Star Wars Episode 3

[WarLocke]

I have no idea where you are getting the properties of the lightsaber colours from.  As far as I can tell it has always just been a personal preference for the wielder.
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Either Doc pulled all that lightsaber properties stuff from thin air, or he's much more of a geek than I am. The only places I know of where crystal properties are mentioned are the KotOR games, and they're not exactly canon. Well, except for the Jedi Academy trilogy, but I prefer not to think about 3-foot blades that extend to 9 feet with the flip of a switch. :whistling:



I remember reading an interview with Lucas somewhere where he said that all Jedi use blue sabers, and that all Sith use red ones. The only reason Luke's saber is green in ESB and RoTJ was due to some technical difficulty or another, and I guess that's why we see green blades in the prequels. But it was intended that all sabers would be either red or blue.

Windu's purple saber was an exception, because Jackson specifically asked for his to be that color. I guess so he could be extra cool or something.

[Mirajj]

The best spoiler for me was in reading the current TIME magazine. I was reading through their SW article, and came across an italized disclaimer about spoilers in the next couple of paragraphs. Since I've long figured out what happened, I didn't really care, so I read along.

Their first spoiler "Palpatine is Sidious!" Duh. I figured that out as soon as I saw him in Ep I. That's a basic no-brainer right there. But the best part was, they dedicated 3 paragraphs to this, and then ended with a "End spoilers" italized bit.

Okay, they've done their part...no spoilers...right? Wrong.

Heading the page, is a huge (1/4 of the page) picture, captioned "Mace Windu battles the traitorous Emp. Palpatine!"

*Headdesk*

[DeeBye]

Well, except for the Jedi Academy trilogy, but I prefer not to think about 3-foot blades that extend to 9 feet with the flip of a switch. :whistling:
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That was much worse than the Darth Maul's double-bladed lightsaber. I'm glad that lightsaber gimmick never made it into the films.

[DeeBye]

Their first spoiler "Palpatine is Sidious!" Duh. I figured that out as soon as I saw him in Ep I. That's a basic no-brainer right there. But the best part was, they dedicated 3 paragraphs to this, and then ended with a "End spoilers" italized bit.
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That was known in the original trilogy, wasn't it? I think Leia says that the Emperor is Palpatine, and that he is a Dark Lord of the Sith. It was in A New Hope, right? The only extra bit added by the prequels was that his name was the not-so-original Darth Sidious.

[Doc]

Actually, I get my information from old books, and comic books, from long ago in the 80s.

Jedi use all manner of blades. Yellow, blue, greens, purples, reds, pink, but I have never seen orange. Most of them are just colours. Some do have secondary function. Electrum has some secondary function, as does red. Yellow in particular was interesting. It acted more like a bolt of lightning rather than a focused blade. Or at least I remember it being so in the comic books and graphic novels. Not all lightsabres are straight edged either... Some have curved blades due to clever design.

I should have made my statement more clear. It is the first time in the Star Wars movie history that two Jedi face off with the same colours. In all six films, this has never happened before.

The physics of a lightsabre are interesting to ponder, and in theory they could really be made. A lab in Australia managed to push a small object with a special type of laser. Once they figure out how they did it, and can reproduce the results on a regular basis, we will be a lot closer to making a lightsabre type weapon a reality.

[Minionman]

Well if i was challanging my spouse to tell the truth about whether they did, or did not, kill a bunch of kids I think I would use a little more forceful approach than to refer to the slaughtered youths with a smarmy, cutesy label.
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It's more Yodaish to say "youngling". If you guys are telling right ,and Yoda is the one who uses it most, that explains it well.

I haven't actually see it, and may never. I have problems handling darker stories or stories with a lot of death and destruction for nothing. I get int ocharacters really easily.

[DeeBye]

The physics of a lightsabre are interesting to ponder, and in theory they could really be made. A lab in Australia managed to push a small object with a special type of laser. Once they figure out how they did it, and can reproduce the results on a regular basis, we will be a lot closer to making a lightsabre type weapon a reality.
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I was watching a Discovery Channel thing about the possibilities of a lightsaber, and most physicists seemed to agree that using lasers was pretty much impossible. This is mostly due to the fact that it it isn't reasonable to suggest that you can make a beam of laser light solid and give it a defined shape and endpoint.

