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Putting Star Wars to the MythBusters Test
DangerTenor writes "The cast of the show MythBusters chat about their pasts with ILM, talk about some Star Wars myths (Can you avoid freezing to death in a blizzard overnight by gutting a dead animal like a tauntaun and getting into its carcass?) and why R2-D2 is the perfect sidekick." Not as cool as our interview, but pretty neat.
I kind of like this article on howstuffworks.com, on how light sabers work: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/lightsaber5.h tm
This is the page on practical uses of the light saber around the home.
I must be weird. I just watch the movies and don't talk about them much if at all. Tech and stuff in Star Wars is just too much of a stretch, what I'd refer to as fantasy, rather than Sci-Fi. Trying to explain stuff from Fantasy, down that path madness lies.
so, y'see, if greedo shot first, han wudda been blinded anyway, so...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can a weapon like a lightsaber actually exist?
Even the most uninformed fan knows that it's not just the light, but it's plasma being shaped into a cylindrical shape approximately 1 meter in length (according to the Episode III novel) that gives the lightsaber its power. (Yes, and the Force, but let me just talk about the saber for the moment...)
One of the problem has to do with the state of the plasma, often called the fourth state of matter. It is by no means solid, and yet the fact that the lightsaber has a distinct shape when activated and the fact that two lightsabers can clash in a duel mean that there is a solid-like boundary to the blade that is inviolable. On the contrary, often we see the blade cutting through other objects and body parts with frightening ease. (Just ask Count Dooku.)
Which brings me to another issue: The power required to confine the plasma in a blade-like configuration (be it magnetic or otherwise) may well exceed the power to generate the blade in the first place. It seems almost redundant for a weapon of this type to be built, as the builder can control and direct the flow of plasma with a device no more than 30 centimeters in length. As someone else said regarding construction of Dyson Spheres, "If you can build it, you don't need it."
Of course you could always try washing it...
The deer guts manages to find itself into various areas that is near impossible to wash without taking the car apart. In my case, because I had to drive my car home, enough of the deer stuff got in the ventilation system.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I'm going to ruin it for you... In episode IV, the Storm Troopers set their blasters for stun and fill the room up with blaster energy (it was represented as concentric circles), and capture Princess Leia. Why on Earth wasn't this the default setting? Much is made in the movies about the Jedi's ability to block blaster fire with their light sabers, (and in Vader's case his hand). It seems like the obvious tactic against a Jedi is set for stun, knock the Jedi out, set for kill, kill the Jedi. No muss, no fuss. But they never do this...
My other sig is extremely clever...
I am sure that they did not go through the planets core during that sequence of TPM. I was always assuming they were just traveling through some kind of deep water caves that cut through the land as a short cut to their destination.
Its like how some people might call the deep water trenches in the Pacific the "planet core" to emphasis how deep they are.
I got nothin'
A guy who lived across the hall from me in college, in the dorm, had a roof outside his second floor window. He conjured up a snow shovel, made a pile, went to the fourth floor, and jumped.
He did it again from the fifth floor. 3 stories is what, 40 feet? He was fine, physically anyway.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Just an interesting point, Yoda's form of speech actually belongs to a class of languages termed OSV (Object Subject Verb) whereas English is VSO (Verb Subject Object).
m ar/grammar_VSO.htmrel=url2html-20202http://www.ake rbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm> and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order
In fact there are real human languages that have OSV order.
More info at ahref=http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gra
2000 Turbolasers and 2500 laser cannons isn't that much when you consider the size of the deathstar. A sphere with a diameter of 120km (according to Wikipedia) would have a surface area of over 45,000 sq.km. That leaves more than 10 sq. km. per weapon.
I guess that's why Darth Vader had to send out the TIE fighters...
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There are twelve known physical types of ice. Look at the phase diagram carefully. Even at 10,000 gigapascals there are forms of ice. Most of these types are denser than water. What we typically think of as "water ice" is specifically called Ice-1 (there are two subtypes, cubic and hexagonal). Ice-2 through Ice-10 are all denser than water, with Ice-10 being 2.5 times as dense. That's some heavy ice. Ice-11 is less dense than water, but Ice-12 is again denser.
Our observations of water here on earth are not really representative of all the forms of H2O in nature. On the contrary, a big part of the reason why life is able to exist on this planet is that we are almost exactly at the triple point of water. By the weak anthropic principle, we only observe those forms of water that are conducive to the existence of life.
Exactly my thought. However, I'm wondering how they could imitate this kind of situation. Afterall there's no chance they'll kill some animal in some cold place and put one of their interns in it over night. That would be pretty cruel taking into account that it's just done "to be sure"...
My understanding is that Buffalo were shot and gutted as emergency shelters in pioneering days, a bio lean-to, but maybe that's urban, uh no, non-urban myth. Further, that was to get out of the wind and rain, which seems quite plausible, not to get at a blanket of guts which seems to contradict the general survival rule of don't get wet.
As far as getting a Buffalo carcass, that may actually be easily. Some Buffalo are raised and harvested as meat on private ranches. Catalina Island for example, not far from the Los Angeles area, offers Buffalo burgers at some of the local shops.
