I am intrigued that Rachel Maddow’s first date with her partner Susan, was at a shooting match, less that it was an NRA “Ladies Day” event where gun culture still thinks of gender roles as fixed, so technical talk about Star Wars (SW) blaster ballistics is amusing.
The Star Wars / Star Trek discourse has its arcane elements, particularly with its frontier shoot ‘em up scenes. but ultimately it has the continuing issues of lethality.
Supposedly non-lethal tasers can still kill much like contemporary tear gas guns routinely used unethically by police (see DAPL). But isn’t that what civil disorder is about … exploiting tension and chaos, often resulting in catastrophe depending on your allegiance (see Kent State). Projectile weapons like versions of rail guns could be the armament of the future with changing environments and battle spaces.
If only the competitive play that mimics actual warfare could remain fantasy rather than the conflicts in real space exploration over resources and power.
Barbarism remains with first-person-shooter video games, which while for children or the child-like, functions mainly as a distracting minder. As digital simulations, such technology is only part of the actual mediated warfare that now makes drones a key element in MIC national policy, however now accessible by many countries unable to field large scale militaries.
More obviously barbarous are the intersection of online gaming, science fiction narrative and online politics, signified by the antisocial behaviors encouraged by RWNJs as part of the racism, sexism, and classism personified by the GOP and its orange figurehead.
As much as one would like to consider the genres of media as more cerebral, the dominance of games is based more on individualistic competitive acquisition, brutality, and reaction.
The popular lack of well-designed computer games built on cooperation and fulfillment makes one less than optimistic about the future of mediated learning or more than pessimistic about the future of online wagering labeled as skill like fantasy sports rather than online gambling.
Entertainment as wealth building seems to be the eternal cultural problem when gambling is seen as addictive disease. Can there be safe, risk-seeking without being seen as a subordinated risk-adverse inferior (“beta”).
Ancient weapons and hokey religion may be all we have left because in the US White House, the Farce is with us. We need elegant weapons for a more civilized age, even if their potential use as threat signifies how barbaric we remain. And we still need recreational activities even if there is so much pressure to make money from them.
Have you ever played both cooperative (group play) and non-cooperative (FPS) video games? Do you have a favorite?
What are these blasters? How fast are the blaster bolts? Do the blasters from the spacecraft travel at about the same speed as the handheld blasters? Why do people still think these are lasers?
One other quick point: Why are there green blaster bolts in space, but for handheld weapons, they all fire red blaster bolts?
One more thing. What is a blaster bolt anyway? It isn’t a laser, right? My guess has always been that it is some sort of super-hot thing. Maybe gas so hot it is a plasma. The problem with the gas is air drag. If the bolt has a low mass, I suspect that it wouldn’t get too far (especially at those low speeds). Perhaps the gas is so hot that it ionizes the air in front of it. Or maybe it is some type of really small, hot bullet. Honestly, I am not sure.
PREEMPTIVE COMMENTS
You know what happens when you talk about Star Wars? Geekplosions.
So, since I likely won’t be able to up with the comments — let me go ahead and preemptively answer some of them. Please don’t be offended by these fake comments, I am just trying to be funny.
- “Seriously? You wasted all this time analyzing something that was clearly not real?” I am not sure that this is actually a question, but yes — it is true. I could say the same thing about you though. Seriously? You just spent 8 hours playing a videogame? It isn’t even real.
- “What about the other Star Wars movies? Do the speeds change in those?” Great question. My original plan was to look at all the blaster shots in the three real Star Wars movies. Alas, this data collection took a bit longer than I anticipated.
- “You must have no life. Why don’t you get out and do something?” This is essentially the same as the first comment.
- “You actually get paid to waste your time like this?” I am not sure I get actually paid for this actual analysis. But, I really do think this is a worthwhile post. It shows how to take data from something (even if that something is obviously fake) and analyze it.
- “You said that the Death Star is 160 km in diameter. Actually, the original Death Star plans had it at 180 km diameter but it was changed to 160 km in order to finish on time to destroy the Rebel base on Yavin 4.” OK.
- “How can you hear the blaster bolts in space?” If you use The Force, you can hear them.
- “How much energy is in each blaster bolt?” Another great question. You could estimate the volume of a bolt and assume it is gas at a certain temperature. You would have to guess at the density — but that would be one way to get a value for the energy.
- “I kind of thought you would do more with the uncertainty in the speeds of these bolts.” Me too.
How disappointing is it when one spends far too much doing extrapolations from cinema about empirical data that is in itself fantasy. Much like those folks who believe in Chemtrails.
Science fiction film (or sci-fi) is a genre that uses speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception and time travel, along with futuristic elements such as spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar travel or other technologies. Science fiction films have often been used to focus on political or social issues, and to explore philosophical issues like the human condition. In many cases, tropes derived from written science fiction may be used by filmmakers ignorant of or at best indifferent to the standards of scientific plausibility and plot logic to which written science fiction is traditionally held.[1]