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The Feasibility of Star Wars Tech
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.'"
...and not Star Trek, but in this vein, The Physics of Star Trek is one of my favorites. It's written by Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist from Case Western Reserve University. Beyond Star Trek was another good one from him.
He dissects, from a scientific standpoint, some of the common plot elements and familiar staples (such as warp travel, transporters, phasers, etc.) to determine whether they'd be physically possible. An example of some interesting diversions along the way are demonstrating exactly how much data is contained in a human body, and how much bandwidth would be required for a "transporter" to work. It's a fun and interesting read, and includes content that would satisfy anyone from laymen to scientists. Being a fan of Star Trek is a prerequisite, though...
The website is navagating automatically for me? What the hell?
BUT THE JEDI RELIGION IS A HOAX! Read The Force Skeptics Page! :)
Man, I love the way that guy writes, so seriously
"The combination of medieval chivalry and modern lethal technology is pretty ridiculous," says Wilczek. "In real history, gunpowder--or even good crossbows--pretty much put knights out of business."
And therein lies one of the problems I've always had with Star Wars and Star Trek. Are you telling me that in a world with hand-held weapons that can supposedly level/vaporize small mountains you are going to pull out your bat'leth or lightsaber and duke it out hand to hand? Heck -- forget the hand phasers/blasters -- you could kill them from orbit fairly easily with either SW or ST level technology.
Yeah, yeah, I know, dramatic license and effect. I miss Babylon 5. Wait -- they had the Minbari using melee weapons too. *Sigh*
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The Starwars Holiday Special!! featuring the happy family reunion of Chewbacca, wife Malla and son Lumpy(!!!!)
The Jedi Arena!! Two rectangles swinging sprites at an orange glob!!!
Christmas in the Stars!! featuring "What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb?)" and R2-D2 dishing out "We wish you a Merry Xmas"!!!
It all makes sense now!!!
But LUMPY!!! If I ever came up with a character name as "Lumpy", I would wilfully get eaten by a Dianoga!!
Rapid Nirvana
You've gotta be a speed reader to read each mini-article at the slideshow's default speed. What dope at Forbes decided how fast his readers should read?
That slideshow could make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
We're talking about Star Wars -- not Star Trek.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"The combination of medieval chivalry and modern lethal technology is pretty ridiculous," in regards to lighsabers....umm it's call the force you geek poser! Now excuse me, mother has just yelled down here into the basement that the brownies are done.
Hello?? McFly?? Did you miss the first line of every single movie??
A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...
It's already happened, thus it's feasability is already established.
Actually, I enjoyed Jedi Arena
"In real history, gunpowder--or even good crossbows--pretty much put knights out of business."
And Ben Kenobi referred to laser beam swords weapons of a more civilized age.
I dunno, if blasters are supposed to be "more random", how come Jedis are still able to block their shots?
This makes as much sense as Chewbacca, a wookie, living with Ewoks on Endor.
Someone will come up with a non-slashdottable web server.
"Twenty miles . . . twenty miles . . . twenty miles. Eight thousand cube miles of rackspace, powered by fifty sub-atomic reactors, all designed to respond to the subconcious urges of the ancient Krell web-surfers."
Stefan
Man, Forbes must be desperate for readers to jump on the Star Wars bandwagon now.
Lightsabers are not lasers or simply light, they are directed concentrated energy fields that can cut better than a Ginsu knife.
A better reason for saying lightsabers are not feasible is due to the problems encountered when accidentally firing up one. Many Jedi and Sith limbs have been lost due to carelessness and showing off. Lightsaber safety is a serious issue, and people should not dismiss their potential dangers!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Is one of the worst things I've ever seen on the web. And they've been doing it for fucking *years*.
Have they ever actually done any usability studies on it?
ObTopic: I always assumed a "real" lightsabre would be something closer to magnetically-bottled plasma, which would explain its ability to deflect other lightsabres.
