| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
Son of Fire
Captain
Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 554
Location: Rose City Canada
|
 Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2003 2:57 am Post subject: Lightsabre Operation |
 |
|
Here is an interesting theory for lightsabre operation.
I nabbed from a site that’s no long up… it was Robert Browns Star Wars tech site.
| Quote: | First, I need to mention exactly what a lightsaber should do.
1. They cut through stuff. Very effectively. The movies show that metal may defend a bit, however.
2. They block other lightsabers.
3. They deflect blaster bolts (of course, we need to know what a blaster bolt is exactly before this helps).
4. They seem to glow, while generating no light at all.
5. They have a white core.
Now for my theory:
A lightsaber is a very strong electromagnetic field. Imagine a bunch of lines forming a rod, and all turning away at the end.
(I'll create an image sometime). Now, Imagine these lines vibrating, not very high, but very fast.
These electromagnetic "lines of force" would rip valence electrons from surrounding atoms, destroying molecular bonds. This would translate into the materials being cut apart. Metal, however, contains a lot of free floating electrons. A lightsaber would take much longer to cut through metal. And as the electrons are sucked away, the positive ions would start pushing each other away, generating kinetic energy (heat). Essentially, using a lightsaber to try and cut through metal would start melting the metal, as opposed to cutting it. This would explain the "melting door" in Episode 1, and the hit Luke made on Vader in Episode 5 that should have severed Vader's arm.
Now, the electrons that got collected by the lightsaber would collect in the center of the blade. When this "collection" of electrons got thick enough , it would block other collections of equally thick electrons, the same way solid matter blocks solid matter. Now, the sabers won't suck each other's electrons away (becoming stuck) because each saber has a strong enough grip on it's own electrons. The electric crackle of the saber's hitting is from the electrons being pulled in from the air going back and forth.
My theory on blasters is that a bolt from them is a bunch of plasma, maybe in a forcefield, maybe not.. Now, plasma is charged matter. By moving, it creates magnetic fields. A solid mass of electrons, as in a lightsaber blade, would push the charged matter away. Not necessarily over a great distance, but with extreme power. If it didn't happen till the bolt was extremely near the blade, it would appear as if the bolt made a sharp change in direction, not a shallow curve.
The magnetic field in a saber is vibrating. The vibration would tend to wrap light of the same frequency as the vibration around the blade, making it appear a certain color, much as the sky appears blue because dust particle react with the "blue" frequencies of light, reflecting them our way. And you can also notice that the sky does not cast blue light around (it just appears blue), and it does not generate it's own light. In the same manner, a lightsaber blade would do the same.
And the white core. That would be from the electrons. They're all packed closed together. That would generate light, like in a light bulb. It would be white light.
A lightsaber would cauterize because the electrons would be thick enough outside the "cutting zone" to cauterize. Electrons are x-rays, after all.
·
According to astrophysicist Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich, a rapidly spinning conductor will cause the creation of virtual particle radiation at its surface. Particle production is controlled by the charge, angular velocity (of rotation) and radius of this charged conductor.
If we imagine a rod shaped charged field of atomic-scale cross-section, which is super conducting and rotating at near-light speed, then charge regulation becomes the control for the particle emission type and quantity. Such charged fields would tend to repel one-another (if they are of like polarity), which means the blades would BLOCK one another. NOTE: a sabre would have to be built carefully and tuned correctly! A badly adjusted sabre would subject its user (and everyone in range) with considerable amounts of gamma radiation!.
The glow of the sabre blade consists of virtual-photons energized by the rotating field into real photons ... virtual light make real! The opaque 'thumb-thick' blade shape may be a swirl of ionized atmospheric particles (the AIR) drawn in and swirling about the core. When you IONIZE a gas, you actually have a PLASMA (as it is meant by terrestrial physics) ... and this would glow JUST LIKE A FLUORESCENT TUBE (which is ALSO a plasma!) ... BUT this thumb-thick plasma zone is merely a by-product ... the REAL cutting is performed by minuscule core of the true blade ... leaving almost microscopically thin cuts. (The blade would STILL glow fiercely in even in a vacuum, as it throws off 'virtual photons - made real' ... but the thumb-thick core may not be visible.)
