The Feasibility of Star Wars Tech 712
pwnage writes "Forbes Magazine, not usually the the web's premiere source of all things geekish, has posted an interesting summary of Star Wars technology and its scientific feasibility. As a bonus, they also include a great set of Star Flops, including the infamous Jedi Arena Atari 2600 video 'game.'"
I don't know about their technology... (Score:5, Informative)
Man, I love the way that guy writes, so seriously
Short Summary (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Informative)
To stop the slide show click the stop button. Oh yeah, it starts the slide show _again_ when you click the "next" button. So to read the article you have to click "stop" every time you click "next" or "Previous". One of the most mis-featured pages I've ever seen!
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Informative)
wow, engage bs factor 8 (Score:5, Informative)
he doesn't get it, they aren't "made of light", they just look like they are. take a 1mK ion source, have it output out of the long end, give the blade a very strong magnetic field that bends that ion stream along the blade but does not touch it. place a weak magnet on the hilt to reabsorb the ions to be charged again.
a. this thing would probably about as hot as the sun, so touching would be double-plus ungood, even on the hilt. the charged ions would repel each other like in the movies, as long as the charge density was high enough.
b. omfg the power needed would be huge to create a blade of any intensity, ion plasma streams have been created in a tokamak, but not for any length of time or intensity, so youd need a serious cryonic ion storage tech, and that would be used up fast, and youd still get an arc-ing effect if it came near anything. think ball-lighting on crack.
c. i doubt you could move it easily, and if it touched a solid object the charge would be dissipated and the blade and other object would explode... a lot.
so the photon blade idea, no, and the gluon idea was pure 100% columbian grade crack from someone who never finished reading that neat book about physics, cause gluons don't really work that way. i'm sure someone could fix the engineering problems i have so far with a little effort.
And there's more.... (Score:4, Informative)
You can choose to just defend with it - protect yourself without threatening your opponent.
You can also selectively wound with it as well, giving you the ability to disarm (heh, literally) your opponent without killing him. As a lightsabre cauterizes as it cuts, the opponent won't bleed to death (although I bet he goes into shock pretty hard...)
It can also be used as a general purpose cutting tool - good for cutting through doors, cables, or whatnot.
By comparison, a gun (or blaster) is an all-or-nothing deal. You can kill with it by blowing a hole in someone... and that's about it. You cannot parry with a gun. It's nearly impossible to selectively wound with a gun. And aside from its intended purpose, a gun can't do anything else.
The gun's big advantages are ease of use (a gun does not rely on the strength or size of its wielder, at least not for reasonable calibres), its ability to kill at an extended range, and its near-unblockability. But given that Jedi can parry gunfire with their lightsabres (neat trick, that - how do you practice?) and are trained enough that "ease of use" isn't a factor... the lightsabre starts to look pretty good.
In real life, sword loses to gun at all except close quarters - especially if the gun wielder doesn't know the sword is there. But against all other weapons, the sword's ability to parry and defend without necessarily inflicting lethal damage make it pretty attractive.
DG
Lightsabers not possible? (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid slide show (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And there's more.... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, but the phaser...
You could blast through things, use it to heat a rock for warmth, stun, hit somebody over the head with it...
Warp drive paper (Score:2, Informative)
They mention this in the article:
Here's where you can find the paper mentioned above, in various formats:
The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity [cf.ac.uk]
Re:How So? (Score:3, Informative)
The D-5 guidance system is also due for an update in the next few years, IIRC, to shave a bit more off of that number. Even at 90m, though, that's an impressive accuracy for firing at something you can't see from 12,000km away.
Re:Last I checked.... (Score:5, Informative)
Another good analogy is spinning a light source around, so that a focused beam sweeps out a circle. When the light source is millions of light years away, it will appear to the alien viewer there that the beam is travelling much faster than c. However, once again, no usable information travels this way, as any info encoded in the beam of light is travelling from the light source to the alien, and not from one alien to another.
