Author notes

105 - Clingy

El Cid

on Aug. 24, 2016

That was a perfectly shaped bottle if Jetta had wanted to do something unspeakable to Ozzy with it. But no, she was just thirsty apparently. I wrote this scene to have a certain amount of tension, so you wouldn't be too sure what's going to happen next. Is she really going along with Ozzy's plan? Is she setting him up for something? Is she going to kill him? If the dialogue on this page feels somewhat butchered, that's because it is. I rewrote it a number of times. For most of this comic, I've tried to be as naturalistic as possible with the dialogue, but sometimes that makes it hard for the reader to pin down exactly what's going on. So I wrote the first panel as ungarnished as I could stomach, so that it sort of sums everything up nice and neat. It's painful to read, but it's good to have an explain-everything panel thrown in every here and there.




Star Wars is dumb. We all know it. It's a children's cartoon with live actors and big budget special effects. So any attempt to take a serious look at the science behind Star Wars is a fool's errand. I get it.

But it can still be fun.

One thing that I've always wondered about is, what the hell is a blaster gun, really? Like, what exactly are they shooting? It's not a laser. If they were shooting lasers, it'd be a solid beam that travels at the speed of light. But these blaster bolts – yes, that's the official term, “bolts” – clearly don't travel at light speed, in fact they seem to travel a lot slower than bullets.

It turns out lots of bloggers have already taken the time to analyze blaster bolts frame by frame to find the exact speed of a blaster bolt. The times vary, but it's somewhere in the range of 30 to 60 meters per second. To give you an idea of how fast that is, a Nerf gun shoots at 10 m/s, a baseball pitch is a little over 40 m/s, and a handgun bullets range from 200 to 475 m/s or higher. In other words, a blaster bolt is about the same speed as a baseball pitch, and a hundred times slower than a handgun bullet. Rhett Allain of Wired Magazine noted that it may not be the case that storm troopers are all bad shots; it's just that it's so easy to avoid getting hit by the slow moving blaster bolts.



Okay then, so what exactly are they shooting? Well, as it turns out the Star Wars people have a canon answer to that question. According to Wookieepedia – that's a real thing – the blasters shoot plasma bolts by igniting tibanna gas fed from a gas cartridge. Because the plasma bolts are so lightweight, they're highly susceptible to wind resistance, so they need to ionize the air around them in order to move… but they're still not able to move very fast under atmospheric conditions. So blaster bolts are much faster and more efficient when fired in outer space. That last bit isn't canon, I don't think, but it's what I gleaned from reading blog posts by hardcore Star Wars enthusiasts (is there a term for Star Wars enthusiasts? Like “trekkies?” “Wookies?”).

So there you have it. In Star Wars, they're shooting at each other with very slow moving balls of burning gas. Groovy.

Now you're probably wondering why you just read all of that. I have no idea why I wrote it.