HeartBlade
Sr Member
Just curious but what do you take issue with the crystal and optical nature of lightsabers?
Lets talk all things Star Wars
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I never delved too much into that lore (past or present) so I'm not sure there is precedent for my thinking on this but I always assumed that the crystal was the power source for the lightsabers and nothing more. It lent itself to the idea of an alien technology and science beyond our world.
When they introduced that in the Clone Wars, it was a little too Harry Potter for me. It reminded me when Harry is picking a wand and they say something about the wand picking them. I always just assumed a Jedi got a crystal, then they wanted a specific type for certain properties, and you would obviously want the best quality one you could get. There was nothing mystical about it, other than putting together your lightsaber was part of your right of passage as a Jedi.
It makes sense that there would or could be a spiritual component to it. Though I think there are merits to different interpretations because as with lore these things don't really affect the plot or character motivation and are often superficial details that I tend to overlook. As with any detail, as long as it best serves the story then I'm for it.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
wait they are colored by the user? I always thought a jedi went into a cave, used the force and found the crystal that matched their affinity.
I agree that it would be better if it was retconned to something like only a particular variant of kyber crystals have the right “alignment” or dimensions to focus the beam and create a lightsaber and the force can identify them. Thus, it is a jedi’s duty to use the force to identify such crystals and choose one as opposed to choosing a specific one that “resonates” or “chose” them.
the crystal choosing arguably brings up questions and some issues to be honest. In the Harry Potter-verse, I think using a wand not of your own results in your spells not being as effective. We know that jedi train using “training” sabers and these must be powered by kyber crystals. There are also cases when jedi use other lightsabers in an emergency (clone wars on Genosis for example for Obi and Anakin). Do these lightsabers not work as well because the jedi that wield them arnt their “chosen” masters?
To be fair, Obi Wan and Anakin did state that their loss to Dooku was partly attributed to using unfamiliar sabers in the novel but it seemed to be more they were unused to the hilts than it being a crystal issue (apparently Anakin’s ep 3 saber is customized to be ideal for form 5).
Joek3rr
Master Member
"A lightsaber crystal is colorless until first attuned and connected to a Jedi -- at which times it glows either blue or green, or in some rare instances, another shade. From that point on, it retains that hue."
Kyber Crystal (Lightsaber Crystal)
At the heart of every Jedi lighstaber is a kyber crystal harvested from the icebound caves of Ilum. This crystal is attuned to the Force, and connected to a Jedi Knight on a deeply personal level. In this way, a lightsaber is an extension of a Jedi's Force awareness. Because Jedi let the Force...
www.starwars.com
harrisonp
Sr Member
Not to derail all of this crystal juju but I really want to see a “what if” type show that is based on McQuarries concepts for this universe. Laser swords being more mundane and carried by troopers, wild urban landscapes, gunfights and shifty aliens galore, not too much mysticism
McQuarrie didn't come up with that, which I'm not sure you meant, but the phrasing intimates. He was just depicting what George was describing to him. The cylinders on the back of the Stormtroopers' belts were lightsabers, per George. Before he decided to keep lightsabers exclusive to Jedi. But he still had the notion that maybe they were still in wider use elsewhere in galactic civilization, outside of our scope in the film. That made it into ADF's novelization, where Old Ben was explaining lightsabers to Luke. There had been a duelling culture, to settle minor disputes. Many of the nobility, such as Bail Organa, would carry their "laser swords" around with them, the way would have been done in the Renaissance here on Earth.
There was nothing mystical about lightsabers themselves -- just a Jedi's ability to do things with them beyond the ability of ordinary people. A bit like Zen Sword masters versus a Venetian noble.. but with a bit more IRL Wire-Fu.
The crystal thing started out as a misunderstanding of the source material by the good folks at West End Games. They screwed up several things when they were making their first edition of the Star Wars RPG, back in the mid-'80s. In trying to find any available information on how lightsabers worked, about all there was was the description in the Star Wars novelization, based on the early, more sword-like, concept of the lightsaber hilt. The description of what Luke was presented with was: a stubby handgrip containing the highest-rated power cell that size Luke had ever seen, surmounted by a disc "barely larger than his spread palm", one side polished ot mirror brightness, the other side dull and studded with jewel-like controls.