Funny you should mention that. When people ask me about falling off the roof, they assume I had to have been drinking. Sadly, I had only prepared to drink (on the roof), and had yet to begin. I later learned from the doctor that had I been drunk during the fall, I wouldn't have instinctually tried to break the fall with rigid arms, and instead I would have been fine.
The moral of the story is, if you're going to fall, try to have a few drinks in you first.
The Internet is generally stupid
What about ftl (faster-than-light) travel? I think they might want to ask about that.
Weeks of coding save hours of planning
You are right, its not like han squeezed in there too, and as much as Han is the man I doubt he would survive the night out in the opened on Hoth.
Now a side note from a pissed off Star Wars fan. Why is it that R2 has these really cool thrusters in the past (Ep 1-3) but then he falls in the swamp on Dagobah? Why didn't he just fly to land? That has been bothering me since I saw him with the thrusters. Someone please tell me or I will have to personally hunt george lucas down.
No mention of the absolute Worst. Star Wars tech. Ever. I suppose midichlorians are so bad they needn't be dignified with a debunking.
I nearly walked out on Episode I because of them. Reducing The Force to a symbiotic critter in your bloodstream is just plain wrong. I don't know what kind of crack Lucas was smoking when he came up with that concept. But I suspect it would do permanent brain damage, hence the quality of the Prequel Trilogy.
Lack of exposure to this substance would explain why Genndy Tartakovsky actually did a good job on the Clone Wars shorts.
Midichlorians. I hate those guys.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
...Dig a cave in a snowbank, pack the snow down nice and hard, wrap up in as many blankets as you can, and light candles. The temperature will get up around 40 or 50 and you'll be ok. It's an old trick, but a good trick -- snow is an excellent insulator.
:)
An alternate technique, if the snow is deep enough, is to dig a circular pit around a tree, down to the base of the tree, and tie a tarp around the top of the hole to keep the wind out. The snowbank trick is better, though, especially because you can pile up your own snowbank, pack it, and tunnel into it.
They're not lasers. There's a variety of speculative explanations for the name "turbolaser", most common among them being semantic drift-- i.e. a turbolaser is no more a laser than one of us "dialing" or "hanging up" a cell phone involves spinning a numbered plastic dial or hanging a heavy earpiece on a spring loaded hook. From StarDestroyer.net:
Can mobs of various primitive, semi-sentient beings repeatedly defeat large imperial armies (presumably with state of the art training and equipment), by throwing random objects at them?
(from StarDestroyer.net:
Can (a)ships exploding in space not only make a lot of noise, but also (b)not annihilate other ships in close proximity?
(a) The explosion sound is either dubbed in later by the persons assembling historical footage with no sound, or it is the sound of EM noise from turbolaser hits heard and recorded via the common "guard" frequency of all ship radios. Yeah, cheap cop out arguments, but they're vaguely plausible. If you're going to attack the realism, you have to work from the premise that the footage was taken by combat photographers and put together by imperial or rebel propaganda departments.
(b) Apparantly so. They have shield technology, so why not?
Can you really cover the same distance in varying numbers of parallax seconds?
For the famous "Kessel run/parsecs" quote, it has been explained that the run in question is littered with an assortment of dangerous stellar objects. The safest
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Blasters aren't lasers, they're plasma bolts.
Stormtroopers are conscripts and are thus given the worst tech and training possible aside from the brainwashing.
Assuming weaponry of the future continues to advance, if a star destroyer's shields can take repeated blaster blasts, it can take a few antimatter explosions. Can energy shields exist? Quantum physics says yes. Does that means it's true? Maybe.
It's not the same distance, if you mean the Kessel run. It's a black-hole maze, and you can safely pass closer to the black holes if you are going faster.
No, only Jedi-ism, buddhism, shintoism, kaballah, norse paganism, north american paganism, and scientology.
Next.
I know someone (a Scandanvian) who was drafted into the German Army toward the end of WWII and spent a winter night in a horse carcass on the Russia Front. He's still alive today.
While bow hunting you often have to track an animal the next morning because a bow wont kill it right away.
In Sweden, bow hunting is illegal as it constitutes animal cruelty and doing it could land you in jail.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
> Instead, Lucas et al came up with the concept of a laser beam focused through some special crystal. Uh huh. Yeeeeaaah. Good idea, George.
Funny you can pull something out of your butt and label it "better" than something pulled out of someone else's butt. OK, then my take is that firing a laser beam through this special crystal causes a plasma, EM or gravitic reaction in the crystal that creates the energy field we see as the "blade". That works just fine, eh?
> And what about "midichloreans"???
I like to look at midichloreans as a kind of "18th century elements" view of the Force. Back in Earth's past, scientists believed that there were only four elements, those being earth, air, fire and water. Drilling a hole produced heat, they said, by releasing the fire element from the material. It was workable, fit the evidence they had at the time, and turned out to be entirely wrong. The fact that Yoda and Obi-Wan never mentioned midichloreans to Luke late in their lives seems to indicate that they discovered that this view of the Force was incorrect, and therefore they rejected it, but in the old Republic's Jedi heyday, it was a popular theory.
Virg