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Hey all,

Here are my questions - what are the projectiles that exit from a typical Star Wars blaster? Is it a laser, or a super-focussed beam of light, or what? Would they be able to penetrate concrete, like some guns today, or would they bounce off anything that isn't flesh (IRL)?

Thanks for your help

A packet of laser energy encased in love.

They only bounce when it's fired at something that's magnetically sealed (Like trash compactor doors). Otherwise, they explode on impact.

My guess wold be some sort of "Plasma bolt", though "Love encased laser energy" might be correct.

Doop Dude wrote:Hey all,

Here are my questions - what are the projectiles that exit from a typical Star Wars blaster? Is it a laser, or a super-focussed beam of light, or what? Would they be able to penetrate concrete, like some guns today, or would they bounce off anything that isn't flesh (IRL)?

Thanks for your help

A laser is a super focused beam of light.

They're clearly not an actual laser from their appearance on screen. If you fire a laser, you instantly (less than 1 video frame) get a beam from the gun to the target while it fires, then the beam instantly goes away. (Technically if you don't have any dust, smoke, air, etc. you couldn't see the beam, but even someone doing realistic lasers wants something cool on-screen). Blasters fire a glowy bolt of something that you can see moving across the screen, so it's obviously not moving at the speed of light like a laser would. They're shown damaging concrete and metal in the series, the only things they bounce off of are specially shielded.

They're made to look cool, not based off of a real weapon system, and most explanations of how they work are technobabble, so you can't really say exactly what they are. One explanation that is used on one of the official pages is that they take a gas, energize it so that it's damaging, contain it in a magnetic field, then accelerate it at the target. That fits what's on screen and works reasonably well.

I think as far as fluff goes they are a "bolt" of plasma encased in magnetic engery to keep it from exploding everywhere. If i remember right it was on one of my star wars cards so I would have to check. If only we had cool guns like that...

The Foot wrote:I think as far as fluff goes they are a "bolt" of plasma encased in magnetic engery to keep it from exploding everywhere. If i remember right it was on one of my star wars cards so I would have to check. If only we had cool guns like that...

That sounds about right from what I remember of my star wars books back in middle school. Something along the lines of a laser being used to excite a canister of special gas (harvested on cloud city, amongst other places) and that would kick out a bolt of plasma, which would move at subsonic velocities and then hit and potentially kill things, depending on the amount of plot armor they were wearing.

Imperial blasters clearly fire Nerf, and are wildly inaccurate

ArbeitsSchu wrote:Imperial blasters clearly fire Nerf, and are wildly inaccurate

Unless fired at Jawas, Ewoks, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru or Princess Leia's shoulder.

Ewoks are flammable. Jawas might be allergic? As for Leia's shoulder... I reckon if you put down ten thousand rounds, even of Nerf, one of them is going to penetrate.

I reckon they did Owen and Beru with petrol siphoned from the Jawa crawler "as a warning".

FITZZ wrote:

ArbeitsSchu wrote:Imperial blasters clearly fire Nerf, and are wildly inaccurate

Unless fired at Jawas, Ewoks, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru or Princess Leia's shoulder.

Yet they seem accurate enough in the hands of Han Solo.....

snurl wrote:

FITZZ wrote:

ArbeitsSchu wrote:Imperial blasters clearly fire Nerf, and are wildly inaccurate

Unless fired at Jawas, Ewoks, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru or Princess Leia's shoulder.

Yet they seem accurate enough in the hands of Han Solo.....

Luke guides them all to the target as he feels sorry for Hans awful weaponry.

Nerd Alert! From Wookieepedia:

Blasters were a considerable improvement over the archaic laser design. Instead of a coherent beam of laser-heated plasma, the blaster fired a highly compressed, focused high-energy particle beam that was very deadly to most creatures. The energy that made up the blaster bolt depended on the type of blaster being used.

The less common blaster was a plasma based design, like those used by the Grand Army of the Republic. Plasma-based blasters were effective against all targets, but even more so against droids because of the nature of plasma as a superheated, ionized gas. Droids were vulnerable to ion energy, so ion weapons were a natural choice against a droid army. This explains the use of the BlasTech DC-series in the Clone wars.

In plasma-based blasters, a high-energy gas (tibanna gas, for example, used in the BlasTech DC-series) would move from the gas chamber into another chamber where it was altered into a plasma state. It was then released from a magnetic "bottle" effect through the collimating components. This turned the mass of plasma gas and energy into a coherent energy beam as a coherent energy bolt of light and plasma. This combination of light and plasma formed the deadly bolt fired from a blaster.

The more common type was the blaster that fired a high energy particle beam that was more deadly to humanoids and other biological targets than superheated plasma (which was quite deadly anyway), but it was still effective enough against droids to put a B1 battle droid down and keep it down. Particle-beam types were also more efficient because they used less blaster gas to produce the beam than is necessary to form a plasma bolt, as plasma, as a state of matter, requires a far greater amount of energy to produce.

In particle-beam based blasters, like the E-11 used by stormtroopers, a small amount of high-energy gas moved from the Heter valve to the chamber commonly called the XCiter. In the XCiter chamber, the gas was energized by the power pack, then passed into the actuating blaster module, which, when assisted by the components in the barrel, processed the now extremely high-energy gas into a compressed beam of intense energy particles, coupled with intense light, which generated the deadly high-energy particle beam fired from most blasters. In these blasters, the combination of super hot laser-light and a compressed bolt of intense energy particles formed the deadly bolt.

Most personal blasters had two kinds of ammunition: a gas cartridge and a power cell. Less powerful weapons, like the Drearian Defense Conglomerate Defender sporting blaster pistol, relied largely on the power cell and used only a small quantity of gas, while very powerful weapons, like the illegal Tenloss DX-2 disruptor pistol, used much larger amounts of gas. Still other weapons, namely those dating from earlier times, employed a kind of removable power cell/cartridge which supplied enough energy (though at weaker levels) to make total expenditure seldom.

Blaster bolts usually dissipated in a small, but violent explosion of extreme heat and force upon contact with an unshielded surface, sometimes leaving blast points. Weapons such as Han Solo's DL-44 heavy blaster pistol and the E-11 blaster rifle could cause incredible destruction, and had the power to blow huge chunks from stone walls and smaller holes and pockmarks out of durasteel bulkheads, as seen in Han Solo and Luke Skywalker's raid on Detention Block AA 23. An ion accelerator uses an electrical charge to stun or kill enemies.

TL;DR, they're particle beams.

From wookiepedia;

"A blaster (also addressed as a gun) was a ranged weapon that fired bursts of particle beam energy called blaster bolts from a replaceable power pack."

"particle-beam based blasters, like the E-11 used by stormtroopers, a small amount of high-energy gas moved from the Heter valve to the chamber commonly called the XCiter. In the XCiter chamber, the gas was energized by the power pack, then passed into the actuating blaster module, which, when assisted by the components in the barrel, processed the now extremely high-energy gas into a compressed beam of intense energy particles, coupled with intense light, which generated the deadly high-energy particle beam fired from most blasters. In these blasters, the combination of super hot laser-light and a compressed bolt of intense energy particles formed the deadly bolt."

So there you have it. It puts gibberish into a gibberish chamber, which through a process of gibberish fires red line across the screen.




EDIT - Ninjaed by Plutuan4th, by a mere.... hour and nine minutes?!