Warp wrote:
> TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
>> Never 
>> mind that in a vacuum there is no sound to be heard and laser beams are 
>> invisible.
> 
>   Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, at the energy
> levels usually used in terrestrial conditions, might be invisible. But
> energy weapons in scifi movies do not necessarily use either LASER nor
> the energy levels we are accustomed to. (The word "laser" has become more
> or less synonym of "light/energy ray", especially in scifi settings, but
> that doesn't mean that it's literally a LASER.)
> 

If it is a LASER, at a very high energy level, it would still be
invisible from the camera's perspective. There is very little to scatter
the beam, even if it was in the visible spectrum, so the only places
anyone in the movie would see the beam is at any point along the path it
travels, and possibly after it starts to vaporize the target.

As for sound, LASER beams do not go WOOOSH! or PEW! PEW! PEW!

I have thought, however, that it could be explained by having the
Unobtainium capacitors, that power a LASER/plasma/whatever weapon,
discharge with a sonic component. I mean, if the charging circuit for a
set of flash bulbs has a nice whine to it, maybe the futuristic ones
will just have a different charge rate/volt/pattern.

>   The energy beams used by space ship weapons in scifi movies may be though
> of using some form of energy still unknown to us, and the levels of energy
> involved are ostensibly staggering (after all, these energy beams have to
> penetrate energy shields and reinforced space ship hulls, so a regular
> earthly LASER won't cut). It's *plausible* that this form of energy beam,
> at the energy levels involved, might be visible, either all by itself or
> by "burning" whatever matter is in space (after all, space is seldom 100%
> total vacuum, and instead there are always trace amounts of hydrogen
> molecules from stellar wind, etc).

Plasma, ion or blaster guns, antimatter particle streams. All good
choices that may, at some energy level or condition may emit photons.
Waste of good impact energy, but sometimes it can not be helped.

I suppose, thinking about it more, that a LASER might scatter in a space
'dog-fight' situation. The vehicles involved would be maneuvering and,
barring gravity modification or some other reaction-less system, would
be leaving behind a trail of some particles. A LASER would scatter in
that, and may possibly impart enough energy to cause those particles to
glow.

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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> If it is a LASER, 

That's exactly why Star Trek uses phasers. The original scripts had "laser" 
and Roddenbury said to keep someone from showing up in a year or two saying 
"lasers can't do that."

> Unobtainium capacitors, 

I found it very amusing that in Avatar they actually refer to one of the 
minerals as "unobtainium."

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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> light the LED(s). No, the, as one guy put it, "unicorn they are looking 
> for", is a way to make the actual tube itself "extend", without having to 
> have it a fixed length. There is no practical solution at this point for 
> doing that.

Your are perfectly right. I wanted to suggest some way that might allow to 
 >see< through a clear glass cylinder (without noticing LEDs), enhancing the 
illusion of extension. Frankly, to put my idea into work, you would have to 
do quite a bit of experimenting. Fiddling with pressures, dyes, voltages. 
Way too much work and expense for a party ;-)

Something that might actually work and look cool (though not at all like a 
lightsabre) would be putting a chain of miniature plasma globe emitters into 
a clear glass cylinder.

http://www.teslaboys.com/Plasma/MorePlasmaGlobes/index.html

I mean: take a plasma globe, shrink it's diameter to 3 cm, take 50 emitters 
and put them into a 1.5 m long glass cylinder. Fill it with Krypton, power 
up and enjoy.

If you could get it to work, it would look very cool, I guess.

Still - way too much work and expense for a party ;-)

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> light the LED(s). No, the, as one guy put it, "unicorn they are looking
> for", is a way to make the actual tube itself "extend", without having to
> have it a fixed length. There is no practical solution at this point for
> doing that.

Your are perfectly right. I wanted to suggest some way that might allow to
 >see< through a clear glass cylinder (without noticing LEDs), enhancing the
illusion of extension. Frankly, to put my idea into work, you would have to
do quite a bit of experimenting. Fiddling with pressures, dyes, voltages.
Way too much work and expense for a party ;-)

Something that might actually work and look cool (though not at all like a
lightsabre) would be putting a chain of miniature plasma globe emitters into
a clear glass cylinder.

http://www.teslaboys.com/Plasma/MorePlasmaGlobes/index.html

I mean: take a plasma globe, shrink it's diameter to 3 cm, take 50 emitters
and put them into a 1.5 m long glass cylinder. Fill it with Krypton, power
up and enjoy.

If you could get it to work, it would look very cool, I guess.

Still - way too much work and expense for a party ;-)

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I just came across a link to a crackle tube - a much more efficient 
implemetation of the idea I proposed. Maybe it is of interest.

http://www.strattman.com/products/crackle/index.html

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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> I have thought, however, that it could be explained by having the
> Unobtainium capacitors, that power a LASER/plasma/whatever weapon,
> discharge with a sonic component. I mean, if the charging circuit for a
> set of flash bulbs has a nice whine to it, maybe the futuristic ones
> will just have a different charge rate/volt/pattern.

Speaking of Unobtanium, the other day I came across this article, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_115 ...'ununpentium'.  Using the 
naming scheme that they are for elements that haven't been assigned a 
'proper' name yet will clearly lead to one thing and one thing only: 
eventually, we will create unobtanium.

I think they did that on purpose.

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

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> http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/AboutSoundsInSpace.html

So I'm a hypocrite and a smartass? Some people might get annoyed if you use 
language like this ;-)

No, I do not feel like a hypocrite at all. Most movies and most fiction (SF 
and otherwise) is just a dream and does not have much to do with reality. I 
try to forget about reality when watching a movie or when reading a book. I 
try to enjoy it.

