Dear Lucasa--wait, you know what, no.
This--this just isn’t the right way to do this.
Hi, it’s me!
Austin!
I’ve been playing LucasArts games almost as long as I can remember, going all the way
back to the dark ages of the 90s and the amazing Point-And-Click adventure game Indiana Jones
and the Fate of Atlantis.
Along with the masked renegade Zorro, Indiana Jones was my favorite hero as a child.
Huh.
And I also had a crush on Michelle Pfeiffer as catwoman in Batman: Returns.
You know, that's a lot of whips.
Probably was an early warning sign for my adulthood proclivities.
Where was I?
Oh, right, LucasArts!
I love you guys!
You and the rest of the Expanded Universe are single-handedly responsible for saving
the Star Wars franchise during the crisis known as the Prequel Trilogy.
Because of you guys, and your good writing, you’ve managed to keep people interested
in a franchise that was in danger of devolving into a pile of George Lucas’s dried spunk,
so for that, I thank you.
Now that we’ve gotten this out of the way, I have to tell you something--something that’s
been bugging me for years.
YEARS.
And that thing is this: your lightsabers?
Your lightsabers make NO.
GODDAMN.
SENSE.
And to be entire fair, this isn’t technically your fault.
You didn’t invent the things.
But we are a video game channel, and so, you know, I have to justify this rant somehow.
You know, when I was a kid I always wanted a lightsaber.
I imagined myself getting revenge on the dickheads in my science class who, for some reason,
to validate their masculinity by throwing shit at the back of my head.
That’s alright, I’d show them.
BSHOW, no more dicks for you!
But although I got older, realized my own inner-sexiness, and stopped giving a shit
about what mediocre, accomplish-nothing suburban fuckheads thought, I never quite lost my love
for these fantastic fantasy weapons.
They’re just...damned cool.
Of course, I’m soon to be a parent now, and I find myself becoming increasingly aware
of the every day dangers that surround us, both real and fictional.
And lightsabers are FUCKING DANGEROUS.
And I never really appreciated this before.
I thought of them as, I dunno, glowy versions of the sticks me and my friends used to fake-sword
fight with.
And you know what?
Even those goddamn sticks are dangerous!
I got gored more than once, and hid what I’m pretty sure was a wound that needed stitches
from my parents.
I still have the scar.
But no, lightsabers?
Lightsabers are way, WAY worse than sticks, swords, and, as you’ll see in a bit, maybe
even goddamn guns.
Let’s back up for a bit and rehash the lore of lightsabers.
Lightsabers are flashlights that emit deadly-as-fuck beams of energy, and are capable of cutting
through just about anything under the sun.
Or under the two suns, as the case may be.
Anyway, on a basic level, they’re comprised of a few things: a power cell, a few focusing
crystals, because this is goddamn space magic, you gotta have your fucking crystals, thingie
m’bobbers, circuits, channels, and all kindsa shit.
You flick a switch, and energy does things, and--okay, it’s all bullshit, alright?
IT’S ALL BULLSHIT.
Originally, in the back when times, they were attached to battery packs that was strapped
to a Jedi’s waist like an ugly-ass fanny pack, but eventually they took on the modern,
awesome form we’ve all become familiar with.
And, of course, we got weird iterations like Darth Maul’s saber staff, Kylo Ren’s WTF
Thing, and, at peak absurdities, lightsaber whips, because at some point writers stop
giving a shit and just snort all the coke in the room.
Now, let’s set one thing straight: lightsabers are not actual swords made of light.
That’s what we call a laser, and they don’t just magically stop at a certain length.
They go on, effectively, forever.
Plus, they don’t behave like light, either--they physically interact with surrounding materials,
creating resistance for the wielder.
This is not how light behaves.
Now, the lore for Lightsabers dooooooes indicate that the blades are massless, which is nonsense
if they’re not actually made of light.
But, yanno, I’ll buy that they’re very, very light, if not actually massless.
No, modernity seems to have caught up with lightsaber technology, and everyone seems
to be saying the blades are made of plasma these days.
And, you know what?
This is a brilliant choice.