Such a tight rapidly spinning charged super conducting field would rend (tear) through most matter by stripping off electrons, which bind atoms together. The ionized matter about the 'cut', as well as field-excited atomic movement in the localized area of the 'cut', would mimic great point-of-contact heat. A wound to a soft-tissue organic being would appear to be a microscopically thin BURN - and such a wound would usually tend to be cauterized (depending on how slowly the blade passed through - a large blood vessel cut too quickly may not be sufficiently 'burned' to cauterize). Dense metals which have loosely bound electrons (which are free to wander about their lattice structure) would be more resistant to cutting. The 'atom stripping' effect would take a little longer to cut through, because such materials have more electrons 'to spare' before their lattice structure becomes 'torn'.
Metals are also more highly conductive, and the localized 'heat' effects are minimized because the heat is carried away and dispersed through the material more quickly. This means that even though with varying amounts of effort, a lightsaber could cut through virtually anything, some materials would offer more resistance to a sabre blade, and therefore we can now understand how Lord Vader's Armour was able to ward off most of Luke's glancing blow, saving his life. Mr. Albert Forge has gone further, and has postulated a mechanism for the generation of the spinning field which creates the blade described above. Imagine a tiny sphere of unknown composition (perhaps some of the 'hypermatter' referred to in the SWICS & SWVD books by LFL's Dr Reynolds). Rapidly spin this into a disk by the effect of inducing fields (probably EM). The disk deformed and elongated into a tube, or rod (imagine the sleeve of a shirt being turned inside out) by an axially mounted and powerful electron gun (like the tube of your TV).
Field extension/retraction would be controlled by altering the output of the electron gun (which incidentally also controlled the charge of the conducting field ... the spin rate is determined by the inducing EM fields that created the disk from the sphere in the first place). 'Focusing' in this case may then be the very-rapid application of 'tuning' precession forces upon the extended field in order to 'follow' the orientation of the hilt, as left to itself it would tend to gyroscopically resist orientation changes. [NOTE: Mr. Forge would like to say that all the above, which having its roots in 'real' physics, is speculative, and must be taken with "several solar masses of sodium chloride" *grin* ... IMHO however, it is a VASTLY more consistent and believable model than any other. It just 'could' possibly work! *AND* it matches ALL the observed and ascribed conditions!]
ADVANTAGES
it SPINS - matching my 'gyroscopic angular inertia' ideas (independently supported by the SWVD)
no 'plasma' or 'fuel' required other than raw power
the blade is PURE energy
the blade is opaque
there is a sensible 'focusing' (tuning) role for crystals which COULD see them able to adjust the colour!
the blades would block one another AND blaster bolts!
it hums it glows, even in a vacuum!
the cuts are microscopically thin it cuts by 'shearing away' the electrons in the substance, leaving a locally 'induced' heat-like reaction in other words: .. leaving burns & cauterized wounds! dense metallic surfaces with many stray electrons in their matrix would provide higher resistance to the 'electron stripping' cutting action ... thus Vader's Armour stops the glancing blow from killing him!
Mr. Forge has built upon the 'saber/blaster relationship' idea (presented in Model Three above) using his 'virtual-light' model ... A question from Mr. Doran Skalak about gravitic effects prompted me to ask an astrophysicist (Curtis Saxton) questions about high-speed rotations and relativistic effects: the following comments are my own attempts to explain what he told me, and I may have made any number of scientific errors ... In Model#6 there is a 'virtual' object ROTATING at the core of the blade .. a forcefield of almost zero mass (I assume) which has a NON-MECHANICAL induced spin applied at near lightspeed [c] to achieve the Zeldovich effect as described above.