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And there's more.... (Score:3, Informative)
I guess you've never seen Star Wars, where Luke trains with a hovering droid on the Millenium Falcon?
Here are the links to each slide (Score:3, Informative)
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_sta
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_sta
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_sta
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_sta
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_sta
There is a slide 6 but it's devoid of useful content, and broken to boot.
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:5, Informative)
We have tactical nuclear weapons right now, but we do not use them because of social forces. The use of depleted uranium in ordnance is highly controversial, to say the least. The same went for the crossbow for some time. It was internationally recognized as an "unethical" weapon, and those who went against the social stricuture were likely to find themselves in a world of enemies for having done so.
Read about the Battle of Thermopylae. Yeah, ultimately the 300 Spartans, who eschewed the use of bows on chivalric grounds, were cut down by archery fire, but not until the battle had raged hand to hand for some days. There was a purely social aversion to winning with archers, even amongst those who valued and used them. Relying on them impuned ones ablity to win by merit of force.
It was considered important not simply to win, but to do so by physically beating the crap out of your opponant, and Xerxes only resorted to archers when the 300 proved an embaressment by successfully opposing his hundreds of thousands by pure might of arm. In other words the embaressment of using archers eventually became a lesser embaressment than than being shown to be physically (and by implication, morally, in a might makes right society) weak.
The first known military unit commisioned and armed with handheld firearms was formed in the early 1300s. The knightly orders lasted for another 300 years or so, and the concepts of chivalry were at their peak at that later time.
And then they fell. Almost overnight. Not because of the existence of crossbows and firearms, but because there was a great change in society that made chivalry a pathetic and dead concept. Even the concept of an aristocracy was dealt a mortal blow, and it should be noted that projectile weapons are weapons of the "masses."
We call that social change "The Plauge."
KFG
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Vulcan, from "Baron Munchausen" (Score:2, Informative)
Not true. From Wikipedia's Neutron bomb [wikipedia.org] article...
These same authorities say that the common perception of the neutron bomb as a "landlord bomb" that would kill people but leave buildings undamaged is greatly overstated. At the conventional effective combat range (690 m), the blast from a 1 kt neutron bomb will destroy or damage to the point of inutility almost any civilian building. Thus the use of neutron bombs to stop an enemy attack, which requires exploding large numbers of them to blanket the enemy forces, would also destroy all buildings in the area.
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:4, Informative)
First, when you're trying to infiltrate an enemy base, or you're stuck behind enemy lines and have to get past somebody, or you see an enemy who hasn't seen YOU yet -- in other words, you have to kill an enemy quietly and quickly -- the safest, most effective way to do this is with a sharp knife (I'm not going to go into the actual how-tos, but we trained on, and practiced, several good ways of doing this).
There WERE ways of doing this without a knife, but they were a lot trickier. For example, if you have some wire, you can make a garrotte, but that kills more slowly and the target might get a shot off, bringing all his friends down on you. Or you can break his neck in one of a few ways, but if you screw up the guy's gonna be pissed and try to kill you, or at least make a ton of noise and let his friends do it for him.
Also, as far as "utility uses" you forgot boobytraps. Hard to sharpen a punji spike with your rifle...
Finally, supposedly, during Viet Nam something like 50% of the firefights fought in jungle locations had at least SOME hand-to-hand component. It's really easy to close the distance when you can't see too far. This is why bayonet training is still considered important. It's kind of like staff fighting, but more streamlined.
I'm quite delighted to say that my unit wasn't actually used in combat, so I never had to actually DO any of this... It was all pretty gruesome, very gory.
They really know a lot of physics!! (Score:1, Informative)
Wrong. The photon is renowned to interact with everything that has charge, that is, pretty every thing.
Better to stick with good science fiction than with bad science.
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:3, Informative)
The other odd thing is that it should be possible to disengage a block by turning your light saber off momentarily or shortening it. It also shouldn't matter how much momentum a light saber has when making a cut, so fights should look like fencing matches, where the main idea is to get in a flick to the wrist and cut off your opponent's sword hand. The Jedi's sword techniques just don't take into account the particular properties of their weapons.