Any half-realistic movie about the dark ages would be an abomination, too. 
Something I would not like to watch. There is a reason for the dark ages 
being called dark: a cruel, ignorant and dirty time. I enjoy movies like 
"Ivanhoe" and stories about valiant knights as long as I manage to forget 
reality. Nonetheless: chivalry is a dream, too, best enjoyed when emulating 
the viewpoint Ludwig II of Bavaria.

I never watch a "making of" because I simply do not wish the illusion to be 
destroyed. And I never, ever, watch any documentation on a nice TV-series if 
I can help it. There is nothing worse than an actor talking about his or her 
role: after hearing Gilian Anderson talking about her role in x-files I 
could not bring myself to watch another episode. forever spoiled. Hearing 
Amanda Tapping talking about her role in stargate was almost as bad.

One of the problems you encounter when getting older is that it becomes 
harder and harder to ignore reality. When I was twenty I never thought about 
things like sound in vacuum. I was simply entranced by the plot. If 
questioned, I would have realized it to be impossible, of course. But when I 
was still young I simply did not think about this. After I actually 
 >realized< the impossibility, it became very hard to ignore. The older you 
get, the more illusions are destroyed (because you had time to think about 
them) and every passing year adds to this.

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Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> unlike a true lightsaber you would have a solid core, 
> 
> I wasn't aware we knew enough about how lightsabers work to know there 
> isn't a solid core (or at least a wire) under the plasma.
> 
Kidding me? Talking about Star Wars ones here, which, for the most part, 
is basically the same as most of the "versions" I have seen. They all 
pretty much agree that there is no "solid core" in them. What ever the 
energy is, it extend out to a set length, and then just stops, without 
anything "inside" it. Even in terms of what might be feasible, its 
probably more feasible to make something that looked, and worked, more 
like a hacksaw, where the blade is suspended between end of a loop, than 
a sword. Its just the limitations of how the things have to work. 
Anything hot enough to cut through stuff like a lightsaber would, at 
this point, within the reasonable limits of such a technology, render 
its "core" to slag so fast you would never get a blade from it. Only by 
isolating the emitter and collectors, so they are the only thing close 
to the heat, and making those of something that can, at least for a 
while, resist it... A wire doesn't even come bloody close to what would 
be needed, since, in the case of plasma, we are talking about 
superheating some sort of particulate, which means some way to "channel" 
  it to the emission point, then reclaim it the at the other end. Either 
way, you have to have a "hot spot", on one end, and a "cool spot", on 
the other. The cool spot either has to be on the hilt end, in which case 
you can't cut with that (which, now that I think of it, may be 
reasonable), or the tip, which means you can't slice open doors with it, 
using the tip. Either way, we are talking about a) a fairly large 
emitter source, and b) some way to extend it from 0 length, to 3 feet.

Its way more practical to make a saw than a sword, for *multiple* 
reasons, using that sort of plasma.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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TC wrote:
>> light the LED(s). No, the, as one guy put it, "unicorn they are looking 
>> for", is a way to make the actual tube itself "extend", without having to 
>> have it a fixed length. There is no practical solution at this point for 
>> doing that.
> 
> Your are perfectly right. I wanted to suggest some way that might allow to 
>  >see< through a clear glass cylinder (without noticing LEDs), enhancing the 
> illusion of extension. Frankly, to put my idea into work, you would have to 
> do quite a bit of experimenting. Fiddling with pressures, dyes, voltages. 
> Way too much work and expense for a party ;-)
> 
> Something that might actually work and look cool (though not at all like a 
> lightsabre) would be putting a chain of miniature plasma globe emitters into 
> a clear glass cylinder.
> 
> http://www.teslaboys.com/Plasma/MorePlasmaGlobes/index.html
> 
> I mean: take a plasma globe, shrink it's diameter to 3 cm, take 50 emitters 
> and put them into a 1.5 m long glass cylinder. Fill it with Krypton, power 
> up and enjoy.
> 
> If you could get it to work, it would look very cool, I guess.
> 
> Still - way too much work and expense for a party ;-)
> 
Well, the existing system apparently works pretty well. I mean, you end 
up with a silly plastic tube, which you can see, on the thing, but, at 
the same time, the result looks *exactly* like the movies, even when 
using only *one* LED, from the "activation" extension, to the shimmer 
while operating, to the shrinking, as it shuts down. If you could just 
get rid of the damn tube.. lol

But, gas based solutions have numerous issues (early models used them, 
until the super bright LEDs came out), not the least being that you can 
duel, with a fair amount of aggression, with these new ones, but the old 
gas+tube based ones where way to fragile for that (and took a lot less 
power). These will run a single LED for most of a day, I guess, multiple 
ones, for people using that version, for several hours, and can be 
charged pretty fast. The prior ones... not so much.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>> unlike a true lightsaber you would have a solid core, 
>>
>> I wasn't aware we knew enough about how lightsabers work to know there 
>> isn't a solid core (or at least a wire) under the plasma.
>>
> Kidding me?

No.

You could very easily[1] build something like a lightsabre with a loop of 
wire at the tip attached to a wire that runs down the middle, with magnetic 
fields keeping the wire stable. It wouldn't be "solid" core, but just a wire 
held in place by very strong magnetic fields.

The wire could easily be thin enough to break if it actually touched something.

Heck, you've got FTL travel. Why not make a wire out of exotic material with 
negative energy, and build a plasma field around that?

> Its way more practical to make a saw than a sword, for *multiple* 
> reasons, using that sort of plasma.

I wasn't aware we knew what kind of plasma was used in a lightsaber.  I'm 
just highly amused that you're sure enough of how a lightsaber works that 
you're telling me I'm wrong about there being anything supporting the blade.

[1] At least as easily as any other of the star wars tech.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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