- Part A
- Vehicles of Star Wars
- Tie Fighters: Twin Ion Engine. This tech exists but its super low power but efficient.
- Hovercraft and levitation. Land speeders, Pod Racers, Repulsor Lift technology. Magnetic levitation?
- Power: Fission batteries? A AA battery weighs around 23g. Convert it all to energy e=mc^2 and you get 2 quintillion Joules of power. 2,067,136,911,094,680,572 Joules to be precise.
- 16 Teslas to levitate a frog. This consumed 4MW of energy according to the paper. A “common frog” weighs 22.7g. Compact car weighs about 1200kg. So that is 211,453 and some change MW or Joules per second. 8.4million Teslas. This is 211,453,000,000 Watts. A Fission AA battery could power this for 9,775,869seconds or around 113 Days.
- Weapons of Star Wars
- Death Star
- Cost of Steel alone would be $852 quadrillion which is 13,000 times the worlds GDP.
- How much steel required to make it? It is 160km in diameter and they modeled the Death Star to have a density similar to a modern warship. Which gives us 1.08×1015 tonnes of steel. World wide production of steel is 1.3 billion tonnes a year which will take over 800K years to make enough steel.
- Thats no moon. Speaking of the size. Earths moon is 3,474km. Smallest moon in our solar system is Methone which orbits Saturn with a diameter of ~3km.
- How much energy would be required to blow up a Planet? Earth would require 2.24 × 10^32 Joules to blow apart the gravitational binding energy of the Earth if you consider it a uniform sphere. In 1 second the Sun generates 3.8 x 10^26 Joules. Which means in 589,473 seconds or about 6.8 days worth of energy. Gives a reason behind Star Killer Base.
- Star Killer Base
- Its not as silly as people make it out to be in comparison to a Death Star.
- Energy gathered from a Sun? How would that work?
- Part B
- Weapons of Star Wars (continued)
- Light Sabers
- Elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Lots of mystical lore surrounding this weapon.
- Force aligned crystals are necessary for their construction.
- How would the blade be created? Plasma? Use EM fields to constrain it.
- Blasters
- They are not laser weapons! This is why the projectiles do not travel at the speed of light.
- Gas cartridge and a power cell.
- 400-500 shots per charge.
- Gas can be mostly anything but typically is Tibanna – a naturally gas found on Bespin home of cloud city. The gas is created by Beldons huge gas filled creatures. Tibanna is also used as hyperdrive coolant.
- Part C
- Light Speed Travel
- Faster then light travel in Star Wars is accomplished by transporting the vessel to near light speed and then jumping to a “Hyper Space” dimension where faster then light travel is possible.
- In our universe an almost infinite amount of energy is required to go light speed.
- Possible if this “Hyper Space” is worm hole tunneling.
- Prosthetics
- Mechanics exist to make them work.
- General Grievous.
- Really great prosthetics but crappy looking trashcan robots exist in the same universe.
- The “Force”
- The force is actually the main character of SW. That’s why prequels suck.
- It’s expressed in the Skywalker family as the balance of the force. The Skywalkers will be the unbalance AND balance in the force.
- Fundamental problem with midichlorians – turns a mystic ‘non-scientific’ phenomenon into high school organic chemistry, but makes the force worthy of science or tech discussion.
- Force as consciousness.
- Is the “Force” possibility the control over dark matter/energy? 70% of the universe is supposedly dark matter/energy. Possible that The First Order from EP7 that they can control Dark Energy via the Star Killer Base and being able to stop light sabers.
- Part D
- RFO
- What is your favorite Star Wars Character?
- Favorite sound effect?
- The prequels? Do they exist?
- Why do some Jedi disappear after dying and others don’t?
- What are we excited or concerned about most in the new Rogue One movie?
Hosts: Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!