is it stated that lightsaber use no energy when not touching something? Given that they produce light, that is impossible. Not to mention that their "naturally recharging power cells" violate the laws of thermodynamics. Unless one uses the argument that Jedi recharge their lightsabers through the Force over time. Not canon anymore, but I, Jedi had something similar to this*. Nothing like this was mentioned in the Clone Wars lightsaber building episode however.

* And of course Corran Sue was better able to do it than others. And oddly enough he actually did the inverse, draining the power cells of his lightsaber to give him greater energy reserves in the Force.

Ehh... no. I, Jedi says nothing of the sort. It has meditation and force use being integral into creating a lightsaber. A 'Melding the components together until they are more than the sum of their parts' new age spirutal sort of thing. Bit silly but also explains why they're only a force user thing. There was never any mention that Corran was any better at it than anyone else.

Given the number of times he fucks up and almost gets himself killed through his own stupidity in I,Jedi it still amazes me people point to it to cry Mary Sue.

When Corran first created his lightsaber, it was mentioned that he served as a conduit to charge the power cells for his lightsaber. That was what I was talking about. I was wondering if a Jedi could directly use the Force to power their lightsaber in that sense. Though it would obviously be a drain on their other abilities and prevent them from doing anything else, which is rather wasteful when one considers that they could easily draw energy from literally anything else in a universe that has little problem with meeting energy needs.

As for Corran as a Mary Sue, it was more in the X-wing novels that this seemed to be the case. Primarily the first in which he appears to die a half dozen times with the narriation style. And as you mention, most of those cases are him screwing up rather impressively. The part I felt was somewhat off in I, Jedi was his unusual set of Force powers, in which he had extremely powerful mental abilities with the Force that allowed him to project images against almost anyone, even fellow Jedi trainees(though Luke didn't really fall for it). And this was while completely lacking telekinetic abilities unless he first absorbed energy.

[Captain Seafort]

When Corran first created his lightsaber, it was mentioned that he served as a conduit to charge the power cells for his lightsaber. That was what I was talking about. I was wondering if a Jedi could directly use the Force to power their lightsaber in that sense.

No, it wasn't - it was mentioned that this was a common belief among Jedi, and that it was complete nonsense.

[Irbis]

Where is it stated that lightsaber use no energy when not touching something? Given that they produce light, that is impossible. Not to mention that their "naturally recharging power cells" violate the laws of thermodynamics.

Can't you handwave this as a by-product of lightsaber mechanism? Say, light coming from blade fusing atmospheric deuterium into helium, both replenishing energy and producing photons. There, done

[Purple]

Where is it stated that lightsaber use no energy when not touching something? Given that they produce light, that is impossible. Not to mention that their "naturally recharging power cells" violate the laws of thermodynamics.

Can't you handwave this as a by-product of lightsaber mechanism? Say, light coming from blade fusing atmospheric deuterium into helium, both replenishing energy and producing photons. There, done

Someone who knows what he is doing should tell us just what the effects would be of waving a fusion reactor around like that.

[Zixinus]

The lore (I have no idea what part of it is canon or not) says that lightsabers are very efficient and burn negligible amount of energy when they are just switched on, draining only when actual cutting is done.

Can't you handwave this as a by-product of lightsaber mechanism? Say, light coming from blade fusing atmospheric deuterium into helium, both replenishing energy and producing photons. There, done

A good deal of those photons would be ionizing radiation in the invisible gamma-ray spectrum. Then every time a lightsaber would be ignited you would be bathing everything around it in ionizing radiation and Jedi would be constantly sick with radiation sickness.

This is not mentioning the neutrons and charged particles (that too would be producing ionizing radiation due to braking radiation) that would be by-products of such a reaction.

My personal theory is that the blade we actually see is a forcefield that contains either plasma or some sort of energy that does the cutting/blasting. What we see is the forcefield containing the thing, the color dictated by the crystals (or just that specific kybar crystal) used in the lightsaber. The forcefield only releases that energy when it is broken by solid matter or another forcefield, even then only directional in exactly to where it is being broken. That's why Jedi can use the thing without heat-gloves or looking like welders. How and what that forcefield is, I have no idea. All we know from the lore is that the technology is related to blasters somehow, sometimes they are shown having a crystal too.