They do think that it might be possible to do something like that using plasma. Plasma is a form of matter and can be contained in a shape given the correct containing force. Currently the only way to contain plasma is to use a magnetic force, but there's nothing stopping anyone from figuring out a way to use a strong nuclear force (which no one knows WTF) to contain plasma into a narrow blade-like shape.

Of course, this whole plasma thing goes against the Star Wars stuff about crystals focusing light into a beam for the lightsaber. It might be possible, but not the way Star Wars portays it.

[Chesspiece_face]

It's more Yodaish to say "youngling".  If you guys are telling right ,and Yoda is the one who uses it most, that explains it well.
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Actually, if i recall correctly yoda says it once first sort of off hand and then after that there is about a ten minute period where a few other characters use it nearly every other sentence. All in all it felt very forced to me and had the effect of taking a very serious and important event in the movie and making it trivial and redundant. It was obvious (to me) that the actors and, more importantly, the characters didn't feel comfortable using the word and it didn't come natural to the conversations.

[DeeBye]

Actually, if i recall correctly yoda says it once first sort of off hand and then after that there is about a ten minute period where a few other characters use it nearly every other sentence.
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I'm pretty sure Yoda first uses the term "younglings" in Ep 2, when Obi Wan interrupts his teaching session with them. It wasn't just an off-hand term brought up in Ep 3.

[Hammerskjold]

Because egg storm troopers crack me up. :P

http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

[channel1]

I've been busy lately, working on my guide "How to convert your Hobbit costume to a Yoda costume". I expect to make a fortune.

Some tips on how to change from hobbit to Yoda:
1: Smear green crap on your face
2: Talk normally (for a geek)

-rcv-

[Armin]

why didn't they just say "Anakin killed all the padawans!"  Thats what they were! 
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Um, no I think if I remember correctly a padawan is pretty much the same to a Jedi Knight as a knave was to a classical medieval Knight. The stage of a Jedi-in-training when he/she is assigned to learn under a specific tutor as an apprentice.

The younglings are then something like the "Jedi elementary school" or "Jedi Kindergarten", the stage where they are still too young to accompany their masters on travels and misions and are still being tutored in classes and group lessons, as we see Yoda do in Ep.2.

Which also, btw. explains why Obi Wan tells Luke that Yoda was also his teacher, while we all know that Obi was Qui Gon's padawan.

Basically "youngling" is thus just as much a "rank" as padawan, Jedi Knight and Jedi Master :rolleyes:

Btw.: I DID enjoy the film a lot, despite the unsolvable dilemma that Lucas had to tell the reasons for Anakins downfall in terms that today's 10-years olds are able to grasp, while 1977's 10-year olds (aka me :P ) are also still in the theatre (and would probably like to see a bit less oversimplistic, cheesy psychology)

[Armin]

This is mostly due to the fact that it it isn't reasonable to suggest that you can make a beam of laser light solid and give it a defined shape and endpoint.
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According to the Old sourcebooks from West End Games (for the Star Wars RPG we played more than 10 years ago) this is not how a lightsaber works, though.

In their description, the blade is not, in fact, a strait single beam with an endpoint, but a very narrow parabulum, where an extremely focused beam of amplified light is curving back at the tip and being reabsorbed in the hilt. That's in this line of thought also the reason why they use little to no energy when not actually cutting through something.

So, actually, the blade is an extremey narrow "u-shaped" ray of light, where the photons turn back after 3 feet or so, controlled by some force field. Two blades basically - one outgoing one incoming. Just so close to each other and emitting so much stray light that they appear as one.

They called talk like that "pseudoscientific gobbledygook" for a reason, though ;)

[Urza-DSF]

Actually, I get my information from old books, and comic books, from long ago in the 80s.

Jedi use all manner of blades. Yellow, blue, greens, purples, reds, pink, but I have never seen orange. Most of them are just colours. Some do have secondary function. Electrum has some secondary function, as does red. Yellow in particular was interesting. It acted more like a bolt of lightning rather than a focused blade. Or at least I remember it being so in the comic books and graphic novels. Not all lightsabres are straight edged either... Some have curved blades due to clever design.

