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Here you go, Shroom:

Elheru Aran wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:For the droid he clearly knew enough to instruct that one the Padawans had constructed the saber incorrectly and it would blow up if turned on (which later used to take out some of Hondo's pirates in the episode).

And for the khyber crystals the way I understood it was that it's nearly impossible to find ones "in the wild" so to speak so the empire was force to raid temples and what not for crystal that had already been found rather then just mining the stuff.

Spoiler for the Ahsoka novel:

Ahsoka visits Ilum late in the book, and the Empire has basically strip-mined the planet. Of course, Ilum is one of the only places (if not THE only place) where the crystals *can* be found in the wild, so...

And when Lyra Erso was sent to do a geological survey on some planet regarding a supposed "vein" of Kyber crystals it did seem to be just a standard job for someone of her proffesion.

The difficulty of finding Kyber in the wild Ahsoka novel speaks of is most likely specific to Ilum, as the crystals are colorless and grow in ice caves.

Lord Revan wrote:

Shroom Man 777 wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:Technically yes (since droids can do it) but the question is if the plans for how to make a lightsabre are avaible to people outside Jedi Order.

Since when did droids do it?

There was Jedi owned droid voiced by David Tennant who helped jedi padawans construct their lightsaber and so he had to be able to construct a saber himself to know how one is made.

But I can know the principle of building something, even with schematics and stuff but if you need The Force to bind the crystal stuff thingy magic bit, only a Jedi or Sith could actually do it.

They probably do, but the people that own them are usually wise enough not to show it around.

I would imagine that it's kind of like a nuke: there are exotic, regulated components (the kyber crystals), there are usual components (in Rebels, Ezra made his lightsabre out of stuff around the ship) there are plans floating around but actually building one is not as simple as that. The construction is probably also esoteric and mysterious to a non-Force user, so even if a muggle managed it would be too expensive to bother. I recall that lightsabres were highly valuable on the black market.

What's interesting in that I saw concept art and notes how lightsabres were actually more common, with duals happening between soldiers.

It's clear in each depiction of how construct a lightsaber (in the new EU) that Khyber crystal is what makes a lightsaber what it is rather then just a pile of parts of tubural container. so this suggest that those are the limiting factor for lightsaber popularity and in early drafts of what became ANH everyone had lightsaber but I can't remember any canon depiction of anyone up Jedi/Sith having them.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:On the other-other hand, knowing something's been done wrong doesn't mean one knows how to do it right. Like, he might be able to see a wrongly aligned thing... but that doesn't mean he'd have the intuition to position it himself. And the mistake he spotted might not be in the khyber placement, in the special Force-sensitives-can-only-do-it aspects, but in the other more mundane aspects of saber construction?

I haven't seen this though.

YEAH.
I recall reading about an incorrectly-assembled lightsaber, with a wrongly positioned crystal, potentially blowing up when it's switched on.

This was a very long time ago, was it the RotJ novelization that stated this, when Luke built a lightsaber for the first time on Tatooine, in Obi-Wan's old hut?

I remember that I somehow pieced together my the idea that the irregular crystal required very precise alignment, and since a Jedi can sense danger, he simply sees if his precognition warns him he's about to blow off his hand (and possibly his face). If his Spider Sense tingles, he just wiggles the crystal around a little bit more, until the danger is no longer there (which means it's done). Maybe even use precise telekinesis for the wiggling.

Was this actually stated somewhere, or did I actually make it up?


Also, Shroom, your insane posts alone are worth the price of admission to SDnet. Especially the one about the evil orphan-eating Sith Death Star.
Well, there isn't a price, but if there was, it'd be worth it.

That wasn't ROTJ, that was Shadows of the Empire. You're pretty much on target though.

If non force users could build them they'd be pretty damn useful for pulling off bank robberies.... The value of the lightsaber as a non explosive breaching tool is often ignored but it strikes me as a lot more valuable then its actual anti personal value compared to the alternatives.

Consider that unseen door cutting tool at the start of ANH, from what we've seen a lightsaber would have done that way quicker. The fact that the Empire isn't handing them out even to the Vader elite to slice through razor wire and random doors suggests something always was restricting the supply, no matter the canon.

