cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4825742
- The high-powered laser is faster and cheaper than traditional missiles or cannons
- An undisclosed NATO country is expected to receive the weapon in the next 18 months
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Australia is helping to take the world into the era of Star Wars-style combat.
A Canberra-made laser is about to become NATO’s newest frontline defence against enemy drones, in a deal experts say could transform the future of warfare.
The high-powered laser, nicknamed Apollo after the Greek God of Light, can destroy up to 20 drones a minute, at a cost of $1 per shot, which is faster and cheaper than traditional missiles or cannons.
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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.