I should have made my statement more clear. It is the first time in the Star Wars movie history that two Jedi face off with the same colours. In all six films, this has never happened before.

The physics of a lightsabre are interesting to ponder, and in theory they could really be made. A lab in Australia managed to push a small object with a special type of laser. Once they figure out how they did it, and can reproduce the results on a regular basis, we will be a lot closer to making a lightsabre type weapon a reality.
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Hmm...strange the kinds of things they did with the older serials, espically since I havent seen any of that carry over into the expanded universe book catalogue, from Truce at Bakura to the New Jedi Order.

A normal lightsaber has only a single focusing crystal, that must be precisely cut and finished to serve as a proper focus. Personal preference is the only thing that determines what kind of crystal a Jedi will use to create his/her lightsaber, and each crystal yeilds varying effects.

Then there are Dual-Phase Lighsabres. One of the earliest uses of these that I can remember was in the hands of Exar Kun - a dreaded Sith warlord who enslaved the native peoples of Yavin IV and nearly took over the galaxy. He weilded a Double-Bladed Dual-Phase Sabre, so with a simple twist of his hands he was able to control both of the blades length and how much force they could exert over another blade. He won many battles by changing his blades around in this way: switching lengths then dialing down the resistance so the incoming jedi's blade passed harmlessly through his own while opening up a good killing strike area.

Darth Vader also created a dual-phase saber for himself, though it was never really shown off in the origional movies; and Corran Horn, son of the man who chased Han Solo to the Imperial Training Base on Cordata, crafted one for himself as well. With a standard Dual-Phase you have 2 crystals: your Main crystal that always recieves power, and your secondary that comes into play when you activate it. By pushing the 2nd crystal into place the blade is focused even tighter, springing from a standard length of roughly 133cm to 300cm. The slight cost of this is that the blade itself looses girth, and really unless your trying to cause a lot of collateral damage or suprise your enemies there isnt a lot you can realisticaly do with a blade that long.

Heh, never thought my total nerdity when dealing with the SW universe would actually be useful sometime.

[Doc]

You mean... Comic books lied to me? :unsure:

I feel my world coming apart.

I don't think I want to go on living. :huh:

[Ashock]

Help me... For I am geeky.
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This is not geeky at all. It's scary as hell though.....




-A

[WarLocke]

Then there are Dual-Phase Lighsabres.  One of the earliest uses of these that I can remember was in the hands of Exar Kun - a dreaded Sith warlord who enslaved the native peoples of Yavin IV and nearly took over the galaxy.  He weilded a Double-Bladed Dual-Phase Sabre, so with a simple twist of his hands he was able to control both of the blades length and how much force they could exert over another blade.  He won many battles by changing his blades around in this way: switching lengths then dialing down the resistance so the incoming jedi's blade passed harmlessly through his own while opening up a good killing strike area.
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Those never existed. NEVER. :angry:

1) The idea is just... wacky.

2) If the ubersabres gave such an advantage, why would anyone use a 'normal' sabre?

This is one of the things about the EU I refuse to acknowledge (similar to Ysalamiri, Yuuzhan Vong, and cortosis).

(Also, were the staves Greivous' robots using supposed to be 'force pikes'? I can't think of any reason why they would block lightsabres other than that - not sure if I'm glad of a nod to KotOR or if I'm angry at them finding a cheap way to make those fights drag on)

[Rhydderch Hael]

... A lab in Australia managed to push a small object with a special type of laser. Once they figure out how they did it, and can reproduce the results on a regular basis, we will be a lot closer to making a lightsabre type weapon a reality.
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If it's anythiong like the system I've heard, it "pushes" the object by vaporizing a small part of the object, the gas that evolves from the hit supplies the impulse of a reaction motor.

[Doc]

If it's anythiong like the system I've heard, it "pushes" the object by vaporizing a small part of the object, the gas that evolves from the hit supplies the impulse of a reaction motor.
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They have not reliable duplicated the effect. Suprisingly, the lab is working on teleportation.

[WarLocke]

They have not reliable duplicated the effect. Suprisingly, the lab is working on teleportation.
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I thought teleportation was proven and reproducible - only with electrons or some other subatomic particle, though?

Maybe it was Tachyons, I forget...