The question has been asked a million times by now, and still we are no closer to revealing the true makings of the iconic Star Wars lightsabre. The lightsabre, of course, gives the Jedi the kahunas to be what he is supposed to be. A GE Engineer named Mark Glausenkemp decided to break down the lightsabre once and for all and explain to us what would be needed for it to work. Unfortunately it’s a grim truth, and the answer, I am sure, is nowhere near the one you want to hear.
It turns out that in order for it to work, you will need a Diatium power cell which will generate several megawatt-hours of power. This is a power source that is no where near existing today. The Diatium battery is something that the creators of the lightsabre came up with in order to give the sabre a realistic approach; however, it’s connected to the “force” which makes it even more unlikely that we’ll ever see a real lightsabre in the works.
However, even if we did have a power source that powerful, there are no crystals that we know of today that can focus a plasma beam. When focusing plasmas in real life, we use magnetic fields, but there is no way that magnetic fields can direct a beam and keep it stabilized.
Again, if we did have the crystals, we are still left with a third snag and that is that a laser doesn’t stop. It is a continuous beam of light, and in order to stop it, we would need some kind of block. This would be possible with mirrors. However, there is no way we can create mirrors that float in mid-air and work in sync with the movement of the light beam itself.
So, I hate to break it to you, but we are most likely never to see a fully working lightsabre grace our world, at least not during the lifetime of the next several hundred generations, if not more. Let the tears start falling.
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