Plasma, as we’ve gone over many, many times on this channel, is a gas--or really any substance,
that’s been either heated up to an incredibly high temperature, compressed into an incredibly
dense density, or a mix of the two, to the point where the electrons start going berzerk.
Some atoms have more electrons than they should, others have less than they’re supposed to,
cats and dogs living together, it’s MASS HYSTERIA in a plasma.
As a result, these atoms gain either a positive or a negative charge.
In fact, it’s this quality that gives lightsabers their first major feature, and is incidentally
one of the first things we actually see a lightsaber DO in Star Wars: deflection of
blaster fire.
Blasters, which also fire plasma, because I guess we’re just going to be as irresponsible
as we can with materials capable of melting your face off, can be deflected by lightsabers,
in theory, because they both carry the same magnetic charge.
Have you ever tried to stick two magnet ends together when they have the same charge?
It doesn’t work.
They push away.
Unfortunately, we hit our first little snag here.
For one, while atoms in the plasma state are totally ionized, not all the atoms in the
plasma ionize with the same charge--in fact, when one atom loses an electron, it’s likely
that another atom will pick that up, either replacing one that it lost, or giving it more
than it was supposed to have.
As a result, most plasmas as a whole have a neutral charge.
Of course, even in our own world we’ve had luck manipulating the magnetic fields of plasmas
to be either primarily positive, or primarily negative, but this doesn’t exactly fix our
problem.
In order to deflect a plasma, it would definitely, DEFINITELY have to be the same charge as your
lightsaber.
If it were the opposite charge, it would actually get ATTRACTED to the blade, gaining velocity
as it approached, and you’d risk it flying through the lightsaber entirely and smacking
you in the face even faster than it would’ve if left alone.
An easy counter to an ionized lightsaber would be to have a blaster that’s capable of changing
ionization at the flick of a switch.
MEET THE JEDI-SLAYER 9000!
Are you a stormtrooper whose friends keep dying to pesky Jedi assholes who are sending
your blasters firing back at you?
Pick up the Jedi Slayer 9000!
The instant you see a Jedi starting to block your fire and send it back, just flick the
switch, and our handy-dandy blaster will start alternating ionized states, turning that annoying
person in a robe into a glowing fleshpile in minutes!
And, of course, if the lightsabers are neutrally-charged, blasters bolts would
pass through them as though they weren’t even there.
NOT exactly an ideal situation.
But whatever.
We’ve been over bullet deflection.
It’s an awesome pony trick that, at the end of the day, is essentially made-up bullshit.
What about the good stuff?
You know, the cutting-through anything like a hot knife through butter?
Severing arms, legs, heads, hands, and rendering even the most badass steel doors irrelevant?
THIS, THIS is where Lightsabers are not only fun-as-fuck, but totally fucking feasible.
As opposed to being a single beam, lightsabers are actually a very, very narrow arc, so the
material that’s being heated up gets piped back into the lightsaber to be reheated.
In theory, the plasma is contained and guided by a magnetic field which, as I stated before,
is a real phenomenon we’ve seen in our real world.
Now, while plasma seems fancy and science-fictiony, we actually use plasma all the time in our
real world.
It’s in lights, TVs, and is even used to weld metals.
That’s right, plasma is used in our every day world to cut through metal, just like
Qui-Gon did in the Phantom Menace.
So.
How hot would a lightsaber have to be in order to pull this off?
Well, it depends.
As stated before, lightsaber blades can’t possibly be massless if they’re a plasma.
They can, though, be light-as-hell.
If we were to take, oh, I don’t know, 100 grams of our favorite gas to turn into a plasma,
Hydrogen, the blade would weigh less than two snickers bars.
That’s pretty damned light.
Steel is kind of a bitch.
It actually has a relatively low specific heat capacity (the amount of energy needed
to heat it up) than lots of other materials, but it’s very, very, VERY dense.
The average lightsaber blade has a diameter of a little over two and a half centimeters,
so in order for it to melt through, say, a 1-foot-thick steel door, we have to do a little
bit of math.
