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Is the Transporter a Murder Machine?
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Peregrinus: [QB] It's not a laser. It casts a shadow, it blocks another lightsaber blade, it generally behaves like an object with mass, not a massless beam of energetic photons. There was a wonderful web page that dealt with just this question, but it is currently down. Went through all the possibilities and ended up with the best guess based on observed properties. That being: a lightsaber blade is a one-dimensional force field spinning at near lightspeed. The spin produces virtual photons that rapidly decay. This is why a lightsaber blade is very bright at the core, but the intensity falls off geometrically as you move out from the core, hence why a lightsaber doesn't illumnate a room or even nearby objects. The spinning blade also disrupts the electron clouds of the matter it impacts, resulting in heat-like effects without being hot itself, hence cauterized wounds. Metals have more free electrons than non-metals, which is why the lightsaber doesn't have as pronounced an effect on armour or blast doors. Hence glancing off Vader's shoulder armour, and the time it took Qui-Gon to melt through the blast door. An additional side effect of the rapidly spinning force field is an intense gyroscopic effect. A lightsaber won't want to move, and when you do get it to move, it won't necessarily want to move in the direction you want, or stop where you want it to. This is why the Jedi, with their Force-enhanced strength and dexterity, are about the only ones who can wield them with any skill (Han gutting a tauntaun with a single two-handed swipe doesn't count ;) ). This is all bleeding-edge theoretical physics coupled with basic Star Wars assumptions (compact power cell, force fields). I don't know where West End Games (the originators of the jewel-focussed blade model) pulled their lightsaber theory from, but it was probably the same place they got the eight-kilometer Super Star Destroyer. None of the original source material mentions gems, jewels, or crystals beyond Lucas' description of the jewel-decorated hilt in his Star Wars novelization -- but the rest of that description used the dropped first-draft saber design (one-handed hilt capped with a ten-centimeter-diameter polished disc) so I don't cling to stringently to it. There is, however, no problem with using crystals to regulate the output from the power cell to the array of force field generators at the top of the hilt. The more crystals, the more precise you can make the blade. I imagine something to do with the number of crystals regulating pulses and the number and capacity of the field generators are what determine a lightsaber's colour. And now back to your regularly-scheduled Trek... --Jonah [/QB][/QUOTE]
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