Apparently, objects moving at near 'c' WILL undergo the mass-effects predicted by Eientstein even if they have near zero mass ... because the equations effect ENERGY, and mass is merely one form of energy. As a result, the spinning blade will NOT ONLY undergo gyroscopic resistance to changes in angular orientation (being waved around), but will ALSO suffer SOME DEGREE (unknown) of relativistic gravitic effects. In effect, the blade may acquire some 'virtual mass' - FROM the relative standpoint of the user. Further, these effects will produce a form of 'event horizon' effect at the boundary (not incompatible with Zeldovich's 'virtual light' predictions I assume) which you would expect could account for the noise, the glow and the terrible destructive capabilities of the 'light' blade. Sabers and Blasters related?
Now comes the REAL speculation! It was postulated in Model Three (Field contained plasmoids) that the Saber beam may be related to the Blaster Bolt - as though the saber were a 'static' gunshot, or more correctly, that the blaster bolt is a 'mobile saber blade'. This is a fascinating idea, but it has a serious drawback ... there are instances in the films where damage is done BEFORE the visible part of the bolt arrives. the 'contained' model CANNOT explain this... BUT the 'virtual light' model CAN. *IF* Blasters and sabers originate from the same principle technology, then blasters MAY be such 'spinning fields' which can exist for a time on their own, and can be projected along a vector (i.e.: fired!). Such a 'bolt' would indeed leave a TRAIL OF LIGHT in its wake! The 'damage' may well be done BEFORE the visible part of the bolt arrives! Since a blaster is like a saber, and since sabers block one-another, a saber can block a blaster bolt! BUT this would be VERY difficult to do because the saber blade is so thin, and the blaster bolt so very fast! A Turbolaser may be a rotating field of larger diameter. Perhaps such larger fields would retain their coherence for longer (after leaving the emitter) and thus have greater range. If the field integrity decays beyond a certain point, its rapid rotation may cause it to 'explode' beyond a certain distance from the emitter. This would explain the 'flak bursts' observed in the film when some shots miss their targets. The asteroid hit by the Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back would first be 'drilled into' by the bolt, then exploded (vaporized in fact!) from within when the bolt's rotation collapsed - it would essentially have had its constituent atoms ripped apart from the inside out!
|
_________________
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." - George Bernard Shaw |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Hellstorm
Commander
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 253
Location: Montreal, Canada
|
| Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2003 3:40 am Post subject: |
|
|
Excerp from StarWars : The Essential Guide To Weapons And Technology
Page 56 : Lightsaber
"The lightsaber's jewels focus the power cell's energy charge into a tight parallel beam that emerges from the blade emitter as a vibrant blade of pure energy."
Excerp from StarWars : The Essential Guide To Weapons And Technology
Page 58 : Exar Kun's Lightsaber
"Panels controlled each blade's intensity: at its highest setting, a blade was like any other lightsaber, with the ability to cut through dense materials such as armor plating and durasteel with no resistance. At the lowest power setting the blade became a simple shaft of light, delivering no damage and providing no resistance against lightsaber attacks.
Hope this sheds some "light" on the subject.  8)
_________________
Tuco: "But if you miss you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco."
-The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Peter Griffin: "Embrace The Fear." -Family Guy |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Son of Fire
Captain
Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 554
Location: Rose City Canada
|
| Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2003 5:38 am Post subject: |
|
|
I saw that in the other thread, but I did not want o bog it down with such a large post. The thing that made me think of was the “parallel beam” part.
I just thought that it was neat that there is perhaps a potential for something to behave like a lightsabre using real science.
_________________
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." - George Bernard Shaw |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hellstorm
Commander
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 253
Location: Montreal, Canada
|
| Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2004 5:00 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Of late, most Sci-Fi movies and shows rely on reality based science 8)
_________________
Tuco: "But if you miss you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco."
-The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Peter Griffin: "Embrace The Fear." -Family Guy |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Son of Fire
Captain
Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 554
Location: Rose City Canada
|
| Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 10:23 am Post subject: |
|
|
Not from what I have seen.
Heck, even the much-vaunted trek is not based on reality, though they do toss around real scientific jargon to make it appear that it is reality based.
Though some of William Gibson’s stuff could be plausible…like the internet. 
_________________
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." - George Bernard Shaw |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hellstorm
Commander
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 253
Location: Montreal, Canada
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 4:51 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Inter...Net??? whats that? 
_________________
Tuco: "But if you miss you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco."
