The reason prosthetics are so good in Star Wars is because the Jedi use live lightsabers to train.
The reason prosthetics are so good in Star Wars is because the Jedi use live lightsabers to train.
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If they used dead lightsabers, they'd just be swinging around a handle.
Also: the "blade" doesn't weigh anything; how come no one has a super long lightsaber? The length of the blade is adjustable.
And similarly, why can't Star Trek officers just set it to wide beam and/or just hold down the button while they paint the room?
I think the simple answer to both of these questions could be "power limitations".
That's what the big rifle ones are for.
And with the lightsaber, they have double sided ones. Why not focus the twin beams into 1 extra long one?
Janeway used a wide beam dispersal at least once.
Maybe the length of the saber doesn't scale linearly. Maybe there's some extremely fast dropoff in effectiveness after a couple of feet.
And the power limitations of the phasers seem to me like they require some kind of capacitor to charge up and release in a burst. Plus maybe the tip of the phaser would overheat under sustained fire.
And sure, you could say "add more tips", but we've tried that with gun barrels IRL for the same reason. They're heavy & unwieldy so they only get used for mounted guns, like with the minigun.
And star wars has miniguns as well to solve that problem, usually carried by a single heavy gunner
RIP Hevy
We have been shown that there is some weight to a lightsaber when lit though. Like in Rebels and the Mandalorian/Book of Boba.
And this weight is different to how a normal sword would work. The length adjustment is to finetune this power/weight distribution to fit the user and their style of fighting. Which is why we get shotos and claymores, as well as different sizes for different sized species.