Somehow, the WEG folks interpreted "the reverse side" as meaning, somehow, the inside of the lightsaber. And "focusing jewels" suddenly existed. But these were the same guys who interpreted the caption on a picture of the Executor moving in formation with five Star Destroyers, one of the publicity shots from Empire, which said, "Larger and with more firepower than five stardestroyers [sic], Lord Vader's flagship, the Executor"... as meaning the Super Star Destroyer was five times longer than a regular Star Destroyer, and with five times as many guns. They didn't even think anything was amiss when, to make the SSD fit on the diagram of relative ship sizes in the Imperial Sourcebook, they had to drastically foreshorten it and remove an entire bank of engines.
And, because, as part of the Star Wars Renaissance, with all the new content coming out in the early '90s, Lucas Licensing instroduced a policy where any new book or comic or game had to jibe with what had come before (especially problematic, given how such a restriction hadn't been in place for the early proto-EU), so "jewel-focused lightsabers" and the "Five Mile Fallacy" of SSDs were locked into the EU. There was pushback against the latter, as later authors who knew they were bigger would use phrasing like "more than five miles long" and other such oblique language. But lightsabers were well and thoroughly screwed.
The Luke-finishing-his-new-lightsaber scene was a last-minute addition to ROTJ, put in during pick-up shooting at ILM and never in the script. I don't know nearly enough about what went into creating that scene and who all was involved, such as who designed the "opened" version of Luke's 'saber with the crystal visible.
I do not, inherently, have a problem with a jewel or crystal inside a lightsaber. Or even many. We here in Reality-Land use jewels all over the place in electronics, as timing control. Note those fine Swiss watches with "eighteen-jewel movement". Also amplification. Small energy goes in, big energy comes out. Crystalline lattices have a lot of free electrons. Metals are crystalline, too. Or vice versa. Chemistry is weird, and I love it. Like... Aluminum oxide is hard crystalline structure. With trace impurities of Titanium, you have sapphire. With Chromium, you have ruby. Different compositions, different properties. So crystals totally make sense in the "getting energy from the power cell to the emitter" portion of the circuit. I'm even fine with the Jedi using some rare and exotic crystal that "mundane" lightsabers don't, that has some greater connectedness with the Force, and thus giving the Jedi greater attunement with their weapons...
But no... Not optically-based, optically-focused, or the color anything to do with the crystal -- "bleeding" or attunement or otherwise. I can accept a certain amount of "the crystal chooses the Jedi", but not to the extent given in later stuff. A single retcon can be relatively workable. Two or three, if they agree with each other, can add richness and dimension. But with lightsabers, every addition, while in themselves not necessarily problematic, have all been derived from exactly the wrong standpoint, so they keep getting further and further off.
If a lightsaber "blade" is focused through the crystal, why does it self-terminate a meter or so from the hilt? There's nothing to stop it. If it interacts with physical objects, including other lightsaber blades, with destructive effect, it'd do the same to the crystal it's focused through. We don't need mystical hoodoo to make it work. Han was able to activate and use Luke's lightsaber, with no training. So you don't need to be a Jedi to do so. At least minimally. There were notions for a time, that I rolled my eyes at, that one needed to be a Jedi to even turn one on -- that a Jedi was channeling the Force through the crystal and manifesting it as a physical blade. Hah hah hah nope. I've said before, lightsabers exhibiting every property seen in the OT are already modeled through high-energy physics and technologies that are, admittedly, in their infancy, but the potential is easily calculable, and we're already seeing progress.