I liked the first three movies, tolerated the latest three movies, and was annoyed from day one on the hype surrounding the entire Star Wars phenomenon.
It would have been nice to have lived through only one Star Wars flood of commercial crap, but instead we have had to live through decades of Star Wars toys, drink cups, board games, etc.
I'm glad it is nearly over. Now I only have to tolerate the nostalgia periods that will pop up every decade or so.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Ships and weapons make sound in a vacuum in the Star Wars/Star Trek universes. Defying the physical laws of this universe.
Never quite go over this. However, the 1968 movie 2001 space odyssey, got it right!
You're assuming they want you to read the article. They could care less. They care about ad impressions, and flipping from one page to the next automatically cranks them out faster.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
light sabers.
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.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
rusty quote...
It kills the enemy. All of the enemy. And allof his family, and all of his oxen, and all of his cattle, and all of his manservents, and all of his maidservents...
The point of WMDs, be they yielded by nations or terrorists, (distinction left to the reader) is that they conquer nothing, because they leave nothing. If there's a good purpose, they demoralize the enemy into surrendering, and prevent further bloodshed. The fearsome thing about the neutron bomb was that it would make nuclear war practical again, which was why Jimmy Carter cancelled it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
A sword/lightsabre offers the user more options too.
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
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The only reason the Jedi were effective with the light saber, was because the damn Storm Troopers couldn't hit the side of a barn with their blasters. Seriously, there's only so many blaster shots a Jedi can deflect at one time. Maybe if he's real good, he can block two shots at once. But if you had three troopers fire at the same time... ON TARGET... then there'd have been many less Jedi around.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I read the first slide about these, and I loved the comment about how it isn't possible to make light do things without a large gravity source or some thing to redirect it through.
That being the case then... Why does the road or a desert horizon shimmer on a hot day? Heat from the road or the sand is causing the light to shift.
And the whole faster than light travel thing.... Didn't some french researchers prove that warp drive (ala Star Trek style) was possible just a couple years back? Haven't scientists just lately made light travel at speeds faster than light in a lab (in the USA I believe)? If it's impossible, then did all these researchers lie?
I'm thinking that maybe Forbes should get a real science writer that will actually do a bit of research into things before he/she/they start putting things to print.
Further... They said that teleportation (ala Star Trek transporters) were impossible just 10 years ago. Just last year, researchers teleported light particles across a laboratory on multiple occasions. As I recall reading, there were going to start working with more massive particles on larger scales this year.
All I'm saying is that people should really stop and think before they say something is impossible. Flying was supposed to be impossible. Landing on the moon (or even people in space) was supposed to be impossible. Lasers were impossible. Your everyday microwave oven was born from science fiction and most people that work in an office setting have printers, copiers, scanners or even fax machines that all use lasers to do what they do. That bar code scanner at the grocery store uses a laser, so does the one at the fuel station and the scanner that the freindly UPS and FedEx people use.
People keep saying things are impossible, and then 5 or 50 years later someone makes it reality. Writers should think before they start labeling things like that, or they should really be prepared to get laughed right out of town when they are suddenly shown to be quite wrong. I'm not saying that any Star Wars technology is possible today, or even 50 years from today, but someone will make it or something very much like it work one day. I'd rather not be the guy that said (very publicly) that it was impossible.
Things you can say to your dog that you can't say to a girl: "How about a nice bone?"
Clearly they've not seen this article: http://www.howstuffworks.com/lightsaber.htm/
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Try this. That should effectively stop the slide show.
Iesus Christus magnus est.
Why can't (in theory, the engineering behind it is another matter) we keep a stationary wave of light with poles coincident with the ends of the blade and thus create a lightsaber? I know it would not *look* like a lightsaber (you wouldn't see the light coming through) but I'm pretty sure that if you could make such a wave, out of ,say, CO2 very powerful laser.... anything that goes in the middle would be badly burned.
thoughts?
