After taking on that improvised rotating gun trick from "Breaking Bad," MythBusters moves on to testing "Star Wars'" laser blasters.
Actually, the weapons in the science fiction-themed film were just called "blasters," but they were widely assumed to be laser ones. Or are they? That is what one of the show's host, Adam Savage, tried to discover.
Considering the weapons emitted spurts of light capable of injuring a person or even damaging infrastructure, the bursts should be traveling at the speed of light, which is 671 million miles per hour, Popular Mechanics said.
"Using the height Harrison Ford and the width of a door as visual references, Savage performs some arithmetic to come up with a shockingly slow speed: 130 miles per hour over 40 feet," the science resource site said. "For comparison, your average bullet comes out of the barrel moving at around 1,700 miles per hour."
Looks like those blasters aren't the laser kind, after all - a conclusion already arrived at by Wired's Rhett Allain in 2012.
"I am almost certain (almost) that nowhere in the Star Wars movies (even in Episode I) does a character refer to these as 'lasers,'" he said. "If they were lasers, you wouldn't be able to see them from the side very well."
"Lasers travel at the speed of light. Yet clearly, you can see that these beams have some speed that is much smaller than the speed of light," he added.
Allain did his own computations and calculated the blaster shots' speeds to average at 78 miles per hour, which is less than Savage's estimate.
"Maybe this explains why the Storm Troopers suck so bad and shooting," he speculated. "They don't suck, it's just that Han, Chewie, and Luke can easily dodge these bolts when far enough away."
That information could be disappointing for some "Star Wars" fans. However, the die-hard followers of the film franchise would probably not be deterred from their fascination with the iconic film.
But if they're not lasers, what could they be?
"My guess has always been that it is some sort of super-hot thing. Maybe gas so hot it is a plasma," Allain offered. "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."
Savage hasn't offered his own theory on what the weapon's blasts are made of. Tell us yours in the comments below!
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