Just for reference but in real life an 8in thick double reinforced concrete wall can repel all hand and man portable power tool attacks (trying to make a crawl hole) for more then 30 minutes. Pretty clear a lightsaber would go through in a couple seconds.

Cykeisme wrote:Also, Shroom, your insane posts alone are worth the price of admission to SDnet. Especially the one about the evil orphan-eating Sith Death Star.
Well, there isn't a price, but if there was, it'd be worth it.

Sea Skimmer wrote:If non force users could build them they'd be pretty damn useful for pulling off bank robberies.... The value of the lightsaber as a non explosive breaching tool is often ignored but it strikes me as a lot more valuable then its actual anti personal value compared to the alternatives.

Consider that unseen door cutting tool at the start of ANH, from what we've seen a lightsaber would have done that way quicker. The fact that the Empire isn't handing them out even to the Vader elite to slice through razor wire and random doors suggests something always was restricting the supply, no matter the canon.

Just for reference but in real life an 8in thick double reinforced concrete wall can repel all hand and man portable power tool attacks (trying to make a crawl hole) for more then 30 minutes. Pretty clear a lightsaber would go through in a couple seconds.

We saw sabers used to that effect in TPM didn't we? And Luke vs. the AT-AT in ESB.

Did we see that in ROTS? In the novelization, when Anakin and Obi-Wan got hit by ACTIVATE RAY SHIELDS they just lightsabered the floor and went underneath - into some liquid fuel chamber - and carried on with their advance. In the film... were they taken by the droids? Hmmm.

The scene was filmed but cut:



(around 1:30)

it wasn't the ray shield scene but a scene a bit before it, in the novelization they suspected that floor was shielded too not just the bubble around them to prevent them from cutting thru. Also in the theaterical cut Anakin uses his saber to cut thru the roof of the elevator they're in.

I find it a bit difficult that the Empire wouldn't have a number of lightsabers laying about, if only from all the Jedi they killed during the Purge...

It think it's still canon that the Jedi Order peaked at about 10 000 Jedi in total even we assume that number mean Jedi who have completed the trials (aka knights and Masters) I dout we're looking at more the 100 000 sabers in total for the whole order even if we assume that sabre staves count as 2 sabers as the dual blade(aka sabre staff) and 2 saber styles were rare and most Jedi would use 1 sabre.

even if we assume all those sabers survived Order 66 and were captured by the empire, it's still isn't that much when you consider the sheer scale of the empire.

EDIT:also as Sith Lord Palpatine probably wants to discourage research into the "secrets" of constructing a lightsabre. Party to increase the status of his servers like the inquisitors and partly to prevent it from falling into the hands of the general public.

Elheru Aran wrote:I find it a bit difficult that the Empire wouldn't have a number of lightsabers laying about, if only from all the Jedi they killed during the Purge...

According to Catalyst, they did.

Elheru Aran wrote: Spoiler for the Ahsoka novel:

Ahsoka visits Ilum late in the book, and the Empire has basically strip-mined the planet. Of course, Ilum is one of the only places (if not THE only place) where the crystals *can* be found in the wild, so...

Jedha is obviously another example.

Sea Skimmer wrote:If non force users could build them they'd be pretty damn useful for pulling off bank robberies.... The value of the lightsaber as a non explosive breaching tool is often ignored but it strikes me as a lot more valuable then its actual anti personal value compared to the alternatives.

Consider that unseen door cutting tool at the start of ANH, from what we've seen a lightsaber would have done that way quicker. The fact that the Empire isn't handing them out even to the Vader elite to slice through razor wire and random doors suggests something always was restricting the supply, no matter the canon.

Just for reference but in real life an 8in thick double reinforced concrete wall can repel all hand and man portable power tool attacks (trying to make a crawl hole) for more then 30 minutes. Pretty clear a lightsaber would go through in a couple seconds.

Now that I think about it, the Legends novel Scoundrels actually had a character with a mini lightsaber that he used as part of the heist for exactly this. As for canon, the fact that Hondo was willing to attack a Jedi transport to steal them indicates an extremely high value. It is possible that this is tied to the same sort of thing.