Wouldn't it be neat if there was a book about this? It could have stuff about planets, species and races, droids, even the Force! And it could be published in 1999!
Really. A slideshow. How nice.
[Fade into dream sequence]
"You are part of the Frontpage Alliance and a hack! *cough* *choke* *gasp* [web designer's corpse thrown to the floor] "Take him away!"
[Fade out of dream sequence]
*sigh* Back to work I guess.
Either everybody's got a babelfish stuck in their ear, or the folks in that galaxy have the inborn ability to understand a seemingly million different sounding languages (though yes, sometimes requiring an interpreter), a totally different alphabet (see the control panels of the shuttle at the beginning of Episode 6), but yet use Arabic numbers for describing distances.
If Star Wars was based on possible technology it wouldnt be called Sci-FI and it would probably be the most boring space battle movie of the century! Light Saber are unrealistic but it's OK! spaceship making noises in space, IMPOSSSIBLE, but would you want a battle with no sound except the breathing of the spectators in the theather.Explosion with no oxygen , still impossible, who cares.The only thing i dont want them to put in a sci-fi movie IS a totally improbable thing like breathing in space with no helmet on or spacesuit! If you want reality, rent appollo or space odyssey 2001!
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
And those colonists had no clue about massing fire, or about basic unit discipline, even. The longbows at Crecy, or crossbowmen anywhere, always acted as a massed firing unit, and absolutely slaughtered knights.
A samurai vs. a peasant with an arquebus == a dead peasant. A horde of mounted samurai vs. a disciplined, experienced firing line properly arranged == a lot of dead samurai.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
The Peacekeeper MX (which is almost completely withdrawn from service, if any are left out there at all) had a CEP of 90m, as does the Trident D-5. The warheads coming off of the MX missiles are being moved to Minuteman III missiles, improving their CEP to 90m as well.
:)
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Or you could just shoot people with the very powerful laser..
"He pulls a knife you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way."
To avoid having the pages advance, turn off JavaScript, and try these links individually:
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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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I remember a cool science teacher in High School getting people to write papers on the science of Star Wars. Rather than do anything particularly scientific, I gathered all the fictional information I could find on the ion engines in TIE fighters. I did not do well.
Of course, ion engines do exist now. I want some marks back.
Also: Bob's Quick Guide to Its and It's.
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
The simplest truth is that every year we disprove a limitation that stood in the past. Next year I suspect the same.
All our science is realtive to our observations up to this point. I would assume that until we find the grand unifcation equation, or the Hitchihikers Guide to the Galaxy, that it's more likely that the fact that we can imagine it, implies (or is it infers in this context)that there is some possibility of it just based on the fact that we can conceptualize it.
Remeber that within some of the readers lifetimes space travel was sciene fiction and impossible. There was such impossibilities as Nukes came to be. Who would, 80 years ago fathomed that 2 softball sized chunks of material could in fact blow a city away? And long before those, the world was flat, the sky a dome, and the stars in the sky jewels set in the dome of heaven by Gods who had nothing better to do then turn into swans and have sex with hotties.
"With one language (math) that which man could imagine was..."
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
For example if Annakin and Padme had had access to contraceptive technology Annakin might never have turned to the dark side and billions of lives would have been saved.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Did you ever notice the ground transportation they use?
Levitating carts pulled by animals.
Star travel and anti-gravity and they need animals for propulsion?!
The Star Flops section got me to wondering about a 33 1/3 record that was released many moons ago called "Encounter on Ord Mandell", that occured between IV and V. Why is it the internet is rife with copies of the Christmas special, but I can't seem to track down audio of this (supposedly good) peice of Star Wars history?
I think Forbes was lacking in the Technology Dept.
