Tuesday, April 28, 2015

What really caused the Empire's downfall

"That guy in Star Wars IV who stops the other guys from blasting C3PO and R2D2 when they are in the escape pod because "there are no lifeforms" is actually the man who caused the Empire's downfall. He killed the empire with his love of being cost-effective and saving money on laser beams."

Top comment...
If you want to be technical, they're not laser beams; they're blaster bolts. A laser beam wouldn't be visible, since all of the photons would be traveling in a single direction.

The energy weapons used in Star Wars actually emit a form of supercharged plasma that's created by sending a burst of energy through a substance called tibanna gas. The resulting bolts don't travel at anywhere near the speed of light, which is why they oh my god I am such a goddamned nerd.

6 comments:

Chip Ahoy said...

Hilarious.

Look, (I say from high authority) Dr Who is nothing more than a children's show.

Oh man, that totally ruins it for me. Why did you tell me that?

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

One of the things that sucks about having that kind of a self-deprecating sense of humor is every now and then you make fun of yourself and somebody else sees it as an opportunity to pile on and make fun of you, too.

Methadras said...

Nah, if you go off into lala-nerdland like me and my friends do all the time, we all admit we are nerdtastic and then bust each others balls about it and get a good laugh, then we go back to the serious business of theorizing fantastical stuff and doing it all over again. :D

Leland said...

It's not like the laser light or plasma is free. It takes lots of energy to create those things, and that energy comes from cores that generate large amounts of greenhouse gas. The weapons officer didn't want to harm the already decimated Tantooine Climate with more GHG.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

You mean the Empire had an Al Gore to deal with?

Leland said...

Didn't Gore claim to invent the Death Star?