High-energy plasma blade "spinning" (as the arc is handed off to the next pair of emitter nodes that are all arrayed in a circle) at near-lightspeed, The faster the spin, the more blueshifted the spectrum of the blade. Base is yellow-green. Tuning it higher shifts into the blue. Higher still into the violet, but those would be scary unstable, due to the tremendous gyroscopic effect imparted. Jedi temple guardians have "detuned" lightsabers, to yellow, as a badge of their ceremonial duties and the fighting style that goes with the job. The exiled Jedi of the Hundred Year Darkness had to make do with scavenged equipment and materials and after a while their lightsabers were all so poorly tuned, they were red. After they had re-established their resources, they stuck with red as an identity statement.
I like the idea of kyber crystals being especially choice, due to how strong their amplification effect is. See also the Death Star and the Starkiller. I like the idea that the Jedi knew there were paraphysical properties to them, too, that enhanced their combat skills with the lightsabers. I like the idea that they're basically superconductors for the Force, such that Jedi meditating on it can find one that's especially in-tune with them, for optimum efficacy. But the more woo stuff they've been hitting us with more and more recently? So very no.
There was nothing mystical about lightsabers themselves -- just a Jedi's ability to do things with them beyond the ability of ordinary people. A bit like Zen Sword masters versus a Venetian noble.. but with a bit more IRL Wire-Fu.
The crystal thing started out as a misunderstanding of the source material by the good folks at West End Games. They screwed up several things when they were making their first edition of the Star Wars RPG, back in the mid-'80s. In trying to find any available information on how lightsabers worked, about all there was was the description in the Star Wars novelization, based on the early, more sword-like, concept of the lightsaber hilt. The description of what Luke was presented with was: a stubby handgrip containing the highest-rated power cell that size Luke had ever seen, surmounted by a disc "barely larger than his spread palm", one side polished ot mirror brightness, the other side dull and studded with jewel-like controls.
Somehow, the WEG folks interpreted "the reverse side" as meaning, somehow, the inside of the lightsaber. And "focusing jewels" suddenly existed. But these were the same guys who interpreted the caption on a picture of the Executor moving in formation with five Star Destroyers, one of the publicity shots from Empire, which said, "Larger and with more firepower than five stardestroyers [sic], Lord Vader's flagship, the Executor"... as meaning the Super Star Destroyer was five times longer than a regular Star Destroyer, and with five times as many guns. They didn't even think anything was amiss when, to make the SSD fit on the diagram of relative ship sizes in the Imperial Sourcebook, they had to drastically foreshorten it and remove an entire bank of engines.
And, because, as part of the Star Wars Renaissance, with all the new content coming out in the early '90s, Lucas Licensing instroduced a policy where any new book or comic or game had to jibe with what had come before (especially problematic, given how such a restriction hadn't been in place for the early proto-EU), so "jewel-focused lightsabers" and the "Five Mile Fallacy" of SSDs were locked into the EU. There was pushback against the latter, as later authors who knew they were bigger would use phrasing like "more than five miles long" and other such oblique language. But lightsabers were well and thoroughly screwed.
The Luke-finishing-his-new-lightsaber scene was a last-minute addition to ROTJ, put in during pick-up shooting at ILM and never in the script. I don't know nearly enough about what went into creating that scene and who all was involved, such as who designed the "opened" version of Luke's 'saber with the crystal visible.
I do not, inherently, have a problem with a jewel or crystal inside a lightsaber. Or even many. We here in Reality-Land use jewels all over the place in electronics, as timing control. Note those fine Swiss watches with "eighteen-jewel movement". Also amplification. Small energy goes in, big energy comes out. Crystalline lattices have a lot of free electrons. Metals are crystalline, too. Or vice versa. Chemistry is weird, and I love it. Like... Aluminum oxide is hard crystalline structure. With trace impurities of Titanium, you have sapphire. With Chromium, you have ruby. Different compositions, different properties. So crystals totally make sense in the "getting energy from the power cell to the emitter" portion of the circuit. I'm even fine with the Jedi using some rare and exotic crystal that "mundane" lightsabers don't, that has some greater connectedness with the Force, and thus giving the Jedi greater attunement with their weapons...
