Member-only story
Pew Pew… But How Fast? A Physics Investigation of Star Wars Blaster Bolts
A long time ago in a different blog, I did an analysis of the speed of blaster bolts. Well, the internet does not preserve things like we would hope and my original analysis is all borked. It’s time to redo this.
We know that the stuff that comes out of a blaster in Star Wars is not a laser. I mean, if they were laser guns you wouldn’t really see much unless the beam was hitting you. Also lasers are light and travel at the speed of light (about 3 x 10⁸ meters per second). Just so you know, that’s a super fast speed.
They aren’t lasers, they are blaster bolts. I don’t know exactly what they are — maybe some type of plasma or ionized gas? Who knows — but they do look pretty cool. I like it.
But that leaves us with the question: how fast are these blaster bolts? I’m going to go through as much of the original trilogy to get some data.
Video Analysis
Here are some of the first shots we see in Star Wars as a Rebel blockade runner is fleeing a star destroyer.