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:3, Informative)
Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader placed a tracking beacon on Han's ship. They then had to allow them to escape in order to track the ship back to the rebel base. The deathstar is a huge place. After falling into a gabage compator and ending up on some unknown level they were able to find their way back to the ship rather quickly. This was because the stormtroopers were hearding them back to the hanger. They were missing on pourpus. If you notice non of the Deathstars laser batterys fired on the Milinium Falcon on it's way out either. Then Moff Tarkin says to Darth Vader "I'm talking an aweful risk here Vader." Leia figures it out and mentions it. Han denies it as being impossible "...Not this ship sister."
Re:And there's more.... (Score:1, Informative)
Maybe you could make a device shoots at you -- not enough to injure you, but enough so you could feel it when you got hit. You could even make it small, round, and float in the air.
Surely somebody in the Star Wars universe would have been smart enough to think of building something like this...
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, several interesting highlights:
One Army guy dropped the pistol he was showing us, and a smartass in my unit yelled "follow it down!" (meaning he'd better just go ahead and get started on those push-ups).
Another fired an AK-47, but couldn't control the climb and ended up firing half the rounds into the air. There was some scattered laughter.
One of our guys fired a Dragon (I think that's what it was, it was way bigger than a SMAW), but the wire broke and the missle went haywire, slamming into the ground only about a hundred feet away. Nobody was hurt, but it was kind of cool and weird.
An LAV-25 shot the hell out of an old rusty Amtrak, with the announcer quipping, "By the way, boys, you'll be riding to the beach in those." Meaning the Amtracks, not the LAV's. We didn't laugh at THAT one.
Finally, and this was cool, an old Staff Sergeant walked up to the firing line with an M-60 (the newer model, with the forward handle) and fired off about a hundred rounds, standing, with the weapon under his arm. The rounds hit in a perfect, horizontal arc about a hundred yards out, near the Amtrack. He'd been a machine gunner for years, and was now a trainer.
It's possible. I've fired them during cross-training (I was a mortarman), although I did it from prone, and I didn't think the recoil was that bad. Shoulder was a little sore afterwards, that's all.
They're not quite as impressive as they are in the movies, but they DO make that great "thump thump" sound. And they're really accurate. We used to trace into targets six hundred yards away within a second or two.
They're nice weapons.
Re:Regarding Lightsabers (Score:2, Informative)
Force-push is not a dark-side force power, so any jedi could do it. Almost as easy would be for a jedi knight to force-pull all the guns out of the hands of a bunch of clones.
Re:Best place as any to ask this.... (Score:1, Informative)
Yes and no (Score:3, Informative)
There's a reason why in all independence war movies you see them walking up to 100 paces, lining up, firing from there, then charging with the bayonets. Because that was the range of those muskets, and even at that range it was so inaccurate as to make the whole thing mostly for suppression.
It also took a long time for those guns to start to penetrate a knight's armour. You can look at history and see one moment when the full plate was discarded in favour of concentrating all weight all in a super-thick breastplate and helmet. That was the moment when finally they started to penetrate a knight's full plate armour.
So basically knights continued to exist as long as they were still a formidable force on the battlefield. That's all there is to it. They could and did stand a hell of a chance against guns, which is why they continued to be used.
And IMHO you're also mixing up two _very_ different events. The knights as nobility, and the rise and fall of that institution, is _not_ the same thing as the rise and fall of cavalry as a weapon of war.
Cavalry had survived long after the aristocratic institution of knighthood had fallen. Cavalry was used as late as WW2, and sometimes even successfully. Even _Germany_, otherwise remembered by everyone for panzer warfare, still had cavalry units in the 30's.
Cavalry survived that late because as late as WW1 it had still been a damn useful and powerful weapon of war.
So basically chivalry and medieval honour had _nothing_ to do with it. Knights didn't go obsolete overnight in 1300, simply because guns in 1300 were just not yet enough to stop a cavalry charge, that's all.