But no... Not optically-based, optically-focused, or the color anything to do with the crystal -- "bleeding" or attunement or otherwise. I can accept a certain amount of "the crystal chooses the Jedi", but not to the extent given in later stuff. A single retcon can be relatively workable. Two or three, if they agree with each other, can add richness and dimension. But with lightsabers, every addition, while in themselves not necessarily problematic, have all been derived from exactly the wrong standpoint, so they keep getting further and further off.
If a lightsaber "blade" is focused through the crystal, why does it self-terminate a meter or so from the hilt? There's nothing to stop it. If it interacts with physical objects, including other lightsaber blades, with destructive effect, it'd do the same to the crystal it's focused through. We don't need mystical hoodoo to make it work. Han was able to activate and use Luke's lightsaber, with no training. So you don't need to be a Jedi to do so. At least minimally. There were notions for a time, that I rolled my eyes at, that one needed to be a Jedi to even turn one on -- that a Jedi was channeling the Force through the crystal and manifesting it as a physical blade. Hah hah hah nope. I've said before, lightsabers exhibiting every property seen in the OT are already modeled through high-energy physics and technologies that are, admittedly, in their infancy, but the potential is easily calculable, and we're already seeing progress.
High-energy plasma blade "spinning" (as the arc is handed off to the next pair of emitter nodes that are all arrayed in a circle) at near-lightspeed, The faster the spin, the more blueshifted the spectrum of the blade. Base is yellow-green. Tuning it higher shifts into the blue. Higher still into the violet, but those would be scary unstable, due to the tremendous gyroscopic effect imparted. Jedi temple guardians have "detuned" lightsabers, to yellow, as a badge of their ceremonial duties and the fighting style that goes with the job. The exiled Jedi of the Hundred Year Darkness had to make do with scavenged equipment and materials and after a while their lightsabers were all so poorly tuned, they were red. After they had re-established their resources, they stuck with red as an identity statement.
I like the idea of kyber crystals being especially choice, due to how strong their amplification effect is. See also the Death Star and the Starkiller. I like the idea that the Jedi knew there were paraphysical properties to them, too, that enhanced their combat skills with the lightsabers. I like the idea that they're basically superconductors for the Force, such that Jedi meditating on it can find one that's especially in-tune with them, for optimum efficacy. But the more woo stuff they've been hitting us with more and more recently? So very no.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
Joeker, the point wasnt to get facts but to speculate, because right now there arnt any answers on the crystals because Lucasfilm hasnt really expanded on the lore of the crystals."A lightsaber crystal is colorless until first attuned and connected to a Jedi -- at which times it glows either blue or green, or in some rare instances, another shade. From that point on, it retains that hue."
Kyber Crystal (Lightsaber Crystal)
At the heart of every Jedi lighstaber is a kyber crystal harvested from the icebound caves of Ilum. This crystal is attuned to the Force, and connected to a Jedi Knight on a deeply personal level. In this way, a lightsaber is an extension of a Jedi's Force awareness. Because Jedi let the Force...
Besides, if the crystals are colorless and not colored unless chosen by the jedi that they chose, shouldnt training sabers and lightsabers of other jedi be colorless/white?
ScourgiousJinx
Master Member
Love the Jedi and the Sith but I'm all for SW content that steers away from the lore of the force, focuses on other elements of the franchise. Hopeful that some of the new shows/movies will give us that. SW needs to find itself, pick a path, or several paths, stick to it/them and stop trying to retcon past content just to sell the content of moment.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
Did not know this. So WEG needed better reading comprehension lol.
If this is the scene in question, we cant even really state crystal lightsabers are a thing here either. The scene is dark and the lightsaber is already done and closed with Luke using a tool to finish the control panel. No crystal can be seen i think.
Damn this analysis is amazing. Really liked the concept of the spinning frequency determining the color. It also makes more sense for the Sith to have red. They are using a more unstable (aka dangerous) frequency but that frequency likely gives them greater advantage in combat which is why they do it. It was previously canon that Sith (red) crystals could out more power than regular kyber crystals so sith sabers could “short out” jedi sabers when they clashed, requiring jedi to reboot their sabers and thus give an opening.