[Irbis]

Someone who knows what he is doing should tell us just what the effects would be of waving a fusion reactor around like that.

This is not mentioning the neutrons and charged particles (that too would be producing ionizing radiation due to braking radiation) that would be by-products of such a reaction.

Normally, it would bathe you in neutron radiation, but the particular reaction I mentioned (deuterium +helium/lithium) is mostly neutronless and would produce helium and energetic photons. Maybe sword's core absorbs energy of these, emitting waste light while powering its battery?

That would kind of fit how lightsaber works - it doesn't burn you heating air while you hold it, but can melt metal. Maybe sword core fuses/splits atoms it touches physically reducing amount of matter it touched while cutting, dumping waste excess energy around if it cuts something really solid?

That would also mean simple iron would be very resistant to it but no one even today uses pure iron, so nyech. Maybe then fabled cortosis is iron/nickel based mineral, shutting down lightsabers by starving them?

[Zixinus]

And what evidence do you have that they ever even supply the lightsaber with that mix of gas/matter. Even then you would be releasing occasional gamma-rays (which are your energentic photons), especially whenever the blade would contact any matter (not just solid matter, gas or liquid) that the blade would try to fuse. There is no guarantee then that the reaction would be neutron-less and not radiation-free. Again, it would bath everything in radiation the moment it is turned on or contacts anything.

If the blade would require itself to sustain energy, then Qui-Gon's lightsaber should have melted the moment he stabbed into the (presumably some metal alloy) door.

Even then, assuming that the lightsaber blade is a fusion reactor, we should see a mostly colorless blade. Fusion is actually colorless, creating light in the non-visible spetrum, only the plasma would have any light.

[Simon_Jester]

This fun little article compares the estimated power output of some of star wars technologies to those of real life. This site, my site, and Saxton's sites are referenced.

http://www.ebates.com/blog/how-many-bat ... star-wars/

I don't like the approach used for the lightsaber and blaster figures. The lightsaber only had to melt a relatively small amount of material to cut a hole in the door, not the entire center of the door. What they did there would be like saying "well, I sawed an eight-foot two-by-four plank in half, so clearly I must have expended enough energy to reduce 868 cubic inches of wood to sawdust!"

[868 cubic inches is the total volume of the plank]

Plus, it's a bit disingenuous to say it would take "one nuclear reactor" to supply the needed power, even if the needed energy is 1.7 gigajoules. It's not like Qui-Gon was able to perform the whole cut in a second or two. In fact, it's a plot point that he can't and that his lightsaber takes time to finish cutting through the blast door- so much time that security robots show up and drive the Jedi away before they can get through.

Likewise, on the blaster, he's assuming that 50 kg of iron were vaporized in the process of blowing a hole in the grating. The grating doesn't look like it weighs a hundred pounds; it looks more like a screen door or a lightweight lattice covering, not something bulky and durable like a sewer manhole cover or a storm drain grating. There's no good reason for a grating used in that role to be that heavy-weight in the first place, anyway, because it doesn't have to withstand having cars driven over it or anything like that, and presumably human beings are supposed to be able to remove the cover without too much difficulty.

It seems far more reasonable that either the grating was made of much lighter materials (since there is no reason to make it weigh a hundred pounds), or that the blaster did NOT simply vaporize it all and instead just blew it open and knocked it down the garbage chute it was covering. Sort of like how if you blew the hinges off the sliding door to a garbage chute in real life with a shotgun, the door would end up falling into the garbage.

And of course that's entirely leaving out the question of where fifty kilograms of vaporized iron went, because in real life if you flash-vaporized that much metal the answer is "it would condense out of the air onto all nearby surfaces including our heroes' skin and inside their lungs and they'd die horribly."

As for Corran as a Mary Sue, it was more in the X-wing novels that this seemed to be the case. Primarily the first in which he appears to die a half dozen times with the narriation style. And as you mention, most of those cases are him screwing up rather impressively. The part I felt was somewhat off in I, Jedi was his unusual set of Force powers, in which he had extremely powerful mental abilities with the Force that allowed him to project images against almost anyone, even fellow Jedi trainees(though Luke didn't really fall for it). And this was while completely lacking telekinetic abilities unless he first absorbed energy.

