DARTH ANIBAL
Sr Member
Re: The chase. The problem is not that it was a slow-speed chase. The problem was that it was a high-speed chase without referents. Once they realized they were being tracked through hyperspace, they should've jumped to a protostar with a still-accreting planetary disc full of a lot of debris and radiation. Wouldve made for a more exciting chase all round, and they couldve used a different ticking clock -- time to cross the planetary disc rather than running put of gas.
But bonus points if one or another of the smaller ships did exhaust their fuel from red-lining the engines and fall behind to get blasted by the First Order or chewed up by debris.
Re: Lightsabers. The "core" is microscopically thin, per evidence in the OT. It's a standing plasma arc, distorted out from the hilt by something like the electron gun in the back of an old TV, "spinning" by having the arc handed off at superconducting speeds to the next node pair in sequence around the emitter aperture. The arc is electromagnetically collimated to near-one-dimensionality.
Spinning that fast means you have a cutting edge no matter which way you swing it. It also means, because it's effectively spinning at near-lightspeed, that it's throwing off large amounts of virtual photons. By their nature they're very transitory and have a rapid "decay" rate. So the blade is intensely bright at the center and the brightness falls off asymptotically as you move away from it. That's why they don't light up a room, again as seen in the OT.
The color comes from rate of spin affecting the virtual photons that hang around longer. Angular momentum blah blah blah. A more highly-tuned blade spinning closer to lightspeed will have its peripheral wavelength blue-shifted. A less highly tuned blade, such as made from inferior materials or without access to the proper tools, will be red-shifted.
Everything about this post is awesome.