There’s always been something a bit off about watching lightsaber duels in Star Wars, and I’ve finally pinpointed it. This is a technical aspect that I’ve rooted out, not the fact that most of the newer fights deal with the good guys and bad guys simply taping blades and lacking follow through. To be fair, Disney had done a better job of addressing the follow through piece, but is still guilty of producing crappy movies, er, technically flawed representations of a lightsaber duel. The Achilles heel of every single lightsaber scene in every star wars movie boils down to weight distribution and inertia.
Balancing the blade
The lightsaber’s only weight, is the casing and components, known as the hilt, with a very light blade giving you essentially a deadly flashlight. Real swords and sabers are balanced so that the blade’s weight, and the handles weight, equal out giving you a center of gravity somewhere along that handle slightly up the blade. This gives you a bunch of mass balanced on a small pivot point that allows you to control the blade through minimal movement, capitalizing on gravity and momentum.
from: http://blog.subcaelo.net/ensis/documenting-dynamics-of-swords/
Sword makers can balance these things out through a number of ways, one of which was to introduce a pommel (noted above), which lets you wield a heavier, heartier blade. This is a problem that sets you up for a whole slew of problems that we’ll address. With a real sword, you can move and twist your hand slightly, allowing for the weight at either end of the sword to take over and effortlessly move the blade. For lightsabers, the hilt itself has got to be balanced, taking the blade mostly out of the equation, giving you the maneuverability of a roll of quarters.
NOPE!
Basically, now you have to employ a lot more movement of the wrist and pivoting at the elbow which will dramatically slow down your lightsaber duel. Additionally, if you look at the construction of a lightsaber, most of the weight appears to be in the butt end of the handle in the power cell.
In other words, the lightsaber has a budonkadunk
In a real sword, you can use the weight of the blade, coupled with leverage along a long handle to strike down your enemy, in a lightsaber, you are really hoping to make a clean, quick slice to avoid your blade bouncing back at you quickly. This brings me to my next point.
Inertia issues
Ah inertia, as an Allie it’s a beautiful thing, as an enemy it is your undoing. By giving up the mass of a blade, you give up a lot of inertia. Why, because you have drastically reduced mass, which lets you move faster, but with far less impact. Like a Moped moving at 130 mph. Swords do a good job of transferring energy from the handle, along the blade, using leverage and inertia, propelling the mass of the blade into your enemy. If you take away the blade’s mass, the energy stays right in the handle, forcing you to exert a whole lot more force, outside of the center of mass, if your lightsaber comes against some resistance.
Near mass-less objects encountering resistance, what lightsaber duels would really look like
Now instead of a real blade being accelerated and gaining momentum due to it’s weight, all you have is a handle with all it’s weight centered in your hand, dramatically limiting gravity and inertia’s role. Additionally, without a pommel and mass of a blade, it takes a whole lot more effort to hold that handle still when an enemy hits the tip of your blade thanks to leverage. So, little to no mass, coupled with little to no leverage at the handle, means you can move the blade fast, but with very little inertia.
Problems with Twirling
So why is that inertia important? Because you want to twirl your blade all sexy like, both impressing the girls (or boys), and striking fear into your enemy. You wanna look like a god damn ninja master bouncing away blaster bolts and severing limbs. Well without a balanced blade, and a center of gravity in the center of your hand, that twirling becomes extremely difficult. There’s a reason baton twirlers keep the weight on the ends of the baton.
Darth maul aint got shit on this lady
You can really see this principle if you take a flashlight, and a bat, and feel how much the barrel of the bat causes the handle to pivot. Eliminate the barrel of the bat, and you lose a lot of the force you can exert, and a lot of potential energy stored at the beginning of a swing. You might not think this is a big deal until you realize how much you depend on the weight of a blade to turn the handle in your hand. Hell, look at the delicate balance of weight in that baseball bat, there’s a reason the handle is the thinnest. The balancing of a bat, much like a sword, gives you a sweet spot about 2/3rds of the way up. Without mass at the end, your sweet spot is in your hand.
The Saber Toss
Back to that whole twirling thing, if you watch the link you’ll see a lady throwing crazy spinning batons in the air with easy. This is possible through her intrinsic understanding of momentum, balance, and fine motor skills of a long object, with a center of gravity balanced between a long axis. Now if you shrink that axis, and center the weight, your going to dramatically slow down the ability for that object to twirl around brilliantly, leaving you looking less like Tom Cruise in Cocktail, and more like your haphazard wood shop teacher.
Not a lightsaber
Throwing a saber would look less like a brilliant spinning display of aggression, and more like a lazily thrown beer bottle. The only movie to get this right was Return of the Jedi, where Vader’s throw barely makes a full circle in a sloppy attack to throw off Luke.
When Blades Meet
So, what happens when these blades meet, or maybe you hit some armor resilient to lightsabers? A flash of light, some electric whirs, a stalemate? No, with no mass at the blade, that handle is going to pivot violently unless you’ve got the grip strength of Dr. Arnold Nerenberg. See, all that speed you put into your swing might not carry a bunch of inertia at the blade, but that handle does have inertia in it. By bouncing off an offenders blade, your blade has nothing to slow it down on it’s bounce back towards your face, which means your handle just got some force introduced to it, far away from it’s center of gravity.
So what would a real duel look like?
In a reality with lightsabers, and in my opinion, every saber duel should be like the one between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul on Tatooine. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are not nerdy enough to understand this article, and you need to watch some Rebels. Either way, it would look more like very risk adverse fencing, rather than knock down dragged out slug fests.
Boss
Shout out to George L Turner of the Association of Renaissance Martial Arts who is far smarter than I ever hope to be.
Caffeinated Face Punch 