To be fair, we see both Luke and Obi-Wan use mind trickery and illusions in the movies with very little sign of effort. Whereas I'm not sure Obi-Wan ever uses telekinesis at all in the original movies, and for Luke it is hard, very much so, and all the harder for him because he seems to have some kind of mental block and thinks it's "impossible" for him to move very heavy objects.

Yoda, of course, can perform immense feats of telekinesis, but he's been practicing for 900 years and is legendary as one of the greatest Jedi masters who's ever lived.

So it's reasonable to watch the original movies and assume that a rookie Jedi may get the hang of playing tricks on people and creating illusory sights or sounds early, while not getting the hang of picking up rocks and throwing them at people until later.

[Vance]

Good points Simon.

They used my estimates for the lightsaber, this video and image should give you a pretty good idea on my thinking.
http://s.vid.ly/embeded.html?link=v9c4h ... tate=pause#

There is a lot of molten metal there.. we're into megawatts.

--
Heh, 50kg certainly might be a bit much for average maintenance guys. If the grate is to be handled easily then it would probably only weigh 20 or less (these are MASSIVE grates by the way... much bigger than manhole covers). Of-course this is also a Death Star prison bay, where heavy immovable grates made out of iron might be preferable? The total volume of metal missing after the blaster fired worked out to about seven liters give or take.. so equivalent to two or three large soda bottles in solid metal made to disappear in less than a second. It is a strange characteristic that the bolt destroyed so much metal without harming much softer bodies only a few feet away.. but there you go.

[Sea Skimmer]

The cone thinking seems iffy. That would require a bias of the energy of the light saber towards the tip, otherwise it should melt like a cylinder. In fact it should melt more strongly near the hilt, because that's open air, with low thermal conduction, while the tip end is against more material which should conduct heat away and slow down melting. Yet the melting is clearly biased towards the tip. But if the energy is biased then one could just as well contend that the energy is heavily focused towards the tip in a non linear manner and most of the length is not causing large scale melting.

After all the user is not being burned by radiant heat, and while The Force might be used repel that heat, that's guess work. Of course the power output would remain very high, but not nearly the same as the cone. Its also entirely possible that the door is not solid metal, it might have a concrete or other radiation shielded core with entirely different properties. Most thick real life blast doors and bank vault doors are like that. One solid material is seldom the best performing option for protective structures. A concrete like material wouldn't melt easily, but it'd spall and be penetrated easily. Makes for wonky calcualtions.

The Death Star grate might have been made out of a readily combustible metal like titanium or aluminum with much less density then iron. Certainly it was not actual iron!

Personally though I think if you want to apply hard science then it had to be some kind of very lightweight plastic or composite material, because unless the mass was very low you just can't explain where the mass went without a much larger explosion. Security doesn't seem like the biggest deal for that grate considering the configuration of the cell block, and the fact that it only led to a blaster proof lethal trash compactor. Also you can make plastics even today that no human can penetrate in a useful amount of time with that kind of thickness and no tools.

A non secure design isn't so unreasonable either. Why would they have that big grate at all if security mattered? The smell would be an issue and you sure don't need it for day to day trash. It might only exist as a place to dump executed bodies down. Or the station designers were just morons, which is already canon given that they managed to leave an utterly straight preforation all the way from the surface to the shell of the main reactor through hundreds of decks.

[Simon_Jester]

Good points Simon.

They used my estimates for the lightsaber, this video and image should give you a pretty good idea on my thinking.
http://s.vid.ly/embeded.html?link=v9c4h ... tate=pause#

There is a lot of molten metal there.. we're into megawatts.

There are two cuts there.

The first is a wide circular cut. The total amount of metal cut occupies a 'damage track' that is less than ten centimeters wide, and about a meter long. It appears to be less than ten centimeters deep (that is to say, the door is less than four inches thick). Qui-Gon seems to be advancing the cut at a rate in the neighborhood of, oh... twenty centimeters per second before the Neimodians close the blast doors. Maybe thirty.

So on a rough order of magnitude estimate, Qui-Gon is melting something on the order of 2000 to 3000 cubic centimeters per second. Using the figure of roughly 2 GJ to melt one cubic meter of steel (from the website linked in the OP), that indicates that Qui-Gon's lightsaber is putting out around four to six megawatts. If it could put out much more power than that, Qui-Gon would presumably be using the extra power to cut faster. Alternatively, the limit on power output may be determined by whatever magic Qui-Gon uses to shield his otherwise unprotected hands from being in close proximity to a megawatt-class plasma cutter slicing its way through thick steel.

