Araxian Laser-Sabre

Araxian Laser-Sabre, genuinely elegant, and a lot more convenient and more useful than a light-sabre.

Lightsabers may look like laser weapons, but the sky river folks insist that they are in fact plasma-based. Supposedly, but not conclusively (or convincingly) a high-energy plasma is emitted from the hilt by a supercharged battery, contained by magnetic fields and curved back on itself in a tight ring.

Lightsaber are composed of a curved beam, else the end of the thing would shoot off into space.

Plasma is the fourth state of matter, a soup of electrons pulled from now positively charged atoms, created by putting a lot of energy through some medium, like a gas.

When an atom is separated from its electrons by the addition of energy it's considered ionized and if enough of these ionized particles gloop together it's considered a four state plasma sort of an atomic soup with electrons floating in it and in this soup electrons are constantly separating and recombining from these atoms and in turn when they recombine they release energy in the form of light if

The sun does this with pressure and gravity, but we would likely use electricity and magnetic fields.

Tokamaks uses huge electromagnets to contain plasma in the shape of a torus.

A high-energy plasma beam contained in a magnetic field is going to want to react with things, well, everything.

If it came into contact with a solid object, it might start arching wildly, much like a Ghostbusters proton pack.

Having such a plasma naked to the air around you might effectively induce a lightning strike right at your hand or ignite the atmosphere around you if the energies are high enough.

As the plasma beam moves through the air and heats it up, it creates small pressure waves. The sudden increase in air temperature around the lightning creates a pressure wave, or thunder similar at smaller scales similar to lightsaber sounds.

Lightsabre are supposed to be a more elegant weapon, tidy and precise in the wounds that it causes are cauterized and survivable.

If you honestly apply the power that a lightsaber should have to a person death by lightsaber would be so much worse than what people imagine and the propaganda movies show.

What makes a lightsaber such a formidable weapon is that it can cut through just about anything with nearly zero resistance and that's awesome but if a ring of plasma for example had enough energy running through it to cut through metal and bone like butter would have ended very differently and by differently, I mean grosser, than what is shown in the propaganda films.

Lightsabers cuts nothing like a sword does. A sword or another cutting edge cuts by applying a large force over a small surface area and applying that to some material that can't withstand the pressure and therefore the material moves itself out of the way.

A lightsaber though cuts differently the hyper heated blade isn't pushing any material out of the way instead it is heating up the material in front of it and rounded so hot that that material bubbles and boils and moves out of the way of the lightsaber.

All the material that a lightsaber is cutting through is either vaporizing or sublimating or both vaporization is going straight from a liquid phase to a gaseous phase like water turning into steam and sublimation is going directly from the solid phase into the gaseous phase or turning directly into smoke.

Both can happen when you're hit by a lightsaber on the outside a change in a materials phase brings a change in volume atoms in a gaseous phase prefer to spread out and fill the volumes that they occupy kind of like those stars there but in a liquid phase they are much closer together and in a solid phase they're even closer together.

This volume difference is why death by lightsaber would be worse than you think when you sublimate or vaporize material very quickly it acts like a blast wave

Let's take water as an example, you raise water up to its boiling point of a hundred degrees Celsius and then you add a little bit of extra energy to vaporize it that water as it goes from the liquid phase to the gaseous phase will increase in volume by a factor of fifteen hundred times when vaporization or sublimation happens slowly it's manageable think about bringing a pot of water to boil on the stove it's fine but when it happens all at once it's more or less a bomb just look at what happens when some moron throws a water bottle full of water into a vat of molten metal yeah the same thing would happen if you hit a water bottle with a lightsaber and the same thing would happen to you.

Your body is mostly water if you wanted, around 60%

Given the specs of a lightsaber, its power output in heat is in the 35 mega watt range. This is like inserting 9 kilograms of TNT into the target (per second).

It is also enough that it would light your hair and clothes on fire just by being in proximity, plus melt your skin and ignite the air around you. More dangerous than a house fire.

If a lightsaber is radiating enough heat energy to make it through blasters like butter then turning one on would light everyone in the room immediately on fire

When it's around 10 centimeters away from his body it is putting out enough radiant heat energy to flash all of your clothes away into cinders and the first few millimetres of your skin are vaporized off leaving just charred flesh.

When the blade actually pierces the target, it is now encased in his flesh and so it is vaporizing about a kilogram of his water per second now that water has no other place to go so the steam exits the wound at Mach 1.

Because all of this is happening in a hundred microseconds this is a steam explosion like the water bottle in the molten metal and that explosion tears the target apart and the force of the pressure are hitting the rest of the lightsaber critical steam explosions and everything is on fire and it is disgusting.

Soooo, no, no way. Forget that. Araxians are way too practical for that nonsense.

The Araxi Laser Sabre is different, a truly elegant weapon.

Voxels are tiny three-dimensional pixels of plasma floating in mid-air created by laser pulses just 1/100 trillions of a second long. (one femtosecond, an actual word) The voxels are created by pumping laser energy into the air at thousands of different focal points at those focal points teeny-tiny little bitty balls of plasma form in mid air.

Although they are three-dimensional plasma image displays, you cannot touch the plasma they create because they would ignite, as you even these little blobs of plasma are many thousands of degrees.

Our laser-sabre also uses plasma, but use an array of thousands of tiny relatively short ranged lasers with thousands of focal points when activated those focal points a few femtolightsecond away from the emitter create tiny dots of plasma which form a blade, less than a half millimeter in diameter.

To have the same results, we don’t need to same dozens of megawatts of energy. The average humani arm is about 6 centimeters in diameter. The half millimeter cross section of said arm masses about 140 grams. The vaporization heat energy of that 140 grams is 45.5 kilojoules. Nearly 1/800^th the amount of energy of a ‘canonical’ light-sabre.

Lightsabers are a needlessly bulky half inch diameter, about 25 times the diameter of our laser-sabre, thus our power output is about 56KiloWatts, which is the equivalent of a 240 Volt 230 Amp Arc Welder, a common shop tool

The Araxes Laser-Sabres are a fraction of the diameter, but does ignite the air close to the ‘blade’ creating an aura type illusion of up to a half inch diameter blade, but it is in truth a half millimeter,1/25^th the diameter.

A convenient power output which won’t ignite your clothing and hair or sear your skin off in you are in close proximity. We still recommend safety eyewear, basically the same safety gear for using the same power arc welder.

Modern rechargable chemical batteries store about 2 million Joules per kilogram. Modern non-rechargable chemical batteries that store up to 10 megajoules per kilogram. Modern capacitors can store up to 25 megajoules per kilogram. Superconducting loops and nanoflywheels and nanotorsion batteries all seem to peak out at about 25 megajoules per kilogram.

At 2 million Joules per kilogram, that is enough that a single 29 gram D-sized rechargeable lithium ion battery can power it for 1 second. The advanced capacitor banks of the same size can power the laser-sabre for about 12.5 seconds. A standard pack is about 1 kilogram, so standard batteries can power it for 35 seconds, advanced capacitor banks for about 7 and a half minutes.

For most Araxie, these laser-sabres are mere cutting tools used in mechanic shops. It can cut thru 1.4 centimeters of steel per second.

A lower powered version of this Voxel effect can create touchable plasma points you could feel and touch without them searing your skin off. This would be similar to the so-called holodeck the Federataionalists are so fond of. It’s a misnomer, but it’s a catchier name than 3-D Plasma Voxel Simulator. Branding, it’s a thing