Lightsabers
Not possible? I think most StarWars geeks, physics buffs, and George Lucas already understood the properties of light. That's why most techie sites refer to it as an "wave arc" weapon. Meaning it's not a "laser sword" more of some kind of energy/matter stream that loops onto it self. More probable, yes? PS, with all the ILM technology, why are not the lightsaber shadows removed, hmm?Do a google search on building a lightsaber, lightsaber physics. You'll find ton's of pages.
Hyperdrives
So so SO many theories on this one. Most won't work. Some are really really probable. Yes, look at the Physics of Star Trek. Read Michio Kaku. Do your homework!
3D Spacial Holograms Not Possible?! WHAT! Like almost here! A guy has already built a floating 2D projection monitor. Read this article
IO2 Techlology
FogScreen Inc.
OK, let's make this a little clearer.
:) But all else being equal, *because my weapon has a defence as well as an attack function*, I can elect to attempt to withold lethal force if I choose not to kill you. Plus I have the opportunity to communicate with you while we are sparring, and perhaps you can be dissuaded verbally.
.22 rimfire will kill a person stone dead with one shot, and other times somebody will take a dozen 9mm rounds and still keep coming. So it behooves me, if I want to survive, to get as many bullets into you as I can.
Let's examine the (hypothetical of course) case where you and I come across each other, and we're both armed.
In most non-open-battlefield encounters, the distance between us is going to be somewhere between 10 to 25 metres.
Let's start with swords. Could be epee, could be sabre, could be katana, could be lightsabre - it doesn't really matter.
Barring misfortune, both of us should be able to unsheath our swords and come en garde before the other could close the distance. At 10m maybe if one of us is an iado expert perhaps that's close enough to attack straight out of the draw.... but in any case, odds are that we we be able to come en garde before closing the distance.
And that means that we will have the opportunity to defend against an attack made by the other. And in swordfighting, defense is stronger than attack - more points are made on the riposte than on the initial attack, as you tend to be more open during the attack than while defending.
That means we are going to have the opportunity to size each other up, come up with a plan, perhaps even *talk* to each other before commiting ourselves to a plan of action. A lot depends on relative skill of course; but if we are similarly skilled and I don't plan on making an attack, I can probably hold you off for quite some time if I restrict myself to defence only. Accordingly, if I decide to wound or disable only, I can withold the attack until such time as an opportunity to wound/disarm presents itself.
If your skill level is higher than mine, perhaps that opportunity will never come. Perhaps my clumsy defence will open up an avenue, and I wind up skewered.
Now same scenario, but we have pistols instead of swords.
This is a different story. There is NO way for me to parry a pistol shot. There is NO need to close distance - at 10m, I can fire 5 shots in 3 seconds and keep all 5 rounds in an 1" circle (at least, I could once upon a time...) At 25m, that circle expands to about 3" - which still fits nicely on your chest. Plus the only physical effort you need to plug me is to point the gun at me and sucessfully pull the trigger - unlike the sword, which requires more physical effort and skill to execute a successful attack.
In this scenario, my only hope is to get my gun on line and firing before you can do the same, and do devestating, incapacitating damage that puts you down and keeps you down, without having the ability to get a shot off at me.
In real-world terms, that means shooting you centre of mass as many times as I can as soon as I can. Bullets are funny; sometimes a little
Now I do have a few other shots availible to me other than just centre of mass. I can shoot for kneecap, hip, head, and the old Western standby, gun.
Shooting at the gun is a ridiculously low percentage shot. I might be able to make that shot if you struck a Charlie's Angels pose and held it for a second or two, but there's no way I'm hitting your gun if it is coming out of a holster and being pointed at me. That only happens in the movies.
Hip and kneecap are attactive because a solid hit on either drops you - and you won't be running after me any time soon. But neither option stops you from shooting me once you are on the floor - or even on the way down to the ground.
And head is lethal, and a lower percentage shot than centre of mass.
That (if you'll pardon the pun) is the double-edge of the gun.
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Firearms from the 1300, and in fact everything before the minnie ball (i.e., the rifled barrel) were pathetically inaccurate and short range.
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.
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