Stofsk wrote:No, Adam is right- you're letting your biases colour your thinking. Blasters in SW have high-end results like Han's blaster in Docking Bay 94, to Boba Fett's on Cloud City. But we've also seen blasters leave barely a scratch like in the Naboo Palace walls and columns during TPM, Luke got shot in the hand on Jabba's sail barge and all it did really was scratch his prosthetic (not even damaged it mind you, just burned the fake-skin off!) and Leia was shot in the upper arm at the end of RotJ and it was just a burn.
The TPM incident could be chalked up to the bolts striking solid stone (instead of what looked to be wood or fiberboard in Cloud City, or concrete in ANH). Also, those were standard pistols, not rifles or heavy pistols (lower power, in other words). Leia's arm? Two possible arguments: I saw a frame-by-frame once that indicated the blast hit the wall
behind her, and she got a burn from the heat release.
The Truce at Bakura posits that the shot just grazed her.
But as far as Luke's hand? ... I got nothing.
So basically blasters have a wide gap between their low-end observable effects and their high-end ones. Just like phasers. The only difference is that phasers are explicitly mentioned as having 16 different settings (TNG), whereas SW blasters are referred to only having at least two, though to account for the above discrepancies it's possible they have more than that or that different models of blasters have different firepower effects. Han's blaster for examples was customised to have heavy firepower in a small frame.
I believe I read somewhere (might've been one of the Weapons and Tech guides; I'm not sure) that some blasters have variable power settings, while others don't. Easily accounted for by this difference between universes: All Federation infantry phasers seem to be one of the same four models (type 1 mini-pistol, type 2 pistol, type three rifle, phase pulse rifle) from a single Federation defense contractor, whereas blasters come in thousands of models from dozens of manufacturers (understatement). And that's before you account for modified weapons like Han's, which is powerful even for a heavy blaster pistol.