Doing this math, we discover the volume of steel the lightsaber needs to penetrate, and
knowing that we just need to plug in the density of steel, and we get 1.2 kilograms, just for
a good ol’ stabbin’.
The melting temperature of steel is over 1800 degrees Kelvin, and the specific heat is .49,
which means for every one degree raised, it takes .49 joules-per-gram.
But that’s not enough.
You see, any time a substance undergoes a phase change, going from a solid to a liquid,
or from a liquid to gas, it requires a huge jump in energy to make that leap.
Which means for every gram of steel, we need an extra 293 joules of energy.
Dammit.
Okay.
So, pushing all this shit together, we get…
1.2 megajoules.
Alright, that’s a lot, but, you know, not ridiculous.
In order to get this hot enough using our plasma sword weighing 100 grams, our blade
would have to be heated up to a balmy 3000 degrees kelvin.
Awesome.
Well, it’s good to know that some things about this fantasy world aren’t complete
bullshit.
Of course...well.
This still creates some problems, the least of which being that lightsabers at this temperature
would effectively have no color at all, and would all be a blinding white light.
Speaking of blinding, what we have here is, effectively, a plasma welding torch.
Granted, a slightly cooler one than most because of the large volume of hydrogen, but a torch
nontheless.
And there’s one thing you’ll notice, in all these movies, video games, comics, and
books: ain’t nobody wearing protective eyewear.
At these temperatures and masses, these blades are offputting a staggering amount of Ultraviolet
Light.
Not enough to give you a sunburn, but waaaaaaaay more than enough to burn your god damned eyeballs
to death if exposed for too long.
And jedi use these things ALL THE FUCKING TIME.
Their eyes should be practically useless, scabby husks of pus and sadness.
NOT to mention that all those sparks you see everywhere aren’t, like, the harmless sparks
you get while using a sander against a piece of metal: they’re straight-up molten steel
and metal.
One of those tiny sparks is hot enough to sear through your clothing and give you vicious
third degree burns.
This shit happens with real welders all the time!
One slip-up, and a spark hits you where you’re unprotected, and your goddamn month is ruined.
Lightsabers are WAY more dangerous to the person foolish enough to actually turn one
on than they actually are to anybody wearing a white plastic helmet.
So, no, I think I’m good living in a world where lightsabers aren’t real.
I don’t want one anymore.
They seem fucking terrible.
Fuck.
Now I see why folk are so hellbent on ridding the world of Jedi--they’re probably just
burning down buildings and causing rampant third degree burns everywhere they go.
Fucking zealous assholes.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
I have a little bit of extra time.
So, for funsies, let’s do one more thing, as a bonus.
The Force Unleashed was supposed to be awesome.
Instead, it was mediocre, and it completely upended pretty much everything established
in the Expanded Universe and otherwise about how powerful the force is.
Yoda, one of the most powerful force users in the galaxy, struggles to keep a tiny pillar
upright, but Starkiller, a shithead with an even more annoying name, is capable of downing
a God Damned Imperial Class Star Destroyer in the worst Quick Time Event known to man.
Imperial star destroyers are 1600 meters long and weigh over six million tons, aka an assload
of kilograms.
Using frames from the cinematic, we can see that the tip of the star destroyer hits the
ground at 20 degree angle.
Using our trusty geometry, we discover that it travels a distance of almost 560 meters
in 1.4 seconds, at a speed of nearly 400 m/s which is faster than the SPEED OF SOUND.
The star destroyer experiences over 40gs of acceleration, which means for that brief period
of time, it has a weight-force of over 232 BILLION kilograms, or HALF the mass of the
ENTIRE HUMAN POPULATION.
For that brief 1.4 seconds, it would be like if you took half the people on our planet
and just plunked them down in one spot.
The kinetic energy needed to move this behemoth is over 454 TRILLION joules, or the amount
of fucking energy a goddamn hurricane releases in 4 seconds.
Goddamn Starkiller is literally a fucking hurricane.
And instead of, I don’t know, just blowing up the engine with his apparently infinitely-powerful
force powers, he decided to be a complete shithead and just, like, throw it down like
some sort of animal.
What a fuckhead. Asshole.