101
Star Wars 'lasers' are not lasers.
They are semi-stable, self-cohering bolts of plasma.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Seeing as you are at the upper echelons of star wars trivia, do blasters have ammo?
Technically, yes.
Now, ... Disney has "happened" to the canon, so what I am going by is I guess now called the 'Legends' canon...
But uh yeah, going by the canon from roughly the 2000's and prior, yeah, hand held blasters and ship mounted weapons and 'turbolaser' turrets... yeah, there are varying kinds of mixtures of exotic gasses, of which a primary ingredient appears to be tibanna gas, which is what Cloud City largely exists as a uh... mining? harvesting? outpost for... these gas mixtures are the 'ammo' for blaster/'laser' weapons.
'Lasers' in Star Wars seem to basically play by a different set of laws of physics than our real world, because the way they are describes to work is that the weapon somehow transforms this exotic gas into plasma, and then as it moves through the barrel, the plasma is... somehow given, or made to have something akin to kind of magnetic field like capsule that contains the plasma as a coherent packet, which is accelerated out of the barrel as basically one object.
But, this 'magnetic field' wears out after some distance of travel, plasma bolts will eventually sort of dissipate or disperse. And I say 'magnetic field' in quotes because ... it can't be a real magnetic field as we have in our world, by our physics that is completely impossible, to somehow give the plasma this spatially coherent effect ... we can only do that to plasma when it is inside of like a tokamak style fusion reactor, we cannot achieve this coherence effect... projected outward from, external to, the machine that contains the plasma.
Basically, lasers are just specific frequencies and energy levels of light, they travel at the speed of light and ... would look more like a Star Trek phaser, if they can be seen in the human visual range at all.
Where as Star Wars blaster bolts are not continuous beams, they are more akin to bullets, to projecticles that travel at a much slower speed than literally that of light.
EDIT:
Ok... unless 'ball lightning' is both actually real, and someone can actually explain the physics of how it works, to the point that they can create it, and ... loose it outside of whatever device generated it... and it remains stable on a scale of at least seconds... then, yeah, Star Wars plasma bolts are somewhere between completely impossible and outside of our understanding of physics.
I thought a shot of this kind of stuff would be way more expensive in terms of power supply
Well, according to https://www.ex2.com.au/news/eos-unveils-apollo-high-energy-laser-weapon-helw/
Scalable to 150 kW
it'd be quite affordable, even if that power had to be sustained continuously.
1 hour of operation requires 150 kWh of energy. That's a steal compared to alternative "ammo".
It's even more of a steal since it can be easily recharged using a trivially available and easily transported resource you'll need anyway in order to be mobile: Fuel.
A generator capable of powering that kind of equipment will definitely come with a price tag of some description, but in the not even very long run it'll be cheaper, because it is a mass produced widely available piece of industrial equipment, and uses a relatively inexpensive consumable. The expensive bit here is the laser itself, powering it is dirt cheap in comparison. The laser will draw up to 150kW of power, a diesel generator in that power range will burn roundabout 40l of diesel an hour under full load. That's way cheaper (and more compact) than even a relatively small amount of ammunition you could use for shooting at drones instead of frying them with an enormous laser, and a dude carrying jerrycans working at a leisurely pace could easily keep it resupplied.
thought a shot of this kind of stuff would be way more expensive in terms of power supply
Yeah me too. And it was said also that the energy levels needed for a beam to penatrate was very high, especially for long distances.
+Here some more info on the EOS' βApolloβ High Energy Laser Weapon (HELW), 100~150 kwh. Nothing like starwars ofc, still issues with humidity, fog and hills fyi.
Still could be a neat thing if it works well in the field. I wonder how it will do during (North) European (winter) conditions.
I pay $0.10575/kwh - now this varies around the world, but let us round it to $.10 which is reasonable and makes math easy. $1 then would be 10 kwh over 1 minute - that is a lot of power. Of course they are probably using a generator so $.50/kwh is more likely, but still we are getting 2kwh over 1 minute - that is a lot of power and a big generator.
Yes, indeed it's a heavy energy using Laser the Aussies made.
US energy prices are very low, like 60% cheaper compared to European prices which are around⬠0,22 per kWh ( 2024)
Star Wars style
Are they satellite-mounted, or do they move at 45 mph?
at a cost of $1 per shot
Huh, we are paying by the laser.
So... Like... It's a bolt of tibantha gas or something?
Or did they somehow make a slow travelling bolt of concentrated light?
*tibanna
tibetta
Tapioca
Hopefully they have a few for Ukraine!
To be fair, fog, rain and snow aren't great for drones either
"it will see primary use in liquifying Palestinians from 400km away"