Chrontius said:
He who said he could explain blasters and proton torpedoes -- please do so. You have piqued another geek's curiosity ^_^
Challenge accepted.
Blasters
Blasters in the SW universe are a successor to the common light laser.
Lasers work by passing a high intensity light through a medium (typically gas) which excites the light particles and is configured to allow them to pass out coherently towards the intended target, the result is a highly focused and highly excited beam of light particles hitting the target.
The problem with Laser technology is that light particles have nearly no mass, and therefore excited or not they are very poor energy carriers, in short it takes a lot of power to do any real damage.
Enter the blaster. A blaster works by exciting a charge of gas with energy and then compressing that gas in a magnetic bottle. A high intensity burst of light causes the excited gas to begin to undergo a type of "phase shift" resulting in a chaotic flux of energy to matter, all contained in a bolt held together by a "magnetic bottle" effect created when the gas was compressed and excited, the matter fluxing between phase states serves to hold this bottle until the energy dissipates or it impacts something. Upon impact with an unshielded surface the energy contained within the bottle is passed along to the target, the fluxuating energy/matter passing it's chaos to the target, both penetrating matter and subjecting the target to intense heat generated by the high stress conditions of the bolt of energy.
Proton Torpedoes
Imagine a nuclear bomb, now instead of atoms fissing to produce the destructive energy imagine that electrons and neutrons are being obliterated at the same time, funneling all of the energy from the obliteration of the electrons to cause the massive expansion and resulting shock as individual protons, which are positively charged, instantly have their bands broken and are allowed to accelerate away from each other as fast as possible.
Imagine you had a 1'x1' cluster of .1” diameter magnets, all polarized north (I know that's impossible, but imagine here) and those were all held together by a force field, imagine what would happen if you overloaded that force field and caused the energy that was holding them together to suddenly reverse and add to their natural repulsion to one another. Now imagine that same scenario the size of the state of Oklahoma, would you want to be anywhere near when those little balls of metal start flying? Well that is, in essence, what happens when a proton torpedo is detonated (although the warhead isn't the size of Oklahoma, but the little balls are a lot smaller too)
The entire reaction is set off much like a modern nuke is, a high yield charge begins the reaction and a split second later it’s all over.
And, that solidifies it, I am an officially a, oh I’m not even sure anymore, Nerd? Geek? Genius? Innovator? The next John Moses Browning? (Oh Lord lets hope so
)
oh, and before I forget, modifiedbrowning got the E-11 first, Ian got them both first, and TimboKhan was right on both accounts. oohrah.