[Please note that these are approximate numbers based on 'eyeball' results; you could probably get more precise numbers by fooling around on screen with a ruler and a pad of scratch paper, but I don't feel like doing that right now.]

Heh, 50kg certainly might be a bit much for average maintenance guys. If the grate is to be handled easily then it would probably only weigh 20 or less (these are MASSIVE grates by the way... much bigger than manhole covers). Of-course this is also a Death Star prison bay, where heavy immovable grates made out of iron might be preferable?

It'd be a lot easier to secure the grates with fasteners that are designed to be impossible to remove without tools (like, oh, deeply recessed screws with a funny-shaped head that cannot be turned by an improvised screwdriver).

Plus, the grate leads only to a garbage masher infested by squid-monsters. Jumping down there is a certain gruesome death, not a realistic means of escape. If a prisoner is capable of getting free and removing a bulky grate to jump into the garbage masher.. frankly, they could easily commit suicide by much easier means.

The total volume of metal missing after the blaster fired worked out to about seven liters give or take.. so equivalent to two or three large soda bottles in solid metal made to disappear in less than a second. It is a strange characteristic that the bolt destroyed so much metal without harming much softer bodies only a few feet away.. but there you go.

How did you get seven liters? Can you show me your math? It didn't look to me, the times I watched the movies, like that grate contained seven liters of metal all together, let alone in just the portions that were blown up by the blaster. And seven liters of metal would easily weigh fifty kilograms or so, which is (again) far heavier than is reasonably necessary for this grate.

I think you're seriously overestimating the quantities of material being destroyed here

[Simon_Jester]

Ghetto Edit:

I'm looking at that moment from the screen right now. There are about... I'm going to estimate twenty bars there, each of which has a foot-long or longer chunk blown out of it. On the other hand, the individual bars don't look to be more than a few inches wide or an inch thick. And there is literally no reason to suppose they are made of metal, or even out of heat-resistant plastic. This grate is literally there only to protect people from slipping and falling down the garbage chute, and possibly to stop a squid-monster from sticking up its tentacles out the shaft and grabbing people.

It is presumably intended to be moved by one or two normal humans with hand tools, because there's not much point in having a garbage chute that you can't open without bringing in a forklift.

It is not presumably designed to withstand blaster fire.

Compare the vulnerability of the grate (one shot or a very short burst destroys a huge section) to the seeming invulnerability of the walls of the detention center (which take repeated shots without so much as being cratered). The walls are presumably made out of sturdy metal- but the grate isn't, and there is no logical engineering reason to make it so.

That's the difference between materials in Star Wars that are designed to withstand blasters, versus those that are not.

[Batman]

Why do we even assume the grate material was melted/vapourized? For all we know it was just blown clear of the grate and disappeared into the goop in the garbage masher.

[Sea Skimmer]

The hole was much wider then the blaster bolt, a radial explosion effect required to accomplish this wouldn't launch 100% of debris straight down the chute. It'd launch most of them in a radial pattern which would cause lots of ricochets everywhere. So fragmentation hardly fits the evidence better then vaporization. But really its just not a plausible effect in any real respect.

[Simon_Jester]

The easiest explanation would be for Leia to fire a burst or continuous beam that would either cut the top and bottom of the bars off (so they fall down the shaft). But that's not supported by the visuals, although we might handwave based on the limitation of Industrial Light and Magic's special effect.

Part of the problem is that literally everyone in that firefight is using the same weapons, and nothing blows a square foot of material into wreckage the way that blaster bolt did. Stormtroopers get shot in the chest, it doesn't blow them apart. Dozens of shots hit the walls, and aside from maybe a few showers of sparks, there are no consequences- nothing like, oh, having 1% of the beam energy ricochet off the wall STILL carrying enough energy (dozens of kilojoules) to cripple or kill the entirely unarmored princess and Wookiee, or Han and Luke with their unprotected faces.

It's really hard to reconcile that with any portrayal in which the individual blaster bolts are carrying energy comparable to that of a small artillery shell.