Joek3rr
Master Member
I doubt that training sabers have Kyber crystals. They probably aren't needed for something that's low powered. But if they needed Kyber crystals they could probably recover them from dead Jedi. I'm sure the temple has vaults of sabers.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
why wouldnt training sabers use kyber when they are basically low-powered lightsabers?
Lightsaber/Legends
The lightsaber, also referred to as a laser sword or space sword by those who were unfamiliar with it, was a distinctive weapon, the very image of which was inextricably bound with the mythos of the Jedi Order and their polar opposites, the Sith. The lightsaber also became synonymous with the...
starwars.fandom.com
I guess the issue with the crystal choosing the jedi and the jedi “coloring” the crystal, etc is that it implies that there is some connection between the crystal and the particular jedi in question. If the crystals are interchangeable and can be used by anyone with no ill effects, why is this connection so important? Its basically a change in the lore that is unnecessary.
Joek3rr
Master Member
I'm don't think the Jedi "color" the crystal. The color is just something that occurs once the Force is awakened in the crystal. "From the Battles of Rashfond, to the Peacekeeping of Parliock, to our very own Clone Wars, the lightsaber is a Jedi's only true ally. But how do they work? Hmm? Yes, you have brought me crystals, but they're all useless unless you give them life. Do you know how to awaken the Force within the crystal? No? Then I suggest you listen and learn, until you think of a question this droid cannot answer."why wouldnt training sabers use kyber when they are basically low-powered lightsabers?
Lightsaber/Legends
The lightsaber, also referred to as a laser sword or space sword by those who were unfamiliar with it, was a distinctive weapon, the very image of which was inextricably bound with the mythos of the Jedi Order and their polar opposites, the Sith. The lightsaber also became synonymous with the...
I guess the issue with the crystal choosing the jedi and the jedi “coloring” the crystal, etc is that it implies that there is some connection between the crystal and the particular jedi in question. If the crystals are interchangeable and can be used by anyone with no ill effects, why is this connection so important? Its basically a change in the lore that is unnecessary.
If look at Ahsoka's second lightsaber, it's a different shade of green, then her first. If it was the Jedi that "colors" the crystal wouldn't have been the same color as her first saber? Assuming of course, she went and took another crystal, and wasn't just given another. And that she didn't change the angle of the crystal to achieve a different color, which according to Dave Filoni is what Anakin did to her's to make them blue.
Good point. I had forgotten that the "reveal" 'saber is of dubious provenance. I know the one Harrison/Elstree Props was auctioning for fifty grand was a fan-made ROTJ replica made in '05, but I've never been able to find any definitive proof one was ever made for the original production.
That one doesn't work so well. Redshifting the blade is a result of a slower spin rate. Longer wavelength, lower frequency. On the one hand, the 'saber would be less gyroscopically willful, so the wielder could develop uncomplicated power swings that worked harmoniously with their tendency to channel their anger into raw strength. Any finesse would be developed by them, without the help of an inherently unstable weapon (like how modern fighter jets' instability is to aid in dogfighting -- they require active correction from onboard computers to simply not stall... take that away, the pilot has to work harder to get the thing to maneuver). The only way, really, they could "short out" another lightsaber would be by having some function built in that grounded out the other blade, possibly recharging their own. Not a function of "out-powering" the other blade. That's... not how high-energy physics work. *chuckle*
I think the training lightsabers probably do use crystals, it would just be a smaller power cell or lesser power output that would let kids use them.
ghostryder
Legendary Member
HeartBlade
Sr Member
Well Sith color their crystals red so hard to say. If crystals have their own unique hue, independent of the Jedi. Ashoka also got white lightsabers after reversing the red coloring on a sith crystal so whatever.
good point about Jango. I kind of assume that the Jedi went with the clone troops because they were stuck in between a rock and a hard place. The battle on geo showed that the Jedi needed an army because they were outnumbered and the army was needed to even the playing field. They probably also got reassurance from Kamino that the clones obey them only and Kamino assumed they knew about order 66. After all, Kamino themselves thought the Jedi ordered the army.
ghostryder
Legendary Member
Was this posted? Some interesting ideas in here:
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