-The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Peter Griffin: "Embrace The Fear." -Family Guy |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hellstorm
Commander
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 253
Location: Montreal, Canada
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 4:57 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Of course the technologies aren't that advanced. Recently I read that a team working on "Transporters" had in fact transported a photon successfully. Mind you that a photon is not a matter atom, but still impressed the hell outta me. 8)
_________________
Tuco: "But if you miss you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco."
-The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Peter Griffin: "Embrace The Fear." -Family Guy |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Son of Fire
Captain
Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 554
Location: Rose City Canada
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 12:21 am Post subject: |
|
|
I think what they did had more in common with a “replicator”, or so I have heard.
They made a copy over a distance.
But I do know they do have ion drives and stings of antimatter.
_________________
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." - George Bernard Shaw |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hellstorm
Commander
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 253
Location: Montreal, Canada
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 1:06 am Post subject: |
|
|
I saw the ion engine, SPEED : 10 Km/s, thats 36000 Km/h
and the antimatter is incredibly hard to collect so far they barely got any in a few years 8)
_________________
Tuco: "But if you miss you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco."
-The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Peter Griffin: "Embrace The Fear." -Family Guy |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Son of Fire
Captain
Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 554
Location: Rose City Canada
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 1:10 am Post subject: |
|
|
I heard it was something like 200 in a string.
Either way…it’s a start.
_________________
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." - George Bernard Shaw |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Esoomian
High Admiral
Joined: 29 Oct 2003
Posts: 6207
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:50 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Son of Fire wrote: | I think what they did had more in common with a “replicator”, or so I have heard.
They made a copy over a distance.
But I do know they do have ion drives and stings of antimatter. |
I heard that too. I was very disappointed when I found out that the 'teleported' photon(s) were in fact identical (or perhaps just very similar) photons generated at a new location.
Still it puts the making of fire to shame  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Son of Fire
Captain
Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 554
Location: Rose City Canada
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 7:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
True enough, but still, most sci-fi is not based on real science, despite what people may think just because a film or program tosses about a bunch of scientific jargon and catch phrases does not mean that it is based in reality.
Take a look at Star Trek.
_________________
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." - George Bernard Shaw |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Rathe Ehtar
Commander
Joined: 11 Oct 2003
Posts: 440
Location: Vacaville, CA
|
| Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 3:45 am Post subject: |
|
|
Why should scifi be based on real science. I would assume they might be going off of theories. After all, it's science FICTION. As for a show that uses real science watch Star Gate SG-1. Amanda Tapping, who plays Major Sam Carter, actually researches Worm hole theory to play the part. Scifi shows are suppose to awe and inspire. Leave it at that. If you want real science, watch Mr. Wizard. (a cool show btw.)
_________________
"I don't know about angels, but it's fear that gives men wings." -Max Payne
"I don't buy that cluck like a dog, bark like a chicken stuff." -Col. Jack O'Neill |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Son of Fire
Captain
Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 554
Location: Rose City Canada
|
| Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 3:54 pm Post subject: |
|
|
My problem is not that I believe that sci-fi should be based on real science.
You are misinterpreting what I am tying to say.
My problem is those certain properties that make the claim that they are based on real science when that is clearly not the case. Sci-fi is just another genera, and I don’t think it should be limited by is or is not plausible. Fiction is fiction. But when the declaration is put forth that “our program/movie/etc” is reality based when it is clearly not, it tends to annoy me. That’s a misrepresentation at best or an outright lie at worst.
That’s why I like Star Wars. It makes no bones about being what it is. It does not try to hide behind a veneer of authenticity on the basis of false scientific plausibility to give it a greater sense of “validity”. It is just plain fun.
_________________
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." - George Bernard Shaw |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Hellstorm
Commander
Joined: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 253
Location: Montreal, Canada
|
| Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 6:36 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Your exactly right SoF, science-FICTION. but still, in a couple of decade who knows 8)
Besides if we only listened to PLAUSIBLE programs and movies we would have missed alot of cool stuff 8)
_________________
Tuco: "But if you miss you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco."
-The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Peter Griffin: "Embrace The Fear." -Family Guy |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