Though I wouldn't overstate the abilities of a lightsaber. We don't know the thickness of the blast door from ANH, and from TPM, Qui-Gon's lightsaber had trouble with a blast door as well. It was still cutting through it, but not any faster than whatever the stormtroopers were using.

Galvatron wrote:

Elheru Aran wrote:I find it a bit difficult that the Empire wouldn't have a number of lightsabers laying about, if only from all the Jedi they killed during the Purge...

According to Catalyst, they did.

What exactly did they do with them?

My info is second hand (I don't own the book myself) but they used them as supply of khyber crystals, again suggesting that mass producing lightsabers (or lightsabre style cutters) is (most likely) not practical (or at very least the emperor wants to maintain that imagine) and as I stated there's probably not that many lightsabers floating around to begin with.

Adam Reynolds wrote:

Galvatron wrote:

Elheru Aran wrote:I find it a bit difficult that the Empire wouldn't have a number of lightsabers laying about, if only from all the Jedi they killed during the Purge...

According to Catalyst, they did.

What exactly did they do with them?

At least some of them were given to Galen Erso for research.

It would be nice - or stupid, who knows - if the lightsaber dismantling process would somehow disalign things so the Jedi in reassembling it has to repeat that same old Force-reliant process of precisely intuitively aligning the "living crystal's" facets... which means that if some other non-Jedi, or even another Jedi not "personally acquainted" with that device tampers with it or disassembles it with intent to reverse-engineer it or something, they're gonna have a really hard time...

I think a lightsaber can be made by anyone, even a droid like Huyang can do it fine. However, if a force user wants to use a lightsaber, they go through the whole song and dance of finding the right crystal, feeling through the force of what it should be, and assembling it(after proper instruction). As to why we don't see it everywhere? Before the fall of the Republic, the Jedi guarded their lightsaber assembling process and their locations for the crystals like hawks.

If you were like Hondo, and wanted one of your own, or one to sell, you'd have to deal with the Jedi to learn how, or kill them and hope you were one heck of a reverse-engineer while examining it. And as above, you'd need a place to gather crystals to manufacture them.

Afterwards, Palpatine wanted the myth of the Jedi to die, and he needed crystals for his superweapons, so two problems in one, mine the heck out of those planets(or at least Jedha). He of course supplied Vader and company with what was needed to make theirs to hunt down still living Jedi, but other than that, they were meant for Death Stars. Unless they're still going with the old EU thing that the red crystals were artificial.

After all, if normal people had access to lightsabers, more scenes like this would be common:



Symbols of hope and defiance like that make it a bit hard to keep the subjects of your tyrannical empire in line.

That WOULD be cool though, all sorts of wannabe-Jedi building their own plasma/laser swords, going "I AM SPARTACUS!" and flashing it at stormtroopers in defiance, screaming "You'll take our planet but you'll never take away our FREEDOM!" with their blue facepaint, and then shit gets down and lots of people die.

Sure, Saw Gerrera could've made his own saber and decapitated stormtroopers and broadcasted it on the HoloNet

As I've stated before I suspect that the khyber crystals are reasonbly rare and it's not just a matter of "don't know how to make one" that makes lightsabers rare, after all if khyber crystals were common or easy to get the empire wouldn't need to raid temples or salvage lightsabers to get them. That would also explain why no-one in the millenia that Galactic Republic has stood for reverse engineered the lightsaber tech and sold in the blackmarket.

I'd imagine the existence of door-breaching space arc wielders, possibly clunkier and taking a bit longer to set up, would offset the need for ridiculously rare khyber-using sabers.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:I'd imagine the existence of door-breaching space arc wielders, possibly clunkier and taking a bit longer to set up, would offset the need for ridiculously rare khyber-using sabers.

obviously but it would also explain why sabers never got that common, you got rare (and therefore expensive) khyber crsystals needed to be the "heart" of lightsaber and pretty much all tasks that a lightsaber in the hands of a non-Force user could do are done "good enough" and cheaper by other things.

Kyber. K-Y-B-E-R

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kyber_crystal

Thank you for the correction for some reason I though in new EU there was an "h" there.